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
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
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
‘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
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...
The ‘Time’ of Elizabeth Madox Roberts
In 1926 Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a 45-year-old former schoolteacher from Springfield, Kentucky, published her first novel. The Time of Man came out to great acclaim; it was reviewed widely, admired here and abroad by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Glenway Wescott,...
Robert Traver: Anatomy of a Fisherman
The eight nudists arrested near Battle Creek, Michigan, had an advocate in the novelist and fishing writer Robert Traver. His disapproval fell not upon them but upon the police officers involved in the arrests. He called one of them a “deputized window-peeper” and...
On Brooklyn’s Side
New York City does not normally figure in the regionalist imagination, either conservative or liberal. It is self- and other-described as the original melting pot, the place where people move when they are getting away from somewhere else, to land in a no-man’s land...
