The Capitol Book & News Newspaper Column
Appears Every Other Sunday In
All Columns 1999-2007
The Last
Minute
Your Christmas shopping is finished, right? Well, if you suddenly remember that one last person you need something for, and if you think a book might be just the thing, there’s still time to get a good one, but not much time. Here are our very last suggestions of the year, and remember this: your favorite bookstore has these, and all the other ones we’ve recommended all year, and probably about 5,000 more! And every one of them a perfect gift for somebody.
Schott’s Miscellany 2008 This almanac is rapidly becoming Thomas’s most looked forward to book of the year. He wishes he’d been the first to say about it, “One of the oddest and most addictively readable reference books in print,” but the Boston Globe beat him to it. Sort of a World Almanac with verve and wit and a wry point of view. The perfect gift for the person who may not know everything, but yearns to. ($26.95 hardcover)
Born Standing Up Steve Martin’s look back at his days as a stand-up comedian. Very funny in places, as you’d expect, but also very moving. We actually listened to this one on CD on a drive home from a Thanksgiving trip, and were mesmerized. Anybody who grew up with Saturday Night Live would love this one. ($25 hardcover)
The Alphabet From A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! by the very same Steve Martin (and illustrated by the great Roz Chast!). Just imagine the illustration for Martin’s couplet about the letter S: Sour notes so badly sung by sopranos/Sank a seaworthy sloop that was shipping pianos. Go ahead and read this book 100 times, and on reading # 101 you’ll discover something brand new. ($17.95 hardcover)
The Dangerous Book For Dogs by Rex and Sparky. A parody of the mega-successful Dangerous Book For Boys, this one’s a surefire hit for the dog lover on your list. Non-dog people will just not get it. ($15.95 hardcover)
Lost Worlds in
The Portable Atheist An odd title for a Christmas list, we admit, but nonbelievers need something to read, too. This one comes on the heels of the great success of God Is Not Great, whose author Christopher Hitchens selected the writings for this new one, including pieces by Omar Khayyam, Percy Bysse Shelley, Mark Twain, H.P Lovecraft, Ian McEwan and 42 others. ($17.50 paperback)
Pop-Up Books Here’s a very old category of book that’s seen an explosion of popularity in recent years, and this year there are lots of them to choose from. Here are a few of the very best:
The Chronicles of Narnia by Robert Sabuda, the grand master of the pop-up book. $29.99.
600 Black Spots by David Carter. Combines his wonderful sense of humor with astonishing craftsmanship. There really are 600 black spots, but you’ll have to get a 3 year old to help you find them all. $19.99
How Many by Ron van der Meer. This one does for colors and shapes what the previous one does for black spots. $24.99.
The Night Before Christmas by Niroot Puttapipat. Beautiful! And to reward you for reading this far, we’ll tell you this: this is the book we’re giving this Christmas to all the children on our list. Please don’t tell them! $16.99
For You,
Only The Best
It’s gift-giving time, and at such a time there are two ways to shop for books in a bookstore. You can roam all over the store, poring over hundreds of books, and spend hours trying to find just the right one for everyone on your gift list, or you can head straight to the display of Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American” books, stand in one spot for maybe two minutes, and find the perfect gift for everybody.
Here’s a quick little recap of every book in the series.
The Best American Comics 2007 Nowhere in this book’s 346 pages of comic strips will you find Beetle Bailey or Blondie or even Doonesbury. In fact there’s not a single comic strip in here we’ve ever even heard of, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize the brilliance of the art and the writing in these strips. Warning: this one’s not for kids.
The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 Thirty five of the past year’s best essays about religion and spirituality. Nobody will agree with every essay here, but with writers like Robert Bly, Adam Gopnik, Garry Wills, and John Updike you’ll not find a single one of this book’s 304 pages uninteresting. Edited by Philip Zaleski.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2007, edited by Carl Hiaasen. Know a mystery fan? Buy them this book. With stories by Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Louise Erdrich, William Gay, Laura Lippman, Ridley Pearson and 14 others, they’ll be in mystery hog heaven.
The Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King. Some folks like short stories, some don’t. Find somebody who does, and thrill them with this book. The writers include Ann Beattie, Mary Gordon, Alice Munro, Richard Russo, William Gay (yes, him again), Louis Auchincloss and John Barth. These stories originally appeared in 20 different American and Canadian magazines, so it’s unlikely that your giftee will have read more than one or two of them.
