Nonfiction Shorts

Short reviews of recent nonfiction books.

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Published: Mar 21, 2007

By John FreebornSelf-published, 120 pp., $20

The art collective Space 1026 is now more than 10 years old, has a blog, and recently took over a wing of West Philly's Institute of Contemporary Art with a massive yet minutely detailed installation. But everything had to start somewhere, and John Freeborn lovingly details the origins of Space in his new book, Big Kids/Little Kids.

Freeborn, himself a Space 1026 member, breaks down the collective's connections from its beginnings in Providence, R.I., to 1Pixel and 222 Gallery, and ultimately the space on Arch Street. And, as Freeborn writes in the introduction, "The network grows every day." While there is a linear journey of sorts, Freeborn's book focuses on individual artists who have contributed to Space's success. The overall impact of Space 1026 on the art scene — Philadelphia's, and nationally — is as strong as its members. Freeborn writes simply and from the heart about almost 100 artists; Rebecca Wescott, who won a Pew Fellowship in 2004 and died that same year, gets a lovely eulogy. Even when Freeborn admits that tension exists or existed between himself and a Space 1026 member, he always writes something positive about their work. Whether he's being slick or just polite is up to you.

—Alex Richmond

When Pagan Kennedy — self-made zinestress, novelist and biographer — turns her attention to plastic surgery and transsexuality, she does so with the zeal that made her The Exes and Stripping so charming and the historical Black Livingstone so riveting. That Kennedy manages to roll aristocracy, religion, celebrity, feminism, class and sexuality into the mix is mere icing on a rich, rare cake.

The story of Britain's first female-to-male sex change starts in the early 20th century, when Laura Dillon — a well-to-do Oxford medical student and lesbian — finds Harold Gillies, an ethicsless surgeon experimenting with both facial reconstruction and testosterone. She wanted to change her life and sex. He wanted to change physical, mental and spiritual circumstance. This match made in heaven — consummated in 1946 when Gillies turned Laura into Michael — is comparable only to the relationship Dillon would share with dashing race-car driver Robert Cowell. That Robert became Roberta and possibly the first male-to-female transsexual in the U.K. (castrated by Dillon) is the centerpiece of this passionate story.

Kennedy goes through medical books and old letters. She discusses Dillon's outside world — one not yet accepting of the couple's love — and the celebrity of the whole thing, but more intimately, she portrays the insular Dillon, as he privately becomes a ship's doctor, a Tibetan Buddhist and a resident of India; a dignified man who frees himself not only from the vessel from which he was born, but from the confines of British temperament and social convention.

—A.D. Amorosi

Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You starts with a proposal. Sean Thomas, 39, is finally ready to settle down. He pops the question to Claire, whom he met online, but we don't read her answer until after Thomas works backward through how he started Internet dating.

It wasn't intentional. Thomas, who is also a novelist, signed up for Udate.com as an assignment for the British Men's Health magazine. He didn't have high hopes; "howler monkeys" is how he described people looking for love on the Web.

Slowly, Thomas became a convert. In the process of recounting his dates — one per chapter — he reflects on his checkered love life, including two abortions, one 17-year-old girlfriend (he was in his 30s at the time), an online porn addiction (that indirectly sent him to the ER), strings of prostitutes and a guestimate of 60 to 70 bedmates.

Thomas pulls the funniest bits out of his experiences, but is serious when he needs to be, especially when writing about the women who broke his heart, and vice versa. It's in these moments where he shines. Toward the end, after he's become an expert in reading dating profiles, he offers "The Sean Thomas 'Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You' Official Profile Decoder," which is, speaking from experience, painfully accurate.

"Net dating is telling me precisely the kind of people I am likely to appeal to; not just the kind of people I would like to appeal to," he writes. "It's telling me where I slot in the marital desirability stakes. And I suppose in that sense it is a salutary experience, if not a terribly romantic one. Even if nothing comes of this I'll have learned something very valuable. Goddammit."

That Thomas shares his dating knowledge without cloyingly promoting online sites or, worse, depressing his lovelorn readers out of their minds, is quite an achievement.

—Jen A. Miller

Eric Bepots' Vatican Conspiracy Theory is such a raw, incendiary document that it almost seems outside any critical scope. The author seeks to indict the Catholic Church's actions concerning sex abuse by clergy. And it's personal: As a youth, Bepots was himself the victim of a pedophile priest, who drugged him, raped him and gave him HIV.

