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BIOGRAPHY OF A PHANTOM

A robert johnson blues odyssey.

by Robert "Mack" McCormick ; edited by John W. Troutman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2023

A worthwhile investigation into a true legend of the blues.

A dogged researcher illuminates the mysteries and majesty of Robert Johnson.

McCormick (1930-2015), an influential musicologist and folklorist, was known for the massive archive he had assembled on seminal blues artists as well as his refusal to share so much of it. He dubbed his archive “the Monster,” and he struggled to tame it into book form, which makes this long-awaited publication a significant event in music scholarship. Edited by Troutman, a curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, this volume contains an early draft of the Johnson manuscript that the author had revised for decades and ultimately abandoned before his death, in addition to Troutman’s preface and afterword. It’s a highly readable account of his discoveries. When he began, McCormick had little useful information about his subject beyond the towns mentioned in Johnson’s recordings, which had been reissued to great acclaim. He proceeded through the Mississippi Delta area, knocking on doors and asking questions, a White outsider in predominantly Black communities. There were no photos of Johnson and almost no information on where he was born; nor was there agreement that his name was actually Robert Johnson. Still, McCormick pushed on, diligently recording his findings in text and photos. He describes how he shared the reissue of Johnson’s recordings with those who had heard the music in person, and he records eyewitness testimony from the night of his murder, likely poisoned by a man who had warned Johnson away from a woman. This edited version of the manuscript could stand on its own as a revelation, but the contextual material adds to the intrigue. Troutman interrogates some of McCormick’s methods while raising the larger issues of race and appropriation. “Rather than collaborate with living Black intellectuals to study Black music,” writes Troutman, many White collectors and writers “preferred to pursue…what they considered the authentic Black experience, the real , through their own, self-guided, personal quests of blues discovery.”

Pub Date: April 4, 2023

ISBN: 9781588347343

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Smithsonian Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

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by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey

CORRECTION: The review’s statements about Johnson’s death have been clarified.

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Biography of a phantom: by robert “mack” mccormick.

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It doesn’t help that editor John W. Troutman, who’s curator of music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is so openly dismissive of his literary charge. In a long introduction, Troutman takes aim at the “Blues Mafia” (is this Blues Mafia in the room with you?), made up of elite white researchers who made hay on their research and refused to invite others to join in their fun. In the article linked above, Gioia curtly debunks Troutman’s odd perception that there was this cabal of privileged blues researchers lording it over the riff-raff, when the truth was more that such investigators, while admittedly white, didn’t exactly profit from their obsession with the blues. Troutman in fact damns whole swaths of blues fans, relegating them to an “emergent audience of thousands of white progressive college students who could not get enough of such things.”

It’s ironic that in an afterword, Troutman continues his screed, attempting to be magnanimous while showing little self-awareness: “Moments in the book command great suspense; others convey extraordinary beauty. Some convey humility and self-reflection; others are laced with a sense of superiority and disdain.”

At any rate, what’s left of Phantom has been described as a great mystery novel, but in practice, it feels like an interrupted procedural. McCormick describes his research method and his travels throughout the South as he tries to pinpoint Johnson’s history. There are moments that feel like padding, as when he explains that in 1938, when Johnson died, “Civil war had been raging for two years in China.” There are moments that seem disingenuous; on the false alarms he frequently encountered that led him to the wrong Johnson, McCormick wrote, “Sometimes I felt like a trained seal that tooted horns and balanced a ball on the end of his nose.”

But when McCormick finally locates the source of the myth and finds himself around people who really knew the man, he seems genuinely excited: “The room was filled with a jovial, eager feeling and a sense of expectancy. These people had known Robert Johnson—or Robert Spencer, as they spoke of him—as only a boy and young man. He was part of their collective youth. They’d watched each other grow older, but his memory and music reminded them of their youth, of their dances and frolics and their early social life in the countryside.”

The search for Johnson’s murderer is somehow less satisfying, and considering the unwieldy nature of McCormick’s archive, it must not have been easy to wrangle anything at all out of what is reportedly an early manuscript. But Troutman again undermines the work by eliminating material based on conversations with Johnson’s surviving sisters, who were at first willing to speak with McCormick but then told their story to a researcher whom McCormick considered a bitter rival. It’s a whole other controversy in which McCormick did not act well, to the point where his obsession became unhealthy. Still, the controversy isn’t exactly settled by withholding information.

Who gets to tell Johnson’s story? Who gets to edit it? Biography of a Phantom is a story that blues fans have been waiting to read for decades, but for all its value as research and for all its literary trappings, it’s ultimately unsatisfying.

