“El Borak and Other Desert Adventures”, by Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Tim Bradstreet and Jim & Ruth Keegan

 

592 pages, Del Rey, ISBN-13: 978-0345505453

In the early oughts, Del Rey began producing the complete works of Robert E. Howard; El Borak and Other Desert Adventures, illustrated by Tim Bradstreet and Jim & Ruth Keegan, was the tenth volume to be published and contained the stories Blood of the Gods, The Daughter of Erlik Khan, The Fire of Asshurbanipal (original version), Gold from Tatary, Hawk of the Hills, Son of the White Wolf, Sons of the Hawk, Swords of Shahrazar, Swords of the Hills, Three-Bladed Doom (long version), Three-Bladed Doom (short version) and The Trail of the Blood-Stained God.

As you no-doubt are well aware by now, Dear Reader, Robert E. Howard was more than just the creator of Conan, Solomon Kane and the like; his characters are legion and his stories are numerous, and all fit into a mere 30-year life span. Shame. One of these fascinating but lesser-known characters of which I speak was one Francis Xavier Gordon – that would be the “El Borak” of the title (Arabic for “The Swift”) – a Texan gunfighter from El Paso who travelled the world before settling in Afghanistan where his heroic derring-do became legend. While El Borak mostly spends his time keeping peace between the many warring tribes of Afghanistan (boy, does THAT sound familiar), more often than not through his Texan cunning, that wouldn’t make for a very entertaining tales, so FXG must resort to violence to keep the peace (read that as many times as you need to). The bulk of the book features the seven El Borak stories (thus explaining his name on the cover) while the other tales within feature Kirby O’Donnell and Steve Clarney. Although not totally dissimilar to El Borak (in that he’s not an overweight clerk working in the colonial office), Kirby O’Donnell is still his own man and battles a bloodstained path through Gold From Tatary, Swords Of Shabrazar and The Trail Of The Blood-Stained God; Steve Clarney, meanwhile, is allotted just one story, the original version of The Fire of Asshurbanipal (a second, non-fantasy version of the story also exists).

That leaves El Borak’s tales, and lordy what tales they are. In the introduction by Steve Tompkins, Francis Xavier Gordon, though living, thriving and surviving in the mountains of Afghanistan is, in fact, a Western gunfighter of the Untamed Frontier, said frontier being the desserts of the old Middle East rather than of the New World. Like all Real American Heroes, El Borak is as wily and clever as the natives he battles and, like every Howardian hero worth his mettle, he’s possessed of incredible stamina, enormous courage and the great strength of those mighty muscles (O’Donnell and Clarney are no slouches, either). As I think I have stated before in these reviews, one wonders why some characters launch into the stratosphere of literary popularity while others are ejected and fall to earth. Conan and the other, more popular characters Howard created deserve their places in the sun, but so too does Francis Xavier Gordon, dammit. A hard charging Texan who spreads American derring-do about the place without a damn given to local attitudes – El Borak was and is a rare bird who deserves his tales to be told to all. But in El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Del Rey have done their level best to once-more bring to light this most interesting and deserving of characters.

“The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin”, by H. W. Brands

 

784 pages, Anchor, ISBN-13: 978-0385495400

While in Paris in 1780 (Midnight, October 22^nd, pour être exact), Benjamin Franklin wrote Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, in which the fictitious “Madame Gout” comes to call and, as she inflicts her inevitable torments upon his poor feet, chastises him for his indolence:

While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast, by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea, with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.

This is just one example amongst many of Franklin’s spry sense of humor to be brought forth by H. W. Brands in his The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, a work with which even Madame Gout could find nothing to fault. After completing this biography, I found it difficult not to be thoroughly overwhelmed with the length and breadth of Franklin’s many, many accomplishments, seeing as he was a pioneer in many fields of American thought, from philosophy to physical science to political science, and all seemingly without effort.

Brands begins his tale of this familiar yet extraordinary American with an account of the pivotal event in Franklin’s life that led to his eventual break with Great Britain. He was at first a reluctant revolutionary, but this event – when he was called to appear before the Privy Council on January 29^th, 1774, at the Cockpit at Whitehall Palace – changed the course of his life and his loyalty. It is an excellent way to begin an account of Franklin’s life, for, this dignified servant of the Crown found himself subjected to a withering tirade from Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor General, and publicly humiliated. Before this humiliation Franklin was a proud Briton; after, he became a reluctant revolutionary.

