Books
Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South Roy Blount Jr
What do you call an Indianapolis native who grew up in Georgia but has spent the past 38 years flitting between western Massachusetts and New York City? Once called “a quintessential Southern commentator” (he didn’t like that at all), Blount is proud to be “a direct inheritor of the orality, earthiness, emotional juice… rhythmic relish and improvisatory looseness of Southern American English, whose black and white ingredients vary as to proportions but are inseparable.” Th is collection of wit and sagacity is overflowing with riff s and reflections on everything Southern, from writers and movies to food and religion. He has something to say about the word “y’all” and “short’nin’ bread”— the food and the song. And if he seems a bit defensive about Faulkner or Twain, well, that’s his privilege. As he puts it, he’s a proud cumgranosalist—taking things literally with a grain of salt.
The Real All Americans Sally Jenkins
(Doubleday, $24.95)
Strikingly, less than a quarter-century separates the last major battlefield confrontation between the US Army and the Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890 from the modern-day struggle between the two groups on a more structured terrain: the football field. The more recent encounter, a “war without death,” in the author’s words, pitted a team from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in rural Pennsylvania against West Point’s gridiron greats. Jenkins, a Washington Post sportswriter, uses that game to bookend a sprawling portrait of an era, a population and a visionary who believed Native Americans not only merited US citizenship, but could gain success through education and training.
Three interwoven stories depict the downward spiral of their history in the post-Civil War era, the contentious fledgling years of American college football, and the creation, shaping and evolution of Carlisle’s distinctive program. Carlisle coach Glenn “Pop”
Warner brought a reckless wizardry to both his team and the game itself by inventing the forward pass, double-wing formation and reverse. And Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt’s foresight and dogged, often self-righteous, boldness was a commanding presence against those in Washington and across the plains who wished Carlisle ill. It’s quite a story, thrillingly told, and resonates in our society, as well as the educational and sports worlds, today.
THE SECOND OBJECTIVE
Mark Frost
(Hyperion, $24.95)
Frost dips deep into the shadows of World War II history for the centerpiece of his story.
Operation Greif was Hitler’s final attempt to recoup his losses in Western Europe during the waning months of the war. Sticking close to the actual events of the false-flag campaign and to the “second objective” of the title, Frost is a skillful master of dialogue, and his action sequences—a jeep and motorcycle chase that would do James Bond proud—leap off the pages. It’s amazing to see what can still be accomplished on the printed page. —Michael J. Bandler