Book Giveaway - Scottsboro: A Novel

As I mentioned before leaving for Kentucky on June 23, I made my 1000th Book Chase post a few days ago (this is post 1,012 in way of context). Book Chase had been in existence for almost exactly 29 months when I reached the milestone. Anyway, as promised, I would like to give away the last book I reviewed in order to mark the occasion.

Take a look directly below for my thoughts on Scottsboro: A Novel and, if you think you might enjoy the book, send me a comment saying so. One week from today, I will use a random number selector to choose the winner. This one is easy - just throw your name in the hat.

I appreciate you guys.

Scottsboro: A Novel

When, in 1931, nine young black men were pulled off a train in rural Alabama and accused of raping two young white women who happened to be on that same train, no one could have imagined the ultimate outcome. Earlier, the young men had drawn attention to themselves by tossing some white boys off the moving train and, subsequently, the train was halted by a group of vigilantes seeking revenge for that insult. The two white women aboard the train were just a bonus to the mob, an excuse for a quick lynching that the young black men would barely escape.

Ellen Feldman recounts this real life event largely through the eyes of Ruby Bates, one of the young women who falsely accused the young black men of raping her and her friend Victoria Price. Feldman alternates between the first person accounts of the real life Ruby and fictional reporter Alice Whittier in order to explain the events of the fifty years following the original arrest of the nine Scottsboro boys. Interestingly, and very effectively, the Scottsboro boys themselves remain largely in the background – as they did for most of the lawyers, reporters, judges, Communist Party members, NAACP members, and others who were happy enough to exploit the plight of the boys for their own gain.

It was, of course, impossible for any of the nine accused rapists to receive a fair trial in Jim Crow era Alabama. Even after Ruby Bates recanted her original testimony and a new trial was granted to one of the defendants, a new jury returned the same guilty verdict and death sentence. No matter how many juries or courtrooms heard the evidence against any of the nine, the result was invariably the same because, as Feldman makes clear in the novel, no white person could vote anything other than guilty if he wanted to live in the state of Alabama after the trial.

Feldman uses the relationship between reporter Alice Whittier and accuser Ruby Bates to get at the heart of how this kind of thing happens. Ruby, an impoverished part-time mill worker whose family barely sustained itself during the Great Depression, was desperate for cash money. She and the more aggressive Victoria Price were part-time prostitutes who enjoyed the men and attention as well as the extra cash they received from selling themselves. Ruby was a follower, directed by Victoria to give false testimony, but she was no fool. She gained fame by changing her testimony to favor the defense and, for a while, was able to turn that fame into a new life in New York City supported by those seeking freedom for the Scottsboro boys.

Scottsboro is a clear snapshot of an era of American history during which racial minorities had few rights in the South, a time when poor whites, economically no better off than their black neighbors, marked their own place in society by demonstrating to those neighbors that they were racially superior to them. By telling her story through the eyes of one of these desperately poor whites, Ellen Feldman makes what happened, in the context of its times, almost understandable.

What happened in Scottsboro makes for sad reading, a story without a happy ending, but sometimes it takes a novel like this to remind one that it all happened to real people, people with simple hopes and dreams, people who were victims of their times, accused and accuser, alike.

Rated at: 4.0

Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music

Greg Kot’s "Ripped" offers a clear look at how the old school recording industry, primarily the major record labels, committed group suicide by allowing the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to attack the customers who put money into its various corporate pockets. The dinosaurs managing the major labels failed to recognize the multitude of potential benefits offered by the new digital technology of the internet, insisting instead that it was to be business as usual for them. Very few big labels or their CEOs survived the mass suicide, and the misguided fools at the RIAA are steadily wiping out the few survivors.

Ready or not, and the labels were certainly not ready, “a new generation of bands and fans empowered by personal computers and broadband Internet connections…forged a new world of music distribution that seized control from once all-powerful music and radio conglomerates.” Suddenly, even the most obscure regional bands could find a market for their music, and just as suddenly, that music was largely available on the internet free of charge. Rather than embracing the new technology, however, and offering its back catalogs and new music for sale in the new mp3 format at a reasonable price, the industry panicked and decided to have the RIAA try to kill song downloading through lawsuits and other nasty intimidation methods.