The Best American Sports Writing 2007, edited by David Maraniss. Ian Frazier, Larry Brown, Michael Lewis, Bill Buford and 24 other great writers write about every sport you can imagine, and maybe one or two you can’t.
The Best American Travel Writing 2007, edited by Susan Orlean. This may be our favorite of the whole series, probably because we actually travel way less than we wish we did. Luckily, people like David Halberstam, Rick Bass, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Ann Patchett do get around, and write about it so beautifully.
The Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace. The word “essay’ is a little off-putting to some folks, but just think of them as nonfiction ruminations, or just think of them as very interesting long magazine articles. Or better yet, just read them. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Cynthia Ozick, Moly Peacock, Louis Menand, and 18 others.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, edited by David Eggers. Stuff that fit no other category went into this volume. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, lists, short graphic novels, etc. One entry is a list of the best life stories consisting of exactly 6 words. (“Ex-wife and contractor now have house” is one of them). Odd, offbeat stuff.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007, edited by Richard Preston. Can we change something we said before? This one, not the travel one, is Thomas’s favorite, by a long shot. From the essay about the fraudulent (and possibly murderous) British ornithologist, to the question of whether all important scientific discoveries have already been made, to the fascinating essay about gryllacrididas (they’re insects) and what they tell us about our own violent natures, every essay in this collection teaches the reader a lot of new stuff, and makes him think differently about a lot of stuff he thought he already understood.
We think these books are just about the best bargains in the whole book world, and they come with one other great benefit: if you give one of these to somebody, and they love it, then your gift problem is solved forever, because there’ll always be another new one next year! Except for the Comic Strip book, which only comes in hardcover for $22, they’re all available in paperback for $14, and in hardcover for $28.
The Good
News
Serious Christmas shopping has begun, and we are here to do our part. What follows is a very little bit about a whole bunch of books, and if, while reading all this, you will just keep in mind everybody you know, we have no doubt that you will find the perfect gift for at least one of them. And if not, don’t worry. We’ll have two more columns just like this one before Christmas gets here.
Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion To The South by John T. Edge. This is a revised – and expanded – edition of an old favorite. And how can you not love a book about food written by a guy who wrote his Master’s thesis (at Ole Miss) on potlikker? . The book explores mostly hole-in-the-wall eating establishments all over the South, with as much emphasis on the people who run them as on the food they serve. ($14.95 paperback)
In The Know: The Classic Guide to Being Cultured and Cool by Nancy MacDonell. Ever feel left out of the conversation at one of those upper East Side cocktail parties? Then this may be the book for you. It’s filled with information about art and fashion and architecture and travel and music and lots more. But it’s also cheap! Only $14 in paperback.
How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard. Nobody can read everything, so sometimes you find yourself in a conversation about a book you think everybody else has read, but you haven’t read it, and you don’t want anyone to know it. This book will guide you through that sticky situation. Give this one to someone in your book club, but only if they have a good sense of humor. ($19.95 hardcover)
With The Old Breed At
Peleliu and
Wolf of the Deep
by Stephen Fox. This one has been one of our bestsellers all year. It’s
the amazing story of Raphael Semmes and his ship
The
The Mitfords : Letters Between Six Sisters This substantial tome is edited by Charlotte Mosley, but written by Nancy, Diana, Jessica, Deborah, Pamela, and Unity Mitford, privileged British women who knew – and wrote to each other about – such diverse people as John F. Kennedy, Givenchy, Adolf Hitler, Queen Elizabeth, and Virginia Durr.
At 834 pages, it’ll keep you entertained for years. ($39.95 hardcover)
Defining Moments in Books Sometimes people ask us where we get our ideas for this column, and this book is sort of the answer. It’s 800 pages of ”the greatest books, writers, characters, passages and events that shook the literary world.” Any bibliophile would love to get this one for Christmas, and the really good news is that it’s just one of a series of books. There’s also one about movies, and one about music. ($24.95 paperback)
Math Doesn’t Suck by Danica McKellar. We argued about including this one, and Thomas only agreed after being reminded that the author once played Winnie on one of his favorite TV shows, The Wonder Years. Now she’s a world famous mathematician, and this book is her attempt to get middle school girls interested in math. ($23.95 hardcover)
The Good
News
Except for the mortgage crisis, and global warming, and
The book we’ve had the most fun selling this year has been The Dangerous Book For Boys, by Conn Iggulden. It’s chock full of stuff boys find fascinating, and so do their fathers, and every week we sell more than the week before, and no doubt it will be a big seller this Christmas. But the really big news is that, just as we suspected they would, the publishers have now produced a similar book for girls, The Daring Book For Girls, by Miriam Peskowitz, and early reaction from our customers leads us to predict that this one will be one of the big hits of Christmas. Both books are $24.95 in hardcover.
