Show Me a Statesman

Jim Reed, Senatorial Immortal: A Biography By Lee Meriwether. Kessinger Publishing (Whitefish, Montana) 296 pp., $28.95 paper, 2007 Sen. James Alexander Reed of Missouri was one of the titans of the isolationist, individualist Old Right—though, like others of that...
Dire Straits

Dire Straits

Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand. Simon & Schuster (New York) 303 pp., $25.00 cloth, 2008 I was in the City of Niagara Falls twice in recent months, both times on business, but I was only lost the first time. It was a wintry night with...
Northwest Passages

Northwest Passages

The Canoe and the Saddle By Theodore Winthrop Edited By Paul J. Lindholt University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln) 240 pp., $13.95 paper, 2006 Good Pacific Northwest literature peels back the layers of cant that have accumulated over time about this region and gives...
Stealing Dorothy

Stealing Dorothy

‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and My Fortunate Home by Caleb Stegall If ever an association between a book and state has been stamped on the national consciousness it must be the up-and-down literary-geographical marriage between Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...
Across the Great Divide

Across the Great Divide

Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South By Barney Hoskyns. Bloomsbury (London) 256 pp., $17.24 paper, second edition, 1998Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown begins, to quote the script, with “the rhythms of funky seventies SOUL...