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Show yy j: 2K 1 ht Sail Ltikr 7 rjhunr, Sundd. M.v y y'" y i.-n- my -- yi''. ly-- Id, 1' Hearts Desire: Living for the future Heart's Desire, Gwxmth b Cra- vens, Alfred A. Knopf, 25f pp , $16 95. When we first meet the three heroines of Heart', s Desire, were inclined to write them off, a bit conde- scendingly, as familiar, and not all thdt interesting types Theres Judy, Tommy Hammonds pert, devoted wife, who obediently cooks and cleans house for her handsome hubhv and woi ries that she's unworthy of Ins attentions. Then there's Effie, Tommy's formidable mother, a spunky, can-dowoman of the New West -you can picture her being played by an older Sally Field in the movie verwho's fond of dission of the novel enpensing chirpy, greeting-carcouragements like New York in the " Gwyneth Cravens Author of Hearts Desire fall must be the most inspiring fantastic place for you to achieve every ' possible success in every way And finally, there s Effie's daughter Nancy, a sweet, somewhat muddled girl, who comes across on first meeting as a variation on your standard-issuAmerican teen-agenarcissistic, insecure and obsessed with science fiction e r Thioughout the first third of the the author of the story. Cravens highly acclaimed novel .ore and Work (1982) seems intent on simply portraying these characters lives from the outside. She conscientiously obseives their taste in clothes and Effies penchant for dresshairdos es with silver rickrack is duly noted. - as is Judy's fur yellow and she also goes through the motions of trying to delineate the Hammonds' world, by dropping lots of brand names, as though references to stores and Lotaburger joints were sufficient to evoke an entire time and place. mini-dresse- s Willful None of this provides much insight into the inner lives of Effie, Judy or n Nancy; and while Cravens alternates between third-annarraallow ing each of her heroines tion to speak to us in turn this approach initially provides little further illumination. Her characters, after all, are bent on concealing their real feelings from one another in the interests of d first-perso- n Wagonmasters of the high plains Opening the frontier with a bullwhip The Wagonmasters: High Plains Freighting from the Earliest Pays of the Santa Fe Trail to IHHO, by Henry of Pickering Walker; University 17 pp , illus., Oklahoma Press, xii maps, footnotes, bibliography, index, $11., paper. FiJ'st published in 1966, T)ie masters by Henry Pickering Walter has been reissued in paperback: by the University of Oklahoma Press. Few books on the western frontier offer as much substantial information as Dr. Walker has managed to sandwich between these pages. Wagonmasters on those overland traili of the llith century were the conVoy commanders of their day. Hough, tough, hard, independent as a soul could be and still survive, these were the men who ramrodded the freighters and teamsters in an age when that breed was more feared than a hostile Indian or a drunken bulfalo hunter. Throughout the journals of overland travel are accounts of the fearsome, barely civilized teamsters who could swear in constant streams of vulgarity and obscenity for minutes at a tinny without repeating an oath or blasphemy; originality in cursing became a hallmark of the western bull whacker Badge of Offiee Wielding the deadly black bullwhip their badge of office marking the profession as surely as a poker chip the was the signet of a gambler high plains freighters were the means bv whtch western movement suc- - tribune U W'u-lo- hair-raisin- n g Book aljc Suit lake Bu cecdcd until the transcontinental railroud became a reality in May p The intrepid Lewis & Clark used a keelboat to carry most of their supplies as far as Fort Mandan Inear present Fhsmaick, N I) ) in 18(14. but it was a slow, wearisome means of far too expensive for the travel transportation of bulk goods tracing the history of wagon trains, Dr. Walker has done his homework well He discusses fully the disadvantages of river travel, and the complexities of pack trains. His account of wagons west takes the reader back to 1825 when the first wheeled vehicle (thought to be a small cannon) crossed the Continental Divide at South Pass when Gen. William Ashley took his fur trapping brigades into the Great Basin. Meanest of Lives It was the meanest of lives, and reports of killed or mangled wagoneers are liberally sprinkled through the pages of newspapers of the time. Joe Skelton, a Montana freighter," writes Walker, "was hooked under the chin by a wild ox which carried him around the corral several times before he was able to lift himself off He was carried for five days in a dead-axlwagon to the railhead and then e un Enou, S t 'to wm Fiction WhA V.iv Cm Perfect Sov, fe Cd"f Take Mdfuftan, Krj-- 'j 1 The Bourne Supremacy, lucjhjm 4. Lake Wobegon Days, KeM 5 The Mammoth Hunten, Aii s A Break In, f M Xfe Down With Liom, f 1 lhe Book ot Abraham, Hj't.