Joel Fishbane's Blog

About six years ago I went through a phase where I read all the books that had been turned into musicals. I began with Gregory Maguire's Wicked, went straight through Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, made a left at Dubose Heyward's Porgy, went a few miles with Hugo's Les Miserables, and finally ended up in the middle of nowhere with a copy of Struggles and Triumphs, the autobiography of 19th century American showman P.T. Barnum. Struggles and Triumphs wasn't the official source material for the Cy Coleman-Michael Stewart musical Barnum, but the no doubt mined it for material. I thought the book might be a bit of a slog but it was surprisingly engaging. Barnum was famous for his various schemes to amaze, astonish and occasionally humbug his audiences with Siamese twins, dwarves, wolfboys, living skeletons and other human curiosities. I settled in for an intriguing portrait of this "first purveyor of mass entertainment" (as the editors at Penguin Classics called him), already planning to move on to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime when I was done.

And then, on Page 283, everything changed. A single sentence had the same effect as a flat tire on a road trip; it was something which forced me to stop for breath.

“I first heard of her through a quaker who came into my office and told me of a wonderful girl, seventeen years of age, who resided near him at Pictou, Nova Scotia and who was probably the tallest girl in the world. I asked him to obtain her exact height, on his return home, which he did and sent it to me, and I at once sent an agent who in due time came back with Anna Swan. She was an intelligent and by no means ill-looking girl, and during the long period while she was in my employ, she was visited by thousands of persons. After the burning of my second Museum, she went to England where she attracted great attention.”

"She was an intelligent and by no means ill-looking girl..." This sentence struck me hard. In the short space that Barnum devotes to Anna Swan, what do we learn about her? No one was expecting a detailed biography about her birthplace, parents, schooling or nine brothers and sisters (there would be ten, but one was born two years after Barnum's book). But during her time in Barnum's employ, Anna Swan gave lectures and performed Shakespeare. In 1863, she went to England and met the Queen. Writing in 1869, Barnum could have mentioned one of these salient points. Instead, what does he choose to tell us? She was tall. And she wasn't ugly.

I didn't know about Anna Swan when I first read Struggles and Triumphs. I didn't know that she stood somewhere around seven feet, eleven inches or that two years after Barnum said she was "by no means an ill-looking girl", she would marry Martin van Buren Bates, a former Confederate soldier who was eight feet tall. I didn't know that she had survived three fires while in her employ with P.T. Barnum, one of which she only escaped with the aid of a fireman's derrick that hoisted her safely to the ground. How could I know any of these things? The paragraph Barnum wrote was 160 words long - 161 if you count ill-looking as two separate words.

Barnum had lots of things he could have told us; he chose to focus on how Anna Swan looked. Has anything really changed? Aren't women still being celebrated (or demonized) because of their beauty and size? When a woman has reached almost mythic proportions, is it ever possible for us to see beyond her measurements? Equally intriguing is Barnum's use of the word intelligent; for this singular remark to make it onto the page means Anna Swan's personality must have been as memorable as the size of her shoes. Yet Barnum could not bring himself to dwell on this and so today we know nothing of who Anna was. We know only what Barnum wanted us to know in his various advertisements: that she was a woman who was notable for being tall.

It was these thoughts which eventually led to my book "The Thunder of Giants". Since it's fiction, I can't say it's a definitive portrayal of who Anna Swan was. But I hope I'm in the right ballpark; I hope that if Anna Swan was to read the book, she would recognize something of herself. However small it may be.

Sometime around January 1, 2011, I stumbled upon one of those sites where readers had challenged each other to read a hundred books throughout the year. It seemed ridiculously easy at the time, but in fact I almost didn't make it. This has everything to do with my penchant for picking up fat biographies and even fatter books on American History. Early on, I knew I'd have to set some arbitrary ground rules: graphic novels would be acceptable but cookbooks were a sin. So while I can report it wasn't all heavy tomes whose weight broke my Kindle's back, I have to admit I only finished the last book on December 30 at around four o'clock. You can see the full list here .

Some may take exception to the presence of graphic novels and plays on my list, but I'd argue that such items are necessary for anyone planning on following in my, er, booksteps. Consider them as you would sorbet during a fancy meal: something to cleanse the palette between a heavy course. This isn't an insult. Sorbet is a complex thing, as anyone who's tried to make it can attest. A good sorbet - with or without the liqueur - is a bit of a godsend and there have been plenty of times when the sorbet has impressed me more then the course that came after it. Similarly, Alan Moore's "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman impressed me far more than Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood".