Bepots eventually hired a private detective to locate the priest, only to discover that his abuser had died of AIDS and that the church had falsified his death certificate. He claims that cover-ups, evidence tampering and lies were part of a systemic conspiracy that went all the way to the top, and provocatively makes a direct connection between the spread of HIV/AIDS by pedophile and sexually active priests to the global scope of the pandemic. His own case was part of a class-action suit in New Hampshire that was mishandled and finally dropped.

Bepots is not a legal writer or a theologian, and eventually he proves to be a less-than-thorough sleuth in uncovering key elements of issues. Corroboration comes in unanalyzed transcribed depositions and phone conversations from witnesses, without conclusion. Narrative deficiencies aside, these documents are jarring in their detail.

But Bepots' purpose is not to write a comprehensive study that no one will read. Vatican Conspiracy Theory is a mishmash of gonzo journalism and passionate plea for accountability. Arcane journalism style notwithstanding, Bepots is most on-target when describing how abuse victims are further traumatized by interrogation techniques, payoffs and dismissals. Even if he doesn't harness his anger enough to make this more than a j'accuse, the book raises the specter of the profound hypocrisy and crimes perpetrated by and for the church.

—Lew Whittington

"Nicky" Barnes made the life of heroin dealing a raw, romantic adventure. At least he tried to. Then again, his legend may be best rendered by the filmmakers of Live and Let Die and New Jack City, who borrowed Barnes' story, or by hip-hop MCs who've worshipped him from afar.

The story goes that by the mid-'70s, Barnes was moving more than a $100 million worth of H; laundering cold cash by the gazillions; making murder and mistresses his mien. Though convicted of narcotics conspiracy in 1977, he ended up in the Federal Witness Protection program due to a parole recommendation from U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani (and because he snitched on fellow drug-dealing "council members," one of whom slept with his wife). Co-writer Tom Folsom, a documentary film director, must have been a plus in helping Barnes structure his long dark night into something heightened and dramatic. But then again, much of the drug stuff seems like drudgery. And Barnes — a man who lived by the code of the street — forgets to mention one thing: He snitched. And isn't "don't snitch" the stuff of T-shirts? Don't buy this book. Steal it. Or just listen to a Biggie CD.

—A.D. Amorosi

I was with John Sellers. His memoir about indie rock and its not-overstated power to save hits the right tones early. Sellers' tale — that of a kid repulsed by his father's Dylan obsession who stumbles from Top 40 to 120 Minutes and eventually to The Smiths, New Order and Pavement — is smart about indie rock. About how "indie" is more of a feeling than an ironclad rule about independence. And about how indie rock is an affliction boys develop as a means to impress chicks but which eventually supplants them.

Sellers is upfront that he's never been the first guy on the bandwagon, and that's generally to his credit; no one likes that guy anyway. So he's unashamed to have been, say, a few months late discovering Pavement, or a couple decades behind on Superchunk. Where Sellers lost me was not in his hyper-footnoting (though the chapter-length note on Joy Division was a bit much). It was when the last third of the book — essentially a series of essays on bands — devolved into a drooling fanboy account of meeting Guided by Voices' frontman Bob Pollard. Now I enjoy GBV as much as the next guy not named Sellers or employed by Magnet, and recognize that the uber-prolific Pollard is more than deserving of adulation. But when Sellers admits that he discovered GBV only in 2002 — not in 1994 with their breakthrough Bee Thousand — you can't help but question his credibility. You wonder how much of being a disciple is not just believing, but being there when the gospel's being written. And when Sellers reveals his faith wavered after a flap with Pollard — who was unaware Sellers intended to write about his visit to one of Pollard's infamous Monument Club drinking bashes — you wonder how truly he believed in the first place.

—Brian Howard

Like recent books about Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech (Drew Hansen's The Dream) and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (Gabor Boritt's The Gettysburg Gospel), this new book describes the lively, unpredictable history behind one of America's proudest literary accomplishments — namely, Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat."

While "Casey" made its debut in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, author John Evangelist Walsh convincingly insists that the poem didn't really take hold until a production of the musical Prince Methusalem that August, when the flamboyant Broadway actor DeWolf Hopper recited it in front of two assembled major league teams. Walsh thoroughly illustrates how Thayer lifted most of the poem's more famous phrases (i.e. "outlook wasn't brilliant," "tore the cover off the ball," even "beating of the storm waves on a stern and distant shore") from contemporaneous newspaper baseball stories.

