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American journeys
Lost Boy
Kansas Charley: The Boy Murderer,
by Joan Jacobs Brumberg MA'71 (Penguin, 2004)
Written with spare style, this is the story of Charley Miller, a nobody who became a minor 19th-century celebrity because he committed capital murder at a young age and was hanged for it. Born in a Manhattan tenement in 1874, Charley Miller lived a childhood that could have powered a Dickens novel: the death of his mother (of what may have been a botched abortion) when he was five, and his father's subsequent suicide by poison; this followed by harsh orphanage treatment, placements with families looking to adopt a boy who would be happy working hard in field or factory, a stint in jail for petty theft, silly self-baptism with the outlaw sobriquet "Kansas Charley," and a hobo's flight West to become a cowboy. And then, in a rolling boxcar just over the Wyoming border, the 15-year-old boy rather inexplicably shot two young men in the head while they slept and took a few of their meager valuables. Two years of public wrangling over his fate followed, with lawyers, judges, ministers, cattle barons, and temperance advocates all getting into the mix, debating the nature of guilt, leniency, and childhood. All of this was reported on, and fomented, by a delighted press. Brumberg is a lucid guide, informative on subjects ranging from 19th-century views of bed-wetters to how a gallows rope was prepared. A faculty member at Cornell, she previously published an award-winning history of anorexia, and she attempts to tie Charley Miller's story to current American struggles with ideas of guilt, leniency, and childhood, particularly in light of the Columbine murders and contemporary efforts by prosecutors to try children as adults. The intrusions don't work. The sinuous narrative shrugs them off and keeps moving, and we follow. An excerpt from Brumberg's book, recounting the last hours of Kansas Charley's life, begins here.
Coming of Age
Asian American X: An Intersection of 21st Century Asian American Voices,
edited by Arar Han '03 and John Hsu (Michigan, 2004)
In 2001 a Harvard undergraduate named Justin Fong published a sardonic essay in the
Harvard Crimson
in which he castigated his fellow Asian students for behaving in ways that supported views of Asian-Americans as "the model minority." Fong was excoriated by other Asian students, the normally chippy
Crimson
apologized to its readers twice, and Arar Han, then a BC sophomore, became one of a few respondents to the story who (in a letter to the
Crimson)
called for a more considered exploration of the curious ways in which personal and cultural (if not racial) identities intersect for young Asians rooted on these shores. This book, which Han began that same year and which she edited with a young Harvard graduate she's known since high school, contains 35 responses to that call, some eloquent, some jargony, some funny, some sad. The result is a gridlock of ideas and emotions (the word "intersection" in the title seems well chosen), an effect that is heightened by the fact that these contributors are young enough to be preoccupied with how to be men and women, sons and daughters, beautiful and homely, passionate and coolheaded, and they haven't yet got the steady hands it takes to sort these strands and lay bare the crackling nerves that connect who we are and where we come from. Some of the publicity attendant upon this book has compared it to Eric Liu's
The Accidental Asian
and Richard Rodriguez's
The Hunger of Memory.
Not yet. But just wait.
Sea-Tossed
Sail Away Ladies: Stories of Cape Cod Women in the Age of Sail,
by Jim Coogan '66 (Harvest Home, 2003 and 2005)
The retired high school teacher who writes gentle books about local history is a cherished American cultural figure, and this book illustrates why. Coogan, a native of Cape Cod who spent nearly 30 years on the faculty of Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School, uses public records and letters and diaries to build brief chapters about the experiences of a dozen 19th-century wives who chose to accompany their captain-husbands on sea voyages. The dangers—loneliness, pirates, illness, storms, frequent sightings of drunk and/or naked men, and the errant wave that sweeps a boy away from his mother and overboard, "his little face and hands [visible] just above the water" as he disappears in the ship's wake—are all here, as is the love, stubbornness, bravery (and ignorance) that allowed these women to lay their lives in balance against a husband's protracted absence. Coogan has a fine eye for the way people try to anchor a life that's being swept along by wind and currents, such as the happy practice of investing a child born at sea with the middle name of "Seaborn" or "Woodhull," and the sad practice of carrying a dead infant home in a jar of alcohol for baptism and burial in consecrated ground.
Master's Voice
The Easiest Thing in the World: The Uncollected Fiction of George V. Higgins,
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Carroll & Graf, 2004)
Higgins '61, JD'67, published nearly 30 books, of which the best known was
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
(1971). This volume contains three novellas and a dozen short stories divided among previously published works and typescripts that turned up in Higgins's papers, which went to the University of South Carolina on his death in 1999. The first story begins: "Barbara Harkness Kendrick asked me to handle her divorce because, she said, I was a friend of the family. If this had been true, it would have been the worst of all possible reasons. Since it wasn't true, it was merely the worst of available explanations." This is a voice—sad, knowing, intelligent—that you can trust with your time.
Ben Birnbaum
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