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Show it 2E Sunday, March The Salt Lake Tribune 18, .cym w 'ymy i iyhy" Eudora Welty on the poetry of living 1984 One W riler 's by Beginnings, Eu-dor- .. Welty; Harvard University 104 pp., $10. When Eudora Welty was a small child in the early 1900s, her father taught her what to do if she was lost in a strange country. He also taugh' her how to take precautions against being struck by lightning. In their house in Jackson, Miss., there was a large telescope on a tripod and many clocks. It was as if her father had known that Miss Welty was going to be a writer. In One Writer's Beginnings, Miss Welty presents her life as if it were one of her stories, so that the book is something more than a brief autobiography. It's a lesson, by one of our best writers, in how to look at a life, how to see it as an art form, not a chronicle, but a drama. She shows us how close we all are to literature, if we only knew it. After reading her book, we might go back and our lives and feel better about them. Even if they (pK Press, Joseph YVambaugh, author of popular police novels, has turned his attention to Mexican border and illegal aliens. Joseph Wambaud y were miseries, they were inevitably filled with metaphors, scenes and moments of transcendent appeal. Circumvented Question Miss Welty was very lucky in her parents. Her mother, Chestina, was a beautiful woman who "read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him. Whatever Dickens' limitations, one could not have a better household deity. Chestina Welty belonged to that generation of mothers who always sang to their children. Often, when she came to kiss her daughter goodnight, Eudora asked, "Where do babies come from0" But the dog next door would Salt i.al;r eribnnr Book Reviews bark in warning, or there would be the sound of rain beating on the windows. Though there was no lying in the Welty family, both daughter and mother were afraid of the implications of the question, and between them they circumvented it. Cured by Champagne Chestina Welty insisted that her daughter enjoy the pleasures she had missed as a child, and, knowing this, Eudora wanted to give these pleasures back, wanted to trade places with her mother and offer her a second chance at childhood. When Eudora or her two brothers were quarantined in a room with measles and could communicate with one another only through notes, their mother would bake the notes in the oven before passing them on. Lines & Shadows s Of California cops, Tijuana and illegal aliens Lines & Shadows, by Joseph William Morrow Wam-baug- & Co., 3H3 pp., $13.95. Someone more knowledgeable than I gave an extemporaneous, and thankfully brief, lecture on the questionable virtues of Joseph the other day. This gentleman, fully acknowledging the force of the writer's ability, felt his books too depressing, from the promising Scottish policeman in The Onion Field to The New Centurions and their taste for steel blue gun metal. There is, I'm told, a propensity for Mr. Wambaugh to avoid a positive, or even pleasant ending. I agree. Thus, if it is fairy tale you crave, then Lines & Shadows will not perform. It is brutality, and it is frankness. It is a story about border wars between innocent aliens, illegal entrants who are beset by American gangs within yards of crossing into the promised land. It is sheer Wambaugh, a master at the mixture of tension and humor, of turning daily melodrama into fear. Dose of Pathos In this, the true story of avenging San Diego police, who sought to pro Wam-baug- h New York Times Service The bsmys Detow are based on eou'i'er unxeivo sales figures from 2 000 tnxMVes "i eve, rev.'11 uf United States Fiction las' This e- - l s 'Vee" Week 1. The Acquitame Progression. lum u Z Pet Sematarv. K.ng 1 o 1 Almost Paradise, isaac J 4. Smart Women, B 5. Who Ked the RoMxns Famrfv?. ' Ajler and Cnastan 6 6. Poland, Wichener ' 7. The Name of the Rose, Llu 1 Nttfit Skv, Francis 4. The Buttei Battte Book, Seuss 10. Lord ot the Dance, 6ree'e tect the lives of illegal aliens as they entered by cover of darkness, he adds to the aforementioned ingredients a dose of pathos. It is a near perfect mixture, one designed to appeal to even the hardest American, those who still believe the wetback to be a bane upon the American work ethic, welfare system and all. He accomplishes this without dwelling on political argument and the attendant statistical hype. Rather, he accomplishes it by detailing human frailty, be it the near raping of a child, or the slashing of another. Then, too, he contrasts with simple vividness the lives of "polios" or migrants. He does so by explaining what everyone knows that some of the poorest souls on earth, are within minutes of a community