ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610080015
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
BOOKMARKS
Homeland of valley settlers
Reviewed by ROBERT P. HILLDRUP
THE SCOTS-IRISH IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY. By Billy Kennedy. Causeway Press. No price listed.
Many families in the valley can learn a good bit about their heritage from Billy Kennedy's delightful book. A newspaperman in Northern Ireland, Kennedy provides a history of the five great waves of immigration to the New World that originated from his part of what is now the United Kingdom.
Early Virginians are often regarded as being either patrician cavaliers of English origins, black slaves or indentured servants like those who populated much of the state from the mountains east. But, as many residents of the valley know, there are other heritages as well, including the Scots-Irish of whom Kennedy writes.
Some of Kennedy's work is cursory and concerns material already well-known to American readers, though perhaps not to his fellow Irishmen. This includes references to the Scots-Irish ancestry of various presidents and Civil War leaders. His book is of greater local interest when he talks of specific settlements, communities and churches and families whose names are still prominent throughout the area.
This is not a definitive history. It is more of a handbook and an interesting survey of the subject. And, too, it is a reminder that, in the case of history, studies can run from the old country to the new and not just in the other direction.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
Billy Kennedy will sign copies of his book at Books-a-Million on Monday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
BRIEFS: Books on Tape
Shaara's Civil War prequel
GODS AND GENERALS: A Novel of the Civil War.
By Jeff Shaara. Read by Stephen Lang. Abridged. Random House Audio Books. $23.50.
This novel is a prequel to Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Killer Angels," which explored the men and circumstances of the Battle of Gettysburg. Shaara's son, Jeff, does the same for the earlier period, the beginnings of the Civil War. He focuses on Lee, Jackson, Hancock and Chamberlain and the battles at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Shaara adheres carefully to fact while giving breath to these men, and although he succeeds in capturing their characters, his telling lacks drama despite Lang's mellow, gently modulated voice. For feeling and understanding about this part of our history tune in James Robertson on Friday mornings on WVTF public radio.
- MARY ANN JOHNSON
PUSH.
By Sapphire. Random House Audiobooks. Abridged and read by the author. $18.
This harsh and heartbreaking story of a young abused black girl in Harlem in the late 1980s is read so effectively by the author that oral narration seems its natural form. It loses nothing in the transfer to audio and, in fact, is enhanced by what the author brings to the medium. "Push" may be even stronger on tape than it is in print. In either medium, Sapphire has given us a story not easily forgotten and a character forever remembered.
- MARY ANN JOHNSON
TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: Games of State Audio Tapes.
Created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenic. Read by John Rubinstein. Random House Audio Books. $23.50.
"Op-Center" is the latest offering in a series of "creations" using the cachet of Tom Clancy's name to sell original paperback volumes. This abridged audio version on four cassettes is true to the written material - poorly done with little continuity between scenes. John Rubinstein is a journeyman actor, but the talent to imbue each character in a reading with some recognizable vocal coloring is missing from his resume. The plot, involving German neo-Nazi thugs, is convoluted in print, but when abridged into four cassettes with no audio dead space between scenes, it becomes as murky as the reasons Clancy allows his name to be used to sell these "creations."
- LARRY SHIELD
Mary Ann Johnson is book page editor.
Larry Shield trains dogs and horses in Franklin County.
Authors visit people, places in Faulkner's Oxford, Miss.
Reviewed by PETER CROW
TALKING ABOUT WILLIAM FAULKNER: Interviews with Jimmy Faulkner and Others. By Sally Wolfe with Floyd C. Watkins. Louisiana State University Press. $24.95.
There are not many people still alive who knew William Faulkner well, not to mention the places he wrote about around Oxford, Miss. One such person is Jimmy Faulkner, William's favorite nephew, the son of William's brother, John. As Sally Wolfe puts it, they "shared an enthusiasm for hunting, flying and five o'clock cocktails."
Over a period of years, Wolfe and Floyd C. Watkins visited Jimmy with students from Emory University, and here they record those conversations. Jimmy escorts them through the Oxford jail featured prominently in "Requiem for a Nun" and through College Hill Church where William and Estelle were married and which is the likely model for the church where Thomas Sutpen and Ellen Coldfield were wed. He takes the authors to the big ditch where Nelse Patton, the model for Joe Christmas, ran after escaping jail. They visit the Yokona River crossing, which probably inspired the setting for the Bundrens' disastrous attempt to ford the river during a flood. And he shows them through Taylor's Grocery and Restaurant, where Temple supposedly gets off the train in "Sanctuary."
