Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

Leonard, Elmore. Road Dogs. New York: William Morrow, 2009

Walter Giersbach '61

Robert Pinsky, reviewing for The New York Times in May 2009, said Elmore Leonard’s Road Dogs “is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in human relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Droll and exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance of a master now in his mid-80s, Road Dogs presents interesting questions: Can a grown person change? Specifically, can a man abandon expertise that wins him respect but makes a mess of his life? Can anybody trust anybody? Is love ever true? Is friendship ever real? Or, leaving aside love and friendship, does loyalty exist? We road dogs—trotting along companionably on our way to sniff and woof and boogie-woogie and perhaps knock over an occasional trash barrel together—are we reliable?”

I’ve maintained a list of every book I’ve read since 1973, starting when I realized I was reading an embarrassing amount of pop fiction at the expense of more worthy literary efforts. Not that Robert Ludlum is bad, but it’s genre writing. Finishing my seventh Elmore Leonard opus I realized it was time to get back to Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering or David Liss’s Conspiracy of Paper. Then I had my epiphany: Elmore Leonard was an extremely good writer.

You know Leonard from the films Get Shorty, Stick, Mr. Majestyk, Jackie Brown and 27 others. You just haven’t read him.

The Christian Science Monitor’s James Kaufman (who teaches at the U. of Iowa) wrote in 1983, “It’s taken awhile for people to catch onto Leonard, though Stick finally brought him the scrutiny of the critical establishment…. But like more overnight successes, Leonard had been writing…since 1953.” Newgate Callendar, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1973, stated, “When [Leonard’s] 52 Pickup appeared in 1974, it had some critics talking in terms of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald…. But it is really wrong to talk of this writer in terms of Chandler and Macdonald. He has little in common with those two. They are ‘clean’ writers; there is no profanity to speak of in Chandler, and Macdonald has never been an exponent of the verismo school of speech. Leonard is.”

Leonard’s characters are for the most part, good, decent people, but ones who might challenge you to arm wrestle. The writing is spare and lacking in simile or metaphor. His protagonists have interior thoughts and existential questions. What remains when the reader puts down a Leonard work are characters drawn in clean, sharp lines. He is Hemingway, unexpurgated and sitting in a bar or police squad room.

Then you may find Road Dogs and Leonard’s 40 other novels are addictive.

Books (and a couple of films) by Elmore Leonard at the Grinnell College Libraries

PS3562.E55 (3rd floor)

Road Dogs. 2009 On Order The Hot Kid: A Novel. 2005.
Mr. Paradise. 2004.
Tishomingo Blues. 2002.
Pagan Babies. 2000.
Be Cool. 1999.
Riding Rap. 1995.
Rum Punch. 1992.
Maximum Bob. 1991.
Get Shorty. 1990.
Killshot. 1989.

Films

3:10 to Yuma. 2008

Rum Punch. 2002

Hunger

Knut Hamsun. Hunger. New York: Noonday Press, 1967. Originally published in Norwegian in 1890.

R. Stuhr

According to the Isaac Bashevis Singer's introduction to this translation (by none other than Robert Bly), Hamsun is the father of modernism, won the Nobel Prize in 1920, and sadly, was a dupe, and therefore a pariah in his own country, to Hitler. The friend who recommended this book to me told me he was a Nazi, and through the entire novel (I read the introduction last) I kept thinking, that my friend had mispoke on that detail. But Singer lays it out unambiguously. Singer writes, "The Knut Hamsun who had kept aloof of the masses and social reformers allowed himself to be taken in by Nazi demagogues. It was a sad day for many of Hamsun's followers when a picture of him greeting Hitler appeared in the newspapers. In it, Hamsun's face reflects shame, while Hitler looks at him mockingly....Following Hitler's defeat, Hamsun's sons were imprisoned."

Singer considers Hunger to be one of Hamsun's four best novels along with Mysteries (1892), Editor Lynge (1893), and Pan (1894). Hunger takes place completely in the mind of the main character who is an impoverished writer living in Christiania, Norway. From time to time he looks for a job, but he makes what living he does make through writing. Hamsun's character is nearly insane from malnourishment and want, but always conscious of his wild compulsive behavior. Despite his tenuous grasp on life and sanity, he continues to try to write. When he knows he is at his limit, money suddenly materializes in some way, but it never lasts long and it is never enough to restore him to health. The book ends abruptly when the writer convinces a ship captain to take him on board to work.

After all the pain and desperation, wildness and compulsiveness, Hamsun's character is overjoyed at the prospect of the ship and not bitter about his days of poverty in the streets of Christiania. He ends the novel, "So he gave me a job to do ...When we were out on the fjord, I straightened up, wet from fever and exertion, looked in toward the land and said goodbye for now to the city, to Christiania, where the windows of the homes all shone with such brightness."

Burling 3rd Floor PT 8950 .H3 S813x 1967

A Prairie Reading at the Faulconer Gallery

Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College Libraries, and Prairie Studies co-hosted a thoroughly enjoyable event last Tuesday night (September 1) at the Faulconer Gallery. The reading celebrated the closing week of the Small Expressions and Beneath the Surface exhibitions that have been going on all summer and that include an array of visual representations of the prairie. We had thirteen participants reading and performing, students, faculty, and staff. I, for one,was inspired by the choices and the enthusiasm behind the choices, so I decided to share the program with the Grinnell Community. If you have a favorite text that represents the prairie or nature in some respect, please let us know at the Book Review (bookreview@grinnell.edu)--just send us the title 0r the title and a sentence or two description.