From there, Brands moves in a conventional chronological manner, beginning with Franklin’s upbringing and eventual abandonment of Boston for Philadelphia where, alone and poor, his momentous life truly begins and does not let up until we arrive at his death (the only thing capable of stopping him, it would seem). The dizzying array of fields he dabbled in and made substantive contributions to is staggering. The First American achieves a level of detail that will allow you to appreciate the scope of Franklin's accomplishments within the time in which they occurred without ever getting bogged down in the dirty details, as Brands seems to have an appreciation for what Franklin really stood for. Franklin was not an ideal family man, and the book also gives a taste of this side of Franklin, as family seemed to play a lesser role in his life than his philosophical and scientific (and later, political) interests (one question the book did not answer for me was why he was known as “Dirty Ben” in some circles).

The book also gives a brief but not insufficient history of the American Revolution. Franklin played a pivotal and probably still underappreciated role in securing victory for the colonies. Why he and Alexander Hamilton are not considered at least “co-fathers” of the United States eludes me even more after reading this book, and I would have liked to have seen more as to why Franklin does not share Washington’s ubiquity in modern America. Reading H.W. Brands book will probably evoke similar questions to all readers.

The First American tells the story of a great human being, not just a great American, and while long it is well worth the effort. Franklin’s personal philosophy, elucidated brilliantly in the book, is still relevant today; by looking at his life and how he shaped it one can learn much about one’s own life and how to shape it.

“The Feud. The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story”, by Dean King

 

448 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316167062

There are some books that I buy that have a backstory, although I don’t always know what that backstory is. For instance, my copy of The Feud. The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story by Dean King that I picked up from 2^nd & Charles has a hand-written dedication at the front that reads: “Enjoy The Hatfields are 2 of our great grandson there [sic] father is from Kentucky and is from the Hatfield clan Lang’s #117”. Putting the poor grammar aside, I’d really like to know more (Lang’s #117?), but that is impossible. The curiosity remains, though.

So anyway, Dean King has written an all-inclusive account of the feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia (led by William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield) and the McCoys of Kentucky (led by Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy). This real-life tale of hate and violence and pathos reads like a Greek tragedy, with the main players seemingly swept along by events they cannot control. This is natural-born drama, as King somehow enlivens this true story without sensationalizing it; like a novelist, he manages to preserve the tension of his tale utilizing all available primary and secondary sources while adding refinements of his own. There are a series of genealogical charts that help somewhat to keep the different players straight, especially as several have the same names, passed down from one generation to the next.

The Feud is a fascinating and entertaining account of perhaps America’s most notorious legend; birthed originally from the lingering bitterness of the Civil War, the Hatfield and McCoy feud was powered mostly by to the principle of protecting what’s yours, be it your family’s honor (or perhaps, “honor”) to the fruits of your labor. Across 24 chapters, King reconstructs the history of the Feud, from the original killing of Ellison Hatfield and the retaliatory killings of Pharmer, Bud and Bill McCoy, to all of the death and violence that followed thence. The dominos fall fast and hard and, seemingly, all on their own, with typically small slights being blown up into deadly encounters. King introduces each character in so intimate a manner that you find yourself sympathizing with their motivations, if not their actions. If you want the whole story of the Hatfield and McCoy feud look no further, for King has supplied us all with the unvarnished facts without any foolish romanticization.

“Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34”, by Bryan Burrough

 

624 pages, Penguin, ISBN-13: 978-0143115861

I saw the movie “Public Enemies” in the theater back in 2009 when it first came out and was thoroughly entertained by it, although even at the time I had to wonder to myself just how accurate it was – so when I found the book the movie was based on, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough, you just know I had to have it. But the cost of reading and owning this book meant that I had to give the movie up, because I found that there were just too many liberties taken with the historic truth for me to enjoy that movie ever again – pity, too, ‘cause it was a damn good movie.

The theme of the book is simple: the Feds, faced with an unprecedented national crime wave, had to create an enforcement organization on the fly capable of tracking fugitives across state lines and, in some cases, internationally. This task ultimately fell to a (‘til then) nameless, faceless bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover (I still have yet to read a satisfactory history as just how Hoover landed this job that so many better, more senior officials could have handled). While Public Enemies is the story of the founding of the FBI, it is the criminals and their actions that are the ultimate stars, the driving force, of the book. Typical.

What set the criminals of ’33-’34 apart from all of the scum that preceded them was the seemingly romantic glamour of a lost cause; once the overwhelming might of the Federal Government was brought to bear against them, there was no way in which they could win. Besides that, the Great Depression made Robin Hoodesque heroes out of these aimless losers. With millions of Americans unmoored by the Depression and adrift on America’s highways and byways – whole families sleeping in their cars, living in what were known, in a grimly chipper euphemism, as “tourist camps”, essentially middle-class shantytowns on wheels – these new criminals could be seen as striking back against The System, when all they were really doing was wandering aimlessly from place to place without a plan and without a future, robbing banks to feed their wanderlust and fuel their inability to do anything productive.