The labels, of course, were trying to protect CD sales, a goldmine format in which it resold its back catalog to longtime music fans for the third or fourth times. Many consumers had purchased the same music in multiple formats over the years already, vinyl albums, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, and CDs, and when the opportunity to get music at little or no cost presented itself, they jumped all over it. Most downloaders felt little guilt about “stealing” music from the labels and, instead, saw the opportunity as a kind of payback from the label for all the money already wasted on overpriced CDs. It did not help the labels that so many of the new CDs being marketed contain only one or two decent tracks and ten “fillers.” Now the consumer was doing the “ripping” rather than being “ripped off” by the labels.

The music industry is hardly recognizable today and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Independent labels and even independent artists are doing better on their own today than when they were dependent on the major record labels and radio conglomerates to give them any exposure. The industry may not like it, but radio stations, record labels, and television channels such as MTV and CMT do not move many recordings these days. Much more important to this generation is word-of-mouth, internet buzz, music blogs, and bands and singers that market themselves through the new technology.

It has never been better for independent and regional bands willing and able to do it for themselves. No longer are they tied to record company contracts from which 90% never made a dime, in the first place. No longer is their future in the hands of business types who care little about the music and see it all as some interchangeable product whose artistic value is purely coincidental.

"Ripped" explains well how it all happened and where the industry may be heading. The second half of the book does focus, however, a bit too much on individual bands that either have fought or embraced the new world in which they find themselves. This portion of the book becomes overly repetitive at times, and offers more detail about some of the bands than most readers will care to wade through, but anyone interested in the music business as it works today will do well to add "Ripped" to his library.

Rated at: 4.0

The Winter Vault

The Winter Vault is a complex, passionate novel about loneliness, destruction, replication, personal loss, and memories of one’s roots, and it requires high levels of patience and concentration if one is to absorb everything that Anne Michaels is trying to say. It is neither a plot-driven nor a character-driven novel and, in fact, those are its weakest elements. Rather, it is a philosophical novel filled with rambling monologues, lessons, and meditations that often have little to do with plot. Further, the book’s main characters, although they can be memorable, often have more the feel of actors being brought on stage simply to make an author’s points than the feel of real, breathing people.

It is 1964 and Avery Escher is in Egypt to save Abu Simbel’s Great Temple from the floodwaters soon to be released by the new Aswan Dam. He is there to oversee the dismantling of the centuries-old Temple so that it can be reconstructed some sixty feet higher in a cliff where it will be safe from the flooding. His wife, Jean, who witnessed a similar event in Canada when ten villages were sacrificed to the waters of the new St. Lawrence Seaway, is in Egypt with Avery, whom she met when he worked the Seaway project.

Jean is saddened by what she sees in Egypt, the displacement of the Nubian people whose government is happy enough to sacrifice them for the greater good of the country. As trainload after trainload of these people are relocated and their ancestral villages are destroyed and flooded, Jean realizes that she and Avery are part of something destructive rather than something positive. When a personal tragedy forces her to return to Canada, she finds that her feelings about her life and marriage have changed and she decides to live alone.

The second half of the book sees Avery largely fading into the background while Jean tries to put her life back together with the help of her new friend, Lucjan, a Polish immigrant who, as a boy, survived the World War II destruction of Warsaw. In Jean, Lucjan has finally found a woman with whom he can share his detailed memories of those days, including how disoriented he was when he first walked the streets of the uncannily accurate replication of the old city completed after the war.

The two halves of The Winter Vault share a common theme but their plots and characters are so different that they read like two novels under one cover. Anne Michaels has published several poetry collections and the prose of The Winter Vault, only her second novel, is often as striking as her poetry. Unfortunately, however, some of her extended passages continue to be vague and distracting no matter how much attention and time a reader gives them. It should also be noted that the decision not to use quotation marks or chapter breaks in this 336-page novel may tempt some readers to abandon it well short of its final page. Those who persevere will, however, have much to think about when they finish The Winter Vault.

