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Woodstock:  The Oral History. By Joel Makower.
Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press
$19.95, 361 pages

Reviewed by Cyndi Young-Preston
 
It was supposed to be a music, arts and crafts festival drawing 50-75,000 people.  It morphed into a 500,000-person rock behemoth and spawned a legend that’s still fresh 40 years later. Woodstock. Also called the Aquarian Exposition. August 15-17, 1969.

It inspired movies, books, music.  In fact, Makower’s book was originally published in 1989; this is the updated 40th anniversary edition about the mega-concert that almost didn’t happen because site after site fell through.  Then the concert moved to the farm of Max and Miriam Yasger in Bethel, New York.

This story of Woodstock is told through the words of people who planned the concert, played in it, worked for it, attended it and tried to block it.  There’s no narrative at all ... just dialogue that tells the complete story of how two rich guys, a druggie and a record producer somehow got together to put on a show in a field.

The real Woodstock was a financial disaster, a drugfest, an orgy and a rain-drenched mess.  But the aura of Woodstock ... the essence of it ... has never been forgotten or surpassed.
The subject matter and the language in Woodstock:  The Oral History are frequently coarse and explicit.  A couple of the pictures are not for young eyes.  Regardless, this book is a superb vehicle to visit (or revisit) a sensation that defined the Sixties and changed a generation forever.

"Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court"
by Jan Crawford Greenburg
Penguin, 368 pages, $16

Reviewed by Lenny LaRose

Lenny LaRose lives in Roanoke County and works in Customer Service for a local company.

Jan Crawford Greenburg is well-qualified to deliver an intriguing account of the inner workings of the United States Supreme Court, and in this vivid exposé has certainly done so.  I never imagined the extent to which personality and politics influence the Court’s decisions.

Defining the beginning of each daily session.  The precise start time of 10 a.m., never early or late, the solemnity of the Chief Justice as he emerges from his chambers to join the other justices, the single-file procession of the associate justices following their leader to wait behind the red velvet curtains that lead to the courtroom, and the formal announcement of their entrance by the court’s marshal.

Chapter one portrays the friendship between Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist from their days as classmates at Stanford University Law School.  It discusses their similarities and their differences, and reveals how Rehnquist convinced O’Connor to retire so that he could serve one more year as Chief Justice in spite of his debilitating illness.

The second chapter illustrates why President Reagan had to settle for Anthony Kennedy after Robert Bork’s nomination met overwhelming resistance from his many critics and ultimately redefined the Senate confirmation process. The conservative Kennedy was soon to learn how vicious criticism from special-interest groups,  powerful editorial pages, and even other justices, clearly define the partisan lines along which interpretations of law are drawn.

Much is told about the eccentricities of the Justices, such as Sandra Day O’Connor’s desire to create a filing system by which she could organize petitions in sequence by case numbers (an endeavor that proved to be useless), or Justice Harry Blackmun’s refusal to join any opinion in which a certain word appeared. 

This is a book about humanity as much as it is about the modus operandi of our highest court.  It is a story of passions, and the lengths to which people will go to promote their own beliefs and ideologies.

TRESPASS: LIVING AT THE EDGE OF THE PROMISED LAND
By Amy Irvine
North Point Press
363 pages. $15

Reviewed by Lynn M. Davis
Who has been on the Colorado Plateau

Articulate as they come, a word-picture poet at heart, intense philosophical-intellectual, and a daughter broken by her alcoholic father who shot himself, Amy Irvine spent nine years of her chaotic life writing out this book, her personal story intertwined with geography, history, and culture lessons of the Colorado Plateau — the Promised Land of Utah and parts of California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada claimed by Mormon prophet Brigham Young and her ancestors.

Called the Kingdom of Deseret by the Mormons, the plateau is an unforgiving region of redrock deserts and less than lush mountains drained by the Colorado River and mostly owned by the federal government. A sixth-generation Mormon whose pedigree includes 3rd great-grandfather Howard Egan, bodyguard to both founding prophets of the Mormon church, Irvine moved to San Juan County, Utah, a remote southeast corner of Utah south of Hole ‘n the Rock (which has family and historical significance in her story), to be near her boyfriend and write grants for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. There she worked on her book and there she felt totally alienated from the locals who resented her as a neo-hippie environmentalist who causes trouble with their way of life.

