Biography | Now I See …

2012-0819

The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

1 Comment[Author: mkeltz Category: Biography, Reviews ]

By Steven Watts

University of Missouri Press, First Paperback Printing, 2001 Click to Buy this Book!

In the Introduction of this 526-page biography of Walter Elias Disney (1904–1966), Steven Watts, Chairman of the History Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia, describes some of the challenges involved in the immense undertaking of this project: the sheer scope of Walt Disney’s lifework, an achievement that always depended upon the work of other artists; the extreme divergence of Disney’s admirers and denouncers (“I don’t know anything about art.”); and his powerful and continuing influence on the American popular culture, for the average American, he knew instinctively, wanted entertainment, not high-class art. The book is organized into broad strokes of Four Parts consisting of 22 Chapters, although within this outer structure the author manages to handle the complexities of the development of his themes by sacrificing harmonious adherence to chronology. As the book moves along, a large number of repetitions of earlier material become apparent, especially in Chapter Nine, “The Fantasy Factory.” It is as though the author has chosen to disregard the content of his previous chapters in favor of a quest for new insight by way of serious second consideration. Lengthy subsections within many chapters are consistent in devotion to the biographies of those personally close to Walt Disney, and to the contributions of such great Disney Studio artists as Vladimir “Bill” Tytla, but these subsections would have been better placed within the correct chronological flow. For example, not until near the end of the book, beyond Disneyland, beyond the 1964 World’s Fair, and even beyond EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), does Watts manage to fit in a very important biography, that of Walt’s brother, Roy Oliver, in Chapter 22, taking the reader all the way back to the time of Roy’s birth in 1893.

The book is heavy and overly complex because the author is in essence searching for answers, and is without the secure foundation of deeper understanding from the beginning.

The last paragraph of Chapter 21, which the reader may review by way of briefly postponing another go-round on Watts’s dizzying Disney carousel, is actually one of the most astonishing in the entire book: “The Florida Project [EPCOT] promised to weave together the many threads of the great Disney expansion of the 1960s. On a scope unimaginable even a few years before, it promised to transcend entertainment by entering directly into the social and political realm. Disney’s magic kingdom, it seemed, was about to become a concrete reality as well as a state of mind.” But the great innovator, the Good King of the Magic Kingdom who was absolutely determined to change the woeful circumstances of the Common Folk on Planet Earth, was struck down unexpectedly and quickly and died of lung cancer in 1966.

Author Steven Watts does not really succeed in opening any doors to significant hidden darkness in the personality of Disney, although not for lack of trying, but the avuncular Disney — by Jiminy Cricket! – had only various ambiguous grey areas; he was very much a man of his times. He was happily and faithfully married but once, to Lillian Disney, “who was never cowed by her husband’s volatile moods and iron will.” “Confirmed homebodies, Walt and Lillian occasionally got together with a small circle of friends … while avoiding the nightclubs-and-parties scene.” He smoked, but never around children, drank moderately, and was photographed once at a racetrack with his good friend Charlie Chaplin. Business-wise he did become something of a corporate tyrant in the late 1930s, probably due to enormous responsibilities and financial pressures, but he saw the light after a devastating 1941 strike led by some of his best animators, including, sadly, Bill Tytla. These events were followed by drastic changes at the Burbank Studio wrought by the years of World War II. More »

Tags: American, biography, book review, Kingdom, Life, Magic, Martha Keltz, review, Steven Watts, Walt Disney, Way

2012-0704

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Comments Off[Author: mkeltz Category: Biography, Reviews ]

By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, New York, 2005 Click to Buy this Book!

In the Author’s Note and Acknowledgments section, Martin Sherwin informs the reader that this biography was 25 years in the making. The work began in 1979 with a visit to the “Oppenheimer Ranch” in New Mexico, called Perro Caliente (“hot dog”), a few months after Sherwin signed a contract with publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Here he met Peter Oppenheimer, Robert’s son. Kai Bird, author of The Color of Truth, was invited to join him as co-author in 2000. Both authors “acknowledge the percipiency” of two friends who suggested the title of the book, “American Prometheus.” It will be indicated at the conclusion of this review, however, that this is not an appropriate title: J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) hardly stands up at all by comparison with the Titan Prometheus.

