Candice Millard finds her real story, the demise of the death penalty, and Vietnam in fiction: newsletter, December 27, 2019

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Candice Millard, through her own struggle, finds her real story

When Candice Millard was researching and writing her best-selling River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, she had to navigate her own river of doubt, which eventually helped her better understand what her real story was.

When Millard was pregnant with her second child and working on the book in 2005, she got a phone call from her doctor saying something odd had turned up on her latest sonogram. Within 24 hours, her life had been turned upside down. Her daughter was born by an emergency Caesarian section and had a rare form of cancer.

The child went through two years and eight rounds of chemotherapy, and eventually the cancer was declared in remission.

As I sat in a seemingly endless series of hospital rooms, surrounded by blinking lights and beeping machines while my daughter endured eight rounds of chemotherapy, I realized that I was less interested in Roosevelt’s accomplishments than in his struggles. 

Roosevelt’s struggle — particularly the point where, on this journey through the Amazon forest, he contemplated suicide as a means of saving his son and the rest of his traveling party — was the real story she was trying to tell.

Over the years I had spent writing “The River of Doubt,” Roosevelt’s story had taught me that no life is immune to tragedy. Well before he had traveled to the Amazon, he had experienced as much grief in his life as great achievement. He had endured the painful death of a father whom he adored; the deaths, on the same day, of his mother and first wife; and a stunning and deeply humiliating defeat in his attempt to regain the presidency in the election of 1912. Each time, he had responded by fighting back, throwing himself into extreme physical challenges that tested his strength and his courage and helped him forget. Source: Candice Millard on the writing life – The Washington Post

Millard’s book hit the best-seller list when it was published and has been widely acclaimed. She has continued her writing with two more books on famous people and their supreme struggles: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President about the assassination of James Garfield; and Hero of the Empire: the Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill.

Millard’s books are exciting, well-written, and deeply researched. Each has a unique and important story to tell. Millard won the 2017 BIO award from the Biographers International Organization for her “major contribution to the art and craft and biography.”

The fight to save the apostrophe revives

Even though the brilliant, talented, and hard-working Anu Garg, creator of A Word A Day email, has declared “Death to the Apostrophe,” there may be another way forward for this much-misused punctuation mark.

Things looked pretty dark when John Richards, creator of the Apostrophe Protection Society, announced a few weeks ago that he was shutting down his website. The announcement apparently stirred apostrophe lovers everywhere to action:

Due to the recent decision made by John Richards (see below), www.apostrophe.org.uk has had a massive 600-fold increase in demand. This has resulted in our Server’s bandwidth being exceeded and, as a result, we have closed the full site until early January 2020. We apologise for disappointing you but do come back in the New Year! Source: APS Temp Page

Thus the fight to save the apostrophe continues.

Happy New Year!

The war in Vietnam as a springboard for fiction

Why has Vietnam (a.k.a. the war in Vietnam) produced so little good American fiction?

World War II, which lasted less than half as long and during which the country remained relatively unified in its purpose, produced plenty of titles that are familiar to us all: The Winds of War and The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk), The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer), Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), The Bridge Over the River Kwai(Pierre Boulle), The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak) — the list could go on for a while.

America was heavily involved in Vietnam for nearly a decade. Why isn’t there more fiction reflecting that involvement?

Andrew Nette takes on this question in an interesting article on CrimeReads:

But while Vietnam equipped numerous fictional characters with the skills to combat the Mafia, terrorists or various other threats, few books in the late 1960s and ’70s focused on the war and its consequences as anything more than a background or reason for why a character was as confused/damaged/homicidal as they were. Removing reportage and autobiographies, fewer still were actually set in Vietnam. Source: Blowback: Late 1960s and ’70s Pulp and Popular Fiction about the Vietnam War | CrimeReads

The article is an excerpt from the book Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, edited by Nette and Iain McIntyre and published by PM Press.

Part of the problem with Vietnam is that we Americans remain terribly conflicted about it. Our purpose in being there was never clear and what we accomplished is open to many interpretations.

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The mention of Vietnam gives me a chance to tout one of the publications of the Blount County Friends of the Library, Vietnam Voices: Stories of East Tennesseans Who Served in Vietnam, 1965-1975. We have the book in softcover on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and we now have a hardcover on Barnes and Noble. All of the profits from the book go to the BCFOL, which supports the programming of the library.

Now I’m going to risk being labeled a crotchety old woman … but “they” becoming an acceptable singular pronoun?! Ugh! It just sounds so wrong to my ear and goes against many, many decades of training and writing and speaking. Reporters are using it fluidly on cable news, and I cringe. I haven’t seen it in writing yet, but I expect I’ll want to whip out a red pen. I spent too many years with “he” supposedly including females, and so I welcomed the use of “he/she” or “he and she.” Many people fought the change, of course, because they found it awkward. I did also, to be honest, and before too long I was reworking sentences and paragraphs to be plural so that use of “they” was appropriate. It soon became second nature, and I enjoyed showing colleagues how to do it. Language style and word meanings are constantly changing, so I suppose you and I will become accustomed to the singular “they.” But I don’t have to like it.

Thanks for your newsletter. I always enjoy it You introduce me to new things every week or expand (or correct!) my accumulated knowledge. I often end up googling to learn more. And your sketches are delightful.

She said she only bakes once a year. Soak a lot of dried fruit in a lot of brandy overnight, add some other stuff the next day, mix it up and put it in the oven till it looks cooked. She said she took the Roman approach to recipes – add some of “whatever” till it looks good. 

Best quote of the week:

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate (1918-2008)

Fires in California, hurricanes on the Atlantic Coast — disasters occur everywhere. They have spread untold misery and disruption. The people affected by them need our help.

It’s not complicated. Things happen to people, and we should be ready to do all the good we can in all of the ways we can. (Some will recognize that I am paraphrasing John Wesley here).

When is the last time you gave to your favorite charity? The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR.org) is my favorite charity. Please make a contribution to this one or to yours.

Keep reading, keep writing (especially to me), and have a great weekend.

Jim

Jim Stovall 
www.jprof.com

You can connect with Jim on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and BookBub.

His Amazon author page is where you can find more information about his books.

Last week’s newsletter: Martha Gellhorn and the wars of the 20th century, parkour considered, and plenty of reader reaction: newsletter, December 20, 2019

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