The Searchers Revisited

07 Mar 2013 2 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Books, Reading Tags: , , ,

This morning the Houston Chronicle ran an article on a new book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel. Long before I’d finished reading, I knew I wanted the book.  A few minutes on line told me that my local Barnes & Noble store had copies, and I reserved one to pick up tonight on my way home from work.

Although this blog is mostly about reading, writing, and the adventures of everyday life, an amazing number of my visitors wander in here looking for something related to the TV show Hell on Wheels, and I don’t think a day passes without at least one reader landing here after searching for Cynthia Ann Parker.  (WordPress keeps track of such things.)

So I know some of you share my interest in Texas history and old movies, and this book deals with both.  Frankel The Searchersopens with the story of Cynthia Ann, taken by the Comanche at the age of nine or ten, living with them for twenty-five years, marrying, and bearing three children.  Forcibly returned to “civilization,” Cynthia Ann died a sad and lonely death but also became a legend.

Part two goes on to tell the story of her son Quanah, the last great Comanche chief, who led his people into the twentieth century.  The third section deals with Alan LeMay and his novel, loosely based on Cynthia Ann’s story, and the fourth on the making of the movie.

I’ve seen The Searchers and have the DVD on my shelf, and I’ve read the original LeMay novel, also on my shelf.  I won’t post spoilers of either, but I will say that while the first half of the movie follows the first half of the book closely, the second halves diverge considerably.  As a writer, I’m interested in that story, too.  Now all I need is a little more time to read . . .

There’s been much discussion lately, in this age of electronic marketing, of the process of book discovery.  How does a reader find new books, new authors?  Are the virtual shelves of amazon or Barnes & Noble as “browsable” as those of a brick and mortar bookstore?  Interesting question, and one I’ll talk about another time.  But this book I found in my morning newspaper.

Happy reading!

 

 

 

When Memories Become History

16 Feb 2013 4 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Life Tags: ,

I seem to be writing about memory a lot lately.  Not sure why, but don’t worry:  I’ll get back to writing about books any day now.

This morning, however, I heard on the news that Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey has decided not to run for re-election.  Not surprising, perhaps, given that the senator is 89 years old, although I certainly hope that I’ll still be making major life decisions at that age.

No, what took me by surprise is that Lautenberg is the last member of the United States Senate to have served in World War II.  That is truly the end of an era.

I do not, I hasten to say, remember World War II myself.  It was over before I was born.  But when I was a girl it was an important, vivid, and recent memory for all the adults around me.  My father served in the Navy, my uncle in the Army.  My mother and her sisters and friends told stories of the war years, when they worked and lived as young women with new-found freedom.

When I was in high school World War II was still recent history, less than twenty years in the past.  Our teachers remembered it, and some of them had served.  Politicians certainly remembered it, and every candidate had his war stories.

A few years later I married Jack Hudson, who had joined the Army at 17 and spent the last few months of the war in the ball turret under the belly of a B17.  Jack had lots of war stories, too, most of them involving women.

So in many ways World War II was as much a part of my life as if I had lived through it myself.  And it has receded into history without my realizing it.

I think our last president to serve in World War II was the elder George Bush, who is about the same age as Senator Lautenberg.  Then we went through a few campaigns in which men were attacked for their service, or lack of it, in Viet Nam.  Now we have a Commander in Chief too young even for that war, and a generation of veterans with very different wartime experiences.

This is what happens as the years go by, of course, and I’m grateful for the years I’ve seen and the years still to come.  But it took that simple phrase in a radio news story, “last remaining World War II veteran in the Senate,” to bring home the fact that what was recent memory when I was a child, and so much a part of life for so many years, is decades-old history today.

Research: Would She Say That in 1877?

13 Jan 2013 1 Comment

by Kay Hudson in Books, Writing Tags: , , ,

Yesterday morning West Houston RWA enjoyed a terrific presentation on research, given by our own Deeanne Gist.  Dee spends an impressive five months on research before she begins to write a novel, and not just for her American-set historical tales.  Even her contemporary romantic suspense novel (Beguiled, written with J. Mark Bertrand) required detailed research on its Charleston setting).

It Happened at the FairDee brought along samples of her research material for her upcoming release, It Happened at the Fair, set at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and available April 30.  For this novel Dee accumulated numerous spiral binders of newspaper clippings and first person accounts of the Fair, as well as an enormous, disintegrating “Book of the Fair” she found on EBay, full of contemporary descriptions and photographs.

One of our chapter members asked Dee how she tracked down colloquial expressions appropriate for her characters, setting, and time period, and Dee laughed and said she bought every book on slang she came across.

I know my personal library doesn’t rival Dee’s, but I’ve written historical fiction, and I have shelves of research books on a wide variety of nineteenth century Americana, including several on language and slang.  My favorites are three volumes by the late Stuart Berg Flexner, not least because they are the sort of books one can open at random and be pulled into an hour of happy browsing.

Even the titles are tempting to a word nerd like me.  I Hear America Talking, An Illustrated Treasury of American Words and Phrases, was published in 1976.  Listening To America, An Illustrated History of Words and Phrases from our Lively and Splendid Past followed in 1982.  Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley, published in 1997 and edited by Anne H. Soukhanov (Flexner died in 1990) combines material from the earlier books with updates and additions.  All three appear to be out of print, but thanks to Internet sources like Amazon and Alibris.com, this no longer means unavailable.  The books are excellent resources for writers and great fun for readers.  They cover, with colorful phrases, historical vignettes, and (important to writers) dates, topics from religion to sex, business to sports, food to technology.  With indices, illustrations, and quotations.

Opening I Hear America Talking at random, I find on page 71 that “Canoes and Cannibals were two concepts Columbus and his men brought back to Europe from the West Indies (they also brought back syphilis, but that’s another story).”  On page 208, I learn that “gravy train” dates from the 1940s but came from the earlier (1910) use of “gravy” to mean profit or illegal gain through political conniving.  And on page 377 I see that ”Zombi, often spelled zombie, was also now first recorded (in 1871) . . . Zombie was both the name of a snake god and of a spell that could animate a dead body.”

See what I mean?  I’d better put them back on the shelf right now, or I’ll get nothing else done this evening.

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