As her book metamorphosed from an environmental rant, she came to realize symbolically that everyone was staking a claim to the land and taking water out of the Colorado, that is to say that the land was taking a beating from all of us, not just “those people.”

Irvine saw that the resistance to new ways of looking at landscape have met a fierce resistance to federal laws, environmental protection efforts, and intervention because of the Mormons’ sense of persecution and belief that they were entitled to their “land promised from God.” She underwent a shift in her thinking as an apostate Mormon who was frustrated with her relationship to Mormonism and what she saw as its negative impact on the environment in the West. As she recognizes the duplicity on both sides of the fence, at one point when she is so dissatisfied with everything, she pens one of her many descriptive word pictures, “When I walk out into the night, I see how the trees scratch their own architecture in the star-soaked sky.”

Edward Abbey, who wrote a lot about the Colorado Plateau from the 1950s to the 80s, including his famous The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, greatly influenced Irvine. While she holds some differences, she believes in order to save wilderness you have to find your place in it. She has been surprised that her region’s conservation critics — Mormons, off-road enthusiasts, ranchers, and anti-wilderness folks — have received her book with curiosity and interest in her unique story rather than attack her.

Irvine ends her story less than satisfyingly with the questions as to whether the New West will destroy the fragile desert ecosystem and if her marriage to her environmental attorney boyfriend and her own health after giving birth to a stillborn child will survive. Her marriage and health have apparently recovered after she moved to Colorado, but the other question remains — will the New West destroy the Old West?

And while her outdoor loving father was a hunter and fisherman who despised environmental efforts to protect it, the also outdoor-loving author so serious about protecting wilderness is her father’s daughter, and one author I would like to meet.

NO ROOM FOR DOUBT. By Angela Dove. Berkley Trade. 384 pages. $15

Reviewed by Cathy Benson

Angela Dove has recounted a true-crime tale in “No Room for Doubt,” the story of the murder of her stepmother, Debi Whitlock, in Modesto, Calif., in 1988.
Whitlock’s father was considered a prime suspect by the authorities for years. This is the story of the dedication of Whitlock’s mother, Jacque McDonald, who became a champion of victims and a prime reason why the mystery was finally solved more than eight years later.
When the attention of media wanes and cameras quit clicking, families of murder victims must deal with the thought of a murderer still at large, the tragedy in the way the victim died and the unbelievable sense of sudden loss. They also deal with the perceptions of society toward the victim and the family, and sometimes even survivor’s guilt.
Dove does an excellent job putting the family’s trials and tribulations after her stepmother’s death on paper. Her engaging style begins with the foreword and carries through the final chapter.
This book may not be for everyone, but for those who wonder what a family faces after murder, “No Room for Doubt,” is a worthwhile read.

Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq
by Steve Fainaru

Da Capo Press
288 Pages, $26

Reviewed by Al McLean

America is fighting two wars in Iraq.  There is the war being fought by our armed forces.  There is also a parallel war being fought by thousands of mercenaries.  The exact number of mercenaries operating in Iraq is unknown.  Estimates range from 25,000 to 50,000.

Big Boy Rules by Steve Fainaru is the fascinating story of America’s mercenaries.  Fainar is a reporter for the Washington Post.  His book is a continuation of the reporting which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it became apparent that there were not enough soldiers to hold the country.  Soon this void was being filled by what the government prefers to call private security contractors.  To free up soldiers for the fighting, mercenaries were hired to protect buildings, escort people, and guard convoys.

Contracting companies keep scant records of their business and employees.  The few statistics that do exist are staggering.  As of 2007, the infamous Blackwater Group had been paid over a billion dollars for contract work.  There are twenty-five countries that have participated in the allied coalition.  Only three, the United States, Britain and Italy have suffered more deaths than one contractor Armor Group a private contractor that guards convoys.