And then there’s Rhett Butler’s People, the authorized companion novel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. This is one about which you’ll read a lot of divergent opinions. Most of the criticism will be about McCaig’s handling of the issues of slavery and race, but no matter how he’d handled those questions he’d come in for a lot of criticism from one direction or the other. But here’s the deal: this is a crackling good story about old Rhett, one of the truly enigmatic figures in all of American literature. Read it. You’ll love it. ($27.95 hardcover)
You’ll also love Kathryn Tucker Windham’s newly
reissued
Some people are just amazing, and Phyllis Hoffman is one of them. Publisher of eight women’s magazines, Phyllis is also an author, and her beautiful book Southern Lady: Gracious Tables has quickly become a mega-seller, and promises to remain so right through Christmas. It is an absolutely stunning guide to creating just the right “tablescape” for your party, whether it’s formal or informal. We’ve had to reorder this one three times already. ($39.95 hardcover)
And in that same vein, Bunny Williams has come through just in time for Christmas with her Bunny Williams’ Point Of View, a combination how-to manual and memoir from one of the world’s leading interior designers. Bunny has been a student of the some of the great interior designers in the whole world, and part of this book is her stories of learning from them. The rest is her telling you, and showing you, how it ought to be done. Her Affair With A House from a couple of years ago is still the most popular book in our design section, but this one’s about to take its place. ($60 hardcover)
And then there’s this: the first-ever “Scanimation” Picture Book, and don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of scanimation, because nobody else has either, since it was invented just for this book. It’s for kids, and when you turn each page an animal runs, struts, swims, flutters, swings, soars, springs, or gallops across the page as if by magic. We say it’s for kids, but Thomas spent the better part of a recent afternoon fooling around with the book, trying to figure out how they do that. It’s called Gallop!, it’s by Rufus Butler Seder, a genius, and it’s only $12.95. That’s cheap for a miracle.
Ptahhotep and Enheduanna
You’ve probably never heard of Ptahhotep, or of Enheduanna. That just goes to show you how fleeting is fame. Ptahhotep lived in about 2350 B.C., and Enheduanna about 100 years later, and they were only the first two people in the whole world to be called literary writers, or at least they’re the earliest we know about.
Writing had been invented almost 1,000 years before
Ptahhotep’s day, but for a whole millennium it was used mostly for
commerce. Then Ptahhotep came along in
Enheduanna came along a century or so later, and has enjoyed a little resurgence of popularity in the past few years, because Enheduanna was a woman, and the study of her writings has become a staple in courses on feminism. She wrote poems and hymns, and like Ptahhotep, only a very little bit of her writing has survived the past 4,500 years.
Not too long after Enheduanna, people began to do what we think of as “literary” writing in earnest, mostly in the form of epic poems, the first of which we know about is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which you really ought to read, not because it’s important, but because it’s really good, especially if you like to read about friendship, rivalry, betrayal, lust, the doomed quest for immortality, monsters, and, for good measure, a flood which covers the entire world, a literary device to which the author of Genesis would return about 1,000 years later.
If you do decide to buy a copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh the first decision you’ll have to make is which edition to buy. There are roughly 75 different editions in print, some in verse form, some in prose. Any will do, but the reason we thought to write about Gilgamesh is that we came across it as part of a wonderful series of books published in the past year or so by Penguin, and called Penguin Epics. They’re mostly extracts of much longer works, and at about 125 pages they’re not too long, but just long enough to give you a real sense of the source work, and at least expose you to some of the stuff you’ve always meant to read, but just never got around to, like The Epic Of Gilgamesh.
There are 20 volumes in the series, and they’ve sat over in a corner of the store for some months, mostly ignored by our customers and, sad to say, by us, too. In fact, we were thinking of sending them back to the publisher the other day, but thought instead that maybe we ought to take a little closer look at them, and now we’re hooked, and don’t intend to stop until we’ve read all 20, or most of them.. Besides old Gilgamesh, we’re reading Xenophon’s The Sea, Virgil’s The Destruction of Troy, Ovid’s The Serpent’s Teeth, Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, and 15 more.