The five-part biography is 721 pages in length, and the reader may soon begin to wonder why it was necessary to include so many personal or private details about the life of Oppenheimer and those he knew or influenced. To the degree that biographical research and writing make no attempt to approach the science of the spirit, as is called for in our time, it risks sinking, by way of compensation, into a haze of insignificant details that will eventually prove tiresome for the most determined of readers. In contrast to American Prometheus, author William Sheehan approaches and enters into the realm of the spirit, although tentatively, in his biography of Edward Emerson Barnard, The Immortal Fire Within.

The Preface of American Prometheus introduces the central theme of Oppenheimer’s personal trials that began in the year 1953 when his life “suddenly spun out of control” after he received a letter from the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hinting at espionage activities and stating that Oppenheimer had been declared a security risk. The government, i.e., J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, had been hounding Oppenheimer for years with constant surveillance and illegal wire-taps because of his affiliations with the Communist Party in the 1930s. Through long detailed expositions, the authors stress that interest in communism was popular among many young academic intellectuals at that time. They were seeking, through involvement with various left-wing movements, the ideal of a humanitarian social order along the lines of socialism or communal sharing, and were apparently unaware of the dark and brutal side of Russian communism. The conclusions of the AEC’s hearings are revealed near the end of the book, in Chapter Thirty-Seven, titled “A Black Mark on the Escutcheon of Our Country.” “By a vote of two to one, the board deemed Oppenheimer a loyal citizen who was nevertheless a security risk.” Oppenheimer (often affectionately called Opje or Oppie) had his security clearance revoked, yet went on to live the rich and rewarding life of a respected professor of physics and an international celebrity. Ironically, in Latin America the admired physicist was called “El Padre de la Bomba Atomica.” (There is no evidence in this thoroughly researched book that Oppenheimer ever passed on secrets about the atomic bomb to Russia, as claimed in the 1994, 1995 book by Pavel A. Sudoplatov, who had been a KGB agent, a spy and an assassin. Who, besides conspiracy theorists, would believe the word of someone like Sudoplatov?) More »

Tags: American, biography, book review, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird, Martha Keltz, Martin J. Sherwin, Prometheus, Tragedy, Triumph

2012-0619

The Immortal Fire Within: The Life and Work of Edward Emerson Barnard

2 Comments[Author: mkeltz Category: Biography, Reviews ]

By William Sheehan

Published by Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2007 Click to Buy this Book!

This 429-page biography of Edward Emerson Barnard (1857–1923), an astronomer who is best known for his discovery of Jupiter’s fifth satellite, now named Amalthea, and “Barnard’s Star,” was published in its paperback edition in 2007 and, with its new preface, the same wealth of photographs, and 27 chapters that present the biography in precise chronological order, it will prove a treasure for amateur astronomers and serious readers alike. However, even in the paperback version this is a very costly book, although it can continuously serve as a course in astronomy, particularly as the science developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially helpful is the fact that the footnotes are included at the end of each chapter, instead of at the end of the book. Reading slowly, a chapter at a time, will nearly guarantee thoughtful visualizations of starry night skies, and summon many familiar questions regarding the mysteries of the universe. It will also be discovered that author William Sheehan (an amateur astronomer and a psychiatrist by profession) touches upon the meaning of the words The Immortal Fire Within only very lightly and in few places, yet somehow the deeply significant meaning of these words pervades the entire book, as though throughout the long process of studying and writing this biography Sheehan had put this question to E.E. Barnard himself and awaited the answer. What is a biography of this devotion and profundity but repeated meetings of two souls, however separated in time, space, and spiritual dimension? In the end, each reader will have to draw his or her own conclusion as to the meaning of The Immortal Fire Within. Clues are apparent, such as the author’s wariness of the term “sixth sense,” and his touching upon the fact of “immortal fame” as merely in regard to a new astronomical discovery. Certainly the inclusion of this poetic phrase in the title does seem affirmative. “As above, so below,” recalls the anthroposophist, and thoughts of the “Macrocosm and Microcosm” enter anew into the sphere of consciousness.