Reading one hundred books in a year isn't much of a boast: it won't impress the ladies and if you're running for office, it might even turn voters away ("Why is he reading so much? Shouldn't he be out there running the country?"). But for the bibliophile, it can be a pleasant challenge that forces you to get your head out of the Internet. I found myself wantonly distracted throughout 2010 and though my To Read pile increased, the amount of books I actually read was pitiful. I became sentimental for those days as a boy when I would scamper off to summer camp, my duffel bag filled with six or seven books which I read in under a week (I went to camp for the privacy, not the activities). My 2011 challenge, then, was actually an attempt to recapture my inner bookworm, who I had feared had been trampled by the passing of time.

I'm happy to say that he's still alive and just as voracious as ever. Like the alcoholic, I took a single drink and was lost to the ages. Looking back over the list, I'd have to say that my favorite non-fiction read was Kenneth Ackerman's "Dark Horse", a book whose relevance was even greater as we headed into the 2012 Republican primaries. I began a (literary) love affair with Sarah Vowell and rekindled the spark between me and Brian Moore. But my favorite fiction of the year was either E.L. Doctorow's "Homer and Langley" or Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending". For audiobooks, you can't get much better then "The Mark of Zorro", although anything read by B.J. Harrison is usually a treat. And I'd have to say the best part of the challenge was that I was able to bookend it with the two volumes of Stephen Sondheim's collected lyrics, a companion set that serves as memoir and playwriting masterclass even as it gives a slight orgasm to the musical theatre geek within.

Reading is an intimate and ultimately private act; it's about personal gratification, much like another activity most people do in bed late at night. If your resolution is to read more this year, use the 100 book challenge as your guide: but don't despair if you don't make it. The moment reading becomes a chore, it has defeated its purpose- one of the reasons why academic settings tend to dissuade more people from reading then the Internet ever could.

They definitely don't write them like this anymore. The Mark of Zorro may very well be the king of the popcorn novels, succeeding in being a witty, adventurous delight despite having absolutely no nutritional value. This isn't an insult: Johnston McCulley's original 1919 novel is as delicious as a well-made dessert, overflowing with chases on horesback, sword play, evil tyrants, noble thieves and of course the requisite lovely senorita who manages to not always be the damsel in distress. It's given a spirited reading by B.J. Harrison, the chief cook and bottle washer over at thebestaudiobooks.com . Mr. Harrison, who has narrated dozens of novels and short stories for his Classic Tales podcast, has outdone himself this time around: he gives both voice and character to McCulley's calvacade of characters, moving from lisping generals to languid nobles with impressive ease.

The Mark of Zorro is almost a century old and has been remade, re-imagined and rebooted so many times that it's easy to forget its original appeal. A not-so-distant literary grandson to Robin Hood and The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro is the classic gentleman bandit, helping the helpless with a careless laugh and an easy flick of the blade. McCulley's contribution to the genre is the creation of the "masked avenger" and it's no accident that he inspired countless superheros of the 20th century, beginning with Batman and moving on down the line. Both Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel had to resort to one clever disguise after another to fool their captors, but Zorro is far more blatant: he simply dons a mask (in the book it covers his whole face, which at least makes the public's inability to figure out his secret identity a little more plausible). The other thing that explains Zorro's appeal is that he's the quintessential American. The novel is set in California during the Spanish colonial era and it's not hard to see the metaphor: Zorro is a hero encouraging rebellion against colonial overlords in the name of truth, justice and, one presumes, other principles of self-government.

It's hard to tell whether McCulley intended Zorro's "secret" identity to actually be a secret to the reader. Since Zorro only reveals his identity at the end, one can surmise that he hoped for readers to be as shocked as the people of the pueblo. On the other hand, it's so blatantly obvious throughout the book, that one has to wonder if McCulley wasn't employing a little dramatic irony along with a sly wink. In any case, ninety years of films, sequels and television shows (and now the Internet) have all conspired to ruin the surprise.