The mercenaries operate under no laws but their own.  In 2004, America’s operational government entered an order granting mercenaries immunity from Iraqi law.  The armed services are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  Mercenaries are not.  Their only law is a law of the jungle called Big Boy Rules.  With no controlling law, they can act with an impunity that creates an arrogant, cowboy culture.  That culture has led to numerous incidents of random shootings and unprovoked violence against civilians.  This mayhem has undermined much of the work of others to gain the trust of the Iraqi people.

Fainaru depicts the brute callousness of many mercenaries. Yet, he sympathizes with many of the young men who often find themselves shorthanded and ill-equipped by employers concerned only with profits.

The book follows the short life of Jon Cote.  Cote first came to Iraq as an enthusiastic soldier until his platoon accidentally attacks a wedding party.  Unable to adjust to civilian life and looking for something different, he returns to Iraq working for Crescent Security Group.  Fainaru is one of the last people to see Jon Cote alive.    Cote is part of a woefully undermanned team guarding a convoy.  After being ambushed five team members, including John, are kidnapped.  Five months later his tortured and decapitated body is discovered.

Fainaru describes the massacre at Nisoor Square where mercenaries of the Blackwater Group have been accused of killing seventeen unarmed Iraqis in fifteen minutes.  Since the book went to press, five members of the Blackwater team have been indicted on murder charges.  Whether Americans can be tried in America for crimes committed in Iraq has not been decided.  The trial may show that the mercenaries are subject to no law but the Big Boy Rules.
 
Al McLean is an attorney in Roanoke.

A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature Through the Seasons. By Rick Van Noy. The University of Georgia Press. 164 pages. $16.95

Reviewed by Lynn Davis

Outdoor play for children, where have you gone?

When the April 16 tragedy struck Virginia Tech, many of us working there utilized the counseling services that were made abundantly available. After that horrible week, we were advised to “get outside; the outdoors would help us heal.”

It was Richard Louv who first brought the power of the great outdoors to the attention of modern America several years ago with his alarming book, “Last Child in the Woods,” which flashed the red lights on America’s children who were morbidly bound to video games and TV as they grew up with no outdoor experience.

In that same vein, Radford University English professor Rick Van Noy has written a personalized collection of essays of his family stories to encourage others to get outside and build relationships with the natural world.

Roanoke Times readers will especially be interested in his numerous chapters that give accounts of his family’s outings along the New River, Mount Rogers and other local spots. He pays special tribute to one of America’s finest naturalists, Clyde Kessler, legendary local of the New River Valley.
“Walk with Clyde,” he promises, “and an otherwise ordinary landscape awakens with life.”

Not only a colorful descriptive writer and engaging storyteller familiar with the earlier literature on the natural environment, Van Noy also knows his outdoor stuff. He unfolds with his children trails to create, animal tracks to follow, trees and plants to identify, an outdoor museum to start, bird calls to recognize, a treehouse to build, the sounds to differentiate katydids from crickets and hoppers from peepers, a fresh and new world to discover.

In this series of not necessarily connected essays about Van Noy’s attempts to get his family outside, he shares biologist and writer Rachel Carson’s hope that children be given “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” The author and his family traced Carson’s footsteps on the Maine coast, including Ocean Point, where she liked to go tide pooling.

Paraphrasing one philosopher’s well-known quote that we are the sum total of all that we have met, Van Noy applies this to embrace outdoor experiences. Any seasoned outdoors person will tell you that hardships sometimes abound; it’s not always easy traipsing around the landscape.

And as one might expect, the hardest challenge of all is getting youngsters outside during the winter months. Van Noy does a pretty good job on that front.

Readers will appreciate these creative accounts of how one father, who grew up near where George Washington crossed the Delaware, tried to get his children outdoors into nature despite the seduction of today’s technologies. It’s good for the soul.

And you will have a resounding response to your child’s proverbial “I’m bored” complaint: “Go play outside.”

LYNN DAVIS handles public affairs for Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources.