Dean Porter opened our program with a reading from Jacqueline Edmonson's Prairie Town: Redefining Rural Life in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). (HN79.M6+E36+2003). This is a contemporary study of conditions in the rural areas of the midwest.

Betty Moffett read an essay that she wrote about her own personal prairie, "My Prairie," and then sang a song, again her own composition, with Sandy Moffett and Mark Schneider, "Golden Iowa." Both her essay and song depict the peaceful beauty one can experience stepping off of the pavement and into the grasslands of Iowa. Betty's essay was published in Midwest Woodlands and Prairies and you can hear the Too Many String Band perform her songs at Sts. Rest Coffee House on the third Wednesday of every month.

Jacob Gjesdahl enthusiastically recommended The Emerald Horizon: the History of Nature in Iowa by Cornelia F. Mutel (University of Iowa Press, 2008). (QH 105.I8 M875 2008) Mutel describes the way the prairie tends to itself (if left to its own devices). Mutel's book seems to be one that can lead the reader to a deep appreciation of the subtle Iowa landscape. If you have friends or family who wonder how it is you live in the middle of the country surrounded by cornfields, this might be a good book to give them.

Mark Schneider read the poem "Soy Beans," by Alan Orr from Hammer in the Fog. Mark also sang (with Sandy and Betty!) the song "Roseville Fair" by singer Bill Staines. "Soy Beans" is a poem about the hardships of farming versus the different kind of risk taken by the speculator.

Katherine Vanney read from a childhood favorite, Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake.

Tilly Woodward read from the booklet of poems by Paula Smith and available at the gallery. The poems were "Rhizomes," "The Grassland," and "The Tallgrass on Fire."

Richard Fyffe read two of his own poems, “Peterson’s Guide (Only a God Can Save Us Now)” and “Like a Picture, or a Bump on the Head,” and “Prairie Proper” from Merrill Gilfillan's Rivers and Birds (Johnson Books, 2003).

Kayla Koether read from Kent Nerburn's Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder (New World Press 1994). Kayla's reading illustrated the perspectives and cultural orientation of native people on the prairie.

Rebecca Stuhr read a short poem by Gary Snyder, "It Pleases," and played two etudes for flute by Robert Wyckes, "The White Tailed Kite," and "The Marsh Hawk."

Hart Ford-Hodges read an excerpt from the text she'd used in a biology class, Konza Prairie: A Tall Grass Natural History by O. Reichman. (University of Kansas Press, 1987). QH105.K3 R45 1987.

Catherine Rod read an excerpt from the writings of an early settler in Grinnell. You can find this memoir in the college archives and learn something about the unpredictability of Iowa weather and the boom town of Westfield.

Eliza Mutino read from the poet laureate, Ted Kooser, "So this is Nebraska," and "In the Corners of Fields."

Finally,

Jon Andelson read an excerpt from a novel by Herbert Quick (Bobbs-Merrill, 1922.) Vandemark's Folly PS3533.U53 V3. This excerpt celebrated the hard and sometimes miraculous work of the farmer, while at the same time mourning the loss of the prairie caused by the emergence of farmland.

You can see that the mixture of selections was eclectic. Each reading left me wanting to hear more from the poet or author or song writer ... You might want to investigate some of these readings as well, many of them are available in the libraries.

submitted by Rebecca Stuhr

My Year in Iraq

L. Paul Bremer with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Some one recently asked me what is the funniest book you have read in the last five years? Honorable mention has to go to Pervez Musharraf's In the Line of Fire: A Memoir. But, for real belly laughs the undisputed champion is L. Paul Bremer's My Year in Iraq. The most endearing quality of the book is that despite the absurdity of any situation Bremer finds himself in he never fails to convey a sense of absolutely childish sincerity.

It is hard to know where to even start. Shortly after the U.S. invasion, in a surprise turn, the Iraqi army “self-demobilized.” Despite this setback Proconsul Bremer valiantly stuck to his principal mission, which was providing for the material well-being of the Iraqi people. Bremer was besieged by a range of issues such as “...what to do about subsidies, the state-owned enterprises and the currency, down to the price and availability of rice and beans.... We had inherited a structural crisis” (p.28). In a corollary to Mickey Rooney in virtually any Andy Hardy movie Bremer might have been heard saying: “Hey kids, let's put on a structural adjustment.” After all, just as sure as there were weapons of mass destruction to unearth, the decrepitude of Iraq's industrial base was due to Saddam Hussein's “economic mismanagement, lack of investment, and cockeyed socialist economic theory” (p.62). As everybody with an economics background knows, the way to turn around an economy with eighty percent unemployment is to put into place a flat corporate tax rate of fifteen percent. Privatizing state industries and devaluing the currency are also helpful in this respect.

Bremer, a master of improvisation, need not have concerned himself with any of the technical literature which erroneously maintained that the state sector in Iraq was established with little regard given to the competing models of collectivism or free enterprise. Imagine the naïveté of any one believing for a minute that the thing that mattered in Iraq was the relationship of senior figures in Saddam's regime to various enterprises, be they state industries or private ones. Patrimonial state development? Get outta here!

Despite a media that refused to report on the good news stories and focusing instead on all manner of negativity, Bremer remained steadfast in his hope for the people of Iraq. In a reflective moment he opined: “One day... a free Iraq with its educated, hardworking people will help transform this region” (p.70). Some what like Henry Fonda in Young Abe Lincoln, walking off into the sunset to the strains of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Bremer remained positive to the end. “Once secure, this country will be a tremendous economic success” (p.388).

Bremer, who I argue missed his calling in life, like all great comedians has “got a million of 'em.”

Burling 1st Floor DS79.769 .B74 2006