that he describes as the riehest of the riehest state in the richest country. As is his wont, he has contributed thorough research to his sparkling style. The 10 men who comprise the team of avenging cops, known as the Border Crime Task Force, are led by a melancholv sort. Dick Snider. Tf'S eeks Am kVet'k M3Y0r, Kuc'h 1 Lines and Shadows, Aa" Ddt.g 1 (Tie) Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, 4. Toutft Times Never Last, But Toutfi Peode Dof, Sc'Ver 5. On Wings of Eaes, Fane 6. tn Search of Exce4ence, p?Vs a"d Waerman 7. The Discoverers, Bovs'e" L The Best of James Haiot, 'Of 9 Faith for Tenderhearted Peoete, Schjie' 10. Approaching Hoofbeats: Horsemen of the Apocalypse. V La ue O L'St whose own life was filled with tragedy. Then, you add spice in the form of Manny Lopez, a sergeant who embodies machismo, and eight other ragtags with assorted domestic and career problems. This. then, is the band sent out to resolve an international border crisis. Loves Cops It is a true story, though one could probably do the same research and come up with entirely different conclusions and story. Which is why Joseph Wambaugh reads so well, and is so well read. He loves cops remember, he spent 14 years on the LAPD and isn't afraid to romanticize them. For example, his explanation of Mexican jurisprudence is marvelous. Although Americans perceive Tijuana as a hellhole, and perhaps rightly so, Mr. Wambaugh believes differently. It has a crime rate far less than any major American city. And as he explains why, his conclusion smacks of heightened police powers concepts any good cop would embrace in a moment. Whether it is good policy is another matter. Back to the explanation. He has put together a hypothetical arrest, one involving a rather brash American who crosses the border, sneaks a grab at one of the senoras. and is arrested and charged with attempted rape. Now, according to his research, Mexico has two forms of pothe ones in brown uniforms lice charged with traffic control and minor offenses, and the judiciales. those who look like Omar Sharif or A1 & Tyrone Power and wear expensive cowboy boots and designer jeans. Interrogation Technique It is the latter who interrogate and they do it in the most intriguing way. They shake up a cola, gag your mouth and explode it up your nose. According to Mr. Wambaugh, who said his statement was according to someone else, the process is akin to a volcano erupting in your brain. Pain. More pain than imaginable, he says. You get the idea. Then, in order to assure the confession, they do it again. 1 bring this up to reacquaint you with Wambaugh, if it's been a while. Only he could tell you Tijuana has a higher moral tone than San Diego, and at least leave you with doubt. And only he could tell you America's court system needs the positive aspects of cola up the nose, and make you wonder. And only he could do it with humor. As evidence, and in conclusion, I offer this, written in conjunction with the soda pop interrogation: "When they let him up and dry him off and he finally stops sobbing long enough to be intelligible, another one of the judiciales walks in. He's not as young and handsome as the guy who gave him the soda pop. In fact, this one looks like someone who would sidle up to you and try to sell you a lame horse, or a TV crate filled with bricks, or a Porsche with a VW engine. In short, he looks like Wayne Newton." You get the picture. The book's a Charles Seldin good buy. pray so that he could shout his conviction as loudly as he pleased. It was snowing the day Miss Welty first read Yeats Sailing to Byzantium and she felt that she could go out into the poem the way I could go That it would out into that snow. be falling on my shoulders. That it would pelt me on its way down." When Chestina appeared to be dying of septicemia, Eudora s father miraculously cured her by giving her champagne, which he had to order from 40 miles away. It was never clear how he conceived of this it was remedy, or why it worked of of the poetry surprising just part ordinary living. When Miss Welty began to read, she was disappointed to discover that books were written by people, that they were not natural wonders. Later in life, she did her best to make her own books natural wonders, as if they were written by a time and a place and a whole race of people. She tells us that, from the beginning, she always lieu rd the stories she read. In her own writing, she says, The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth." Looming Line Near the end of One Writer's Be- Welty has a line that seems to loom over literature. Speaking of her mother, she says ginnings, Miss that children especially those have who are to become writers to learn that they cannot console their