-9 The Good Molher, M 10 The HanctnaKYs Tale, Awno1 Non Fiction Thu Week ). The Triumph o Podhci, man You're Only Old Oncd, Scgss J Fatherhood, ( "pv I A I I Sck I When Al You've Ever Wanted Isn't Kuner Bui 9 to Paradne, Buicag'd Enter Talking, H vers i i 4 4 11 10. mjn NecMury lMl, VwrV BMl W Truman, T'uran Th Man Wh Mnlw Hu fw a Hal, Sat lacocia An AuTotwacH. WrW h Nl)V IK :o 9 Advice, , Mucrtaneous Th s Act'k 1 Weeks On Lut 1 4 5 Frt For Life, Da'TV'd f'd 0 t rxxxl Calanehcv, PmxKiH'v w th Bav:n Women Who Love Too Much, Norwood The Be (Happy) Attitudes, St hi her The Rice Diet Report, Vovpv z tCoovrigMl lei VVp 2 i Ait i On I Si The blacksnake" rawwhip tipped with an eight-inchide popper, properly handled, could tear through the hide of the toughest ox, and frequently did. Accounts seem to agree that bullwhackers ranked with the crudest of men. Alexander Majors, who employed wagonmasters, bullwhackers and muleskmners, deplored intemperate language and instituted an program among his men. h In 4. vss by rail to Salt Lake City Skelton survived his ordeal and lived for sixteen food fed through years on ground-ua stiver lube in his throat " 1869 Best Sellers New York Timei Service Tne I'ihngs Uxo d'e based cm COPeW l gufPi t'O'n ? COD DeohOtyPY n rvwv ffvon ies However, when Majors partner, William B. Waddell, watched in frustration while one of his bullwhackers tried to dislodge a wagon from a mudhole, the teamster remarked Boss, the trouble with them oxens is that they don't understand the kind of language were talkin' to 'em Plain Gee and 'Haw' ain't enough under the present circumstance. Now, if you could find it convenient to go off on that thar hill, somewhere, so's you couldn't hear what was goin' on, I'd undertake to get them oxens out " Walker notes that Waddell obliged, and soon the mired wagon was free. The Wagonmasters is rich in anecdotes and heavy in facts. It makes fine reading and is immensely informative about these "knights of the road in frontier America Harold Schindler. has a price unun, she s deoiled Tommy will finish his dissertation and become a famous professor And she and Tom will buy a new camper, take a wonderful trip to California, and live happily ever after. Tom's death, of course, not only kills this dream, but it also exposes all the lies and euphC misms on which Effie's constructed her tidy emotional world avoiding unpleasant scenes, and they're also committed to a kind of willful that enables them to gloss over anything (a rude remark, an inappropriate article of clothing, even an infidelity) that might disturb the shiny, waxed finish of their domestic routines. As a result, they strike us at first as bland, women, almost thoroughly devoid of will and imagination We're barely allowed a glimpse of the anger that must lurk beneath their cheery exchanges, and we want to shake them, make them wake up to gathering disorder in their lives. How can Judy talk of domestic bliss." we wonder, when her husband, Tommy, stays out late every night drinking and carrying on? And how can Effie persist in her belief that everything is going to turn out fine" when it's obvious that her husband's dying from heart disease, that her son's on the verge of becoming an unemployed bum? Jarred Into Reassessment It is the death of Tom Sr. that precipitously jars the Hammonds into a reassessment of their lives: and as they become increasingly Cravens also appears to shift storytelling gears, exchanging the opaque, mechanistic style of the opening chapters for a densef, highly detailed approach that more fully displays her novelistic skills. Indeed, the narrative shift is so pronounced that the reader is led to presume that this has been the author's intention all along to recapitulate, through the changing texture of her writing, the Hammonds' own gradual awakening to the emotional complexities of life. For years, it seems, Effie has planned her familys life planned, and plotted and dreamed, briskly dismissing naysayers with a quote from Positive Wisdom, neatly sweeping away problems through the sheer force of her optimism and good will. Nancy will go to secretarial school and become a young n Lifes Preeariousness As for Judy, she, too, is jolted into an awareness of the precariousness of life. In the wake of her father-in-law'- s death, her husband, Tommy, drifts further and further out of reach, and as their marriage slowly unravels, Judy realizes that everything that had once seemed so steady and so sure is now spinning out of control. Though Cravens resists the impulse to italicize this theme, it becomes clear that both Effie and Judy not just in the are Westerners sense that they were born and raised west of the Mississippi, but in the sense that they have predicated their entire lives on the future. They believed in all the old promises of the American Dream they believed that if they worked hard and cared fhr their families and their men, everything, as Effie put it, would turn out fine. They believed in dreaming and making plans, and they believed, fervently, m the meliorative principle. Tom would recover from his heart attack; and Tommy would pull out of his slump and become "a success. A great American." If optimism ,s one of ihe great