WEDLOCK: The true story of the disastrous marriage and remarkable divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
By Wendy Moore
Crown (Random House)
$25.95, 400 pages

Reviewed by Jill Bowen

This story is so sensational that it appears more like improbable fiction than truth. Indeed when William Makepeace Thackeray first heard of the details of Mary Bowes' colorful life he used it as the basis for his successful novel “The Luck of Barry Lyndon.” Mary Bowes was the only daughter of an extremely wealthy Yorkshire coal mine owner who died in 1760 when Mary was 11 years old, naming her as the sole heir to his vast estate and stipulating that any husband must change his name to Bowes. Mary had been given an excellent education on the insistence of her father, a very uncommon thing in Georgian times.

By the time Mary was 13, she was “intelligent, accomplished, and self-confident, and engagingly pretty with her curling brown hair and blue-gray eyes,” and quickly attracted a swarm of suitors. In this era when “the question of whether to marry for money or for love had become one of the chief dilemmas of the age.” With her fortune and her longing for love, Mary was caught between the two. She decided on marriage on her 18th birthday to the 28-year-old ninth Earl of Strathmore, John Lyon who took the name Bowes-Lyon. This marriage was an unhappy compromise, as Mary knew she was marrying the wrong man.

The marriage produced five children but was filled with acrimony and contempt from her husband who never let her forget she was not an aristocrat by birth. “At a time when divorce was both rare and difficult, and separation spelled social exile, the death of a spouse was frequently the only means of escape from an unhappy marriage,” and Mary was delighted when the earl died in 1776. Leaving Mary a young, very rich, widow who celebrated by engaging in a number of affairs. One of her lovers was George Gray, “an unscrupulous entrepreneur who had returned from India with an enviable fortune,” who got her pregnant over and over again. Mary ended all the pregnancies except the last “with toxic abortifacients.” Gray fully expected to marry her until Andrew Robinson Stoney; an impoverished Irish soldier tricked her into marrying him.

Stoney took the name of Andrew Robinson Bowes, in accordance with Mary’s father’s will. Stoney was “conniving and manipulative when he wanted something, arrogant and defiant when he was spurned.” Bowes beat her often and mercilessly; Mary knew that there was little she could do because “during the eighteenth century wife beating was not only common and widely tolerated but even supported by law.”

Mary came to believe, like so many women in the same situation, that it was her faults and failings that were somehow responsible for her husband’s behavior. Eventually, Mary told her loyal and honest personal maid the full story of her husband’s abuses, finding in the maid a willing ally. Mary was terrified that Bowes would institutionalize her as “Throughout the eighteenth century husbands had successfully shut away disobedient or inconvenient wives in private asylums or country houses and often won the backing of the Georgian courts;” she also believed that, given the opportunity, he would murder her.

Mary, helped by her maid, ran away, leaving all of her children behind. She had no money, and as a woman she had few rights within “the male-dominated, tradition-bound society of the eighteenth century.” Yet she did something else equally astonishing: Though at the time it was almost impossible for a woman to end a marriage, Mary sued for divorce and to “regain all her land, mansions, mines, and income.” How Mary managed to achieve her aims and how it came about provides the climax of this book. Including the dramatic kidnapping and imprisonment of Mary in broad daylight from a London street by Bowes, who threatened to kill her unless she revoked the divorce. Escaping with the help of her maid and some ex-servants Mary exacts her revenge by dragging her husband through the law courts, winning her divorce and reclaiming her children and her money as well as getting Bowes imprisoned for assault.

The final result in the law courts decision in Mary’s favor “marked a significant victory in the lengthy process toward wives’ rights to retain their own property,” but what really stands out is the courage that Mary showed after years of unspeakable treatment by Bowes and to a lesser extent by her first husband. Although the newspapers of the time portrayed her as not much better than a prostitute, Mary emerges as honorable and brave. “Wedlock” is a serious compulsive read, it certainly made me realize how happy I am to be living now and not in the 1700s.

Queen Elizabeth 11’s mother was born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and was a direct descendant of Mary Bowes, as is the present Queen.

JILL BOWEN is a veterinarian in Blacksburg

To coincide with our history themed printed Books page in yesterday's paper, we offer a review by Michael Ramsey...

FORGOTTEN PATRIOTS:  The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War
By Edwin G. Burrows
Basic Books
364 pages, $27.50

Reviewed by Michael L. Ramsey

The treatment of prisoners of war often generates stories of unpleasantness.  Edwin Burrows has found many such stories from the American War for Independence.

