Brew it and they will come: Adolph Coors was a master beer maker and an astute businessman who regarded quality and its consistency as the pillars of his brewing company in Golden, Colorado. These traits and strict discipline imposed on his sons, created a family-run business that was paternalistic and self-sufficient. Fiercely independent and rooted in their beliefs of self-determination and tradition, the next two generations perpetuated those ideals to create a successful, regional business -- innovative engineering-wise and ahead of its contemporaries in vertically integrating its operations into energy needs, conservation and packaging. Having survived both the Great Depression and Prohibition, Coors felt invincible.
But modern threats pursued their philosophies ... unions, boycotts, pollution, governmental regulation ... a barrage of "attacks" that they fought against well into the fourth generation of citizens Coors.
Baum's book is much more balanced that the blurb back cover reviews suggest, particularly the one from the Chicago Tribune that sums the story as an example of cultural change that left inflexible, insular companies teetering. To quote Baum, "The characteristics that differentiated Coors from Anheuser-Busch -- that made them all so proud to be a part of Coors -- were small-scale attention to quality, identification with the West, and disdain for the hollow showmanship of advertising. All that was slipping away. The Adolph Coors Company was on its way to becoming Anheuser-Busch -- if it was lucky. If it wasn't, it was on its way to disappearing."
When an outsider finally is selected to run the company, the Coors perceive a new kind of invasion, no longer one of Visigoths, but one by the Frito Banditos. The beer going national and becoming yet another well-marketed and advertised commodity, Coors mutates into a changeling -- created by Wharton MBAs and (m)ad-men who transform the profit line and keep the company in business, However, with its eccentricities sacrificed to Mammon. It is the equivalent of niching Duncan Hines from Pillsbury cake frosting. It is no longer, "if I brew it they will come," but "tell me what you want to buy and I'll pretend what I make is what you think you need."
Avoiding the similarly undifferentiated, mass-produced, mass-consumed interstate highway system, I drove old Route 93 instead of I25 and I70 from suburbs south of Denver to Boulder several times last spring. The scenery is spectacular, the road hugging the front line. The sign to Golden is unobtrusive, and from 93, there is no vista of a near-by big industry; however, neither are there signs of a rushing pristine mountain creek feeding the bottling line. I never turned off; not being a big beer drinker, friends say that if Coors made wine, I would have. The place evokes a rugged self-sufficiency and a selective, limited interdependence among the sparse population. The newly constructed rows of condominiums are a 21st Century's intrusion which look ill-prepared to handle and thrive in the rigors of the geography and climate.
Reading Citizen Coors continues themes found in two other of our states: Meet You in Hell about Carnegie as a titan of 19th Century industry in Pennsylvania, and American Lightning about labor-management tensions in Los Angeles in more recent decades. The Coors are portrayed as austere fundamentalists, unlike the gilded age exhibitionism and self-promoting largesse of Carnegie and Frick; they are baffled yet uncompromising by workforce agitation and consumer manipulation. Their ultimate concessions come across as having been demanded as extortion and not as parity.
Tracing a family and its livelihood across generations in one location is almost as interesting in Colorado as in TC Boyle's Worlds End rendering of interconnected families in the Hudson Valley. What's missing is a sense of what Golden and Colorado were like before they was marked by the Coors. Published in 2000, it does not reference the pendulum swing to micro-breweries and also predates the locavore cause celebre. Maybe the genetic predispositions of Adolph the first have skipped a couple of generations and can flourish anew.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Sanitizing the Dirty Thirties -- Little Heathens, Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Coming on the heels of The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl in the 30's in Oklahoma, I thought this book would parlay an analysis of the decade in a near-by State. Instead this is a nostalgic white wash by a little old lady, Mildred Armstrong Kalish, who never once mentions threatening weather or lack of money for food. Here's is a simple life, of shoeless days in meadows, cuddly farm animals, passels of cousins, and fortuitous inspiration and education.
Maybe if I were a mid-Westerner, I would prefer this book to Noel Perrin's essays on Vermont. But it covers lots of the same topics of farm life albeit from a child's perspective not a middle aged man who consciously chose that place rather than being born there.
There is nothing that is essentially Iowan about the book either. Picture look like Bennington, Vermont buildings. Recipes and folklore are universally American. It is a charming book as a piece of family history that warrants a private publication and a sharing with distant relatives. That's all.
Maybe if I were a mid-Westerner, I would prefer this book to Noel Perrin's essays on Vermont. But it covers lots of the same topics of farm life albeit from a child's perspective not a middle aged man who consciously chose that place rather than being born there.