The first chapter, titled Through rugged ways, describes the boyhood of Edward Barnard, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, a place of culture and cultivation that became ravaged by the Civil War. His father died before he was born and his mother, also raising Edward’s older brother, decided to move to Nashville in hopes of finding work. Edward was born with a caul, and his mother gave him the middle name of Emerson after the New England writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The dreadful privations that fell upon the South during and just following the war only intensified the misery of the impoverished Barnard family. Barnard recalled many years later that his early youth was ‘so sad and bitter that even now I cannot look back to it without a shudder.’” When Barnard was nine years old his mother obtained employment for him in the photography gallery of John H. Van Stavoren, and the boy was soon put to work running errands and guiding the immense solar camera that Van Stavoren had mounted on his studio roof. The camera was named, significantly, Jupiter. William Sheehan quotes from an autobiographical sketch by Barnard: “Through summer’s heat and winter’s cold [the boy] stood upon the roof of that house and kept the great instrument directed to the sun. It was sleepy work and required great patience and endurance for one so young, and at this distant day he realizes that this training doubtless developed those qualities — patience, care and endurance — so necessary to an astronomer’s success.” More »

Tags: astronomy, biography, book review, Edward Emerson Barnard, fire, Immortal, Life, Martha Keltz, science, William Sheehan, Work

2012-0403

Ravelstein

Comments Off[Author: ftsmith Category: Biography, Reviews ]

by Saul Bellow

Published by Penguin Books; First Printing edition (April 26, 2001) Click to Buy this Book!

I don’t think that “Ravelstein” is really about Ravelstein — whoever he’s supposed to be in real life, some say Alan Bloom, but this doesn’t interest me much. The real antagonist of “Ravelstein” is Chick, Ravelstein’s reluctant biographer. And Chick can’t be anyone but Bellow himself, or who Bellow would like to think he is or would like us to think he is, for the disguise is transparent.

Chick is old, a well-known writer of fiction, recently survived a serious illness by the skin of his teeth, married to a much younger woman, and Ravelstein’s best friend, perhaps his only friend, Jewish. And his writing style is suspiciously identical to Bellow’s. Sound familiar?

Now that we have established that the book is more about Chick than Ravelstein, we have no choice but to continue in that direction. What about Chick. What’s his issue? No question there. The issue is death – and what, if anything, happens afterwards. And why not? Bellow is 85 and that’s pretty near the end, even if he, as Chick, miraculously escaped death from fish poisoning. (One could look for symbolism in that, but I’ll abstain.) Trust Bellow to go for the jugular, try to get to the bottom things, even though he knows he can’t. At least he asks the questions that concern us all.

One of the things that I like most about Bellow’s writing is that he attacks these questions with ironical humor. In “Ravelstein,” Chick’s ex-wife (Bellow is not kind to ex-wives) tries to get him to be frozen for a hundred years and thawed out when a cure for his illness is known, but he suspects her of selfish ends and refuses. I can’t find the place or I’d quote it for you, but the book is worth reading for this hilarious episode alone. More »

Tags: biography, book review, death, fiction, illness, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow

2012-0307

Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves

Comments Off[Author: mkeltz Category: Biography, Reviews ]

By John Kroger.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008. Click to Buy this book!

This absorbing 466-page book by former federal prosecutor John Kroger (Assistant United States Attorney, or AUSA) includes a Prologue, Four Parts with 19 chapters, an Epilogue, Sources, and Acknowledgements. The Parts are titled Rookie, Mafia Prosecutor, The War on Drugs, and Enron: White-Collar Crime. The Prologue, titled “Waiting for a Verdict,” opens the book with a description of the most dramatic moments in the trial of the United States v. Scarpa (Gregory Scarpa, Jr.), as the judge receives a note and informs the court that the jury has reached a verdict. Kroger, still something of a rookie in this his third trial — although an extraordinary rookie — writes of his six-month course of preparation, together with trial partner and veteran mob prosecutor Sung-Hee Suh, during which both worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week. The verdict is not revealed until the third chapter of Part II. As it turns out, both the government and the defense had flawed cases, so the jury decided to give each side a partial victory. Scarpa was convicted on all counts except murder; the jury would not convict a man of murder solely on the basis of cooperator testimony.

The entire first part of the book describes the path of John Kroger’s life (b. 1966) that brought him to the moments of the Scarpa verdict. The book’s back cover praise proves absolutely accurate: “… Probably the frankest discussion ever of the extraordinary ethical dilemmas that go with wielding the government’s crushing power over lives.” — Scott Turow. “Kroger wins here as he did in the courtroom — with simplicity and candor, passion and integrity, and a ferocious, persuasive intelligence.” — Susan Choi. More »

Tags: Aquinas, Aristotle, battle, biography, book review, convictions, drug, enron, freud, Jeremy Bentham, john kroger, John Stuart Mill, killers, kingpins, mafia, Plato, prosecutor, review, thieves, white collar crime