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Biography of a Phantom Summary and Reviews

Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books

Biography of a Phantom

A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey

by Robert 'Mack' McCormick

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' rating:

Published Apr 2023 264 pages Genre: Biography/Memoir Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

The drama of In Cold Blood meets the stylings of a Coen brothers film in this long-lost manuscript from musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick, whose research on blues icon Robert Johnson's mysterious life and death became as much of a myth as the musician himself

When blues master Robert Johnson's little-known recordings were rereleased to great fanfare in the 1960s, little was known about his life, giving rise to legends that he gained success by selling his soul to the devil. Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey is musicologist Mack McCormick's all-consuming search, from the late 1960s until McCormick's death in 2015, to uncover Johnson's life story. McCormick spent decades reconstructing Johnson's mysterious life and developing theories about his untimely death at the age of 27, but never made public his discoveries. Biography of a Phantom publishes his compelling work for the first time, including 40 unseen black-and-white photographs documenting his search. While knocking on doors and sleuthing for Johnson's loved ones and friends, McCormick documents a Mississippi landscape ravaged by the racism of paternalistic white landowners and county sheriffs. An editor's preface and afterword from Smithsonian curator John W. Troutman provides context as well as troubling details about McCormick's own impact on Johnson's family and illuminates through McCormick's archive the complex legacy of white male enthusiasts assuming authority over Black people's stories and the history of the blues. While Johnson died before achieving widespread recognition, his music took on a life of its own and inspired future generations. Biography of a Phantom , filled with lush descriptive fieldwork and photographs, is an important historical object that deepens the understanding of a stellar musician.

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Reader reviews.

"This edited version of the manuscript could stand on its own as a revelation, but the contextual material adds to the intrigue... A worthwhile investigation into a true legend of the blues." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "This page-turner, crime-thrillerlike odyssey leads readers through the American South for details about the blues guitarist... McCormick conveys a wild enthusiasm for his research and the music of Robert Johnson that readers will find contagious." — Library Journal (starred review) "This volume is a significant contribution to scholarship on Black culture and the blues, told by a flawed man whose perseverance, patience, diligence, and methodical methods provide valuable insights into Robert Johnson and the milieu from which his music sprang." — Booklist "When in 1973 Mack McCormick first told me about Biography of a Phantom , he called his search for the facts of Robert Johnson's life 'a detective story,' and it is. But what McCormick really found and brought home is a gorgeous intimacy with Johnson's works and days, all culminating in a 1970 Mississippi listening party where people who knew Johnson more than thirty years before, who heard him play, who played their now long-gone Johnson 78s until they wore out, gather to hear King of the Delta Blues Singers. McCormick's research may have been superseded by other books; the spirit in his book, a thing in itself, has not been. Not even close." —Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music "One of the most coveted books in blues scholarship, Biography of a Phantom is truly a brilliant firsthand account by Mack McCormick. While it is a book about Robert Johnson, it is also a window into Mack's idiosyncratic method of folkloric research. In a world without reference books dedicated to the blues, one can't help but be drawn into Mack's search through a sea of small southern towns for a specter of a blues singer." —Dom Flemons, The American Songster "At long last, a legendary manuscript sees the light of day. In the half century since Mack McCormick began his Biography of a Phantom , Robert Johnson has become much less phantom-like, with numerous books, articles, and films devoted to illuminating his life and legacy. It is instead McCormick who has become a mystery—and who is this book's most compelling revelation. Through Smithsonian historian John Troutman's editorial framing and McCormick's own narrative, we understand for the first time the real life of a phantom, just not the one McCormick intended. —Preston Lauterbach, author of The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll

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Robert "Mack" McCormick (1930–2015) was an American musicologist and folklorist who researched the lives of blues musicians while supporting himself by writing, census taking, and in 1968 and 1971, working with musicians in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. John W. Troutman is curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

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Biography of a Phantom

A robert johnson blues odyssey, by robert mack mccormick, narrated by adam verner, this title was previously available on netgalley and is now archived., send netgalley books directly to your kindle or kindle app, to read on a kindle or kindle app, please add [email protected] as an approved email address to receive files in your amazon account. click here for step-by-step instructions., also find your kindle email address within your amazon account, and enter it here., listen to an audio excerpt, pub date apr 04 2023 | archive date apr 04 2023, tantor audio, biographies & memoirs | entertainment | nonfiction (adult).

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Description

When blues master Robert Johnson's recordings were rereleased to great fanfare in the 1960s, little was known about his life, giving rise to legends that he gained success by selling his soul to the...