The book's only flaws are a couple of imagined conversations Walsh stages between Thayer and Hopper — they're fanciful, but don't belong in a nonfiction book. Walsh is on stronger ground describing a benefit game between Hopper's group of actors and New York sportswriters. A local restaurant owner "led in a donkey that had a large keg of beer slung on its back. The keg was placed on a stand at third base, and any player who could get that far 'was entitled to a glass of the foaming beverage.'" Nice to see that some things about journalists, actors and free beer haven't changed.

—Andrew Milner

Local author Marion Deutsche Cohen's math poetry is not just about finding rhythm in language, or emotion in calculus, or even using numbers as characters (or vice versa). It is about the complex analysis of feeling. Cohen artfully expresses her dreams, childhood memories, thoughts about teaching mathematics and reflections on her family in this graceful collection. Her best work finds the symmetry between a husband and wife in a hospital room, or illustrates a love for the emptiness of space.

Using math to create imagery — Handel's Water Music yields sines and cosines, a day at the beach forms convex horizons and an x-axis — Cohen shows familiar things in a new way. As she writes, "Only the clock sails counter-counter-clockwise/ Provided it's not digital, it persists/ insists/ and resists/ the flow of the room."

Even if readers do not know about lemmas and blinking points, Crossing the Equal Sign invites investigation. Though, her use of all caps instead of italics to create emphasis or emotion detracts on occasion, especially in a poem that includes an anti-math monologue by a woman on a bus.

—Gary M. Kramer

They didn't have playoffs or wild-card teams in 1908 major league baseball; after reading Cait Murphy's lively history of that season, you'd wonder why anyone would ever want to meddle with the traditional pennant race.

Three teams battled for the '08 National League pennant — the Pirates with superhuman shortstop Honus Wagner, the Cubs with their double-play combination of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, and the New York Giants with classy pitcher Christy Mathewson, pugnacious manager John McGraw and rookie Fred Merkle. In a September game against the Cubs, Merkle, the runner on first, neglected to touch second base when the winning run scored and thousands of fans stormed the field. "Forevermore known simply as 'the Merkle game,' Murphy writes, 'it is the hinge on which the season turns — and 1908 is the season in which baseball itself makes the turn into the modern era." League president Harry Pulliam ruled the game a tie; when the Giants and Cubs ended the season tied for first they were forced to replay the game, which the Cubs won. The Cubs then beat the Tigers in the World Series, their last world championship of the 20th century.

There was a great American League season too (on Oct. 2, for example, 40-game winner Ed Walsh struck out 16 in a 1-0 loss to Cleveland's Addie Joss, who merely threw a perfect game), which Murphy chronicles, putting the national pastime in historical and sociological context. She also has an ear for the great quote; when Pulliam blew his brains out in 1909, McGraw snapped, "I didn't think a bullet in the head could hurt him."

—Andrew Milner

There's a hilarious old short film that compiles the history of opera (in 10 minutes), in which the most famous operas are parodied. Madame Butterfly, Wagner's Ring Cycle and so on, are played out with cutout pop-ups a la Monty Python. Plot points like betrayals, adultery, poisons, rapes, murders, suicides are tallied up like grocery items.

Franklin Mesa could have applied some of that camp comedy and theatrical ump in his mummified tome. This handsome reference book should carry a disclaimer that it contains "just the facts, ma'am."

Mesa might be a great archivist, but he places the dust on this book right away. He might have considered using 101 Stories of the Great Ballets as a model. That book not only details premieres and significant performances, it inspires analysis. And what about those famed tenor tantrums? Surely there's a backstage drama or two to tell about Luciano Pavarotti (who, incidentally, was nowhere to be found in these sheets).

Instead of being packed with obsessive, over-the-top, scene-stealing operatic trivia, this book reads like a stamp collection. The first section is devoted to opera premieres, noted alphabetically under their original titles with production minutia. Cross-references and a glossary of terms would have been serviceable in this compendium.

Mesa pumps more active prose into the biography section. Who knew that Blow-Up bad boy David Hemmings sang the first Miles in Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw? There are some thematic sparks, too, like this entry introducing Maria Callas: "Celebrated soprano of undying fame, Callas revived the art of coloratura soprano and helped restore bel canto repertoire." A few more ariatic lines like that might make this encyclopedia more attractive to musicologists and opera queens alike.

—Lew Whittington

 

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