From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would...
It is a beautiful prospect, looking east from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We were there recently on a fine March day, and could see past the Vietnam and Korean Memorials up through the Reflecting Pool (currently under repair for a leak), to the giant fountain of the World War II Memorial (dry also),...
There he was, Abraham Lincoln in a Confederate Army cap, staring out of the page of an old Courier-Journal. I had been looking for something else when I happened upon this collateral descendant of the 16th president, photographed in front of the obelisk that is the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, as he honored...
To date, Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult novels about a teenage girl (Bella Swan) and her vampire boyfriend (Edward Cullen) have sold well over 100 million copies worldwide, and the movie versions are still coming. When a phenomenon is of this scale it doesn’t matter what a book is, artistically; you have to take such a cultural...
It may be hard for us in the United States to imagine that food could ever be scarce here. We may worry about avian flu and mad cow disease, and about the general safety of our increasingly mass-produced food supply, as from time to time some Americans sicken or die from tainted meat or spinach. ...
Longtime readers of Chronicles are familiar with John Shelton Reed, who used to write a column for this magazine. Those less familiar may recall the occasional news story based on the latest intelligence-gathering done by the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, which Professor Reed founded. Well-known among his fellow...
In 1994, Lois Lindstrom, an American, moved to Stockholm. There she befriended Karin Wiking, then in her early 70’s, and from their regular conversations grew this very personal book about Mrs. Wiking’s life and experiences. Like so many others during and right after World War II, Wiking ably served her country and the dispossessed of...
To a woman who has spent several decades of her life in New Orleans, a city that lies mostly below sea level, any trip out is a journey to higher ground. And so Catharine Savage Brosman’s title works for a book of essays mostly about journeys away (though she includes a nice piece on New...
Priscilla Buckley has long been well known to readers of conservative journalism. For nearly three decades, she was managing editor of National Review, a constant font of editing skill, institutional knowledge, good humor, and courtesy. She had a 12-year career before NR, however, and it is those dozen years with United Press in New York...
A few years ago, an old friend of my husband watched her three-year-old son die after eating a tainted hamburger at a fast-food chain in Oregon. She is a pediatrician, and her son had good care; but there was simply nothing anyone could do for him. He was one of many Americans who become sick...
Anyone writing a novel about thoroughbred racing in Kentucky would think first of setting it at Churchill Downs—that brassy track in Louisville which holds its tinsel-television spectacle of the Kentucky Derby every May. Instead, Alyson Hagy chose Keeneland, Lexington’s track set in the middle of the Bluegrass horse farms. Keeneland is smaller, greener, more pleasant...
The Tobacco Bill went up in smoke in June, and as I write there’s no telling whether it will resolidify, like Aladdin’s genie, if Congress rubs the lamp. But before we consign the fight to the ancient history file, it’s worth noting a few details. With the McCain bill died an attempt to kill the...
Ira C. Magaziner, the Rhode Island business consultant turned senior White House advisor to President Clinton, has been in the news again recently as the administration’s Internet man—defending Mr. Clinton’s view that the Web doesn’t need government policing. But Mr. Magaziner is best known as the aide in charge of the effort to create a...
This speech was delivered in April at the Webb School, a private secondary school in Knoxville, Tennessee. I try not to put on airs about what I do for a living. I would never tell you that writing is dignified enough to be called a profession, like being a doctor or an architect. Writing is...
Peyton Place is the name of the North Dakota bar where First Lieutenant Kelly Flinn went to relax, and the name sums up her case very well. It has been a soap opera all through. And as often happens in the soaps, the worst characters prove to be the most popular. Thanks to her healthy...
Actors Theatre of Louisville started its new play festival 20 years ago—that’s a long life in the American theater, and the Humana Festival of New American Plays achieved institution status several seasons back. Unfortunately, the festival is now a little like a fully endowed congregation that no longer has to look to itself to underwrite...
There is nothing so painfully ironic as a war between countrymen. So when nurse Kate Cumming speaks bitterly in her 1864 diary of “our kind northern friends, who love us so dearly that they will have us unite with them, whether we will or no” it is hard to blame her. Cumming is one of...
