October 7, 2009
In E-Books, It’s an Army vs. Google
By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — Whenever it can, Google likes to have programmers solve its problems. But now it faces a dispute that even its ranks of lawyers and lobbyists are finding hard to smooth over.

A broad array of authors, academics, librarians and public interest groups are fighting the company’s plan to create a huge digital library and bookstore. Their complaints reached the ears of regulators at the Justice Department, which last month helped derail the plan by asking a court to reject the class-action settlement that spawned it.

That request led to a last-minute decision by Google and its partners, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, to redraft the agreement. A federal court hearing in New York on Wednesday will shed light on their progress.

Some analysts say the broad-based opposition to Google’s lofty plans was unprecedented and a harbinger of the intense scrutiny the company’s ambitious agenda will face.

“This was the first issue through which Google’s power became clearly articulated to the public,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. “All sorts of people — writers, researchers, librarians, academics and readers — really feel they have a stake in the world of books.”

Google expressed confidence that a new agreement that could win court approval might be ready within weeks. “I don’t think we need a lot of time,” said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer.

This is not the first time Google’s ambitions have collided with the Justice Department. Last year, after advertisers and competitors argued that a planned ad deal with Yahoo would harm competition, the department said it would try to block the partnership in court. Google chose to abandon the deal rather than fight.

This time, the department’s lawyers heard from Google rivals like Microsoft. But they also heard complaints from a much broader group, many of whom shared the same fear: that the deal would allow Google, the 800-pound gorilla of digital information, to bulk up even more and lock out competitors in the nascent digital book market.

In a recent order, the judge who will have to approve or reject the settlement remarked on the number and breadth of objections the court had received. “Clearly, fair concerns have been raised,” wrote Judge Denny Chin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The Justice Department told the court that it hoped the parties would be able to modify the agreement to address antitrust, copyright and class-action problems, while preserving some of its benefits.

Some experts say that even if a modified deal is approved, the dispute portends the kind of suspicion that Google’s plans will likely face.

“Google will have continuous challenges to major initiatives around consumer choice, security and trust, privacy,” said David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “This will never stop. It will be a question of how well Google builds coalitions and lays the groundwork before they establish a fait accompli in a particular area.”

Google’s plan emerged from a sweeping settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed by authors and publishers in 2005 over the company’s effort to digitize books from major libraries. Google and its allies hailed the agreement as a public good: millions of out-of-print books would become widely available, unlocking vast swaths of human knowledge, while giving authors new ways to earn money from digital copies of their works.

While Google’s corporate rivals fanned the flames of opposition, much of the resistance to the deal began in the confines of academia and spread gradually. In the end, more than 350 individuals, companies, nonprofit groups, academics, library associations, overseas publishers, states and even foreign governments lodged complaints in court against the agreement, in whole or in part. They outnumbered the filings in support of the deal by about 10 to 1.

Many scholars initially sided with Google in 2004 when its scanning project, originally designed to create a kind of universal card catalog, drew lawsuits from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. But the settlement transformed Google’s plan into something far more ambitious.

Online users of Google’s digital library and store would get free access to 20 percent of any book and be able to pay to read the rest. Every library in America would be able to offer free, full access to Google’s library at one terminal. And universities would be able to purchase access to the entire collection. Revenue would be split among Google, authors and publishers.

Even before the agreement was signed last October, however, opposition began to brew. Harvard University, which along with a few other libraries had been invited to participate in some of the negotiations, withdrew. A few months later, Robert Darnton, head of the university’s library system, wrote an impassioned attack on the deal in The New York Review of Books.

Around the same time, Pamela Samuelson, a respected Internet law and copyright expert at the University of California, Berkeley, convened a meeting of concerned scholars who began spreading the word at universities.

At a conference at Columbia Law School in March, the outlines of the opposition began to emerge. Critics said the deal would grant Google quasi-exclusive rights to commercialize millions of orphan works, books whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found. That would make it hard to compete with, potentially leaving Google free to raise prices.

Others said the deal turned copyright law on its head by letting Google profit from millions of books unless authors objected. Librarians grew concerned that Google wouldn’t adequately protect their patrons’ privacy.

Gail Steinbeck, the daughter-in-law of John Steinbeck, received notice of the settlement shortly before a May deadline for authors to opt out. She thought most authors would not understand it.

“When I saw this come through, just a few weeks before the deadline, I flipped out,” said Ms. Steinbeck, who along with her husband has been involved in a legal fight over the rights to some of John Steinbeck’s works.

