"A Guitar and a Pen" - Controversy

I reviewed A Guitar and a Pen back on April 28 and I well remember the short story that is causing author Robert Hicks a few problems this week. It was one called "He Always Knew Who He Was" and featured a real life visit that Bluegrass music originator Bill Monroe made to the White House. The story was attributed to country music journalist Hazel Smith who has now come forward to say that she did not write the piece. Robert Hicks admits to having ghost written the story and is apologizing for some apparent inaccuracies contained in it according to the Country Hound website.

The story is presented as a true account, first-person narrative in which Smith accompanied Bluegrass great Bill Monroe on a trip to the White House. Monroe performed and received an honor from former President Bill Clinton. Smith maintains she was not present for the event, and that the only person who was with Monroe on the trip was his agent, Tony Conway.

Conway argues the story itself is incorrect. The trip Monroe took as described in "He Always Knew Who He Was" actually took place in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was President. In today’s Tennessean.com story, Conway said, "I think this guy (Hicks) had heard the story at some point in his life and just kind of embellished it from there. He might have heard it four or five times from different sources, but he got the story wrong."

Hicks and his publisher, Center Street, will make corrections to future printings of the book and current electronic copies. Said Hicks, "I regret it and I take full responsibility for it. It turns out that the story's point of view isn't correct. It's a story I have told personally for many years, and I was wrong."

Either way, it has the makings of a fine tale.

Good Time - Alan Jackson

I know more than a few Alan Jackson fans who were concerned that Alan’s previous album marked a permanent change of direction for him. That album, produced by Alison Krauss, will likely prove to be the worst selling album in the Alan Jackson catalog so it is good to see that Good Time is a return to form for him. His fans can stop worrying now.

Good Time is jam-packed with solid country music and, as usual for an Alan Jackson album, the songs will appeal to a wide audience. There are love ballads for the ladies, a drinking song or two for the guys, some autobiographical songs, and lots of Alan Jackson humor on display.

Alan shares some of his own story on “Small Town Southern Man,” the first single from the album, a song in which he pays tribute to his father, and on “1976” in which he describes some of the notable highlights of 1976, the year he met his wife at the local Dairy Queen. One suspects that the lady has a sense of humor after listening to “Nothing Left to Do,” Alan’s description of “one night in the life” in which he tells us that there’s “nothing left to do now that we’ve done it.”

Other examples of Jackson’s humorous touch are “I Still Like Bologna,” in which he admits to enjoying plenty about the digital age but says that he’s not ready yet to give up all of life’s simple pleasures and “If Jesus Walked the World Today,” in which he imagines that when Jesus comes back it will be as a hillbilly.

“If You Want to Make Me Happy,” a traditional honky tonk song, kicks off with a fiddle and closes with a steel guitar. What more can a country fan ask for? How about a hook that advises, “If you want to make me happy, pour me bourbon on the rocks and play every sad song on the jukebox.” Does it get any better than that, country fans?

Good Time includes a love song duet with the talented Martina McBride, “Never Loved Before,” that may be destined to be a single at some point. It is just one of at least half a dozen love songs on the album, some of which are mid-to-up-tempo songs that even the guys will enjoy.

Alan Jackson fans will love this album…and, with seventeen songs on it, Alan is offering us a real bargain. Buy this album. You won’t be sorry. It’s not a perfect album, but it is, for the most part, real country music.

The Bush Tragedy

Jacob Weisberg must thank his lucky stars every day that George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the United States because first he was able to cash in with a series of junk books on “Bushisms” and is now playing armchair shrink with a real book in which he claims to have gotten into Bush’s mind to the extent that he can explain every major decision made in the White House during the last eight years. Even better he claims to understand the motivation of pretty near every decision Bush has made since he was a boy. That would indeed be a remarkable achievement if it were to be believed.

Amateur psychoanalysis aside, The Bush Tragedy is an interesting biography of George W. Bush primarily because of the amount of time and research spent on the Walker side of Bush’s family tree. While the Bush and Walker families had much in common, Weisberg points out that their differences are more important than their similarities, much as was the case when the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families merged. The Bush family, as headed by Prescott Bush, was a modest one that did not believe in flashing, or wasting, its wealth. Prescott Bush’s ideals demanded that he treat others as equals and that his wealth be as hidden as possible while he and his family lived its relatively frugal lifestyle. Other than money, the Walkers seem to have had little in common with the Bush family. The Walker family, as headed by George Herbert Walker, was a flamboyant one never afraid to display its wealthy lifestyle to the rest of the world, a family that thrived on the acquisition of all of the toys, estates and hired help that fit the image it had of itself; an aggressive, impatient and class-conscious family.

George H.W. Bush, by all outward appearances and temperament, is very much a Bush as he demonstrated during his four years in office, a period during which he was usually cautious, open to counsel and not afraid to change his mind. George W. Bush, on the other hand, seems to have more the personality of a Walker than that of a Bush, traits that can be observed in the way he has run his own presidency: impatience, aggressiveness, personal certainty and the preference for action over time spent on careful analysis.