Finding the stories and the places where American prisoners were held by the British Army was a challenge.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft-used line “the rich are different from you and me” can be applied to New Yorkers.  To paraphrase Fitzgerald, “New Yorkers are different from you and me.”
New Yorkers have always been builders.  A major port city brings its own growth demands, and in the process of meeting those market demands, landmarks are sometimes incorporated in newer structures, or obliterated.

Such was the case in Manhattan, the place where most American prisoners of war were held by the British.

Some of that change can be attributed to the need for more stores and warehouses and tenements, but it is also true that we don’t like to memorialize our dark side.

Faced with the absence of the historian’s usual touchstones, Burrows nevertheless has crafted an instructive and sometimes amusing account fo the treatment of prisoners and the sacrifices they made to build a new country.

While a majority of the captive American soldiers were kept in barns or rotting prison ships anchored around Manhattan, officers with means were treated as gentlemen and allowed to stay in boarding houses, keep their possessions and wander the streets during the day on their parole.
In some cases, the treatment of prisoners appears to be comic, as in the case of the hero of the New Hampshire Grants, Ethan Allen.

Allen was captured on an incursion into Canada, shipped to Britain to be tried and hanged, reprieved and sent back to America.  His escapades almost take on the air of a Moliere comedy, except for the seriousness of his situation.

Throughout the war, General George Washington protested the torture and mistreatment of his captured soldiers, and he kept his own soldiers from retaliation through torture of captured British soldiers.

Edwin Burrows has delivered a fascinating tale about a part of war we never like to discuss.  We will discuss strategy and battles and the personalities of leaders, but we don’t like to acknowledge that war is not all glory.  It is good to be reminded of the ugliest part of an ugly enterprise.

MICHAEL L. RAMSEY is president of the Roanoke Public Library Foundation

The Optimist’s/Pessimist’s Handbook: A Companion to Hope and Despair
By Niall Edworthy and Petra Cramsie
Free Press, 256 pages, $16.95

Reviewed by Heather Froeschl

Is your cup half empty or half full? Likely there are there days when you could see things from either way. If you are looking for a little read that will confirm your beliefs, on any given day, this handbook is for you.

One side of the book, in white background with gold lettering, is “The Optimist’s Handbook: A Companion to Hope.” Flip it over and other side is a black cover with red lettering for “The Pessimist’s Handbook: A Companion to Despair.” This work of humor is a collection of points covering numerous topics from adventure to youth that will either agree with your view or counter it. For instance, on change: Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as saying, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world,” while a Chinese proverb states, “It is easier to divert a river than change one’s character.”

Whichever side you think you may be on chances are you might see things you agree with however you choose to hold the book. With interesting facts, quotes, and the occasional funny illustration, it is a book to be picked up now and then, given your current mood, rather than digested all at once. I found the optimist side to be uplifting and comforting and read it all in one sitting. The pessimist side, I could only take a little of at a time and found the negative taste it left a bit too much. I would garner a guess that the authors can congratulate themselves on a mission accomplished. I would also guess that it is quite obvious which side of the book I relate to.

I found it humorous that the authors chose to show both sides of themselves as well, with versions of their biographies appearing with each side of the book, reflecting those characteristics that pertained to that side. All in all, it is a lighthearted read, or heavyhearted, depending on your view.

HAUNTED HEART: The Life and Times of Stephen King
by Lisa Rogak, St. Martin’s Press,
310 Pages, $25.95

Reviewed by Alicia Johnson

Should readers fear a typical lengthy biography with a time-line of a writer’s history, only sprinkled with anecdotes and points of interest – they should put down their pre-conceived notions and pick up Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. Lisa Rogak does not write the typical biography. Rogak presents to readers not just a sketch of King’s life, but a personal, sit down with coffee, chat with the master of macabre. Rogak shares King’s story in such a conversational way that readers will feel as if they now know the writer. "#1 fans" looking for more details on King than what one would find on an inside cover or in a magazine interview, will find that this read fills in the gaps.