THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412130474
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
ULYSSES
ROBERT SKIMIN
St. Martin's Press. 449 pp. $24.95.
Novels about real people sometimes do big mischief by the serious distortion of history. Such is not the case with Robert Skimin's novel Ulysses about the life of Ulysses S. Grant.
Any tinkering with the record seems to have been minor - as in the firm placement of James Longstreet (the Southerner who maintained a lifelong friendship with his military opponent and fellow West Point graduate) at Grant's prewar wedding. One respected researcher has made a point of the uncertainty as to whether Longstreet was an usher or best man.
Overall, however, Skimin sticks doggedly - in much too massive detail, perhaps - to the factual record of Grant's personal life, his pragmatic design for Union victory in the Civil War and his scandal-haunted two-term presidency.
One result is a lack of suspense. And only scant tension is created by the depiction of Grant's drinking (much exaggerated by his enemies, according to some historians) as a dramatic struggle with temptation.
Skimin, wounded in Korea and the first Army pilot to wear the Green Beret, has written a number of well-received novels and is working on a novel about Robert E. Lee. Where his Grant story, on which he spent 17 years, succeeds best is in the clarity of its telling and in its convincing portrait of a quiet, honest man who was propelled into military leadership and who, once in command, maintained an unflappable focus on what his armies had to do to win.
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- George J. Hebert
WILD RIDE
The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm Inc., America's Premier Racing Dynasty
ANN HAGEDORN AUERBACH
Henry Holt and Co. 438 pp. $22.50.
Wild Ride, the story of an American tragedy, opens with a gripping account of the 36 hours that led to the destruction of Alydar, Calumet Farm's prized stallion. The horse, a multimillion-dollar breeder insured for $36.5 million, came up lame in a late-night freak accident.
Calumet Farm was established in 1923 by William Monroe Wright, who with little formal education became known as ``the baking powder king.'' In 1933, Warren Wright Sr. took over the $10 million, 1,200-acre farm from his father and set about applying his own management formula, which ultimately produced eight Kentucky Derby winners.
With the death of Warren's daughter, Lucille Wright Markey, in the early 1980s, the farm's administration passed to J.T. Lundy, son of a local sharecropper and husband of Cindy Wright, Warren's granddaughter. Lundy took less than a decade to plunge the solvent Calumet operation into bankruptcy.
Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn Auerbach expertly chronicles the family's financial disintegration in Wild Ride, offering a textbook case of what can happen when great wealth, inadequately guarded, falls into the hands of predators feeding upon greed and fraud. But Auerbach is at her best when ferreting out the intriguing deals and deal makers characteristic of the corruption that brought down the horse market in the '80s. A superb book.
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- Chiles T.A. Lawson by CNB