Ms. Steinbeck quickly sent a letter to several influential authors laying out her fears. “It would be a shame to have to go back to Congress and/or the courts in a few years to ask them to split up a monopoly, when we have the chance to stop it in its tracks right now,” she wrote.

As a result, a group of authors that included the musician Arlo Guthrie asked the court for a four-month extension, which was granted. The delay proved crucial, as it gave time for opponents to get organized, leading to a veritable deluge of last-minute filings.

Lawrence Lessig, an Internet scholar and professor at Harvard Law School, said Google’s belief that its actions and motives were misunderstood reminded him of a frustration that permeated Microsoft in the 1990s.

“I’ve seen these big powerful companies filled with people who drank the Kool-Aid,” said Professor Lessig, who initially supported Google’s scanning but later came to oppose the settlement. “I really get the sense in which these people feel they are doing good. But I am always surprised by their failure to recognize how they will be perceived outside.”

Mr. Drummond said Google anticipated that a deal so sweeping would generate criticism. He said support for it was far broader than the opposition, noting that the guild and the publishers association represented a large portion of the American book industry.

“The benefits far outweigh any of these criticisms that are being made, many of which are quite theoretical,” Mr. Drummond said. “We have a good process now for taking into account some of the objections.” He added: “The fact that there are some critics doesn’t mean you should be paralyzed and not do something that provides value.”

City of Joy

Swayze film. Enjoyable.

October 7, 2009
Novel About Henry VIII Wins Booker Prize
By MOTOKO RICH

Hilary Mantel won the 41st annual Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night for “Wolf Hall,” a historical novel about Henry VIII’s court centered on the king’s adviser, Thomas Cromwell.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s ceremony at the Guildhall in London, Ms. Mantel, 57, was the overwhelming favorite, with the bookmakers William Hill giving “Wolf Hall” odds of 10-11, the shortest odds ever for a nominee.

Ms. Mantel beat out the literary lions J. M. Coetzee and A. S. Byatt, both previous winners of the prize, and deprived Mr. Coetzee of the chance to become a three-time winner of the award. She was the first favorite to win since Yann Martel won for “Life of Pi” in 2002.

Accepting the award, Ms. Mantel said, “I had to interest the historians, I had to amuse the jaded palate of the critical establishment and most of all I had to capture the imagination of the general reader.”

James Naughtie, a BBC broadcaster who led the panel of judges, described “Wolf Hall” as “a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century,” praising it for the way it “probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII’s court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women.”

Mr. Naughtie revealed that the decision was not unanimous and that the five-judge panel was split this year 3 to 2 in favor of “Wolf Hall.” In a report on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper, guardian.co.uk, Mr. Naughtie said the panel’s decision “was based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.”

The Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, is conferred every year to a novel written by an author from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth nations. The award comes with a check for about $80,000 and usually results in a bump in sales. Last year’s winner, “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga, for example, has sold 236,000 copies in paperback in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales. “The Gathering” by Anne Enright, which won in 2007, has sold 300,000 paperback copies.

Ms. Mantel, who has written 10 novels, a collection of short stories and a memoir, spent five years writing “Wolf Hall” and is already working on a sequel. This was her first time being nominated for the Booker Prize.

“Wolf Hall,” published by Fourth Estate in Britain and Henry Holt & Company in the United States, was widely praised among reviewers. Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Janet Maslin said the book’s “main characters are scorchingly well rendered,” adding that “their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words.”

And in The Sunday Telegraph of London, Lucy Hughes-Hallett wrote that Ms. Mantel “makes that world at once so concrete you can smell the rain-drenched wool cloaks and feel the sharp fibers of the rushes underfoot.”

The Booker Prize was perhaps most notable this year for its lack of controversy. In previous years, details of the judges’ deliberations have been catnip for London’s literary society and the shortlists have often been scrutinized as much for who is left off as for who is included. This year, several heavyweights — and former winners — were left off the long list of finalists, but that was largely viewed as a measure of the strength of the year’s offerings in literary fiction.

The shortlist of finalists for the award were Ms. Byatt for “The Children’s Book,” ; Mr. Coetzee for “Summertime,” Adam Foulds for “The Quickening Maze,” Simon Mawer for “The Glass Room,” and Sarah Waters for “The Little Stranger.”

American on purpose

Ferguson, Craig. (2009). American on purpose: the improbable adventures of an unlikely patriot. New York: Harper.













