Tuesday, June 18, 2019

A final blast from Dallas Festival of Books & Ideas

Did you miss your chance to register for the Mayor’s Summer Reading Challenge at the Summer in the City portion of this year’s Dallas Festival of Books & Ideas? It’s not too late to sign up online or at the nearest branch of the Dallas Public Library. Because what is summer vacation without a stack of books to get us through the long, hot days? As essential as a run through the lawn sprinkler or ice cream cones dripping down our fingers! (And, as always, the reading challenge isn’t just for kids.)

Listening to authors’ panels at the festival added some books to my want-to-read list. Books like The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis.

Opening long ago in a galaxy not so very far from our own, President Richard Nixon feels surrounded by enemies. The bombings, fires, explosions, and calls for his execution might try the soul of a lesser being, but "even worse, as far as Nixon is concerned, are the attacks from the Democrats and the media that threaten to undermine his reelection campaign.  He has decided to strike back, to wage war and do it hard."

I must pause for a moment to note that although Minutaglio and Davis's description of Nixon's paranoid search for something – better, someone – to distract the country from his Watergate troubles sounded presciently topical, Minutaglio and Davis insisted that since their book was completed in 2016 (although not published until 2018) they had no contemporary parallels of political paranoia in mind.

The problem, Treasury Secretary John Connally tells Nixon, is that “You are not identified vis-à-vis an identifiable character or an identifiable incident, something that stays in the minds of people.” (Seriously? Yes, this strangely-worded statement was indeed captured on Nixon’s secret recordings.)

But who to choose as this poster child anti-Nixon? Should it be a Mafia warlord? No, they need someone still worse. And so, began a 28-month manhunt for a psychologist, a Harvard don of the effete elite, a person as violently nonviolent as -- Timothy Leary.

Having finished a follow-up of the John F. Kennedy assassination (Dallas 1963), Minutaglio and Davis were ready for another take on the 1960s. 

“We decided Timothy was a really wonderful prism to look at this time period,” Minutaglio said, of the “pope of dope’s” odyssey from Harvard to the Black Panthers’ embassy in Algeria to Folsom (as well as numerous other prisons), like “Mr. Magoo on acid,” Davis said.

Not to mention that the authors had the interest of Minutaglio’s personal connection to Leary. 

“I had met Timothy Leary in Houston in the early ’80,” said Minutaglio, and the pair stayed in touch. When Minutaglio, then a Dallas Morning News reporter, found himself assigned to a story about the Dallas Cowboys during one of the team’s low points looked for offbeat comments, he contacted Leary. Things would have been better for the football team, the godfather of the counterculture said, if the Cowboys’ longtime coach Tom Landry “was still alive.”

Landry was in fact, still alive at the time, and the DMN was flooded with outraged letters from fans.

The Most Dangerous Man in America (be sure to get the Leary version, not all those books about other characters foolishly deemed “most dangerous”) is available (of course) at the Dallas Public Library, as well as in bookstores near you. 

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While Minutaglio and Davis revisit the mid-20th century, another Texas writer, Melissa Lenhardt both revisits and revises the mid-19th in her latest book, the female outlaw Western, Heresy.

Make that the women-oriented, gender-bending outlaw Western. 

“How hard is it to discover what women really did in this time?” Lenhardt said in her interview during the Festival of Books & Ideas. The answer is, very, but she took the liberty to assume that if there’s no official record of events, there’s no reason women couldn’t have been involved in them.

After all, she noted, to an appreciative audience, “Women can be just as murderous and conniving as men.”   

And her characters are based at least loosely on historical figures. Her favorite is Hattie, a freed slave based on real-life Buffalo Soldier Cathay Williams. The first enlisted female U.S. soldier, Williams is also the only woman known to have served in the Army while posing as a man. 

And about the gender-bending sexuality? How hard was it to write about that while staying true to the post-Civil War period?

“Writing about people in love – that’s universal,” Lenhardt said. As for the rest, “They didn’t think of themselves in the way people think today. . . It is hard,” (she admitted) not to put a 21st-century take on it."

Again, for those who want to add Heresy to their summer reading list, it’s available at the Dallas Public Library, among other locales.
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Counterculture, Westerns – when everything old is new again, why shouldn’t kids be hooked on Sherlock Holmes? Especially when there’s a North Texas society dedicated to the legendary detective, The Crew of the Barque Lone Star. And a Texas connection. Sort of. (The barque Lone Star – a sailing ship – features in the Holmes case, “The Five Orange Pips.” In the story, the ship is based in Savannah, Georgia, not Texas, but with Holmes’ vast store of knowledge would have been aware that Lone Star is the nickname of the state of Texas.) 

And since “there has never been an obituary for Sherlock Holmes,” society president Steven Mason told his audience at the Festival of Books & Ideas, Holmes fans have never scrupled to continue writing their hero’s story, with settings both in the present and the future. 

And why Holmes for kids? Despite the 19th-century settings, he still captures the imaginations of readers of all ages, as the Crew acknowledges with his “good guy and bad guy” setups, “providing an introduction to logic and reasoning,” and of course, Holmes’ own acknowledgement of the value of children’s observations as shown in his “Baker Street Irregulars” gang of street urchins. 

For more information about the Crew, check its site. And of course, add some of the Holmes canon to your summer reading list!

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