There is nothing that is essentially Iowan about the book either. Picture look like Bennington, Vermont buildings. Recipes and folklore are universally American. It is a charming book as a piece of family history that warrants a private publication and a sharing with distant relatives. That's all.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Place as Fount of Political Philosophy -- Kentucky
Perhaps of all the titles selected for the fifty State tour, Belonging -- A Culture of Place sounded like it would be the most apropos book. Alas, I was pleased with only half of its essays; the ones that did not engage me were those that rang of polemics.
Bell Hooks, born and raised in the Kentucky hills, is at her best in the chapters dealing with black agrarian life, from the sustenance gained from raising tobacco to the solace of sewing quilts, from the scale of place determined by the distance one can walk to the sense of sisterhood fostered on a front porch. Her best stories rival those of Noel Perrin's love of the land and native flora and fauna of Vermont. Her appreciation of the need to be rooted to the land by farming it respectfully -- acknowledging the power of Nature as the leveler of man's pretense to domination -- segues well from The Worst Hard Time's theme of becoming disconnected from one's agricultural community, sinning against Nature.
However, there are other essays that read like diatribes. She is the "distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian Studies" at Berea College, a town and institution founded in 1853 to create a place of mixed races and equal classes. Hooks returns here, the prodigal daughter, seeking a place of comfort but clinging tenaciously to her terror of whites and her distrust of all the sources of power in America. Her writing style, so evocative in the stories about her grandparents and the hills and meadows, erodes to dialectic buzzwords as hegemony, patriarchy, dominator culture crop up like weeds in her otherwise cultivated reminiscences.
Large parts of these "Kentucky history made me politically what I am today" chapters contain entire paragraphs quoted from deconstructionist authors, revealing her to be yet another uber-liberal university instructor. With roots as an English major and graduate student, she advocates an entirely new language be created to permit dialogue between races. Large segments of her interview with Wendell Berry, a white Kentuckian whom she admires as a mentor for his writing about his friendship and love of black fold who lived nearly his childhood home, is merely her ranted about her perception of his motivations and her interpretations of their larger social context, with Berry replying more often than not that he had nothing of the sort in mind.
This anger seems so dissonant with the other lessons she learned in rural Kentucky and with her avowed philosophy to find contentment in a simple, earth-bound life. The interpretation of birth place as the source of religious and political groundings emerged in our books for Oregon and Nebraska, not to mention Utah. But while Hooks has some distance and wisdom that allows nature to restore her spiritually, she still fights proudly to maintain the "oppositional" habits she absorbed as a hillbilly.
Among her citations is a lengthy quote from the Different Drum by M. Scott Peck that includes: "While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the "soft" individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each other's gifts and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness other's brokenness ... and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection."
She had brought back home some inspiration from her wanderings, but she has not converted them to insight. She id defiantly settled in the blue grass.
Bell Hooks, born and raised in the Kentucky hills, is at her best in the chapters dealing with black agrarian life, from the sustenance gained from raising tobacco to the solace of sewing quilts, from the scale of place determined by the distance one can walk to the sense of sisterhood fostered on a front porch. Her best stories rival those of Noel Perrin's love of the land and native flora and fauna of Vermont. Her appreciation of the need to be rooted to the land by farming it respectfully -- acknowledging the power of Nature as the leveler of man's pretense to domination -- segues well from The Worst Hard Time's theme of becoming disconnected from one's agricultural community, sinning against Nature.
However, there are other essays that read like diatribes. She is the "distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian Studies" at Berea College, a town and institution founded in 1853 to create a place of mixed races and equal classes. Hooks returns here, the prodigal daughter, seeking a place of comfort but clinging tenaciously to her terror of whites and her distrust of all the sources of power in America. Her writing style, so evocative in the stories about her grandparents and the hills and meadows, erodes to dialectic buzzwords as hegemony, patriarchy, dominator culture crop up like weeds in her otherwise cultivated reminiscences.
Large parts of these "Kentucky history made me politically what I am today" chapters contain entire paragraphs quoted from deconstructionist authors, revealing her to be yet another uber-liberal university instructor. With roots as an English major and graduate student, she advocates an entirely new language be created to permit dialogue between races. Large segments of her interview with Wendell Berry, a white Kentuckian whom she admires as a mentor for his writing about his friendship and love of black fold who lived nearly his childhood home, is merely her ranted about her perception of his motivations and her interpretations of their larger social context, with Berry replying more often than not that he had nothing of the sort in mind.
This anger seems so dissonant with the other lessons she learned in rural Kentucky and with her avowed philosophy to find contentment in a simple, earth-bound life. The interpretation of birth place as the source of religious and political groundings emerged in our books for Oregon and Nebraska, not to mention Utah. But while Hooks has some distance and wisdom that allows nature to restore her spiritually, she still fights proudly to maintain the "oppositional" habits she absorbed as a hillbilly.
Among her citations is a lengthy quote from the Different Drum by M. Scott Peck that includes: "While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the "soft" individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each other's gifts and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness other's brokenness ... and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection."