But for all that, they are with us still. Alvin Karpis, the shrewdest of all the bank robbers, took time out from his interstate flight to cruise the streets of Hollywood with his girlfriend, hoping to see an actual movie star, only to ultimately be arrested by none other than Hoover himself. He was one of the most notorious prisoners in the then-new federal penitentiary of Alcatraz, alongside Machine Gun Kelly who, it turns out, was a pussy-whipped whimp enthralled by his wife. Baby Face Nelson was gunned down trying to escape the Feds, but not before killing three of them first. The Barker Gang was broken up and “Ma” Barker, the supposed mastermind of her brood’s antics, was killed alongside her son, Fred (actually, Kate Barker was nothing more than an ill-tempered hillbilly who wanted nothing more than to play with her jigsaw puzzles; the myth of the motherly mastermind was invented by Hoover to justify her wrongful killing).

And there’s more, still. While Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd was the nation’s most wanted fugitive, his wife, Ruby, consorted with radio preachers, made a short film on a Christian theme and toured with the film and a vaudeville show called “Crime Doesn't Pay”, all while being bugged and tailed by a team of federal agents, though he was eventually gunned him down by officers of the East Liverpool (Ohio) Police Department. When Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow set off from Dallas on their muddled multistate murder spree, they took a famous set of photographs – Bonnie with a gun, Clyde and Bonnie with cigars – and the photos, widely published together with Bonnie’s eerie girlish poetry, became the very stuff of the magazines Bonnie herself had once read; their strange journey ended in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. And of course John Dillinger, likewise obsessed with movies, was shot by agents after seeing “Manhattan Melodrama” which featured Clark Gable playing a character not unlike John Dillinger. These outlaws loved the publicity and the public loved them back.

Strangely, the Oklahoma bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd would become a true folk hero of the plains, the subject of a classic Woody Guthrie song of protest against capitalism and the supposed evils attached to it:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six-gun

And some with a fountain pen

Criminals as heroes. It’s an old, old theme, brought forth especially when times are tough and the future is murky, at best. I wonder: if our own times were more settled than they are, would Black Lives Matter and Antifa be enjoying their apparent popularity?

“The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation”, by Michael Medved

 

280 pages, Crown Forum, ISBN-13: 978-0307394064

Josh Billings (otherwise known as Henry Wheeler Shaw) was a famous humorist and lecturer in the United States during the latter half of the 19^th Century…but what concerns us here about him is one of his most famous quotes, namely: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so”. Quite. And it is just this idea, our own ignorance of the important questions of the day, which concern Michael Medved in his The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation. And just what are these 10 Big Lies About America? Thought you’d never ask:

1. America was founded in genocide against Native Americas 
2. The United States is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery 
3. The Founders intended a secular, not a Christian nation 
4. America has always been a multicultural society, strengthened by diversity 
5. The power of Big Business hurts the country and oppresses the people 
6. Government offers the only remedy for economic downturn and poverty 
7. America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace 
8. The two-party system is broken and we urgently need a viable third party 
9. There is a war going on against the American middle class 
10. America is in the midst of an irreversible moral decline

No nation is perfect, but the United States is, I have no problem in asserting, less evil than most. Take the founding, for instance: the long conflict between European settlers and the people they encountered in the “New World” was a lot more nuanced than the “policy of genocide” the left alleges based on either a distorted reading of historical events or on no evidence at all. The truth is there were brutalities on both sides, but even more examples of friendship and cooperation between American Indians and European settlers than there were bloody skirmishes. Medved also shows that a view of Native Americans as near saints living peacefully in harmony with their neighbors and the environment until Europeans showed up and ruined Eden is a total fiction. Americans Indian tribes fought almost constant wars between themselves before Europeans arrived.

Or how about slavery? As grotesque and utterly unjustifiable as the institution of slavery was, it was not peculiar to the West in general or to America in particular. It has existed throughout all of human history on all continents (in fact, it still exists in parts of Africa today and even China; think of the Uighurs). Indeed, it was Britain and America, with no help from anyone else, who were responsible for bringing it to an end in the West. Medved in no way apologizes for slavery (as some of the left have falsely claimed) but shows how ubiquitous it has been and how Western Christian values were central in ridding most of the world of this plague.