The friendship between Jimmy and Brother Will, as William instructed his nephew to call him, grew stronger with age. But some of the most interesting stories come from Jimmy's early years and help explain both the fascination kids felt for William and the reluctance of their elders to encourage it. When Jimmy was 14, he came across his father and William drinking. William announced that the boy was old enough to have his first drink. Jimmy took a long slurp as he had observed his elders doing and immediately felt the impact of 200-proof straight whiskey. It was a year before the Faulkner women would allow Jimmy to visit his uncle again unattended.
Wolfe and Watkins interview two other local personalities, Pearl Galloway and Motee Daniel, but the majority of the book is devoted to Jimmy Faulkner. His observations and anecdotes are by far the most interesting.
Peter Crow teaches English at Ferrum College.
Thriller strives for depth
Reviewed by Chip Barnett
THE INTRUDER. By Peter Blauner. Simon & Schuster. $23.
Jake Schiff is a nice-guy defense attorney with a loving family and a million-dollar Manhattan townhouse. John Gates is a homeless drug addict with a dead daughter. Philip Cardi is a Brooklyn mob contractor with a battered wife and a violent fear that he's gay.
Gates goes crazy and harasses Schiff, and Cardi kills a man, but pins the murder on Schiff.
Will Gates testify in Schiff's favor? Will Cardi's barely repressed violence erupt? Those questions drive the suspense in this novel. And they mostly work because Blauner portrays Schiff as sympathetically human, despite plot contrivances that make the lawyer seem unbelievably stupid.
Blauner goes an admirable step further, adding realistic depth to both Gates and Cardi. But Cardi is basically a nasty sociopath, and Gates, while sympathetic, is so messed up that his internal agonizing seems interminable.
Still, "The Intruder" is a superior thriller even though it's not as deep as it strives to be,
Chip Barnett is a Rockbridge County librarian.
Tasteful book on apples
Reviewed by DIANE SALYER
OLD SOUTHERN APPLES. By Creighton Lee Calhoun, Jr. McDonald & Woodward. $49.95.
This is a large, beautiful book with 48 intricate color plates of a variety of apples by U.S. Department of Agriculture artists. It catalogs more than 1,600 varieties with names and areas of growth such as "Yellow Bellflower-Tidewater," "Chenango Strawberry-Connecticut or New York," "Leatherberry's Favorite-Mississippi," and "Coffelt Beauty-Arkansas," to list but a few. Of these many varieties, only 200 are still in existence.
The author owns a small nursery that specializes in old Southern apple varieties, and he is well versed about his subject. Sections on apple cider, dried apples and storing apples offer how-to information. A particularly informative chapter is headed "Orchard Preparation and Cultivation."
"Apples" makes a lovely gift or coffee-table book.
Diane Salyer spent many years in professional theater.
Family survives unbearable pain
Reviewed by Monty S. Leitch
THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN. By Jacquelyn Mitchard. Viking. $23.95.
Beth Cappadora makes her living as a photographer. She believes in the power of images. She believes that she can detect portents of disaster in photographs, that "those muddy images" of soon-to-be victims include "a hint, a foreknowledge, of the mishap to come."
And so, when Beth's 3-year-old son unaccountably disappears, she hordes the last photos taken of him, afraid to look at them for 10 years, afraid of what she'll see there. When finally she does look, "posed to receive that face like sacrament," she sees, instead, "not much of anything ... no message .... There had been no warning."
This is a gripping novel of almost unbearable pain. Throughout, author Jacquelyn Mitchard holds steady to a terrible honesty about the ugliness, and the beauty, of truly raw human emotion.
Everyone assumes blame for the child's disappearance and, in truth, everyone deserves at least some of the blame assumed. The tragedy is no one's fault, and everyone's fault.
And then, as unaccountably as he disappeared, Ben reappears. The Cappadora family has its Ben back. But he's no longer Ben. Neither is the Cappadora family any longer the same.
Here is where Mitchard's terrible honesty is at its height, in the pain that marks recovery as surely as it has marked loss. The family has, apparently, survived its loss. But will it survive its gain?
Each character in this novel has a clear and authentic voice. But the strongest is the voice of Vincent, the older brother who let go of the baby's hand but who, finally, is the one to take his brother's hand again. Very carefully. Very subtly.
Having done so, Vincent, never one to fall for mere imagery, looks "past his reflection" in the window, to the "lightening out at the edge" of the yard, knowing, really knowing, that "Night could only last so long."
Monty S. Leitch is a columnist for this newspaper.
LENGTH: Long : 197 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. JACK COFIELD. Novelist William Faulkner died in 1962.by CNB2. (headshot) Blauner. 3. no caption.