Until last summer, Michael New was an unknown 22-year-old Army medic, three years into his eight-year enlistment contract. But in August, New learned that he and his battalion were being assigned to Macedonia, where they would serve under the operational control of the United Nations commander, and wear the baby blue U.N. beret and a...
Michael New, the 22-year-old Army medic who faces a bad conduct discharge for refusing to wear the United Nations uniform, may well lose his fight to clear his record. He was court-martialed and convicted in January, and it seems unlikely the Army court will reverse that decision. At issue is his refusal to wear the...
The Civil War and Hollywood have been a pair ever since Ken Burns—because of potential profits, of course. But most of these recent pictures, with their emphasis on marketing rather than script or acting, have had more in common with Nintendo than any real war. For the pittance of $500,000, independent filmmaker Robby Henson has...
Beth and John want to break the news in as civilized a manner as possible. After all, they mean to have a pleasant weekend away in their cabin. So, over beers, cheerfully, they tell John’s parents that Beth is leaving him for his best friend—who is smiling in the armchair in the corner, the fifth...
You may think of Louisville, Kentucky—if you think of it at all—as a sprawling, midsize, metropolitan community of 800,000 m the Upper South. But like most other American cities, Louisville is legally not one community, but many. County-wide there is a total of 95 governments: Louisville, the county, and 93 small cities. There are also...
St. Matthews Episcopal is a modern, manicured church set in the heart of suburban Louisville’s East End. It contrasts somewhat with the dusty farm truck sitting in its parking lot. Near the truck, half a dozen people say hello to a slender man in blue jeans and then mill around numerous apple crates filled with...
The lesbian roommate case in Madison, Wisconsin, that has been pending since 1989 was finally given a hearing this past fall. In a decision dated December 27, 1991, Madison Equal Opportunities Commission hearing examiner Sheilah O. Jakobson found that Anne Hacklander Ready and Maureen Rowe unlawfully discriminated against lesbian Caryl Sprague by refusing to rent...
In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would go on to be one of the...
Graham Greene died this year at 86, a ripe old age that was no small accomplishment for a man who at 19 played Russian roulette on the Berkhamsted common until he grew bored with even the possibility of his own death. As a “semilapsed” Catholic who professed belief (though not certainty) in purgatory but not...
American playwrights handle comedy better than tragedy, at least if this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville is any gauge. Richard Strand’s farce of corporate ladderclimbing, The Death of Zukavsky, and Jane Martin’s broad comedy about lady wrestlers, Cementville, were the two high points of the festival, and even...
Enterprise Zones are the subject of Jeffrey Tucker’s article in this issue; Mr. Tucker found that despite the free-market wrapping paper Jack Kemp’s gift to the American public is only more welfare, this time for businessmen. The original idea, as it was transported here from Thatcher’s England by Stuart Butler, was that economically depressed areas...
Our Scottish friends were trying to explain the phenomenon of the television police, and we were trying to understand. Television sets are taxed yearly in Britain and require an annual sticker. But since the sticker buying is done on the honor system, the citizens of Great Britain enjoy an occasional visit from the television police,...
At the Univ. of Texas, in answer to criticism that he has turned a freshman English composition class into a one-sided debate on political correctness, English department chairman Joseph Kruppa has made several strongly worded replies. The concerns of his most outspoken critic, Professor Alan Gribben, are “nonsense.” Gribben et al. are “people of bad...
When Harlan Hubbard and his wife, Anna, set themselves adrift on the Ohio in late 1946 in a homemade shantyboat, they began not only a five-year river adventure but a way of life together that was as distinctive as it was unmodern. In his memoir of that trip, Shantyboat: A River Way of Life, first...
When the NEA’S Council and chairman last July refused to fund four of the eighteen “solo performers and mime” grants the NEA staff had recommended, there was a tremendous reaction from the artists involved and the Joseph Papp crowd. Rejected! went the headline in the Washington Post‘s Show section. Most of the coverage concentrated on...