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Kirkus Reviews Starred Review Library Journal Starred Review

Advance Praise

"This volume is a significant contribution to scholarship on Black culture and the blues, told by a  flawed man whose perseverance, patience, diligence, and methodical methods provide valuable insights into Robert Johnson and the milieu from which his music sprang." — Booklist

"One of the most coveted books in blues scholarship, Biography of a Phantom is truly a brilliant firsthand account by Mack McCormick. While it is a book about Robert Johnson, it is also a window into Mack’s idiosyncratic method of folkloric research. In a world without reference books dedicated to the blues, one can’t help but be drawn into Mack’s search through a sea of small southern towns for a specter of a blues singer." — Dom Flemons , The American Songster

"This volume is a significant contribution to scholarship on Black culture and the blues, told by a flawed man whose perseverance, patience, diligence, and methodical methods provide valuable...

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What is aliveness? That’s not a trick question.

In the new book ‘on giving up,’ psychotherapist and essayist adam phillips explores what it means to really participate in life.

At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.

Adam Phillips’s new essay collection, “On Giving Up,” presses at this same theme. What, other than the obvious, is aliveness? Phillips’s background is in psychoanalysis, both as a practitioner and an explicator. He is a prolific essayist whose other collections include “On Balance” (2010) and “On Wanting to Change” (2021), and since 2003, he has served as the general editor for Penguin’s retranslations of Freud. Naturally then, it is through the lens of psychoanalysis that Phillips views the question of aliveness.

In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” published the year before Joyce’s youthful lecture, Freud had announced similar conclusions about the universality of the great drama: “By … showing us the guilt of Oedipus, [Sophocles] urges us to recognize our own inner self, in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still present.” Everyone, even the deadest among the living, plays the lead role in their own Sophoclean tragedy.

Like Freud, Phillips is an analyst steeped in literature. The touchstones on show here are the European writers of the early 20th century, the generation working in the era when psychoanalysis was making its first, greatest impact on European thought: Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Viktor Shklovsky and, most prominently, Franz Kafka. Phillips takes Kafka’s aphorisms and pulls at them until their immediate wit or strangeness unravels to reveal something else behind. When Kafka writes in his diary that the advantage of lying on the floor is that there is nowhere left to fall, Phillips points to the difference between freedom from — which is what Kafka offers us with the pretend-solution of lying on the floor — and freedom to . What is aliveness without the potential to participate in life? “If Kafka has a subject,” Phillips notes, “it is exclusion — the feeling of being left out.”

Most of the essays have been published as individual pieces elsewhere, in the London Review of Books, the Raritan, Salmagundi. The variety of sources means sometimes ideas we have encountered in earlier chapters are reintroduced later, a glimmer of almost-repetition as Phillips reminds us of Kafka’s failure to marry or of Freud’s attempt to control the boundaries of the discipline he had founded. There is a sense — quite a satisfying one, in fact — of circling around ideas, of each essay being ostensibly on a different theme from the others, but really treating the same concerns from a slightly different starting point.

Along with Kafka, another recurrent voice is that of the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, whose essay “The Fascist State of Mind” was first published in the early 1990s but feels more relevant now than ever. For Bollas, the fascist state of mind is not a politically partisan concept, but rather the narcissistic narrowing of one’s perspective, “a simplifying violence” that shuts out doubt or conflict — or, in Phillips’s terms, “an anxious and determined refusal of the complexity of one’s own mind and the minds of others.” When Hamlet vows to “wipe away all trivial fond records” — to erase all the clutter and whimsy of a real personality — and to become solely the instrument of his father’s vengeance (“thy commandment alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain”), he is in thrall to the fascist state of mind. Not indecisiveness but over-decisiveness.

Though Phillips doesn’t quote it here, Bollas has another useful example from the “Revolutionary Catechism” of 1869: “All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude, even honor must be stifled by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause.” What do we feel when we read this? Disgust? I hope so. But also perhaps a seduction, an envy? It must be nice to be so sure of oneself. We have seen it before, not only in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, but also in the self-congratulatory stridence of some of our modern political discourse.

One form of aliveness, then, is to resist the foreclosure of our overbearing convictions, to hold at bay our impulse to simplify the world. As William Blake noted: “To generalize is to be an idiot.” Put another way, one way to stave off the deadness of the commonplace is by countering the urge to assimilate people, opinions, experiences into commonplaces in the first place — to be attuned to detail, alert to specificity, curious about difference. In one of these essays, “On Not Believing in Anything,” Phillips reminds us that belief, in one sense, represents the “the fear of curiosity” and that the word curiosity has its root in the Latin cura, meaning care.

This is a wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had. Why does being a grown-up not feel like what we thought being a grown-up would feel like? Why does getting what we want produce anxiety rather than satisfaction? But a book about psychoanalysis is not an analysis. There is no program here, no self-help regimen. These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious.

Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London and author of “ Index, A History of the .”