Craig Ferguson isn’t kidding. That’s what struck me as I turned the pages of the Scottish late-night comedian’s memoir, “American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot.” Almost every time Ferguson has a chance to go for a cheap, easy laugh — the mother’s milk of late-night comedy — he runs in the opposite direction. Take the opening scene in which he meets George W. Bush at a reception before the 2008 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where Ferguson, a newly minted American citizen, is to be the entertainment. He recognizes that making fun of Bush near the end of his catastrophic presidency would be like shooting fish in a barrel, so what does he do instead? He bonds with Bush as a fellow recovering alcoholic, clinking glasses of sparkling water with him as the president makes an earnest toast to America. I repeat: this is the opening scene of a book by a comedian. That’s what we in the comedy business call courage, and it pretty much sets the tone for the rest of this memoir, in which Ferguson admirably avoids wisecracks and instead goes for something like wisdom.





Craig Ferguson at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2008.

The Polanski Hypocrisy

Amid the many reactions to director Roman Polanski's arrest last weekend in Switzerland more than 30 years after he fled the U.S. after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, none have been as strong as those of the international film community. A petition demanding his release has attracted over 100 film-world signatories, including luminaries from Martin Scorsese and Costa-Gavras to David Lynch and Wong Kar Wai.

Reading the petition, you could be forgiven for thinking that the dispute was over some obscure diplomatic codicil. Its principal focus is on the mechanics of the arrest, namely Switzerland's detention of Mr. Polanski on a U.S. request as he was traveling to the Zurich Film Festival. It cites Switzerland's status as a "neutral country" and the "extraterritorial nature" of film festivals. The substance of his guilty plea and the circumstances of the crime receive only glancing mention, in a single line: "His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals."

One would never know that those easily brushed off "morals"—rape and pedophilia—have actually been a central concern of some of the petition's signatories.

I'm baffled by people defending him.

In their depictions of these acts, the directors and actors in question seem keenly aware of the extreme violence of rape and the terrible psychological consequences that follow its victims for years afterward. But for them, apparently, life doesn't imitate art.

Still, some film-world names were notable for their absence from the petition. Director Luc Besson refrained from signing it, noting, in an interview with RTL Soir, "I don't have any opinion on this, but I have a daughter, 13 years old. And if she was violated, nothing would be the same, even 30 years later."

Not have an opinion? He does, and it is the right one. Mr. Paletta, who wrote the opinion piece in the Journal, is an editor at the Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative think tank.

Continent in carnage

The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy
By Peter H. Wilson
(Belknap/Harvard, 997 pages, $35)




The war fought between 1618 and 1648 remains, by many measures, the most destructive in Europe's history. During those years the Holy Roman Empire—which governed most of the European continent east of the Rhine—lost as many as eight million subjects, or a staggering 20% of its population. This amount to three times Europe's death rate during World War II. Whole swaths of central Europe were depopulated, abandoned to wild pigs and wolves.

Among continental Europeans, the Thirty Years War is etched in memory, immortalized by the stormy prose of Friedrich Schiller, who in the late 18th century published a multi-volume Sturm und Drang history of the war. In the English-speaking world, the closest we have to a classic narrative is Veronica Wedgewood's stylish, if outmoded, history of 1938. A definitive account has been needed, and now Peter Wilson, one of Britain's leading historians of Germany, has provided it.

Weeknd films

Watched these films over the weekend:

Friday night: Pride and glory (2008). Violent, profane, an example of modern film-making; not my style. Jon Voight played a cop wearing a suit, who sons and son-in-law are cops. {retty good acting, but very violent, lots of cursing, and, in the end, not that pleasing, though good enough.

Saturday night (in Chi): Narc. (2002). Violent, profane. Not worth seeing, for me.



Sunday night: Dirty Dancing. An antidote

Swayze

Glenn told me about this video, of a tribute to Patrick Swyze in "Dancing with the Stars."

Brandeis, revered or hated, a Giant

Brandeis was not shy about discussing the role law can play in shaping society. Not for him the self-effacing metaphors of recent confirmation hearings. Brandeis would have scoffed at Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. as an umpire in robes calling legal balls and strikes, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor as a law robot mechanically applying statutes and precedents to facts.

Scoff. Ditto.

Brandeis thought the law an instrument of morality and progress. “Is not the challenge of legal justice to conform to our contemporary notions of social justice?” he asked in a speech just weeks before President Wilson nominated him to the court. It is all but impossible to imagine the nomination of a lawyer like Brandeis today, and it is a small miracle that he was confirmed even in his day. As was the custom at the time, Brandeis did not testify. But the confirmation hearings were brutal nonetheless.