Well, actually 27 more, because over in that same corner of the store was another great Penguin series, this one consisting of 12 works of nonfiction, written, as Penguin says, by “the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization.” Some will be familiar to you, like Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, but if you’re like us you’ll really delight in some with which you may not be quite so familiar, like Baldesar Castiglione’s How To Achieve True Greatness, William Hazlitt’s The Pleasure Of Hating (“Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.”), and Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption. That last one is more than 100 years old, but it is as modern and as withering a satire on modern capitalism as anything being written today.
Amazing. Over in that one little corner we found 32 books, each only $8.95 in paperback, covering nearly 5,000 years of the written word. We wouldn’t expect anybody to buy them all, but we can’t believe that anybody could look through these and not find 4 or 5 perfect reads.
We Play
Catch-Up
The faster we go the behinder we get, and even though we tried all summer to mention these books, we just never got around to it. Until now.
Amy Bloom’s new book Away has gotten universally good reviews, but we just left it sitting on the shelf until our recent book club night. Something speaker Toni Hetzel said about this one, and we can’t even remember what it was, caused us to pick it up, and once up, we did not put it down. Lillian Leyb’s journey takes her halfway around the world in a desperate search for her small daughter. It is a short book,, but encompasses dozens of fully realized characters and covers many years. It is amazing and wonderful that Bloom can make so much come alive in so few words. This one is just great.. (Hardcover, $23.95.)
Dennis McFarland’s Letter from Point Clear is the story of a family, some of whom have
left
One that we read months ago and still think about often is Warm Springs by Susan Richards Shreve. Shreve developed polio as a child, and at the age of eleven went to Warm Springs as a live-in patient. She was one of the many patients there, which included not only children, but adults and babies. Her child's eye view is straightforward, never self-pitying, and her adult understanding of the bigger picture make this unforgettable memoir about an unforgiving disease one of the most powerful and pleasurable books we will ever read. (Hardcover, $24.)
Of course we are always looking for great new mysteries, and found a few this summer that will get you out of town even when there are no more vacation days.
Elizabeth Ironside’s Death in the Garden is a classic English mystery. A group of friends gathers for a party at a country house, a death occurs and everyone is a suspect. It takes a very good writer to bring it off, and Ironside is more than up to it. (Paper, $14.95.)
Fred Vargas is the #1 bestselling author in
And finally, here’s one that we read not so long ago. Just the other day, in fact. It’s Arthur Schlesinger’s posthumous Journals: 1952-2000, and even though there’s nothing in it to disabuse us of the notion that Schlesinger might have sold a little bit of his academic soul in exchange for insider status with the Kennedys, it turns out to have been a good bargain for the reader. Schlesinger never intended this for publication, and you can tell it, as he skewers folks you might think he’d have admired, and hobnobs with folks you won’t believe. Catty, funny, name-droppy, sometimes heartbreaking and always fascinating. A must read for political junkies. (Hardcover, $40)
Lost Dogs
We’ve written before about the Law of the Dog Book, which
law holds that in any book with a picture of a dog on the cover, that dog will
die in that book. It’s the main reason we quit reading books with dogs on
the cover years ago. And it’s the main reason we were a little concerned
recently when it became obvious that we were going to have to read not one but
two books with dogs on the cover, because not one but two very well known
writers, both of whom are coming to
The newer of the two books is Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, by Fairhope writer, and former bookstore owner, Sonny Brewer, who is also the author of two novels very popular in these parts, The Poet of Tolstoy Park and A Sound Like Thunder. The new book is not a novel, exactly, and not nonfiction, exactly, but a tale, the book jacket informs us, “based on a true story.” Which means that Sonny did in fact own a dog, and that the dog did actually go missing during a storm in Fairhope, and that the dog did in fact end up being bounced around a series of animal shelters, and did in truth somehow end up…..well, let’s just say the dog found himself a really, really long way from Fairhope, where Sonny, in the midst of writing one of his novels, is joined in the search for the dog by the whole community. The book is Sonny’s story, not the dog’s, and if you’ve ever lost a dog, or feared that you might, and especially if it was your fault, you’ll be engrossed by this story of one man’s longshot attempt to find his friend. And you can come meet, and commiserate with, Sonny when he comes to town on October 11 to sign copies of this very moving tale. (Available in hardcover, $17, and paperback, $13)
The other dog book is another one of those books we should have known about a long time ago, but didn’t. And we only came across it now because as it happens, it was written (in 1992) by Donald McCaig, the writer we wrote about a few months ago because we discovered another of his books, Jacob’s Ladder, while researching his forthcoming Gone With the Wind sequel Rhett Butler’s People. His dog book is Nop’s Trials, and the more research we did about it, the more often did we see it called one of the great dog books, and it is. It’s a novel about Nop, a Border Collie stolen from his master in West Virginia, and what makes it great is that much of it is told through the dog’s point of view, and that point of view is pretty surprising, and at first maybe a little disturbing to anybody who thinks their lost dog would spend all his time pining away for his master. Nop turns out to be pretty adaptable to whatever circumstance he finds himself in, and not all that unhappy a lot of the time while he’s “lost.” But his owner is sure unhappy, and so will you be when it appears that all hope is lost. ($15.95 paperback)
We’d like to talk to Donald McCaig about this book, but we probably won’t get the chance, because he’s likely to be pretty busy talking about Rhett Butler’s People when he comes to Montgomery’s Huntingdon College on November 19 on one of the very early stops on his nationwide book tour for what promises to be one of the blockbuster publishing events of the year. Mark your calendar now!
