6 posts tagged “book”

I am very happy to see this book on Memphis photographer  William Eggleston.  The Whitney has done a fabulous job of selecting images from 40 years worth of work.

Who better to document Graceland than Eggleston.  I think The King would be proud.

  Maybe it's because I'm from The South, but I can feel the humidity pouring out of these images.  I smell cut grass and puddle water.

Any Big Star folks out there?  This should take you back.

Any shower fans out there?

Do you smell the puddle water, too?

I adore this particular photo for its resemblance to my Aunt Frida.  Frida's hair was pink, but the dress and settee are correctly colored.

If you would like to hear me read a paragraph that accompanies this you will have to click over to Read To Me Tuesday, which is something that Mook, I, and a few other tumblrs do over there at, ummmm... Tumblr.

Book:  Show us a great non-fiction book.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan was not a bad time at all.  I found it quite readable considering that the story piled one catastrophe on top if another.  The book explains how the “Great American Desert ” was renamed the “Great Plains” and how railroads, land developers, and the government coaxed people westward to settle this windswept area.  The turf of the plains was laid down over thousands of years and served as an insulating covering to the ground—perfect for grazing and impervious to wind and drought. 

When beef prices plummeted, more plainsmen began to plow the earth to plant wheat.  Encouraged by increased demand and high prices for wheat, many more rushed to the area to reap the benefits of farming. 

By the time that the market fell out on wheat all the grasslands were destroyed.  As the drought took hold the winds ripped millions of tons of topsoil from the plains.  This airborne soil formed into great “dusters” that would blot out the sun and bury a farmstead inches deep in dust before they would move on.   The worst of these dusters occurred on Black Sunday, April 14, 1935 on an unusually pleasant day.  Folks has come out of their homes to enjoy the day  when the temperature dropped and all the chicken went to roost.  On the horizon the mother of all dusters loomed and when it arrived it sand-blasted at 60 mph everything in its path.  This event gave birth to the phrase “dust bowl.”

And THEN the drought continued for three more years.  And did I mention the grasshoppers?  And the “dust fever” which was similar to black lung/pneumonia.  Of course the depression Great Depression did not help and little aid came from outside the area as everyone was in dire straights.  

Egan does a fine job of balancing the big environmental picture with intimate views of a few individuals from Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska.  A cowboy, a farmer, a school teacher, a doctor, a newspaper editor, and others were all equally devastated by the years of drought and desperation.  My favorite of these is cowboy Bam White.  He sensed that the destruction of the grasslands would alter the nature of the plains for the worse.  White’s romantic silhouette beside his plow is the image chosen by Pare Lorentz to represent his documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains.  And you may look forward to my review of that in another post!

Book: Show us the latest book you bought, borrowed or received.

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Washington, Harriet A.  NY:  Doubleday, 2006)

Harriet Washington's book Medical Apartheid is a recounting of the history of medical experimentation on African Americans.  I did not go into reading this book thinking that I'd be unaffected by Medical Apartheid.  I am not surprised by man's inhumanity to man.  Misunderstood Darwinism spurred the quest for a literal "missing link" between (white) man and ape and Social Darwinism sought to prove by extension that blacks were socially and morally "inferior."   Bad science, misguided beliefs, ignorance, and xenophobia.   Frightening AND intriquing.

There were many unpleasant facts of which I was aware:

1. A long history of medical experimentation on African Americans (Tuskegee, Holmesburg, etc)
2. Samuel Morton's  American Golgotha (660 human skulls: white, black, Eskimo, Native American)
3. All about eugenics and the "Mississippi apendectomy"
4. African Americans on display as "curiosities" (Blind Tom, Millie-Christine, the Hottentott Venus, Madame Abomah, Zip the What's It)

Which is just the tip of the iceberg, it appears.  Here is a short list of some other disheartening facts I learned from Medical Apartheid:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn originally had a scene, now excised, in which Jim had to warm up a corpse for his medical student.  
2. PT Barnum exhibited Joice Heth, allegedly George Washington's "mammie" and 161 years old.  When she died PT arranged an autopsy of her body and charged 50cents a ticket.  After a huge kerfluffle it turns out that she was 80.  PT had gotten her drunk and punched her teeth out so she'd look older.
3. Some performers or "human curiosities" were surgically altered.  Calvin Bird turned up at a Syracuse hospital requesting that his surgically attached horns be removed.
4. Josiah Nott thought that mulattoes were too feeble to reproduce their own kind.  "Mulatto" is the Spanish word for MULE-- as in the sterile cross between horse and donkey.
5. Cesare Lombroso thought the blacks' inability to blush was a sign that they were "savage."
6. JH Greunbault (???) had a list of 47 physical traits other than skin color to distinguish black from white.  Josiah Nott's list only had 25.
7. Louis Agassiz, that Swiss zoologist from Harvard who developed a racial classification scheme, originally believed on the "confraternity of the human type" but changed his mind when he encountered African Americans in Philadelphia. He revised his thinking to "polygenism" or belief in the separate development of white and black peoples.  Anyway, he took a series of photos of African Americans in 1850 in Columbia, SC.
8. Don't even get me started on Thomas Jefferson.  There's one guy who was clearly a genius in some respects and equally without clue in others.
9. In 1852 the Medical College of Georgia purchased a slave, Grandison Harris.  His job there was to procure bodies for the medical classes.  He mostly harvested from Cedar Grove Cemetery which was, of course, the African American cemetery. Who knows how many of those body parts they dug up in the basement were "resurrected" by Mr. Harris.
10. In 1998 Addie May Collins' (a victim of the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing) body was discovered missing from Greenwood Cemetery.
11. The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair featured a "World Congress of Races."  Dr. R. S. Woodworth of Columbia University & associates administered a battery of psychometric and anthropomorphic examinations to 1,100 "exotic" people.  One of these was Ota Benga.
12. Ota Benga (a Mbuti, from what is currently the Democratic Republic of Congo) was brought to the US by Samuel Phillips Verner, Southern Presbyterian minister (after Belgian forces burned his village).  Besides being exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, he was "purchased" in 1910 by William T. Hornaday of the Bronx Zoological garden where he was exhibited in the monkey house.  He shared a cage with a gorilla (Dinah) and an orangutan (Dohung).  After he attacked visitors with a bow and arrows and a knife he was freed from the zoo.  He then went to Virginia Seminary and College.  Later he worked in Lynchburg, VA tobacco factory.  In 1916 when he had lost all hope of ever seeing his home again he borrowed a gun and committed suicide.

I hope this post wasn't too cheerful for you.  Sometimes when it's really ugly, I can't look away.