Listeners definitely have to be ready to forgive a few sexist tropes of the era: the lovely senorita invariably needs Zorro to rush to her aid. Although McCulley - writing the same year that women got the vote - wisely ensures that his heroine does get at least one moment to save herself without the aid of her masked man. Another caveat: The Mark of Zorro was written as a serial and it definitely shows. McCulley is always taking great pains to explain something that happened in an earlier chapter - sort of his version of "in case you're just tuning in, here's what's going on." And one does get the sense that he's stretching out the narrative, probably because he was getting paid by the word. These are characters who love to talk, even when it means repeating something they just said in a different (albeit wittier) way.

This is where Mr. Harrison, as is only appropriate, rides in the save the day. His performances are so entertaining that one easily forgets the weaker points of McCulley's narrative. This really is the perfect marriage of performance and text. You could go off and read the book yourself, but take it from me: it's a lot more fun to have Mr. Harrison do it for you.

Comparing a book to its filmed version is a dangerous pastime: cinema and print are two different mediums and require different storytelling skills. One is visual, the other cerebral. Those that realize this point invariably make good films. Written by Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball The Movie is a taut character drama of a man against the world. Michael Lewis' book, on the other hand, is a far more complex expose of baseball's underworld and the personas behind both the players and those who put them on the field. Book and film are two different entities that have sprung from the same tree: the closest analogy one could give is that they are a pair of successful fraternal twins.

Lewis' book, written in 2003, has been such an influence on the world of baseball that apparently it's title has entered the baseball lexicon. An exploration of the Oakland Athletics' 2002 season - when they won 20 games in a row, among other miracles - Moneyball focuses its narrative on Oakland GM Billy Beane and his assistant Paul DePodesta as they form their team based on sabermetrics, a philosophy cooked up by statistician Bill James. Exactly what sabermetrics is isn't important, at least not for the purposes of enjoying the book (or the film). What matters is that it is a philosophy that flies in the face of conventional baseball insiders: in other words, Beane and co. were implementing a revolutionary system that threatened the status quo.

This threat is seen most clearly in the film, which structures the story around Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and follows him as he squares off against angry scouts, a doubting media and an irascible coach (an under-used Phillip Seymor Hoffman). Watching the film, one gets the idea that Billy and his assistant (played in the film by Jonah Hill) practically invented sabermetrics; Lewis' book, on the other hand, does a much better job providing the history of the idea which began as early as 1978.

Both book and film successfully convey the emotional benefit of sabermetrics: it tends to favor the underdog. And everyone loves an underdog, which is what makes it so easy to become involved in the characters. This isn't easy given that the crux of the conflict is the esoteric interpretation of baseball statistics: and all the authors, whether it's Lewis in his narrative or Zallian and Sorkin in their screenplay, deserve to be applauded for managing to boil the narrative down to its more human elements.

For my money (pun intended), the film is slightly more accessible then the book. Lewis has written a fun expose, but his writing style is loose and occasionally unfocused. If the main character of the movie is Billy Beane, the main character of the book is an idea. By focusing the story on Billy and ramping up the urgency (there's a sense that 2002 was a do-or-die season for Billy Beane), the film manages to pull us along even though it's largely plotless.

Where the book does succeed is in delivering the lives of the underdogs who sabermetric theory saved. The movie hints at these characters but it's a Brad Pitt vehicle and they can only go so far. Lewis has a lot more latitude. Most affecting is the story of Scott Hatteberg, the Baptist catcher who is forced to play first base and ends up securing the Oakland A's 20th straight victory. In a fictional world, one would see the victory coming right from Chapter One; but in the world of non-fiction, it comes as a spectacular moment of truth colliding with dramatic necessity. The underdog triumphs or, to use the book's central metaphor, David faces Goliath and knocks him out of the park.

Still, it's hard to recommend Moneyball, book or film, to the baseball hater in your family. At the end of the day, Moneyball is still about baseball, with a climax crafted right out of the drama of the game. If you have no interest in baseball, you may find yourself coming down with a slight case of disinterest. On the other hand, the book / film may just rekindle your love of the game. I played baseball as a kid but, much to my father's shame, I was never very good (as you might guess, I was more interested in books). I haven't thought about baseball very much over the years, but Moneyball did a good job reminding me how much I adored my time on the field. Perhaps this is why I couldn't help but fall for Moneyball in both its incarnations. Like so many of the players in the story, I was also an underdog. And it's nice to think that, based on sabermetric theory, even I might have been good enough to play in the majors.