legacies of the pioneer ethic, however, rootlessncss and disaffection are the as Tommy will so blatantly others - and as Cravens demonstrate guides Heart's Desire to its dose, drawing the emotional lines connecting the Hammonds into a tight, geometric equation, she underlines the disturbing consequences that their dreamy pursuit of the future will have on their present lives. Kakutani, Aew York Times. self-awar- e. - Mi-chi- Timely lessons from a Napoleonic war A History of The Spanish Fleer the Peninsular War, by David Gates; W.W. Norton & Co., 557 pp., $29.95. One hopes that in Washington more precisely in the Pentagon, in the homes of cabinet members and senators, and even in the Oval Office there is some time to spare for the reading of history, especially of such a history as The Spanish Ulcer. This is a volume that should help remind men in the seats of power that history indeed repeats itself, that history indeed provides lessons for those who will but read. Having involved ourselves, tragically and with lack of success, in guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, we seem forgetful of that carnage and, with little chance of success, to be involving ourselves in guerrilla actions in Nicaragua. Having had our Vietnam ulcer, we seem bent upon weakening our nation's health via a Central American ulcer forgetting that Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps the most skillful military leader the modern world has known, proved utterly unable to bring the peoples of Spain and Portugal to heel during a war of attrition. bloody to cut Hoping England off from trade routes to the Mediterranean six-ye- and India, and in hopes of bypassing or crushing the blockade imposed against him by the seemingly unbeatable Royal Navy, Napoleon mistakenly sent his armies into the Iberian peninsula in 1808. These same armies, these same crack troops, had carried the Napoleonic Eagle to crushing victories in Europe. There, led by such marshalls as Soult, Souchet and Ney, French dragoons, heavy cavalry, artillery, guardsmen and simple infantrymen had swept aside the trained armies of Austria, Prussia and Italy and their component duchies, principalities and kingdoms. A peninsular victory should have been easy, a piece of cake in our parlance. Six Long Years Instead of a speedy victory, Napoleon, seating his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne, found himself feeding troops, munitions and supplies into an inhospitable and rugged and against a raw, ragged land populace that refused to submit to French rule. For six long years guerrilla bands swept down from the hills, cut down French communications and seized supply trains, and retreated to moun tain hiding places. During those years, the trained, half-doze- n well-equipp- forces of Marshall Soult and King Joseph marched and countermarched across Spain. They held Madrid, held Toldeo, held Barcelona briefly. Whenever their armies took to the field, increasingly competent and guerrilla forces formed behind them. Those forces gradually took the shape of disciplined, able, if poorly equipped armies, headed by Spanish and Portuguese generals who gained confidence and competence in the d field. the makeshift armies of and Portugal astounded the Spain leaders of defeated Europe by their ability to halt, harass and even defeat French armies in the field, the English government began voting more funds to support and enlarge the lone British Army in Portugal headed by Lt. Gen. Sir John Moore. He was to die heroically at Corunna, but when Moores troops were forced to evacuate, Sir Arthur Wellesley took command of light forces put ashore by British frigates near Cadiz. Wellesley was eventually to be given command of 80,000 or more Britons, was to take command of an Eng When ever-growin- Portuguese and Spanish army. And he himself was to learn and was to be much in the field titled Duke of Wellington, under which name he would conquer Napoleon at Waterloo. d Bled Napoleon Dry Author David Gates has given us an excellent military history of six years of warfare of large and small battles in which guerrillas, patriot armies and renewed aid from Britain brought defeat for Napoleon. The unsuccessful campaign in Spain bled and renewed fightNapoleon dry ing in Austria, Germany and eventually in Russia, forced Napoleon to transfer troops by the hundred-thousanto sustain his European legions. d As the infection from the Spanish Ulcer is spelled out, Gates makes painfully plain the parallels facing todays military men and political leaders. Obviously, the place names of battles fought across the Peninsula will recall the bitter fighting of another Spanish campaign, of the warfare between the Forces of Franco and the Loyalist troops of the Spanish Republic during the early 1930s. He See E-Column 4 Summers Best Friend eriain tolx. your favorite tunwear during. the lit i months lot ome. let tv romx'r (or II S c over up) w illi I). iik lean lop.'clustit waist ,ind 2 xxkels w hile, red. yellow. iu,il & more. Key, S20 14.99 mien's Mi S SMI. x itiswear FASHIONHACIMAltXtXYTONHtLLS |
