Will in the World

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton. 2004. Print.

First Sentences:

As a young man from a small provincial town -- a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections, and without a university education -- moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkable short time becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. His works appeal to the learned and the unlettered, to urban sophisticates and provincial first-time theatergoers. He makes his audiences laugh and cry; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety....How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?


Description:

I picked up Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare knowing nothing about it,  just another reader interested in the mysterious background of William Shakespears and how he possibly could have lived and created his exequite body of historic, romantic, and thrilling works of literature after coming from a relatively small town with little education or travel. At least, those were the assumptions and subsiquent questions offered to me by many historians

Author Greenblatt, however, is different. He devles deeply into historical documents and social norms of the sixteenth century to postulate about the forces behind Shakespeare's life and the elements that affected his growth and decisions.

For example, Greenblatt reveals primary documents about Shakespeare's father, John, showing him to be an important municiple office-holder in Stratford who tryies to enforce laws between the Catholic residents and the incoming Protestent world enforced by the new Queen Elizabeth. Later a failed glovemaker who William worked for, John's life failed to excite his son.

Also, I didn't know Stratford was a fairly important city that drew traveling performers where William probably was exposed to the theatre and even helped with general chores for a short-handed company. There are records that he offered his services tothe traveling King's Company which found themselves short an actor after their leading player was killed in a drunked fight. Reviews from that period testified that William distinguished himself and possibly escaped Stratford with that company when it moved on toward London.

Other revelations included:

• Shakespeare likely attended King's New School in Stratford, reserved for children of means, receiving instruction from 7am - 6pm six days a week twelve months a year, mostly focusing on Latin "which clearly aroused and fed Will's inexhaustible craving for language." 

• At school "virtually all schoolmasters agreed that one of the best ways to instill good Latin in their students was to have them read and perform ancient plays";

• Anne Hathaway, his bride, was eight years older than the 18-year-old Will when they were hurridly married without the delay of publicizing banns. Church records showed their dauthter Susanna was baptized six months later. The couple soon had two other children, one of whom, Hamnet, died young. Anne was not mentioned in Shakespeare's will except that she would receive their "second-best bed," the majority of Shakespeare's wealth and property going to his daughter Susanna;

• Shakespeare in his early twenties left Stratford, wife Anne, and his three children for unexplained reasons. Greenblatt shows evidence that William might have been in trouble with the law for poaching deer on a wealthy estate near Stratford and was forced to flee;

• Later, during one of the frequent bubonic plague epidemics, all London theatres were closed. To earn income, Shakespeare accepted a commission to write many of his 154 sonnets. It is still unclear who financed him or to whom the poems referred to, whether his patron, a young man, or an unknown dark lady;

• When the ground lease for the theatre where they performed was not renewed by the owner (who controlled the land but not the structures), Shakespeare, his company, and their crew snuck onto the theater grounds one night in December, 1598, dismanteled the entire theatre, carted it across the frozen Thames river, and re-constructed it in the new location as The Globe. The new theater, financed by Shakespeare himself, was an octagonal building with a huge stage, and could seat over 3,000 people;

In London, William probably attended many theatrical performances of rival playwrights, including those of his chief rival Christopher Marlowe. He observed what playwrights presented that worked and what did and did not please audiences. Shakespeare moved away from the current broad morality plays, giving his own characters an intensified complexity and humanness rather than one-dimensional aspects. 

Shakespeare had to engage with the deepest desires and fears of his audience, and his unusual success in his own time in his own time suggests that he succeeded briliantly. Virtually all his rival playwrights found themselves on the straight road to starvation; Shakespeare, bu contrast, made enough money to buy one of the best houses in the hometown to which he eretgired in his early fifties, a self-made man.

I loved reading the original surce records that Greenblatt dug up, supporting or disproving theories about Shakespeare.  Each item is carefully examined, put into historical context, and then applied to Shakespeare's life to provide logical conclusions about the playwright and his influences.

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare.   

The absolute best and highly-readable deep dive into every Shakespeare play, with historical, literary, and cultural explanations to key words, phrases, and plots. So great I read it from cover to cover, and re-read it before watching any Shakespeare play to catch all the references and subtleties. Wonderful. HIghest recommendation. (Previously reviewed here)

  

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title.

(And also read an introduction to The First Sentence Reader.)