Rated at: 3.5

Michael Jackson: Book Lover

I have paid very little attention to the hoopla about Michael Jackson's death. I was out of town the week he died, and didn't turn on a television set for the six days I was away from home, so I managed to miss the worst of the media blitz about his tragic end. Frankly, though, I found the man to be kind of creepy and not too many years after his "Thriller" period I began to ignore him. So the last thing I thought I would be posting about today was something relating to Michael Jackson.

What caught my attention was the comment from Jackson's lawyer, Bob Sanger, about Jackson's reading habits and personal library.

"He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house."

[...]

"And there were places that he liked to sit, and you could see the books with his bookmarks in it, with notes and everything in it where he liked to sit and read. And I can tell you from talking to him that he had a very - especially for someone who was self-taught, as it were, and had his own reading list - he was very well-read. And I don't want to say that I'm well-read, but I've certainly read a lot, let's put it that way, and I enjoy philosophy and history and everything myself, and it was very nice to talk to him, because he was very intellectual, and he liked to talk about those things. But he didn't flaunt it, and it was very seldom that he would initiate the conversation like that, but if you got into a conversation like that with him, he was there."

The complete column at Seattlepi.com recounts some of Jackson's bookstore visits and how he was known to bring a van full of kids to bookstores and let them buy whatever they wanted. I love the fact that Michael Jackson was a reader and that he saw giving books to children as something positive but my lasting impression of the man will be that of one who lived a sad and somewhat twisted existence right up to the day of his death...just another wasted life.

Photo Tour: Rosine, KY, and Bill Monroe Home Place

Rosine, KY, the birthplace of bluegrass music is about a 40-minute drive from Owensboro and the International Bluegrass Music Museum. Despite my attendance at the ROMP festival for the last four years, I have found it difficult to make it to Rosine. ROMP ends late on a Saturday night and the Bill Monroe home in Rosine does not open its doors to the public before 1:00 p.m. on Sundays - timing that does not work out for someone who has over 900 miles of driving to do that day.

This year, however, it was so hot in Owensboro that three of us decided to make the drive to Rosine one morning, opting to hit Yellow Creek Park a little later in the day when things might be a bit cooler (fat chance, that, as it turned out).

The Rosine Barn Jamboree is sure to catch your eye as you drive into town. The barn is right next door to a little general store and cafe that should not be missed either. The store is a great place to get directions to the Bill Monroe Home Place and something cold to drink on your way out to the house. The cemetery in which Bill and much of the Monroe family is buried is just a few hundred yards from the interesection in which the store and Barn sit.

This is a close-up of the circular plaque on the left side of the Rosine Barn Jamboree building:


Just a couple of miles from the general store is this sign marking the way to the old Monroe home, my favorite "dangerous curve" sign of all time:


A few hundred feet down the winding road pictured on the sign will bring you to the Bill Monroe Home Place, the house Bill lived in for much of his life. Monroe was born in a log cabin on the site of this home but the cabin burned to the ground when he was five years old and by 1918 the family was living in this "Cumberland home." The home was fully restored in 2001, by salvaging about 80% of its original wood, and it contains personal furniture, pictures, and other items that belonged to the Monroe family.

The home includes a living room, kitchen, three bedrooms and a back porch on which the family took many of its meals. Bill had the smallest bedroom to himself, his five brothers shared a larger bedroom, his parents had one to themselves, and his three sisters slept in the living room.





This is the scene just off the back porch of the home:


Photos from the Rosine cemetery, including the burial spot of Bill Monroe and much of his family:







And there you have it. Rosine, KY, the birthplace of Bill Monroe and bluegrass music is simply not to be missed. It took me four years to finally get to Rosine but I plan to go back again next year for a more "informed" look around the home place and cemetery. Now that I know what's there and what to expect, a second visit will probably be even better than the first one.

One side note about a nice surprise we got in the general store - Bill Monroe's daughter sitting at a table in the little cafe part of the store, and along side her were the legendary Tom Gray and his wife.