Now, about the Law of the Dog Book. It’s a law which is occasionally observed in the breach, which is to say that there is some chance that the dogs in these two books – or maybe just one of them - will actually survive their ordeals. And that’s all we’ll say about that.
The Old Days - And One To Look Forward To
First, a little remembrance of things past. Then, a look forward to a really significant literary event.
We are getting close to a real milestone. Sometime last week
we celebrated our 29th anniversary as owners of Capitol Book, so if
we’re still standing this time next year that’ll make 30 years, and
that seems like a pretty long time, or at least it does to us. But not nearly
so long as 57 years, which is how long ago our mentor Victor Levine founded
Capitol Book downtown on
We cannot help thinking of Mr. Levine every year about this time, for not only did we buy the store from him in September of 1978, it was also in September that he died, in 2001, just after 9/11. He was a great friend, a great bookseller, and a great boss, and we miss him.
Happily, not all the direct links to the old bookstore are gone. Mr. Levine’s wife Gene, who worked with him in the bookstore, is in fine fettle, and we know that because we saw her not long ago at the 90th birthday party of George Browning, who spent several years as an employee of the Levines, and who stayed on to work for us for nearly 15 years, and is only the smartest, funniest, quirkiest, most cantankerous, most generous, most opinionated, sharpest tongued yet most even tempered person we’ve ever known,
But enough about the past. Let’s talk about the future, and specifically about an upcoming event you would be foolish to miss.
Elizabeth Spencer has been writing since before Capitol Book
ever existed. She published her first novel, Fire in the Morning, in 1948,
only a very few years after leaving
It’s a really brilliant little novel, in which the language barrier between the Americans and the Italians confuses and complicates an already confusing and complicated situation.
In the 45 years since the publication of The Light in the Piazza Elizabeth
Spencer has published 5 more novels and scores of short stories, mostly set in
the South. She’s also been awarded the 2007 PEN/Malamud Award for her
body of short fiction, the Award of Merit from the
And now you have a chance to meet this remarkable woman,
who’s now 86 years old and still keeps a schedule that would exhaust
someone 30 years younger, like us. She’ll be at
It’s called the Stallworth Lecture Series, and if you haven’t been going here’s a few of the folks you’ve missed: John Updike, Jane Goodall, Doug Marlette, Janet Reno, Peter Schickele, David McCullough, Dee Dee Myers, Carlos Eire, Karl Haas and about 20 more of the most interesting people in the world.
But don’t worry about what you’ve missed. Worry instead about what you will be missing if you don’t turn out on October 2 to meet Elizabeth Spencer, and then mark your calendar, and then just go. The folks at Huntingdon will be happy to answer any questions you might have. Just call Su Ofe, the lady in charge of things over there, at 833-4515.
Local Books Are The Best
The best books, or at least the ones that are the most fun to sell, are the local ones. The ones written by and/or about the folks we know and see all the time. And all of a sudden there are several really good ones to talk about.
Timothy J. Henderson lives in
After many, many years out of print, Kathryn Tucker
Windham’s Alabama: One Big Front
Porch has been reissued by
It’s football season again, and for many years around
this time we’ve done a little survey of the newly published books about
The best of the books is Auburn Man: The Life & Times Of George Petrie by Mike Jernigan.