The Navajo Code Talkers

Paul, Doris A. The Navajo Code Talkers. Pittsburgh: Dorrance 19739. Print.

First Sentences:

Every syllable of my message came through. Sometimes we had to crawl, had to run, had to lie partly submerged in a swamp or in a lagoon, or in the dead heat, pinned under fire. But there was no problem. We transmitted out messages under any and all conditions.

Description:

I've always been fascinated (but not good at solving) codes. Over the years, however, dedicated amateurs and professional code-breakers have broken all codes. All, that is, except one: the Navajo code utilized by America during World War II.

Doris A. Paul's The Navajo Code Talkers is the definitive history of this code and the men who created and successfully employed it. Extensive interviews with the Navajo Code Talkers gives the narrative a deeply personal account of each man's commitment to the program. reflecting the intense, maybe desperate need for the code to work.

The Navajo nation, in an edict from their Tribal Council at Window Rock in June, 1940, expressed their commitment to "aid and defend our Government and its institutions against all subversive and armed conflict." After the official call to arms went out, 

Navajo men appeared at their agencies, carrying old muskets and hunting rifles, asking where they could fight the enemy. Many were turned away, heartbroken and humiliated that they could not fight because they could not speak English.

But those who spoke English were recruited to counteract the Japanese proclivity to break any English code. During close fighting, messages containing vital information about positions of troops, coordination of attack times, and battle news had to be delivered quickly, with no time for transcription of complex codes. A simple, unbreakable, easily transported code was needed.

Previously, Choctaws had been employed briefly during World War I to simply relay messages via telephone to stymie German interception. Later, Comanches, Creek, Choctaw, Menominee, Chippewa, and Hopi were used as communicators, but in the limited capacity of speaking only their own language. What was needed was an untranslatable Native American language, but updated by creating new terms for military items like "tank," "machine gun," "barrage," etc.

The Navajo language was suggested as the perfect platform:

The Navajo tongue is an extremely difficult language to master, and should a non-Navajo (particularly German or Japanese) learn to speak it, counterfeiting its sounds would be almost impossible.

Twenty-nine Navajo men were recruited from reservation schools and trained by the Marines for a pilot program. For some, this was the first time off the reservation. Firsthand accounts from interviews with the original Navajo Code Talkers revealed the challenges, expectations, and actual dangers to their jobs:

We wrung our minds dry trying to figure out words that would be usable, that would not be too long, and that could be easily memorized. After all, in the heat of battle, the code talker would have no time to take out a chart and look up vocabulary for an urgent message.

A sample alphabet and terms are reproduced in the book, containing examples like:

"Gini" (literally "Chicken Hawk") is the Navajo word created for "Dive Bomber" 

"Be-al-doh-cid-da-hi (sitting gun) = Mortar" 

"Joy-sho" (buzzard) = Bomber  

"Lo-tso" (whale) = Battleship

"Toh-yil-kal" (Much Water) = River 

"Tsisi-be-wol-doni" (bird shooter) = Anti-Aircraft 

The Code Talkers worked eight hours a day with walkie-talkies under field conditions. They had to remember this new vocabulary, speak into the 80-pound radio sets, and quickly, accurately translate incoming messages. After training, code talkers were utilized to request medical supplies, coordinate troop movements, and relay operational orders.

I found the recollections of surviving code talkers incredibly interesting for painting a picture of life in war in which they contributed a vital part. There was real pride in accomplishment, as well as humor in their voices. They were at Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Okinawa, the Solomon Islands, and many more places, bringing a tense aspect of the war alive for me. 

I recommend this for readers interested in the lives and contributions to our country by Native Americans, the development of a unique code, and World War II as told by those men who were there.

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

McKay, Sinclair. The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park. 

For the first time, the an in-depth look people behind the super-secret operation that broke the Enigma code and shortened the war by two years, saving millions of lived. (previously reviewed here.) 

Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma.   

The man and his team who cracked the German Enigma code in World War II to change the course of the War.

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

Here Is New York

White, E. B. Here Is New York. New York: Little Bookroom. 1949. Print.

First Sentences:

 

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy....for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York.


Description:

Unless you live in New York City or very much enjoy visiting this delightful, challenging city, you might think you would have little interest in reading E.B. White's Here Is New York from his 1949 summer living in the city.  But you would be so quite wrong. 