Benjamin Harrison by Charles W. Calhoun

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The latest in my ongoing effort to study America through the lens of presidential biographies, Charles W. Calhoun's Benjamin Harrison manages the amazing act of being as informative as a Wikipedia article without actually revealing all that much about its subject. This may be a result of the scope of the book - it's part of The American President's Series, edited by Arthur M. Schlessinger Jr, and it's probable that the author was working towards a specific word count. Whatever the reason, this is hardly the most comprehensive look at the life of the 23rd President (that honor resides with the 3 volume opus by Harry J. Sievers). This isn't necessarily a bad thing; but the book succeeds in revealing very little about Benjamin Harrison himself. This is a political biography, focused entirely on Harrison's professional actions, rather then his personal life. This sadly contradicts the aim of the American President series which, according to Mr. Schlessinger is to remind us of the humanity behind America's leaders.

A book that concentrates on Harrison's personal life might prove in drumming up some interest in the man, who is largely forgotten when it comes time to discuss America's presidents. Harrison's political life was the usual domestic arguments over the tariff, pensions, patronage and the economy, with a few international disputes to give the whole thing a little spice. But there are hints of a Greek drama going on behind the scenes: Harrison struck up a long friendship with his wife's neice, Mary Scott "Mame" Dimmick, such that she was eventually brought to the White House and was so trusted that she knew the government ciphers. His many surviving letters to her speak to a deep friendship and he continually sent her invitations and confided in her his professional concerns. All this might just be an echo of the Chester Arthur - Julia Sand relationship, if not for the fact that Harrison married his Mame in 1896, four years after the death of Harrison's first wife.

Mr. Calhoun doesn't let himself delve too deeply into this relationship, although this may be because he discounts the implications that there was a long, secret affair (platonic or otherwise). The question was certainly raised by Harrison's daughter, Mary, and her husband Robert McKee. They detested Mame and Robert seems to have suggested that the relationship was at best thoroughly improper. In any case, after the marriage, Harrison became estranged from his daughter and the two rarely, if ever, spoke. Marrying your wife's necee certainly isn't illegal, but it does fall into a murky moral terrain and the various questions about what really lay at the heart of Harrison and Mame (pun intended) is by far the most intriguing thing about him.

As mentioned, Mr. Calhoun doesn't go too deeply into any of this; much of this book is a survey of Harrison's accomplishments during his single term in office. There's about as much information here as there is in Alyn Brodsky's book on Grover Cleveland, another book which tries to demonstrate a man's forgotten contributions of the man to the evolution of American politics. Brodsky was pretty convincing in his portrayals, but then his book was also larger in scope. He was much more excited about his subject and the age in which he lived; Mr. Calhoun knows a lot about Harrison, but I never got the feeling that the man had inflamed his passion. It may be that there's a book out there that proves Harrison wasn't a caretaker president - but I'm not sure this one is it.





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Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life by Alice Wexler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not officially a two volume set, both Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life and Emma Goldman In Exile are well-researched biographies of the two halves of the famed anarchist's life: B.E. (Before Exile) and A.E. (I'll leave you guess what this stands for). Sent packing from the U.S. after years of anti-government rhetoric, Emma Goldman spent the last twenty years of her life yearning for what she did during the first forty. Or at least, this is the inherent implication in Ms. Wexler's books, which cut a definitive line down the middle of Emma Goldman's life. Ms. Wexler is not in love with Emma Goldman, which makes her an ideal author to conduct this study: there are no rose tinted glasses here, and both books are thoroug, sometimes critical examination of Emma, her politics and the world in which she tried to implement them.

An essential bit of Goldman scholarship, Ms. Wexler's tomes are only quasi-chronological; although events are grouped in rough accordance with a timeline. Ms. Wexler isn't afraid to deviate it from this if it suits her thematic approach. She prefers to discuss Emma's life this way, alternating between the personal and the political in order to give us the full picture of a woman once called "the most dangerous woman in America". This creates a fascinating juxtaposition, as Emma's personal life appears to have contrasted sharply with the cultivated public persona. To the world she was Emma Goldman the Anarchist, who provoked riots, advocated birth control, fought against conscription and inspired Leon Czologosz to shoot President McKinley (Czologosz himself claimed to have been inspired by Goldman's lectures). But behind the scenes she was a scarred romantic, often to the point of desperation. Just as she leapt from one cause to the next, Emma Goldman's life was dotted by a series of ill-fated affairs, each of which have their own air of near-Shakespearian tragedy.