No, brutality is not a modern political phenomenon, at all.

The president of Harvard University, where Brandeis had gone to law school, opposed the nomination; so did seven past presidents of the American Bar Association. William Howard Taft, the former president and future chief justice, called him “utterly unscrupulous” and “a man of infinite cunning.”

Members of the Supreme Court of the United States shows Taft as Chief Justice 1921-1930. He'd been President 1909-1913.

Brandeis was the first Jewish justice, and Taft’s comment at least flirts with anti-Semitism. But Mr. Urofsky generally plays down the role anti-Semitism played in the hearings, where the subject of Brandeis’s religion arose only once, and in Brandeis’s career generally. It was Brandeis’s perceived radical beliefs and hostility to business interests that provoked his enemies, Mr. Urofsky concludes; being Jewish was “a complicating factor.”

Brandeis was confirmed by a vote of 47 to 22.

Brandeis is often paired with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., his frequent ally in dissent on a generally conservative court. But they arrived at similar positions by very different routes. Holmes liked abstractions and gnomic epigrams; Brandeis cherished detailed information.

“No justice of the 20th century had a greater impact on American constitutional jurisprudence,” Mr. Urofsky writes. That is a large statement but probably correct, and the author certainly makes a vigorous case for it.

Take the law of privacy. In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Brandeis objected to warrantless wiretapping by the government and set down some lasting principles. “The greatest dangers to liberty,” he wrote, “lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

A certain recent vice-president comes to mind.

Brandeis told Frankfurter that he construed the Constitution liberally where property rights were involved, meaning he seldom voted to strike down laws regulating them, but that laws restricting individual rights required closer scrutiny.

He explained why in a 1927 concurrence to a Court decision that would help transform First Amendment law. “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards,” Brandeis wrote. “They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.”

Bill Clinton After Hours

The Clinton tapes: wrestling history with the president by Taylor Branch
707 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.



No cigar?

Public art for public schools

New book entitled Public art for public schools contains some great pictures of NYC school buildings and art within. The Education Dept. website (within NYC.gov) has a section Public Art for Public Schools.

An example is this detail from History Of Mankind In Terms Of Mental And Physical Labor, 1941. Maxwell Starr. 1901-1978
























New York Old and New, 1936. Sacha Moldovan, 1901-1982. Oil on canvas, 4@ Approx 68 1/2" X 55 1/2"

Unchained Melody

Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch
...a long lonely time ...
... and time goes by so slowly; and time, can do so much,
are you ... still mine?
I_I_I need your love, I_I_I need your love
Godspeed your love to me.

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea
to the open arms of the sea ... (yeah)
lonely rivers sigh 'wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home, wait for me.

Oh, my love, my darling ...
I've hungered, hungered, for your touch
a long ... are you still mine?

I_I need your love
I_I've got to have your love
Godspeed your love to me



Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time, and time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love; Godspeed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea, to the open arms of the sea
lonely rivers sigh 'wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home wait for me

Oh, my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time; and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much, are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love
Godspeed your love to me





Found on YouTube; nice version



Yet another version ...


An interesting version by Gene Vincent ...

The outsiders

1983 film. Patrick Swayze's death prompted me to get a film he acted in (Ghost and Dirty Dancing aside). The cast is composed of many future stars in roles early in their careers. The three characters whom the story revolves around are played by C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon and Ralph Macchio (one year and one role before Karate Kid).

Frankly, it was not a very good film. The acting is not flowing, and the movie is kind of choppy (whether that is attributable to editing or the script, I don't know). It certainly was interesting to see Swayze in what appears to be his first film role; alas, his character was not a main one. Tom Cruise had a small role, and had bucked teeth, to boot. I did finish it, and enjoyed it. And it had a nice soundtrack.

GW was a mason

Brown, D., (2009). The Lost Symbol. New York: Doubleday Books.


The Lost Symbol. By Dan Brown
Doubleday, 509 pages, $29.95



The reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Charlotte Allen,is contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus Web site. [The Manhattan Institute is something of a conservative organization.]
She does not seem overly impressed with the book; her review's title puts it: Still More Secrets - Together again, an exciting thriller and a tedious sermon.

She does grant: As District of Columbia resident, I must say that Mr. Brown does a first-rate job of delivering a Cook's tour with duly sinister overtones of Washington's famous sites. I specially enjoyed Langdon and Katherine's narrow escape from the CIA by riding the book conveyor belts of the Library of Congress.