On Christianity, clearly the Founders only meant to prevent the central government from establishing one sect of Christianity as the nation’s official religion, not to drive all traces of religion from the public square. There are constant references to God and Christian principles in our founding documents and in the speeches of the Founders themselves. No one thought it the slightest problem that many states maintained official religions for decades after the First Amendment was adopted.

How about the role of government? Consider just one example: in 1931, during the middle of the Hoover administration and deep into the Great Depression, the national unemployment rate was 17.4 percent; in 1938, five years into FDR’s administration and after federal spending had tripled, regulation put into overdrive and countless economic experiments from Washington had been visited on the economy, the national unemployment rate was…17.4 percent. At no time during the New Deal decade of the 1930s did unemployment drop below 14 percent. So much for the idea that only Washington has all the answers.

You really need to read The 10 Big Lies About America I order to get the whole story, but I will leave you with words from the Gipper’s farewell address of Jan. 11^th, 1989: “We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important…If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are”. Looking at the US of A today, with ignoramuses burning down cities and calling for the imposition of friggin’ socialism – a system that has failed every single time it has been tried – I fear that we have already forgotten.

“Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit”, by William Knoedelseder

 

320 pages, Harper Business, ISBN-13: 978-0062289070

If you’ve never heard of Harley Earl – and damn you to Hell forever and ever if you haven’t – than you have at least heard of his many, many innovations to the automotive sciences. As told by William Knoedelseder in Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit, Earl was responsible for the creation that we moderns just take for granted (like so much), such as, well:

• Motorama Shows – First introduced in 1953, the Motorama was the groundbreaking precursor to today’s modern auto shows, and a staple of post war American pop culture
• The Concept Car – A brilliant marketing and merchandizing device for all global car makers today, concept cars boost general interest in the auto industry, exponentially increase auto sales and car show attendance, and enabled manufacturers to test and gage consumer reactions to new style and engineering ideas
• Women Car Designers – A powerful advocate of women's rights, Harley's hiring of the first prominent all-female design team in America's business world was groundbreaking, controversial, and extremely successful
• Tailfins – Outrageous and wildly popular, Earl’s tailfins are an instantly recognizable icon synonymous with one of the most beloved decades in American history, the 1950s
• Corvette – One of the 20^th Century’s greatest untold stories is the true genesis of the Corvette and Harley Earl’s role as its visionary designer and inventor
• Clay Modeling and Graphic Engineering – Using artistic techniques to help build and engineer cars, while industry standard today, was revolutionary technology when first introduced by Harley Earl, and two of his most influential methods were clay modeling and graphic engineering
• Interior Design and Color Studio – By employing some 75 interior designers, color stylists, fabric and plastic experts, and other craftsmen within a brand new Design Building at the GM Technical Center, Earl introduced the very first modern Interior Design section of any car company
• Annual Model Change – Harley Earl and GM’s mid-century dream team of business leaders initiated a modern tradition of recognizing and anticipating an automotive buyer’s wants and needs, something from which creating regular changes in design and style naturally evolved
• Invented the Car Designer – Before Harley Earl, the auto design profession wasn’t on the business map, but he was the industrial pioneer who revolutionarily merged art, science and engineering in the auto world
• The Modern Automobile – Fathering the modern car may seem like a grandiose claim until you add up the features Earl invented and imagined: first autonomous cars, onboard computers, telescopic power radio antennas, heated seats, tinted glass, electric windows, keyless entry, power convertible and pillarless tops, hidden spare tires, turn indicators, crash test dummies

I could go on and on and on…but don’t worry, I won’t. In Knoedelseder’s telling, Earl was much more than a giant of a man – at 6’5” he would be hard to miss anywhere he went – he was positively volcanic, both in his temperament and his creativity. But there was so much more to the man, too, such the fact that he was mildly dyslectic, or spoke with a stutter, or invented his own lexigraphy to tell his designers what he wanted, once telling an assistant that he wanted a car “to have a dooflunky, to come across, have a little hook in it, and then do a little rashoom or a zong”. Oh. Okay.

Having cut his teeth designing cars for the Hollywood elite such – his client list included Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle – he was hired by General Motor’s Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering as a special consultant and arrived in time to assist GM in the design of its 1927 LaSalle – only to become GM’s first head of design and rule dictatorially over the size, shape and look of all their vehicles for the next three decades. While I wish that Fins had more photos than it does (Google got a workout as I sought out all of the cars described therein), I found the book to be enlightening and entertaining, and not a little depressing, describing how it does when Detroit put the world on wheels and everybody wanted to live here.