My friend Dr. Bob grew up in a coal town called Packard in eastern Kentucky, a place that was abandoned years ago. All that is left these days is kudzu growing over old foundations. He’s a neurosurgeon in Louisville now, and an amateur Kentucky historian, and my favorite tale of his is about the blue...
“Don’t Vote, it Only Encourages Them” goes the bumpersticker, and it is only one among many signs of voter unrest. Another proposal, newly revived and cropping up in states like Oklahoma and South Dakota, is to reform Congress by limiting congressional terms. Back in 1978 two then-freshman senators, John Danforth and Dennis DeConcini, sponsored legislation...
Florence King, a/k/a “Fascist Flossie,” “Ku Klux King,” and “the thinking man’s redneck,” is the author of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and a number of other books under her own name and several others. She is infamous, in a South full of unreconstructed Confederate...
Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, now in its 14th year, has had its up and downs. But some local grumblings notwithstanding, this year’s festival was much better than last, with two excellent plays and only one real miss. Promised works from Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz and novelist...
The Yale Lit. has returned, but not in the form that some Chronicles readers may remember from the early 80’s, when Andrei Navrozov was editor. The undergraduate magazine (est. 1836) he turned into a national quarterly of arts, letters, and politics finished its run through the courts in 1986 and has now returned to the...
Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of tax collecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and if doing so involved the common sense...
A defense of drug addicts another one, in the pages of our family magazine? But defend them we must; this time from prohibitionists who would carry on the fight in utero. Recent cases in Wyoming and Michigan have seen pregnant women being brought up on charges of delivering drugs and alcohol to a minor—not through...
Charley Bland, as his father describes him, would have been a prodigal son except he never had the gumption to leave home. Still, he has the charm most lost souls have, and for the widowed, 35-year-old narrator of Mary Lee Settle’s eleventh novel, returned home to West Virginia from a Bohemian life in Europe, this...
“Alas, that love should be a blight and shame To those who seek all sympathies in one!” —Shelley, “Laon and Cythna” With the publication of the first volume of an expanded edition of her letters in 1980, and now this biography, Mary Shelley’s reputation is being reconsidered. This renewed attention is not due to the...
As 1969 rolled around and the decade was ending, I was six years old and living in a temperate Southern city a thousand miles from New York. Conflict came from wanting to stretch my feet into my brother’s half of the backest-back of our fake wood-sided turquoise station wagon; Vietnam had no meaning for me....
In recent years Actors Theatre of Louisville’s artistic director Jon Jory has come under fire for the relative weakness of his new play festival. He should be happy that this year’s season was stronger. Like any other genre, playwriting is a craft, and if nothing else was evident, it was clear from the eight plays...
The title of Sara Suleri’s memoir, “Meatless Days,” refers to the Pakistani government’s attempt at conservation following its independence from India in 1947. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were decreed “meatless,” meaning no meat would be sold and supposedly none eaten. What it actually meant, recalls Ms. Suleri, was that butchers only worked that much harder on...
In 1963, when Tyrone Guthrie produced his first season at the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the States did not have much in the way of regional theater. In a country whose two most famous actors are, respectively, a President and a presidential assassin, Ronald Reagan and John Wilkes Booth—two actors who, in other words,...
When Bob Woodward published Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, in October of 1987, two things made that book news. One was his assertion that William Casey, the late director of the CIA, had admitted to knowing about the transfer of funds in the Iran-contra deal. The other was the skepticism over Woodward’s claim...
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing written and directed by Patricia Rozema Vos Productions Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to...
Matewan written and directed by John Sayles Cinecom Entertainment Group In 1920 Matewan was a little town on the western edge of Mingo County, West Virginia, right on the Kentucky border. It was a town owned and run by the Stone Mountain Coal Company, and when the miners tried to bring in the union, the...
Full Metal Jacket directed by Stanley Kubrick screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford based on the novel The Short-Timers by Hasford; Warner Bros. Funny, that a film about “Vietnam as it really was,” as Platoon was touted, should fall so wide of any mark of merit, and that Vietnam films with a surreal...