Weisberg covers all of the main players in the Bush administration and ably illustrates the ways that men like Cheney, Rumsfeld and other neoconservatives have been able to influence George W. Bush to attain their own goals. Others, such as Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, come across as weaker characters that either worked to stay on Bush’s good side or found themselves actually conforming their own core beliefs to fit those of the President. Of all the main players, Powell seems to be the one to have been most isolated and taken into the inner circle only when he was needed for some specific task.

The Bush Tragedy has much to offer despite its overdependence on psychobabble and Shakespeare to explain the mind of George W. Bush. Weisberg’s theories may be interesting, but they are only theories, and the real meat of his book is found in its biographical details and its look at the inner-workings of the Bush White House. There is much there that will be new to casual followers of political history and that makes the book a worthwhile one.

Rated at: 3.0

Germany Marks Book Burning Anniversary

May 10 marked the anniversary of the infamous Nazi book burnings that took place in Germany in 1933 and that country is marking this 75th anniversary by focusing on the authors whose works were destroyed that day. According to this DW-World article, some 130 authors found themselves on the list to have their works ceremoniously wiped out:

But while the names and works of many of the targeted authors are still popular today, others like German writers Maria Leitner and Georg Hermann have virtually been forgotten.

This shows that in some ways the book burning had a long-term effect, according to Olaf Zimmermann, managing director of the German Council of Culture.

"Yes, it's disgraceful, but the sad fact is that many authors whose books landed on the bonfires have faded into obscurity," he said.

...

Today an underground memorial marks the spot on what is now August Bebel Platz. Conceived as an "empty library," visitors can view it through a glass window built into the pavement.

"It is the right monument in the right place," according to Klaus Staeke, president of the Academy of Arts.

Records show that at least 35,000 books were burned in 22 cities between May and the end of August 1933 in an event unseen since the Middle Ages.

In Berlin, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered a midnight speech in which he said: "The era of Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The soul of the German people can express itself again."

I've always been struck by the fact that, as the article mentions, the "burn list" was compiled by students who very aggressively worked to purge public and private libraries of the books before the burnings finally took place. It is good to mark this kind of anniversary, I think, in order to remind ourselves that mass hysteria is never that far away from sweeping the world up into some kind of new craziness that we will regret as soon as the smoke clears (pun intended). After all, this was only 75 years ago, the blink of an eye, really.

The Ghost

Robert Harris has written a political thriller that never quite managed to “thrill” me.

The title of the book refers to its unnamed main character, a ghostwriter who has made a pretty good living writing “memoirs” for celebrities and sports figures that are incapable of writing their own books. Despite all of his experience in the field, however, our Ghost has never tried his hand at writing a political memoir until lured to do so by the big money he is offered to complete a manuscript for a former British prime minister.

The Ghost knows that the author of the manuscript he is replacing drowned near Martha’s Vineyard, a death that some attribute to suicide and others to drink, but which is not officially marked as a questionable one. It does bother him a bit that he is ghosting for a “ghost,” but it is not until he finds a stack of pictures, one of which has a phone number scribbled on the back of it, that he begins to suspect that Prime Minister Adam Lange is not the man he appears to be and that some very powerful people in Britain and America are desperate to hide that fact.

Our Ghost wonders for a time if he is being paranoid about the potential personal dangers involved with the project but, as he gets farther and farther into his research, finds that paranoia could be the least of his problems.

Harris has basically written an anti-Tony Blair novel with The Ghost although some of the plot elements are so farfetched that it is easy to forget the similarities between Blaire and Adam Lange. One gets the feeling that Harris is making some legitimate political points in the novel but that they are a bit obscured by the envelope in which they are delivered. The Ghost would have been more effective with a few less of the “Mission Impossible” elements to distract from its political message. The impact of the novel is also lessened to some extent because Adam Lange and the Ghost are surrounded by several stereotypically clichéd characters, an element that made it difficult for the novel to build to the level of tenseness that it deserved.

Readers should be warned not to read the last pages of the book before they work their way there naturally because Harris has saved a little surprise for them that he throws in at the very end. The audio version of The Ghost was perfect for a week’s worth of my daily commuting but I am not convinced that I would have enjoyed the written version as much as I did the excellently narrated audio book.

Rated at: 3.0

Best Booker Winner Ever?

Abe Books polled over 700 of its U.K. customers and compiled this list as the all-time best Booker prize winners:

1) Life of Pi by Yann Martel (12.4%)

2) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (10.5%)

3) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (8.8%)

4) The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (8.5%)

5) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (6.9%)

6) The Bone People by Keri Hulme (5.5%)

7) Possession by AS Byatt (5.4%)

8) The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (5.2%)

9) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (4%)

10) The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (3.3%)

I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't read a single one of these although I own Life of Pi, Possession, and The Blind Assassin. I even held a copy of Disgrace in my hands this morning and could have had the hard cover copy for all of $2 but put it back on the shelf because I found my one Coetzee reading experience to be such a distasteful one. Life of Pi is in my TBR stack at the moment but the other two have been hiding out somewhere on my bookshelves for a long, long time.

I found the list interesting...but humbling, as usual.