She had brought back home some inspiration from her wanderings, but she has not converted them to insight. She id defiantly settled in the blue grass.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The Farm is Gone, but the Roots Remain -- Oklahoma
This is the book about the West that I have been looking for all year: much more on the mark than Devil's Gate or Circle the Wagons or Plains Song. The Worst Hard Time is a book about the Dirty Thirties, the Dust Bowl, set primarily in the Oklahoma Panhandle, as written by Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He is writing about pioneering hardships as treacherous as those in the Utah book and about farm family tenacity as found in our selection for Nebraska. But it is Egan's writing talents that make his story sing, while the others drone on monotonously.
I also have decided that this story beats the Mormon migration because it portrays lives of people "being there" as opposed to "getting there." Comparing the two along a dimension of character motivation is interesting, except that I found it more interesting to see intent executed in daily tribulations rather than just inspiring relocation.
Egan is describing hellish lives of those homesteaders / nesters who stuck it out as long as they could during the "drouth" and dust storms and their ensuing impoverishment and killer disease. Being lured to the Panhandle, No Man's Land, the last undeveloped area in America, with promises of low cost acres, these families had a few good years, especially during World War 1 when government policies further encouraged the expansion of land devoted to the cultivation of wheat by guaranteeing high prices. Wildcat speculation ensued, further plowing under the native grass by absentee landowners. The author clearly lays the cause of the Dust Bowl to these land and farming policies, exacerbated by the lack of information and support for land-preserving farming techniques.
The magnitude and frequency of the dust storms, the nuances in the color of the dust depending on which state it was eroded from, the horrific physical symptoms of inhaling fine particulate matter for years, the sense of being held hostage by inaccessible roads and machine-stopping static electricity, the plagues of grasshoppers and jack rabbits -- the litany of curses is endless. But the only thing that does not blow away was the grit of the people.
The Slackers' search for the meaning of place in a life is herein offered another perspective. In The Worst Hard Time, place of origin is so weathered away as to be something unrecognizable ... no familiar scenery, no animals, no neighbors, no household belongings. Yet the Panhandlers remain marked by the memory of their former surroundings and their hope for its rejuvenation.
I have never been through the Panhandle, only driving up 35 straight through the middle of Oklahoma and then hanging a left on to 70, to drive interminably through the Kansas prairie. Seeing the open, grass-covered land there makes it hard for me to envision several states heading towards becoming the Great American Desert. It is difficult to associate a reclamation being needed to have it look as it does today.
As I finished The Worst Hard Time, I picked up Belonging, for Kentucky, and even after only three chapters, I am forced to think again about the over-development of land and the effect of a boom and bust, flood and drought cycle on a person's life and the values one acquires from a culture rooted in the surrounding environment. Both are nudging me to read You Can't Go Home Again and Look Homeward Angel to further explore how a place changes yet remains indelibly the same in the blood and the heart.
I also have decided that this story beats the Mormon migration because it portrays lives of people "being there" as opposed to "getting there." Comparing the two along a dimension of character motivation is interesting, except that I found it more interesting to see intent executed in daily tribulations rather than just inspiring relocation.
Egan is describing hellish lives of those homesteaders / nesters who stuck it out as long as they could during the "drouth" and dust storms and their ensuing impoverishment and killer disease. Being lured to the Panhandle, No Man's Land, the last undeveloped area in America, with promises of low cost acres, these families had a few good years, especially during World War 1 when government policies further encouraged the expansion of land devoted to the cultivation of wheat by guaranteeing high prices. Wildcat speculation ensued, further plowing under the native grass by absentee landowners. The author clearly lays the cause of the Dust Bowl to these land and farming policies, exacerbated by the lack of information and support for land-preserving farming techniques.
The magnitude and frequency of the dust storms, the nuances in the color of the dust depending on which state it was eroded from, the horrific physical symptoms of inhaling fine particulate matter for years, the sense of being held hostage by inaccessible roads and machine-stopping static electricity, the plagues of grasshoppers and jack rabbits -- the litany of curses is endless. But the only thing that does not blow away was the grit of the people.
The Slackers' search for the meaning of place in a life is herein offered another perspective. In The Worst Hard Time, place of origin is so weathered away as to be something unrecognizable ... no familiar scenery, no animals, no neighbors, no household belongings. Yet the Panhandlers remain marked by the memory of their former surroundings and their hope for its rejuvenation.
I have never been through the Panhandle, only driving up 35 straight through the middle of Oklahoma and then hanging a left on to 70, to drive interminably through the Kansas prairie. Seeing the open, grass-covered land there makes it hard for me to envision several states heading towards becoming the Great American Desert. It is difficult to associate a reclamation being needed to have it look as it does today.