Both books succeed in deliver the fascinating story that is Emma Goldman's life. Born in Russia during the Franco-Prussian War, she emigrated to the U.S. where she became an anarchist, suffered a failed marriage, went to jail several times and was finally deported in 1917. Returning to Bolshevik Russia, she was instantly disappointed by what she found, sending her on a twenty year odyssey to find both a new cause and a new home. There's an ache to the second half of Emma' story, which may be why I found it much more engaging then the first. There is a deeper struggle in the second half of Emma's life, an urgency that is largely absent from her earlier years. At least, this is how it is presented by Alice Wexler; whether consciously or not, even her sharp pen takes pity on Emma.

Still, these aren't perfect examinations of Emma's life. Ms. Wexler has her preference when it comes to subject - she delves deeply into Emma's politics, but speaks very little about Emma's stance on birth control. Even so, one can't deny that the subtitle to the first book - An Intimate Life - is highly appropriate. Who knew that Emma Goldman could write such dirty letters? By rummaging through Emma Goldman's mailbag, Ms. Wexler reveals a lusty mind with a sexual appetite not often attributed to women of the era. The letters to Ben Reitman - a whorehouse physician who Emma loved during the first years of the 20th century - are especially lewd, sometimes bordering on the pornographic (at least for that era). In later years, there is a clear indication of Emma trying to recapture some of this lust with her other lovers, often with limited success.

According to Ms. Wexler, then, there is something of the classic historical tragedy in Emma Goldman. A towering inspiration in her professional life (to this day there are Emma Goldman societies), she seems to have spent most of her personal life hungering for more.



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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Even if I hadn't enjoyed this book as much as I did, I still would have been thrilled that Julian Barnes had claimed the 2011 Man Booker Prize. An author with an eclectic body of work, I view the success more as a nod towards his career then any singular work. This isn't to say The Sense of An Ending isn't a good read, merely that Mr. Barnes' ouevre has been so impressive that it's pretty scandalous he hasn't won already. Here, he gives us a book so subtle that it doesn't immediately scream "award". It's not a sprawling fictional biography of Thomas More (see Wolf Hall) or a structurally ambitious tome (see The Blind Assassin). Don't come to this book looking for smoke and mirrors. There are few obvious tricks to dazzle you; it is, to quote one reviewer, "a work of art, in a minor key".

The novel's ambitions lie in its themes, not in its style or plot. A subtle, affecting exploration of memory and history, it's a good example of why no one's first hand account of a situation can ever be trusted. It's narrator, Tony Webster, is reflecting on his life, particularly on his spot in a love triangle with his ex-girlfriend Veronica and his school chum Adrian Finn. To say more would only ruin the suspense but suffice it to say, perspective is everything and few of us who are afforded a bird's eye view of our own lives. Tony Webster admits early on his memory is unreliable, a fact underscored by his (too) persistent fears about Alzheimers. He barely trusts anything he knows. For him - for all of us - the past remains too far removed, existing merely at the intersection between "the imperfections of memory and the inadequacies of documentation."

As a lover of sparse writing - the "less is more" dictum - I found The Sense of an Ending beautifully concise. Perhaps this is also an example of a good marriage between content and form: Tony Webster is not the most introspective of chaps, or at least he's introspective about the wrong things. He has his obsessions - time, memory, Veronica, Adrian - and he lacks the willpower to vary from them. Numerous times he remarks that he will not discuss the lives or fates of other characters because they aren't part of "this story". It's equally likely that Tony doesn't know their fates himself. His school friends disappear from the book and his daughter never quite manages to make an arrival (although, as Tony insists on reminding us, the two of them "get on well").

The novel(la)'s short length lends itself well for repeated readings, which is almost a must. I'll confess I had to read the last five pages a few times before I understood the full implications of the final turn of the screw. Twist endings can be dangerous in that they become all people remember but this particular twist ending has the unsettling aura of the far-too-casual revelation. Tony doesn't spend a lot of time on it: he devotes only nineteen lines of prose to his reaction, cutting his account short as if he can't bare to discuss the implications of his new-found wisdom. Wisely, neither Mr. Barnes or Tony Webster tell us how to feel about what he have learned, leaving each of us to determine the impact for ourselves.



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