And then she gives herself away: A video unearthed by Langdon depicting numerous highly placed Washingtonians including two Supreme Court justices! wearing full Masonic regalia and participating in a ritual that involves faux-human sacrifice and the drinking of wine from a human skull reminded me of the "Stonecutters" episode of "The Simpsons": "Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do!"

Ah, the Simpsons as a great cultural institution.

It's when Mr. Brown interrupts his storytelling to deliver one of his many lectures on Christian intolerance with pointed digs at the American religious right that "The Lost Symbol" becomes a didactic bore.

The reviewer for the New York Times entitles her review Fasten Your Seat Belts, There’s Code to Crack. She does not seem particularly thrilled with the book, either, though she does not criticize the author's lecturing. In fact, she does praise him, some.

Separate from critics and reviewers, the book sold a million copies today, its first day in the marketplace. And, in the Nassau County OPAC, it has 823 holds on first copy returned of 388 copies, 227 holds on first copy returned of 48 copies (for Large Type), and 120 holds on first copy returned of 19 copies on the CD book.

Patrick Swayze

• Filmography | Times Topics: Patrick Swayze
• Slide Show |

September 15, 2009
Patrick Swayze, Star of ‘Dirty Dancing,’ Dies at 57
By ANITA GATES

Patrick Swayze, the balletically athletic actor who rose to stardom in the films “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost” and whose 20-month battle with advanced pancreatic cancer drew wide attention, died Monday. He was 57.

His publicist, Annett Wolf, told The Associated Press in Los Angeles that Mr. Swayze had died with family members at his side.

Mr. Swayze’s cancer was diagnosed in January 2008. Six months later he had already outlived his prognosis and was filmed at an airport, smiling at photographers and calling himself, only half-facetiously, “a miracle dude.”

He even went through with plans to star in “The Beast,” a drama series for A&E. He filmed a complete season while undergoing treatment. Mr. Swayze insisted on continuing with the series. “How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man?” he told The New York Times last October. “You go to work.”

Miraculous attitude.

The show, on which he played an undercover F.B.I. agent, had its premiere in January and earned him admiring reviews.

A week before the series began, Mr. Swayze was the subject of a one-hour “Barbara Walters Special” on ABC, in which he talked about his illness. “I keep my heart and my soul and my spirit open to miracles,” he told Ms. Walters. But he said he was not going to pursue every experimental treatment that came along. If he were to “spend so much time chasing staying alive,” he said, he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the time he had left.

“I want to live,” he said.

Shortly after the interview, he was hospitalized for pneumonia. At least one tabloid newspaper ran photographs of him in April with reports that the cancer had metastasized and that his weight had dropped to 105 pounds.

Mr. Swayze rose to stardom in 1987. He had received attention in several early movies and in the mini-series “North and South,” but the coming-of-age film “Dirty Dancing” established him as a romantic leading man. He starred opposite Jennifer Grey as a young working-class dance instructor at a Catskills resort who proved to have more heart, integrity and sex appeal than many of the wealthy guests with whom he was forbidden to fraternize.

O, yes, I remember the mini-series. And the film; it was a great one.

He exhibited similar emotional intensity in the supernatural romance “Ghost” (1990), an enormous box-office hit. His character, a loft-living yuppie banker, is murdered early in the film and spends the rest of it as a spirit, desperately trying to communicate with his fiancée (Demi Moore) with the help of a psychic (Whoopi Goldberg). The film, which also showcased his physical grace, solidified his stardom.

One of my all-time favorites

Mr. Swayze was proud of “Ghost,” as he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. “I needed to do something that will affect the audience in a positive way, make them feel better about their lives and appreciate what they have,” he said.

Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on Aug. 18, 1952, in Houston, the son of Jesse Wayne Swayze, an engineer and rodeo cowboy, and Patsy Swayze, a dance instructor and choreographer. He began dancing as a child and was often teased about it. But he was also a student athlete, and his dancing career was hampered by a football injury.

After attending San Jacinto, a community college in Texas, Mr. Swayze moved to New York to study dance, becoming a member of Eliot Feld Ballet. He made his Broadway debut in 1975 as a dancer in “Goodtime Charley” and was cast in the original Broadway production of “Grease,” taking over the lead role. (He returned to Broadway almost three decades later, filling in as the razzle-dazzle lawyer Billy Flynn in “Chicago” in 2003.)