White is a magnificent writer, a quiet observer relating to us lucky readers his thoughts about the sights, sounds, people, and even the air of New York. And rather than me try to convince you of value of this short book/essay (only 56 pages), I'll just present some quotes from White and let you judge for yourself.

• New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.

•  I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss.

•  Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city's tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale.

•  Not many [commuters] have ever spent a drowsy afternoon in the great rustling oaken silence of the reading room of the Public Library, with the book elevator (like an old water wheel) spewing out books onto trays.

• The city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin -- the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.

•  On a summer night [the Bowery] drunks sleep in the open. The sidewalk is a free bed, and there are no lice. Pedestrians step along and over and around the still forms as though walking on a battlefield among the dead.

• New York is not a capital city -- it is not a national capital or a state capital. But it is by way of becoming the capital of the world. 

Well, there it is for you. By now, you'll either love these wonderful descriptions of a uniquely complicated city (as I do) and want to visit it or at least read more about it. Or you will have had enough and are ready to move on to some other diversion. Your choice. But with E.B. White as your guide, how can you go wrong at least reading his brief essay, This Is New York? 

The city is uncomfortable and inconvenient, but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience -- if they did they would live elsewhere

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Hayes, Bill. Insomniac City.   

The thoughts of the author as he wanders the streets of New York City in the late night hours, including the people he meets, the restaurants he visits, and the quiet, dark sights he enjoys.

  

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

The Dictionary People

Ogilvie, Sarah. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.. New York: Knopf 2023. Print.

First Sentences:

 
It was in a hidden corner of the Oxford University Press basement, where the Dictionary's archive is stored, that I opened a dusty box and came across a small black book tied with a cream ribbon....Perhaps those ghosts were guiding me because the discovery I made that day would lead me on an extraordinary journey.


Description:

Sarah Ogilvie, author of the fascinating new non-fiction book, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary, was an editor for the OED and thus had access to the bowels of the dictionary's vast archives. It was there she made an incredible discovery: the address book of James Murray, editor of the OED from 1879-1915. In it, Murray had listed the names, addresses, books read, and special notations (e.g., "Hopeless") from the thousands of people who contributed unusual words towards the creation of this all-encompassing dictionary.

Author Ogilvie, upon this discovery as well as a photo collection of contributors collected by the OED's creator and first editor Frederick Furnivall, decided to research these OED contributors, some of whom had sent in over 100,000 word entries to be considered for inclusion in the dictionary. Who were these people? Why did they work so hard reading obscure books to discover uncommon words? And what was the process these words had to go through until they could be part of the OED? 

Those questions were enough to hook Ogilvie to spend eight years wading through this trove of names and perusing letters, articles, photographs, and scribbled notes, along with "censuses, marriage registers birth certificates, and official records" to unravel the backgrounds of these people and their relationship to the OED and its editor Murray.

The OED was conceived to be "the first dictionary that described language....[and] would trace the meaning of words across time and describe how people were actually using them." To gather these words and the sentences that contained them, the original editors "crowdsourced" the project between 1858-1928, placing advertisements for volunteer readers in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and through popular literary clubs and societies like the Philological Society, which became the underwriter of the OED's expenses. Most readers worked for free, simply desiring to just be a part of this important, historic project.

The Dictionary People could also be cranky, difficult, and eccentric...but that, paradoxically, also makes them lovable , or at least fascinating.

Slips of 4 x 6 paper were sent to contributors for them to record interesting words on the slip, along with the book where each was found, and a sentence that contained the word that would illustrate its usage. These slips were then gathered by sub-editors (often Murray's own family members - he had 11 children), alphabetized and placed in chronological order in the workspace named the "Scriptorium." Editors then created definitions, checked for earlier references of each word, and gathered the finished words into the specific dictionary section/letter currently under development. These sections were published as they were developed, until the final letters were completed and all could be compiled into one vast book. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, the launch of a "uniform penny post" and the birth of steam power (driving printing presses, and leading to railway transport and faster ocean crossings) enabled this system of reading for the dictionary to be so successful...[creating] the conditions for a global, shared, intellectual project.