Chances are that every person who ever attended
We were disappointed with the
They say that football is a religion in
And there’s another religious book making waves around
the store. This one is by Karl Stegall, the longtime (but now retired) senior
minister at
And there are more to come. A book about
Summertime
Mish-Mash
This week, some end of summer odds and ends:
A lawsuit filed by a very prominent
We once hosted a similar “successful debacle,” when Fannie Flagg attracted about 700 people to the bookstore. We’d badly underestimated the crowd, and sold out of books with about 500 people still in line, some of them quite unhappy. We never could figure out anybody to blame for it except us.
And there’s more litigation news in the book world,
only this time it was all settled, finally, when the lawyers were banished from
the room. According to the
All this lawyer talk boring you? Then keep reading, because it gets sexier.
We don’t know Paris Hilton, and we’ve never met
Brittany Spears, but we did recently make the acquaintance of two of the three
principals in the wackiest love triangle to hit the book word in a long time,
and so did some of you. It was back in April, at the Alabama Book Festival, and
two of the star attractions were Pulitzer prize winner Robert Olen Butler and
his wife, the accomplished novelist Elizabeth Dewberry. We enjoyed meeting them
both, and they seemed perfectly happy together, but we were pretty busy, so
maybe we missed something. It seems that
Believe it or not, Fall is just around the corner, and one
thing that means around here is that many local reading groups will be cranking
up again, and they’ll all be looking for suggestions about what to read
this year. You can get such suggestions lots of places, including from your local
bookstore, but one problem with asking the same old folks for their suggestions
is that the suggestions tend to be the same ones over and over. So we’ve
invited a reading group expert, Toni Hetzel of Random House, to come up with
some new suggestions for you. She’ll be at the bookstore on Tuesday,
August 28 at
Gone With
the Wind – Part 1
If you were the scion of a prominent family, and you had fathered an illegitimate son with an employee (well, sort of) of your father’s, and your enraged father had then arranged to have the mother married to the adopted son (well, sort of) of one of his other employees, then banished the mother and the baby (yes, banished his own grandson), and then the sister (well, sort of) of the husband in this arranged marriage went off to boarding school, where she became pregnant by, and then married, one of her teachers, but then lost the baby, and then , in defiance of the prominent father, took in the husband of the banished woman, and then….well, then the Civil War broke out, and you went off to fight in it, and so did the guy who was married to your lover, whom your father had banished along with your very own child, just exactly how do you think all of this would work out for you in the end?
Did you get all that? We hope not, and in fact we tried to make it a little vague, and a little confusing, because we hate to give away too much of any book, and especially of a great book, and especially of an epic which we’ve ignored since it was published nearly ten years ago, and which we now believe everybody ought to read, and we’d believe that even if the book, and its author, were not about to become part of the biggest publishing event of the year. Which they are.
The events we intentionally muddled up in that first paragraph form only the very beginning, the jumping off point, of Jacob’s Ladder: A Novel of Virginia During the Civil War by Donald McCaig, originally published in 1998 but ignored then by us because neither of us was particularly interested in Civil War books, whether fiction or nonfiction. What fools we were, to have dismissed this American epic, as fine and compelling a mix of Love, Hate, Sex, Race, War, Peace, Family, Duty, Honor and Country as we’ve ever read. A truly, truly great read.
And we’d still never have read it but for the executors of the estate of Margaret Mitchell, who came up with the idea that a sequel to the classic Gone With the Wind might be fun, not to mention lucrative, and commissioned Alexandra Ripley to write the universally deplored but commercially successful Scarlett in 1991. That did well enough that they decided to do another, and that’s where the real fun began.
They first hired Emma Tennant, a British novelist who was
best known for her novel Pemberley, a
sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride
& Prejudice. The executors liked the fact that she was comfortable with
tackling the classic work of others, and that she was willing to agree to their
restrictions on certain of their beloved characters’ behavior. She agreed
to the restrictions, and to the deal, and she wrote the book, which she called
The executors say the book was “too British.”
Others say that the executors were astonished to learn that Pat Conroy had
expressed an interest in writing the sequel, and they thought his version would
be a real blockbuster, so they thanked Emma Tennant very much, paid her
$250,000, and forbade her to publish
But what about the “publishing event of the year” we mentioned earlier? Well, it’s coming in November, and by now you must have guessed that it’s the long-awaited second sequel to Gone With the Wind, that Donald McCaig is writing it, that we’re really excited about it, and that there’s more to the story, and there is. But you’ll have to wait until next time.
Gone With
the Wind – Part 2
In our July 8 column, we promised to tell you the rest of the story of the selection of the author for the upcoming Gone With The Wind sequel, and here it is.
In 1926