mothers for what happens to them when they are no longer children. Without challenging it, she writes, we have to find a way around our mothers love. When she got new shoes, Miss Welty remembers, her father would score the soles with his knife so that she wouldn't slip. His strategem seems to have worked: There isnt a single slip or false note in One Anatole Writer's Beginnings. Broyard, New York Times. Her vocabulary was enriched by the King James Bible and by silent movies, whose titles and subtitles taught her words like "jeopardy" She was imand "somnambulist. her too, by grandfather, pressed, who went out to the barn at night to Book rounds out story of Thistle landslide Thistle . . . Focus on Disaster, Oneita Burnside Sumsion; Art City Publishing Co., 173 pp., $12.50 paper; $17.50 cloth. it was April 15, 1983, when The Salt Lake Tribune ran its first article on the Thistle. Utah County, landslide. A short story buried in the local section noted underground water" had buckled portions of Utah Highway 6 and disrupted traffic on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad tracks. In what could be the understatement of the 1983 flood season, the story quoted L. R. Jester, district 6 director for the Utah Department of Transportation, as saying: The mountain is still moving and more damage could still occur." Dramatic Disaster So began one of the most dramatic disasters in Utah's history a landslide which eventually buried a highway and railroad under tons of rock and soil, dammed a river and submerged the tiny railroad community of Thistle. No one was hurt but 50 people lost their homes. the story of Thistle with several pages of background on the history of the community and the railroad. This is followed by a account of the slide which relies heavily on extremely detailed interviews with the employees of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad who were forced to deal with the natural disaster. Here's an example as the slide began causing problems: "Wednesday, April 13, 1983 . . Track patrolman Bob Floyd reported for duty at Thistle at 7:30 in the morning, prepared his motor car for service, obtained a block from the dispatcher, and proceeded westward from the tool house, located just below the Highway 89 overpass at Thistle, Utah. News reports provided a account of the disaster, focusing on the astonishing geologic phenomenom taking place within the canyon and steps to solve the problems it created. Mrs. Sumsions new book rounds out the story of the Thistle landslide with an intimate look at the residents of the flooded community, a history of Thistle and an account of the disaster from the railroad's point of view. Important Visual Link The book is filled with pictures of Thistle before, during and after the slide. Although most of the photographs are less than spectacular, several made during the first week of April by worried railroad crews provide an important visual link between the canyon as it used to be and the canyon as it is today. The author, who was editor of Roadmaster Collin C. Rupel had driven over Soldier Summit early to meet Salt Lake Roadmaster Jack B, Treat who was bringing a train dispatcher out on a 'road trip.' They were to meet at Thistle. Rupel arrived at Thistle at 8 a.m. and was advised of the problem by Mr. Floyd who had returned to Thistle. Rupel and Floyd went back down to 681.4 on the patrol motor car. This attention to minute detail and emphasis on the railroad provides a different and sometimes interesting perspective on the Thistle landslide. It may. however, provide more information than most readers desire. The book devotes 28 pages to photographs and profiles of the families who lived in Thistle. While it's nice to remember these people, this section was about as interesting as looking through a stranger's Jim Woolf scrapbook. by y . Track Out of Line "Floyd noticed that the track at milepost 681.4 was several inches out of line. He notifed section foreman Amos Archuleta by radio, who then proceeded to the spot with his crew. "Meanwhile, blow-by-blo- The Springville Herald, begins Helper, Utah, Laura Almquist invite you to preview their spring collection of exciting home furnishings. Gaa"' On sale now, as always, at attractive prices. Dont miss out or we both lose. 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Comfortable raglan short sleeve top and coordinated pant with elasticized waist and cuffs, two side-seapockets. Soft Rose or Light Blue in m V MMUUisIS L. 90 Day Some As Cash 'em luniixi 1 Us 11 !' J jVNnvthVjtf 3174 Highland Diive486-8735Mon-F- ri 10-7- . Sat. 10-- OcwrHow" 6 tit iMt ON arxi Mtyfnjno I m jrt ljM in' 2 n jrxt MJ mOudtn Shop Sunday to 5 p.m. in Salt Lake V MMHil MUhUUU iJWxth yjtM'Ot Pam rny tMortCSOiv |
