Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

Dan Kois, Emily Bazelon and David Haglund discuss the sprawling London novel Capital by John Lanchester.

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If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the Stockholm 1912 games. But his victory was marred by a controversial International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruling that stripped him of his medals six months later.

In Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Bison Books, 2012), the first comprehensive biography of Thorpe, biographer Kate Buford explores how Thorpe’s Native American heritage shaped his life, but also the impact Thorpe himself had upon American sports. Ultimately, he was the country’s first celebrity athlete, excelling at both baseball and football. His life was memorialized in a 1951 film and, in 1963, Thorpe was among the charter class inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Despite his other successes, the revocation of Jim Thorpe’s medals remains a source of contention for his admirers, Buford among them.In 1982, the IOC approved the reinstatement of Thorpe’s medals and during London 2012, the Hammersmith tube station has been temporarily renamed in Thorpe’s honor. But, despite public outcry, the IOC still refuses to enter Thorpe’s scores into the official record of Olympic events.

As Buford writes: “A gentle person, intelligent and funny, with many flaws, Jim Thorpe was not a complicated man. But what happened to him was.”

 

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Most readers are probably more familiar with the context of slavery or captivity in the context the African slave trade than in the Americas. Some may assume that slavery in the Americas was exclusively a phenomenon that became institutionalized into chattel slavery and racially codified exclusively against African Americans by the seventeenth-century.  There has been increased scholarly attention over the last decade to expand our ideas of slavery, including scholarship about enslavement of African Americans within the “Five Civilized Tribes.”  However, there has been little focus on the long and nuanced history of Native American captivity practices.

Historian Christina Snyder argues that we have to re-imagine the history of captivity by understanding the evolution of such practices amongst Native Americans in her prize-winning book, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010).  Captivity practices existed amongst many indigenous nations from the pre-Columbian era throughout the nineteenth-century.   She broadly describes the evolution of these  practices from incorporating captives into kin networks, and to shifting notions of slavery that became codified by race.   She begins her work by vividly describing Mississippian indigenous cultures of the pre-Columbian era, including the fascinating history of Cahokia, and the captives who were buried in these mounds. She also discusses the roles of Native American women, including Cherokee “beloved women” would were closely involved in determining the fate of captives.   Her work is captivating and extensive, and greatly contributes to the historiography.

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Dan Kois, Meghan O'Rourke, and Hanna Rosin discuss the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James.

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The term “Indian Country” evokes multiple themes. Encompassing legal, geographic, and ideological dimensions, “Indian Country” is commonly understood to be a space outside of or surrounded by the boundaries of the United States. It’s also been used for a pan-tribal, continental consciousness, found, for example, in the popular periodical Indian Country Today. For non-Natives familiar with the term, however, it’s safe to say what the term does not connote: cities. Indian County is “out there” somewhere, a dusty reservation remote from the bustle of modern life.

Historian Nicolas G. Rosenthal argues that this concept is not only problematic but wholly inaccurate. In Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Rosenthal illuminates the forces that drew or forced Indian people to Los Angeles, the “urban Indian capital of the United States,” and the process of forming individual and communal identities away from tribal homelands. Los Angeles typifies a larger trend. In 1940, the census counted 27,000 Indians living in cities, about 8% of the total Native population. By 1950, it spiked to 45%. In 1980, 53%. While the majority of Rosenthal’s compelling narrative focuses on city of angels, he also reckons with these wider trends, reconceptualizing “Indian Country” to reflect a complicated and diverse reality. His intervention is invaluable.

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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson's searing yet ultimately uplifting coming-out, coming-of-age tale, in which a young girl learns to rebel against her fanatical, cult-like upbringing, and set out on her own path in life. To mark thirty years since its publication, here's another chance to hear the memorable World Book Club in which Jeanette Winterson discusses where fact meets fiction - there are distinct parallels to her own life.

Hear how important this ground-breaking novel has been for readers around the globe. British writer Jeanette Winterson is in conversation with Harriett Gilbert (First broadcast in 2012.)

(Photo: Jeanette Winterson) (Credit: Ysabel Halpin)

Emily Bazelon, Dan Kois, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss Alison Bechdel's comic memoir Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

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This is the last edition of the London Calling season of World Book Clubs - which have been going out each Saturday during May.

This week the programme are guests of The Nehru Centre - the cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London - and we're talking to acclaimed Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh about his haunting novel, The Shadow Lines.

A moving and thought-provoking meditation on the very real yet invisible lines, which divide nations, people, and families, The Shadow Lines focuses on a family in Calcutta and Dhaka and their connection with an English family in London.

From the tales of his colourful cousin the narrator conjures up a picture of London in his imagination that is so vivid that he recognizes it instantly when he visits years later and learns that real places can be invented inside your head.

(Photo: Amitav Ghosh) Credit: Getty Images)

Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns came upon an encampment of Kwevkepayas (a branch of Yavapais) sheltering in the shadow of rock overhang above the Salt River Canyon. The soldiers wasted no time on the formalities of battle. They rained down fire, bullets ricocheting from the roof the cave, felling the refugees below. They even pushed down boulders. None survived.

Well, almost none. A few days prior, the advancing soldiers had come across a young boy of eight or nine looking for a missing horse. “They made a rush for me,” Hoomothya would later write. “They pulled me over rocks and bushes. The men didn’t care whether I got hurt or not.” But unlike Burns’ Kwevkepaya siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfather, the invaders did not kill him. In fact, the man responsible for his family’s extermination would adopt the young Hoomothya as something between a son and a servant, renaming him Mike Burns.

Over a century later, the prolific writer and editor Gregory McNamee has brought us Burns’ remarkable story. In The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Burns recounts his survival of the massacre, his time as a scout for the U.S. military on the campaign against Geronimo, his education n white schools, and eventual reconnection with his Yavapai community. “Mike Burns lived in two worlds,” McNamee tell us, “and he was at home in neither.” But his intelligence, humor and compassion illuminates both in profound and unexpected ways.

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This week we've the third edition in our London Calling season of World Book Clubs which are going out each Saturday during May.

This week we're talking to Howard Jacobson at the first Soho Literary Festival in the heart of the UK capital about his dazzling Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question.

A moving but often laugh-out-loud fictional foray into what it means to be Jewish Jacobson's award-winning novel features three old school friends who despite their very different lives have never quite lost touch.

Over dinner one balmy London evening they revisit a time before they had all loved and lost, unaware that an event later that night will change their lives for ever.