On Giving Up

By Adam Phillips

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 160 pp. $26

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By Joanne Kaufman

After Doris Kearns Goodwin’s husband died nearly six years ago, the couple’s home, a 19th-century farmhouse in Concord, Mass., no longer felt right.

“We were there for 20 years,” said Ms. Kearns Goodwin, 81, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” will be published April 16.

“It was a house we had loved, and a house that in many ways we had built together,” she continued, referring to assorted refinements, including the three-car garage that became a library and the addition of a tower inspired by her husband’s fascination with Galileo.

There was a gently gurgling fountain in the backyard, a curved wooden bench, abundant flowering plants and a pond populated with koi. Inside were books — some 10,000 of them — arranged by category and subject matter, and dispersed to shelves in almost every room. “All that we loved was there,” Ms. Kearns Goodwin said.

Suddenly, though, the house felt too big. And everywhere she turned she saw her husband of 42 years, Richard N. Goodwin , the brilliant, rumpled Zelig-like figure who, in his 20s, was a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy and forged an enduring friendship with Jackie Kennedy and, in his 30s, was a speechwriter and adviser for President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy. “Mr. Goodwin called himself a voice of the 1960s, and with justification,” noted his obituary in The New York Times.

“One of my sons lives in Concord, and knowing how hard it was for me, came to stay, and brought my two granddaughters,” Ms. Kearns Goodwin said. “But I just missed Dick too much, so I decided to put the house on the market.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, 81

Occupation: Historian, biographer

Speaking volumes: “I made so many mistakes when I was choosing what books to give away. I kept a lot of biographies, but there are so many I missed. Now I keep saying, ‘Where’s that book?’”

Moving to nearby Boston was an easy call. “I had actually wanted to move to the city when Dick and I got married,” she said. “I grew up on Long Island and loved New York. Concord was our great compromise.”

The youngest of her three sons, Joe, had settled with his family in a high-rise condominium, “so I knew the building and loved it,” said Ms. Kearns Goodwin, who bought a three-bedroom apartment with panoramic views of Beantown two floors below her son in 2019. There she wrote “An Unfinished Love Story,” a braiding of memoir, biography and history.

Ms. Kearns Goodwin’s primary sources were the 300 (and counting) boxes of letters, postcards, documents, diaries, newspaper clippings, photos and other ephemera that Dick Goodwin amassed during the middle years of the 20th century, unceremoniously shoved into storage units, basements and a barn, and then, more than 50 years later, retrieved cache by cache and shared with his very eager wife.

“I was really excited to see them, just as a historian. They had all the elements of what you want in an archive,” Ms. Kearns Goodwin said. “And they were from the ’60s, the decade I really wanted to know more about.”

A cancer diagnosis and the subsequent debilitating — futile — treatment got in the way of Mr. Goodwin’s plans to chronicle those turbulent times. After his death, Ms. Kearns Goodwin took up the project.

She had the source material, but she also needed the setting: a recreation of her Concord study in her new condo. The mise en scène included a nicely worn blue leather sofa, a low chestnut table with plenty of room for books, a side table and the rug that Ms. Kearns Goodwin brought back from Morocco when she attended the 40th anniversary of the Casablanca Conference, a 1943 meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

“It was the only way I could work,” Ms. Kearns Goodwin said. “It was like my talisman, in a certain sense. To have my little nook, I could feel I was still in Concord, though I was in a different room in a different building.”

Her fans will likely be familiar with the bookcase behind the sofa; it’s visible when she is interviewed from home. She consistently scores a 10 on Room Rater , at least in part because she decorously refrains from displaying her own publications.

Other pieces from the Concord house are scattered around the apartment — among them, several Persian rugs and an octagonal Indian coffee table. The bookcase that was in her old foyer sits in the condo’s entryway. Now, as then, it contains first editions and a miniature reproduction of the Revolutionary War Battle of Lexington and Concord, on the North Bridge. Sometimes her 5-year-old grandson plays with the toy soldiers, Ms. Kearns Goodwin said, as she adjusted the orientation of the tiny bridge.

The table from Mr. Goodwin’s study, now a display space for family photos, sits near the large windows in the living room. Nearby, a specially made plinth holds a replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s life-size bust of Abraham Lincoln, a sculpture she received when she won the 2006 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for her book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

Framed photos of Ms. Kearns Goodwin with President Johnson and President Obama, and of Mr. Goodwin with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, hang on a wall in the entryway. Visitors should allow themselves extra time to gape and to stutter out frequently asked questions. Extra credit to those who can act convincingly blasé when Ms. Kearns Goodwin hands them the engraved Cartier cuff links that Jackie gave Mr. Goodwin as a gift, or when she points out the baseball autographed by Don Larsen , who pitched the only perfect game in postseason history, in the fall of 1956.