As I finished The Worst Hard Time, I picked up Belonging, for Kentucky, and even after only three chapters, I am forced to think again about the over-development of land and the effect of a boom and bust, flood and drought cycle on a person's life and the values one acquires from a culture rooted in the surrounding environment. Both are nudging me to read You Can't Go Home Again and Look Homeward Angel to further explore how a place changes yet remains indelibly the same in the blood and the heart.
Monday, July 27, 2009
God Made Me Do It -- Devil's Gate
Once more, who knew ... perhaps attending private Catholic schools for the last 10 years of my education kept me from being exposed to the history and tenets of the Latter Day Saints, but, I mean, I did take comparative religions -- even if taught by a Jesuit.
Devil's Gate is subtitled "The Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy." Apparently in a mid-19th century cost cutting measure, Brigham Young decided his new recruits, coming basically from the British Isles and Scandinavia, ought to drag or push their measly 17 pounds of belongs using hand carts when traveling from Iowa to Utah instead of going in a covered wagon caravan. The tragedy entails two outings that started out too late in the year and encountered blizzards in the final days of the journey, long after the food had been rationed down to less than a half a pound of flour a day. Hundreds died; others "lost their faith" or either turned back or stayed at frontier outposts.
Like The Monster of Florence, the tragedy of the Devil's Gate was not the starvation and inclement weather, but the crime devolving from the rigidity and negligence of the elders of the Church.
The book is tedious and written in a dry, un-engaging style. If anyone is still interested, read from page 284 on, the last chapter and a half. All the revisionist versus "real" history is recapped (very redundantly) in the last 50 pages. I marked a couple of passages to quote, but now think better on it. Essentially, the author is searching to understand why the travelers put up with the suffering for the greater goodness of God's will. It is not a sympathetic description of the religion, its founders and followers, or the motivation of the principal and minor characters. It is interesting to see how deep the roots of blind adherence to religious fanatics eventfully plays out in the contemporary scandals of child abuse through forced marriages.
Nor is there a good sense of the importance of place ... unless that "place" is not Salt Lake City, but the eternal reward of heaven.
Since I have a stack of Western States books, I started The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I can reaffirm that no matter how depressing the topic, a skillful writer can make the reading fly by ... I cannot say that about Utah.
Devil's Gate is subtitled "The Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy." Apparently in a mid-19th century cost cutting measure, Brigham Young decided his new recruits, coming basically from the British Isles and Scandinavia, ought to drag or push their measly 17 pounds of belongs using hand carts when traveling from Iowa to Utah instead of going in a covered wagon caravan. The tragedy entails two outings that started out too late in the year and encountered blizzards in the final days of the journey, long after the food had been rationed down to less than a half a pound of flour a day. Hundreds died; others "lost their faith" or either turned back or stayed at frontier outposts.
Like The Monster of Florence, the tragedy of the Devil's Gate was not the starvation and inclement weather, but the crime devolving from the rigidity and negligence of the elders of the Church.
The book is tedious and written in a dry, un-engaging style. If anyone is still interested, read from page 284 on, the last chapter and a half. All the revisionist versus "real" history is recapped (very redundantly) in the last 50 pages. I marked a couple of passages to quote, but now think better on it. Essentially, the author is searching to understand why the travelers put up with the suffering for the greater goodness of God's will. It is not a sympathetic description of the religion, its founders and followers, or the motivation of the principal and minor characters. It is interesting to see how deep the roots of blind adherence to religious fanatics eventfully plays out in the contemporary scandals of child abuse through forced marriages.
Nor is there a good sense of the importance of place ... unless that "place" is not Salt Lake City, but the eternal reward of heaven.
Since I have a stack of Western States books, I started The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I can reaffirm that no matter how depressing the topic, a skillful writer can make the reading fly by ... I cannot say that about Utah.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
A "Vacation" Abroad
Over the past week, I unexpectedly was away from work, out of State, with time on my hands, so headed for Barnes and Noble and other airport book sellers. Two books transported me to South America and Europe, well off the beaten path of our 50 States.
Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)
Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.
I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.
Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.
An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.
I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.
Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)
Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.
I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.
Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.
An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.
I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Picked Up a Hitchhiker
It's been over a month since I posted any State review for the Slackers, but after I read The Women, T. C. Boyle sort of hitched a ride along my route, and like Bobbie Magee and Janis Joplin, he lured me into his storyteller world. Since he took me to three States, I am tempted to add them as better alternatives to the current picks, if everyone wants to be a Boyle junkie like me. (Coincidentally, my "face to face" book club read Water Music at my recommendation for June, but since that is about Africa, I won't go that far afield. Except to say, that Boyle's humor, erudition and style has given me my theme for the 2010 version of the Slackers: picaresque novels.)
Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.
Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.
Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.
If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.
And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.
And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.
Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.
Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.
Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.
Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.
If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.
And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.
And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.
Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.
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