Here are a few examples of the OED contributors whom Ogilvie discovered, and then placed in chapters arranged alphabetically by the person's distinguishing profession (or quirk) for The Dictionary People:

• Archaeologist - Margaret Alice Murray, a nurse living in India, focused on books of that culture until she became an Egyptologist at age 31, and wrote her own autobiography at age 100 titled, My First Hundred Years;

• Best Contributor - Thomas Austin Jnr, who sent in 165,061 words. Second place went to William Douglas (151,982 words);

• Explorer - Sir John Richardson, surgeon for John Franklin's ill-fated three-year voyage to discover the Northwest Passage, an undertaking where most of the men starved to death or resorted to cannibalism;

• "Hopeless" Contributors (so noted in the address book) - Those people who requested books to read and slips to fill out, then never sent in any contributions, often keeping the valuable, old books;

• Lunatics - John Dormer, "one of Murray's most faithful Subeditors and Readers," was an inmate at the Croydon Mental Hospital psychiatric institution. (Note: Three of the top four OED contributors were in mental asylums. "Lunatic" was, in 1871, a defining term the US Census, along with "Dear and Dumb or Blind, Imbecile or Idiot.");

• New Zealander - W. Herbert-Jones, a wildly popular speaker about New Zealand, (complete with the new invention of projected slides), contributed many words from that country, although he had never visited New Zealand and the information he presented to audiences was completely made up;

• Zealots - James Murray, overall editor of the OED, who had left school at 14, but nonetheless learned twenty-five languages

Contributors could select the books of their own interest to scour for interesting words. Author Ogilive sneaks in some examples of these words submitted which are fascinating in their own right. Here are some words submitted by William Douglas (another member of the asylum "lunatics") from Robert Knox's System of Human Anatomy, taken from the staggering 1,600 words he turned in from that book alone.

• aphasic - "having lost the power of speech"
• buccinator- "a muscle of the wall of the cheek"
• occipitofronalis - "a muscle of the scalp
• ozyat - "an obsolete drink of almond and orange-flower water"

One interesting finding out of the myriad of discoveries Ogilive unlocked was the three words with the most "senses" (definitions). These are  "Run" (654 senses), Go (603 senses) and Take (586 senses). Incredible.

When finally completed and published in 1928, the Oxford English Dictionary, contained "400,000 words, 15,000 pages of literature, 2,000,000 quotations, and 178 miles of type." Peoople still contribute slips of words to update the OED, including Chris Collier who sent in over 100,000 words between 1975 to 2010, taken solely from the local newspaper, the Brisbane Courier-Mail. Ogilive tracked him down in Australia and talked with him about his contribution. He was a reclusive sort, hording a vast collection of movie posters and taken to mowing his lawn and walking the streets at midnight ...naked,

I found myself totally absorbed into this mid-nineteenth century world of dedicated, tireless, scholarly (and sometimes quirky) people who built the OED. I simply could not get enough details about who these people were and how many had voluntary devoted their lives to this project. I highly recommend The Dictionary People for anyone interested in language, people, and the world of the 1800s.

But what united [readers] was their startling enthusiasm for the emerging Dictionary, their ardent desire to document their language, and, especially for the hundreds of autodidacts, the chance to be associated with a prestigious project attached to a famous university which symbolized the world of learning from which they were otherwise excluded.

 

 [If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]

Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman.   

Author Winchester unravels the bizarre, true history of James Murray, the director  of The Oxford English Dictionary, when he discovered that one of his most prolific contributors of new words for the OED was currently committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.. 

 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

Voices and Silences

Jones, James Earl and Penelope Niven. Voices and Silences. New York: Scribner 1993 Print.

First Sentences:

Early in my awakening memory, two grown men lean on a rail fence talking about livestock. It is spring of 1935. Since I am only four, they seem very tall to me.


Description:

Seems I've been in the auto-biography reading mood lately, so with he recent death of the actor James Earl Jones, naturally I hunted up his personal memoir, Voices and Silences, and was tremendously impressed. Not only is his recalling of his life story honest, intriguing, and thorough, Jones is a wonderful writer (along with co-author Penelope Niven) who tells his history with a confident , clear voice. (I only wish there was an audiobook with him as the reader. What a narrative voice that would be).

Since I knew nothing about Jones beyond his acting roles, it was fascinating to learn of his upbringing. Abandoned by both his father (to pursued an acting career) and mother (a mentally unstable person prone to wandering away from home for days), he was relocated from Mississippi to a farm in Michigan to be raised by his grandparents.

 

Soon after joining this new home, he began to stutter, an affliction so great that he simply did not speak for eight years, from age six to fourteen. Teachers accepted his silence and tested him through his written answers. Eventually, a teacher discovered Jones had composed some poetry and asked Jones to read something of his in front of the class. Surprisingly, Jones found he could read lines of writing perfectly without a stutter, thereby opening a door to script-reading and acting.