Books are everywhere: on tables, on sculptural vertical stands and in bookcases custom-made to look like the shelves in Concord.

When Ms. Kearns Goodwin began the process of moving out of her house, culling the collection — 5,000 volumes had to go — became a sad obsession. Fortunately, many found a new home at the Concord Free Public Library in a designated room: the Goodwin Forum. “That meant that the books, my buddies, would still be around,” she said.

For two years after she moved to Boston, she compulsively — one might say masochistically — replayed the video that was commissioned (complete with meditative piano accompaniment) to sell her house. “I don’t know what I was doing to myself,” she said ruefully. “I’d watch and start sobbing. And each time I went back to Concord I felt sad.”

Since then, she has befriended several residents of the building, to say nothing of the valet, the doormen and the concierge. “They’re all my buddies,” said Ms. Kearns Goodwin, who, you feel pretty certain, makes a new buddy or three on an elevator ride from her apartment to the lobby.

When she lived in Concord, it was, frankly, a schlep to come into Boston to go to the symphony or the theater. “Now I can just decide at the last minute to go,” she said. “It’s definitely a different phase of my life.”

It’s been a while since she has watched the video. And she no longer feels undone when she visits Concord. That unhappiness, as Ms. Kearns Goodwin herself might say, is history.

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A photo caption with an earlier version of this article misidentified an item in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s home. It is a Tiffany paperweight commemorating the Pulitzer Prize she won in 1995 for her book, “No Ordinary Time,” not the prize itself.

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Author Interviews

Caleb carr's new book is a memoir about life spent with his beloved rescue cat.

Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks with Caleb Carr, author of the best-selling novel, "The Alienist." Carr has written a memoir, reflecting on his life through the companionship of his scrappy rescue cat, Masha.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Much of the story we're about to hear will be delightful, and some of it will be hard. Caleb Carr is our guest. He's written a memoir called "My Beloved Monster." It's the story of his life over 17 years with Masha, whom he calls his emotionally remarkable cat. They share play and jokes, affection and, finally, the challenge of cancer. Caleb Carr, bestselling novelist, author of "The Alienist" and "The Angel of Darkness," joins us now from his home in upstate New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

CALEB CARR: Thank you so much, Scott.

SIMON: How did you and Masha kind of pick each other out at the animal shelter outside of Rutland, Vt.?

CARR: She picked me out. I sort of turned around. I sensed something, and I turned around, and there was this cat in a little cage, and she had decided already that we were at least going to have an interview together. And then when we had the interview, she really decided that I was going to take her home.

SIMON: You found out she'd kind of rejected everyone else, hadn't she?

CARR: Well, she had been abandoned in an apartment and locked up when the people moved, which is, unfortunately, a very common thing in this country. And she'd made so much noise, breaking things and kind of banging around, that she got taken into a shelter. But at the shelter, that experience, I think, largely had just made her very distrustful. And she had attacked the staff. She had attacked people who tried to adopt her. But when I went into the interview room with her, she was as sweet as could be. And the one attendant sort of grabbed me by the arm and said, you've got to take that cat.

SIMON: She was a Siberian forest cat, I guess you discovered.

CARR: She was a breed that I - until then, I had never heard of. They really are ferociously physical and just fascinating cats, really smart. They really have this wild intelligence.

SIMON: Living in the country, you gave her a lot to react to. Let me put it that way.

CARR: Yes, yes. As I say in the book, there is a big debate about whether cats should be allowed outdoors these days. But when you live in some place that's as wild as this - and it really is just a house on - in the foothills of a mountain - I couldn't have stopped her from going outside. It would have killed her. She took one look out the door at the trees that start right at the back porch of the house, and she just was home, and she patrolled that with a dedication and a fierceness that I have never seen before. And Siberians are known for that.

SIMON: May I ask you about your childhood, Mr. Carr?

CARR: Sure.

SIMON: And I'll take the license to call it a horrible childhood. Your father was often drunk and violent. How did a cat named Zorro (ph) and your love of history help you survive?

CARR: Well, I was the child in my family that noticed things and commented on them. When you're dealing with alcoholics, it doesn't earn you any points. And so I experienced a certain amount of violence. And because of that, most nights I was up most of the night and watching and listening what the adults were doing just in case it was coming my way, basically. And Zorro was the first cat that I really chose that was mine. She would come out and lie down next to me as I sat on the top of the stairs. And she had this remarkable capacity to make me feel safe and sort of understood.

SIMON: Cats are really good at companionship, aren't they? They're just there for us.

