“An unpredictable, unfailingly intelligent demonstration of a unique wit given free reign.” from deliriously happy
YOU NEED A SCHOOLHOUSE Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South Deutsch, Stephanie Northwestern Univ. (208 pp.) $24.95 | Dec. 30, 2011 978-0-8101-2790-6
A tribute to the productive partnership between Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, a now largely forgotten philanthropist who made his fortune in the retail business as the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. The two met in Chicago in 1911: “Washington regularly cultivated wealthy people who might donate money to Tuskegee Institute” and Rosenwald was “interested in using his money promote the well-being of African Americans.” Both were well known and well respected at the time of their first encounter. But where Rosenwald was the middle-class son of Jewish immigrant parents who worked their way from poverty into affluence, Washington was an ex-slave who had to fight for everything he had, including an education. Their remarkable collaboration produced almost 5,000 “Rosenwald schools” scattered throughout “every state of the American South, from Maryland to Texas.” Black children otherwise denied access to public instruction because of Jim Crow laws could count on receiving a quality education that would help them improve their lives. But the Rosenwald schools did more than educate a black underclass that lived in the shadow of a racist white society. As Deutsch notes, they gave rise to “the parents of the generation who marched and sang and risked their lives in the revolution for equal justice under law.” A moving, inspirational story about an important link in the historical chain that led to the civil-rights movement and a new, more truly democratic chapter in American history.
DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY and Other Bad Thoughts
Doyle, Larry Ecco/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $14.99 paperback | Nov. 8, 2011 978-0-06-196683-5
The Thurber Prize winner struts his stuff. Doyle (Go, Mutants!, 2010, etc.) collects a dizzyingly diverse and consistently hilarious body of short humor pieces originally published in a variety of publications, making a case for the former Simpsons scribe as one of the premier practitioners of the form. Encompassing parody, absurdism, black satire, loopy ephemera and unhinged silliness, the author displays a mastery of varied stylistic approaches and comic voices, from the Pynchonesque t.V. to a bravura approximation of Mark Twain in Huck of Darkness, in which “lost” passages from Huckleberry Finn are re-inserted into the narrative, 1890
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15 october 2011
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nonfiction
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making the classic’s subtextual homosexual content decidedly more emphatic. It’s hard to pin a consistent comic philosophy on Doyle’s pieces, aside from a Simpsons-like devotion to dismantling the conventions of social and cultural mores with ruthless efficiency. Highlights include an epic wedding invitation tweaking the smug bride’s increasingly berserk instructions for those attending her special day; a letter from summer camp that reads like the fever dream of a young G. Gordon Liddy; a surreally pathetic newsletter detailing the continuing trauma and attendant delusions of a romantic breakup; and a savage, dogcentric takedown of memoirists in the manner of James Frey and Augusten Burroughs. Doyle repeatedly employs such devices as absurd lists (pretentious ice cream flavors, ideas for pet stores) and magazine-style questionnaires to help pace the collection and suggest a formal consistency, but the greatest pleasure is the sheer range of tones and subject matter on display. An unpredictable, unfailingly intelligent demonstration of a unique wit given free reign. (Author appearances in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C.)
THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW An Intimate History of the First World War Englund, Peter Translated by Graves, Peter Knopf (512 pp.) $35.00 | Nov. 11, 2011 978-0-307-59386-3 978-0-307-70138-1 e-book
The Great War, as experienced by 20 ordinary people. There is no shortage of histories of World War I written from the viewpoints of the generals and statesmen who drove the grand strategies. Swedish historian Englund (The Battle that Shook Europe: Poltova and the Birth of the Russian Empire, 2002, etc.) takes a different approach, creating a history of the war as perceived by 20 individuals scattered across the globe. Among them: an Australian woman driving ambulances for the Serbian army; a Venezuelan soldier of fortune in the Ottoman cavalry; the American wife of a Polish aristocrat, whose home was wrecked and then turned into a hospital for typhus victims by the occupying Germans; a French civil servant; a Scotsman fighting Germans in East Africa, a 12-year-old German girl, and a dozen others. The war began for them in an explosion of optimistic patriotism but descended inexorably into cynicism, horror, suffering, privation and exhaustion. Through it all they endured, trying to make sense of it and bear up with their dignity and humanity intact. There are adventures and battles, of course, but also many moments of quiet contemplation with closely observed details of street scenes, restaurants, railway stations and deserted battlefields. Englund unobtrusively includes helpful background information within the text or in footnotes. The text is based largely on diaries, letters and memoirs, from which the author quotes copiously, but most of the narrative
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