Because of my muteness, I approached language in a different way from most actors. I came at language standing on my head, turning words inside out in search of meaning, making a mess of it sometimes but seeing truth from a very different viewpoint,

After high school and a short army career (where he read Shakespeare plays in his off-hours), he decided to try to pursue acting, using the GI Bill to attend The American Theatre Wing in New York City.

 

To get enough money for living, he reconnected with his father and together they refinished floors, worked as janitors, and made sandwiches at a local diner. For summers, he joined a summer theater to perform for tourists and lived in the theater's "haunted" bell tower to save money.

I was twenty-four years old. I had given up all the certainty I had ever known -- farming, the university, the Army. I knew acting was risky business. I did not let myself dwell on the difficulties all actors face. I simply set to work, as hard as I knew how to work, at the acting classes, and the menial jobs that kept me fed while I studied. I did not know what else to do but to work, and trust that with work and time any talent I had would come out.

Jones performances with the American Theatre Wing were noticed by Joseph Papp and Lee Strasberg. Strasberg had taught the Method Acting technique to Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and many others. Jones unsuccessfullly auditioned to take Strasberg's acting classes for seven years. Later, in talking with Strasberg, the teacher explained that he and Elia Kazan felt:

There were actors such as George C. Scott and me who, by following their own particular drumbeat, had already found an effective technique....Rather than pull them back and teach them the Method, they said, 'We'd better let them go on their own paths.'

In 1966, Jones bumped into Papp on the sidewalk and was offered a small part in Henry V for Papp's brand new Shakespeare Festival, "Shakespeare in Central Park," a series of free outdoor plays for the public.

Roles started to pile in as more and more directors saw Jones perform. Meanwhile, he and his father, while had never really reconciled, found common ground discussing the character and motivations of Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor of Venice. It was a role Jones' father had studied for years and readily gave his opinions to his son prior to James Earl first playing that great role.

Othello, like me,, like my mother and like my father, was a stranger in a strange land....My father had never played Othello in a major production, but as I studied the role with him, I was apprenticing to a master, although an unfulfilled master.

It was fascinating to read Jones' thoughts about taking on new roles, some of which were unsuccessful (Paul Robeson and Nat Turner) as well as the ones in which he triumphed Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope, Lenny in Of Mice and Men, Othello). He praises actors like Jane Alexander (who called him "Jimmy Jones") who played opposite him in his breakout Broadway role in The Great White Hope, and his other leading ladies, two of whom he married who had played Desdemona to his Othello. 

 

Jones is analytical over every aspect of acting, from directors to scripts to messages that he felt the plays should project. For example, he discusses why, in his mind, the theatrical version of The Great White Hope was so powerful and successful while the movie, a popular film that earned him an Academy Award, had changed the original script so much to make his Jack Johnson character and therefore the film a failure.

 

As he aged, the long runs of plays became too much for Jones. He then turned more to television and voice acting. 

In the early days of my television career, I seemed to be typecast as a doctor, a detective, or a tribal chief....In one of my more memorable scenes [on Tarzan], the Supremes appeared clad demurely in habits, playing African nuns. I appeared more flagrantly attired in the stereotypical loincloth and feathers assigned to the African tribal chief. For reasons now obliterated from my memory, the script called for the nun-Supremes and the tribal chief to sing "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." And we did, habits, feathers, loincloth, and all.

By now you can certainly understand that I loved this book, learning about James Earl Jones' background and his rise to fame; about the acting profession; the challenges he faced; his relationships with fellow actors and the public; and his role as a Black man with a powerful voice. I am all in for this book and hope that others who enjoy this wonderful man's acting will pick it up for a look. You certainly will not be disappointed.

Acting can never really be taught. It must be learned in a thousand ways, over and over again. Learning to act is ongoing, a lifelong process, and the responsibility rests with the actors....The challenge is not intellectual, but emotional: how deeply in tune you are with the emotional, imaginative planes of being.

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out]:

Wilson, Victoria. A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True: 1907-1940.   

A towering biography about one of film's most versatile actresses. Highly-detailed, but so full of interesting people, conversations, films, and behind-the-scenes dealings that the book flies by. Highest rating.  (previously reviewed here)

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).