CARR: Yeah, they are really good at companionship. It's a distinctly different kind of companionship than you get from any other animal, but once you accept it on their terms, it's really amazing. They are always there, often without being there. But they're beside you. They're not on top of you the way that dogs are.

SIMON: Can you tell us about Masha's taste in music?

CARR: Masha had a very refined ear for music, and it's not as weird as it sounds. Cats are very sensitive to the upper ranges of sonics, and they don't like high-pitched sounds, which means that most of the popular music, you're going to find that cats don't really enjoy. But when I discovered that she liked classical music, I would experiment with playing different composers for her while I was working. Before long, it was clear that she had a particular affinity for Wagner. And I know it sounds crazy, but it was true. And I eventually made her her own CDs of orchestral selections, and particularly the prelude to "Das Rheingold."

(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD WAGNER'S "DAS RHEINGOLD")

CARR: She would just come shooting in from wherever she was. She would hear it going on in my study. If she wasn't already there, she would come shooting in, throw herself on the floor and just start rolling in absolute ecstasy. And I asked a musicologist friend of mine about it, and he said, well, that doesn't surprise me at all. It's probably the most primal piece of classical music that there is.

SIMON: After almost 17 years together, you and Masha just grew sick in astonishingly similar ways, didn't you?

CARR: Yes. And that's part of the most astonishing part of the story. Masha had - certainly had arthritis from the time she was very young. We never really knew what exactly caused it, whether it was trauma or abuse or just having the genetics for it. But she had arthritis in her back legs and her hind legs, and I ended up coming down with peripheral neuropathy quite badly. And then, eventually, we both ended up coming down with cancer.

And it was part of the amazing - the most amazing details of our story that our illnesses were so similar. Because of that, we knew we were tied in even more in terms of knowing what to do for each other and knowing what was going on with each other. And she made it possible - really possible for me to survive. I like to think - I hope that I did the same for her.

SIMON: What do you think that cord is between us and the animals we love, as you've experienced it, and especially strongly with Masha?

CARR: There are so many things that are difficult and lacking in human life that are provided by animals. And there are so many things that we've gotten away from in our civilized human life that are so basic to being alive that animals provide. And it's just that it is so much more basic. And to use a word I used in reference to Masha's musical taste, it's so much more primal that it takes us to a place that kind of defies all of the complications that we've put on life in our own species.

SIMON: Caleb Carr - his book, "My Beloved Monster." I'm so glad you wrote it. Thanks so much for being with us.

CARR: Thank you so much, Scott.

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‘There is light in the darkness’: Book by former WSU football great Steve Gleason gives readers a powerful glimpse into life with ALS

Great books change a reader.

Maybe they transport readers to unexamined places, such as inside a person’s mind once a body has abandoned it. Or maybe they cause readers to abandon long-held notions of human limitations.

So it is with Steve Gleason’s “A Life Impossible.” Subtitled: “Living with ALS: Finding Peace and Wisdom Within a Fragile Existence.” Published by Alfred J. Knopf, with a release date of April 29.

A graduate of Gonzaga Prep and former football and baseball standout at Washington State, Gleason is now a philosopher, activist, survivor. And, specific to our purpose today, he’s an extremely talented story-teller.

Allow Gleason to explain his life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: “(ALS) is relentless and humiliating. It progressively robs people of their motor skills and, in turn, destroys their quality of life. Although your senses and brain remain sharp, you gradually lose the ability to walk, talk, swallow and breathe.”

After having been a chiseled 210 pounds as a seven-year NFL veteran, the 47-year-old Gleason writes that he is now “… an emaciated meat sack of flesh and bones. I’ve lived in a wheelchair for more than a decade. I’ve lived on a ventilator since 2014.”

He calls his motionless body “a prison,” but, thanks to eye-tracking technology, he still communicates to the world, sharing his frustrations and fears, with a unique perspective.

At this point, Gleason’s every breath is generated by a machine. With arduous eye movements, “typing” on a digital keyboard, he reveals how truly fragile his existence is. For instance, when he is taken off his ventilator for 90 seconds and helped into the shower: “It’s like a practice of dying.”

But with an optimistic caveat that is common in nearly every revelation of unimaginable hardship in the book, Gleason appreciatively adds, “I do not take one glorious, oxygen-rich, ineffable breath for granted.”

For 320 pages, Gleason provides accounts of these skirmishes between his bestilled body and his kinetic mind.

It is raw and honest and eloquent.

“The desire to do something to prove my value has been a theme in my life, even before ALS,” he writes. “I’m a decade past my expiration date, and I’m alive! I have an opportunity to grow stronger, be better and begin again.”

Gleason has been proving his value, in nonlethal circumstances, for a long time.

His story has be widely covered, but a brief history for those unfamiliar:

Gleason starred in football and baseball at Gonzaga Prep and WSU. Undersized for his position, he was fast and fierce, loving contact, with a knack for finding the action.

“Athletics was the engine that gave me the confidence to do everything I did,” Gleason writes. “My success in athletics allowed me to shed my shyness and social awkwardness.”

Initially undrafted in 1990, he fashioned a career on NFL special teams, where his ballistic qualities of velocity and force made him a game-changer for the New Orleans Saints.

His blocked punt in the Saints’ first home game after Hurricane Katrina was so widely viewed as a symbol of the city’s 2006 rebirth that it was immortalized in a statue outside the Superdome.

Jeff Duncan, collaborator with Gleason on the book, covered the Saints during Gleason’s years, and remembers him as a charismatic iconoclast, often found quietly reading a novel in his cubicle amid teammates’ boisterous locker room behavior, or telling inquisitive reporters stories of his far-flung adventure travels in the offseason.

Gleason’s unconventional, life-embracing approach endeared him to Saints fans, Duncan said. Gleason became even more popular with fans when he married New Orleanian Michel Varisco, an embodiment of her home town – artistic, fun-loving, joyful.

Everything changed when Gleason began feeling progressively weaker in 2011, and was diagnosed, at age 33, with an incurable condition predicted to kill him within two to five years.

As his physical abilities decreased, his international profile as an activist for ALS treatment and causes expanded, leading to his recognition as a Congressional Gold Medal winner in 2020 – the first NFL player to be so acknowledged.

As Duncan explains Gleason’s laborious writing via eye movements, it evokes the image of medieval monks, cloistered in their scriptoria, delicately producing manuscripts at an interminable pace.

“It’s really kind of mind-blowing,” Duncan said of the device. “It has an infrared beam that is beamed from his computer tablet into his retina and bounces off the cornea back onto where he fixes his gaze.”

Gleason also had the foresight to build a library of his speaking voice before losing it, and can now call upon a synthesized “voice” to help with communication.

Gleason had given many of his last days with waning mobility to the process of making the 2016 documentary, “Gleason,” and was initially hesitant to take on the book project when Duncan approached him.

“Steve very much believes in telling the truth, (given) his level of candor and honesty, and the unvarnished look at what the disease does,” Duncan said. “He and Michel wanted to lay it all out there and be truthful about it because they want people to see what it’s really like. Steve says over and over, ‘We don’t want an after-school special or Disney story, this is going to be real,’ and I think that’s what makes it so powerful.”

The book is complete, current and ably stands alone. But as a sensory accompaniment, I would recommend readers watch the “Gleason” documentary, which supplies the sights and sounds of Steve’s increasing struggle to communicate.

The images capture the exhaustion in the eyes of his wife, and allows the viewer to sense the unrelenting demands upon her. In one scene, it shows Michel trying to bottle-feed their son, Rivers, with one hand, while tending Steve with the other.

Steve and Michel humbly reject the notion of being heroic. “Both of them are adamant that they’re just humans trying to navigate this the best they can,” Duncan said. “(They say) we’ve got flaws and we’re going to show those (too).”

The book advances the narrative of the documentary, into Gleason’s more recent stages, with the pages giving voice to his thousand internal screams, and translating the rage otherwise visible only through his eyes. It also reveals the peace he’s found in his release of expectations for himself.

Within the first chapters, Gleason recounts scenes of the “brutal powerlessness and vulnerability” he feels each day, from the humbling process of waste-extraction that requires the help of caretakers, to those moments when his daughter, Gray, may cry for her father’s attention while Steve is helpless to calm or comfort her.

“Life became a dance with change and loss,” he writes. “I would lose abilities, we would adapt … each loss forced us to develop new routines.”

Gleason gives an example of the ennobling/humbling dualities of his life. In the summer of 2012, he attended a ceremony outside the Superdome, unveiling the statue of his symbolic punt block.

“It was an epic day,” Gleason writes. “But on our way home from the ceremony, I was losing the ability to control my bowel movements. As soon as we rolled into the house, I pooped all over myself in the wheelchair.”

Such stark polarities, “… are my life.”

The greatest loss? Losing the ability to converse with Michel, Gleason writes, eroded the foundational friendship that had been at the root of their love. “This didn’t tear me up … it obliterated me.”

Michel was also obliterated, he writes, as her care-taking duties took a withering toll. “We were more like nurse and patient than husband and wife.”

In the book’s most moving and revelatory segment, Gleason directly extracts from his typed “chat” conversation with Michel the moment they openly addressed the marital fractures caused by their years of shared struggle.

It would be hard for the most talented fiction writer to capture this level of painful unburdening as Steve and Michel reckoned with the forces that were pulling them apart.

Lose and adapt. Again, looking deeper into himself, Gleason realized the value of what was left inside.

“Through tears of grief, I was reborn.”

In 2018, Steve and Michel welcomed a second child, Gray, through in-vitro fertilization.

The latter chapters in his book reveal such developments, as well as an important discovery of acceptance.

“We all face the impossible at some point in our lives,” Gleason writes. “By exploring acceptance, love and the power of the human spirit … I recognize the innate peace in the midst of chaos. There is light in the darkness. The light within us all. Every precious moment. I know it. I live it.”

The only gift of having everything taken away is how it allows a person to discover what is at their core.

If, as he claims, he is now an emaciated meat sack, he remains fueled by a powerful spirit – indomitable and inspiring – living a life impossible.

Local seed grower grateful to Providence team for stroke care

On November 22, 2020, Fred Fleming was driving home when he started slurring his words.

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Buy with 1-Click P.when("A", "a-expander", "ready").execute(function(A, expander) { A.on("a:accordion:buybox-accordion:select", function(data) { // Change active accordion pricing to APEX pricing A.$("#buyBoxAccordion").find(".accordion-header div#adbl_bb_price") .removeClass("adbl_bb_price_show").addClass("adbl_bb_price_hide"); A.$(data.selectedRow.$row).find(".accordion-header div#adbl_bb_price") .removeClass("adbl_bb_price_hide").addClass("adbl_bb_price_show"); //initialize accordion expander expander.initializeExpanders(); }); }); /* Display price in a table block so it does not overflow, ref: https://t.corp.amazon.com/D76383263 */ #adbl_bb_price { display: table; } /* APEX Pricing for Mobile & MobileApp */ .adbl_bb_price_show .adbl_bb_savings_percent { color: #CC0C39; font-size: 36px; font-weight: 300; } .adbl_bb_price_hide .adbl_bb_savings_percent { color: #CC0C39; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 300; } .adbl_bb_pay_price { font-weight: 400; } .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-whole { font-size: 38px; } .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-whole { font-size: 24px; } .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-symbol, .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-fraction { display: table-caption; font-size: 15px !important; line-height: 26px; } .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-symbol, .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-fraction { display: table-caption; font-size: 13px !important; line-height: 10px; } #mobile_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-symbol, #mobile_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-fraction { display: inline-block !important; top: -15px !important; } #mobile_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-symbol, #mobile_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-fraction { display: inline-block !important; } #mobileapp_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-symbol, #mobileapp_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-fraction { display: inline-block !important; top: -15px !important; } #mobileapp_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-symbol, #mobileapp_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-fraction { display: inline-block !important; } /* APEX Pricing for Desktop */ #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .adbl_bb_savings_percent { color: #CC0C39; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 300; } #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .adbl_bb_savings_percent { color: #CC0C39; font-size: 21px; font-weight: 300; } #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_pay_price { font-weight: 400; } #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-whole { font-size: 28px; } #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-whole { font-size: 21px; } #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-symbol, #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_show .a-price-fraction { display: inline-block; font-size: 13px !important; line-height: 16px; top:-10px !important; } #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-symbol, #desktop_buybox .adbl_bb_price_hide .a-price-fraction { display: inline-block; font-size: 12px !important; line-height: 9px; } -13% $15.04 $ 15 . 04

Biography of a phantom: a robert johnson blues odyssey audible audiobook – unabridged.

When blues master Robert Johnson's recordings were rereleased to great fanfare in the 1960s, little was known about his life, giving rise to legends that he gained success by selling his soul to the devil. Biography of a Phantom is musicologist Mack McCormick's search, from the late 1960s until McCormick's death in 2015, to uncover Johnson's life story. McCormick spent decades reconstructing Johnson's mysterious life and developing theories about his untimely death at the age of 27, but never made public his discoveries. Biography of a Phantom publishes his compelling work for the first time.

While sleuthing for Johnson's loved ones and friends, McCormick documents a Mississippi landscape ravaged by the racism of paternalistic white landowners and county sheriffs. An editor's preface and afterword from Smithsonian curator John W. Troutman provides context as well as troubling details about McCormick's own impact on Johnson's family and illuminates through McCormick's archive the complex legacy of white male enthusiasts assuming authority over Black people's stories and the history of the blues.

While Johnson died before achieving widespread recognition, his music took on a life of its own and inspired future generations. Biography of a Phantom is an important historical object that deepens the understanding of a stellar musician.

• Listening Length 8 hours and 46 minutes
• Author Robert Mack McCormick, see all
• Narrator Adam Verner
• Audible release date April 4, 2023
• Language English
• Publisher Tantor Audio
• ASIN B0BX4L98XQ
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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