He made his screen debut in “Skatetown, U.S.A.” (1979), a roller-disco movie starring Scott Baio. Looking back on that film, he told the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail in 1984, “I saw that with not too much trouble I could become a teenybopper star, but I knew if I accepted that, it would take years to win credibility as a serious actor.”

His first notable film was “The Outsiders” (1983), a drama about teenage gangs that starred other newcomers like Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon and Emilio Estevez. The same year he was cast in a short-lived television series, “Renegades,” a sort of updated “Mod Squad” about young gang leaders turned deputies.

His public profile grew steadily, especially with his appearances in “Red Dawn” (1984), a film about small-town high school students fighting the Soviets in World War III, and in “North and South” (1985), a 12-hour mini-series in which he played a conflicted Southern soldier.

“People don’t identify with victims,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press, discussing his “North and South” character, originally written as a more passive man. “They identify with people who have the world come down on their heads and who fight to survive.”

After that came “Dirty Dancing” and then, just three years later, “Ghost,” with a few largely forgotten movies in between.

During the 1990s he was a bank-robbing surfer in “Point Break” (1991) and a drag queen with the daunting name Vida Boheme in “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar” (1995). “To Wong Foo” earned him his third Golden Globe nomination. (The others were for “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost.”)

His portrayal of a noble doctor in Roland Joffé’s “City of Joy” (1992) was not well received. But then, critics rarely praised his acting ability. At best he was commended for his athletic presence and stalwart demeanor.

From 1995 to 2007 he made more than a dozen feature films, including “Donnie Darko” (2001), in which he played an obnoxious motivational speaker. In 2006 he surprised many by starring in London as the streetwise gambler Nathan Detroit in the musical “Guys and Dolls.” His last film was “Powder Blue,” a drama with Lisa Kudrow that was released on DVD this year. As a young unknown, Mr. Swayze met Lisa Niemi, a fellow Houstonian, in one of his mother’s dance classes. They married in 1975. She survives him, along with his mother; two brothers, Don and Sean; and a sister, Bambi. Another sister, Vicky, died in 1994.

Mr. Swayze said more than once that he was determined not to be typecast. In a 1989 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times, he said, “The only plan I have is that every time people think they have me pegged, I’m going to come out of left field and do something unexpected.”

He also expressed concern about the dangers of Hollywood superficiality. “One of the reasons I bought my ranch was because I didn’t want to hear the hype,” he told The A.P. in 1985, referring to his horse ranch in the San Gabriel Mountains. He added, “Your horses don’t lie to you.”

U.S. NEWS - SEPTEMBER 15, 2009, 5:32 P.M. ET

Actor Patrick Swayze Dies of Pancreatic Cancer
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- Patrick Swayze, the hunky actor who danced his way into moviegoers" hearts with "Dirty Dancing" and then broke them with "Ghost," died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.

"Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months," said a statement released Monday evening by his publicist, Annett Wolf. Mr. Swayze died in Los Angeles, Wolf said, but declined to give further details.
One Last Dance

View Slideshow

A look at Patrick Swayze's life and career

Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Mr. Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer. He kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting "The Beast," an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot.

Mr. Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making "The Beast" because they would have taken the edge off his performance. The show drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.

When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was "considerably more optimistic" than that. Mr. Swayze acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease.

"I'd say five years is pretty wishful thinking," Mr. Swayze told ABC's Barbara Walters in early 2009. "Two years seems likely if you're going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I'd better get a fire under it."

C. Thomas Howell, who co-starred with Mr. Swayze in "The Outsiders," "Grandview U.S.A." and "Red Dawn", said: "I have always had a special place in my heart for Patrick. While I was fortunate enough to work with him in three films, it was our passion for horses that forged a friendship between us that I treasure to this day. Not only did we lose a fine actor today, I lost my older 'Outsiders" brother."

Other celebrities used Twitter to express condolences, and "Dirty Dancing" was the top trending topic for a while Monday night, trailed by several other Swayze films.

Ashton Kutcher -- whose wife, Demi Moore, co-starred with Mr. Swayze in "Ghost" -- wrote: "RIP P Swayze." Mr. Kutcher also linked to a YouTube clip of the actor poking fun at himself in a classic "Saturday Night Live" sketch, in which he played a wannabe Chippendales dancer alongside the corpulent -- and frighteningly shirtless -- Chris Farley.

And Larry King wrote: "Patrick Swayze was a wonderful actor & a terrific guy. He put his heart in everything. He was an extraordinary fighter in his battle w Cancer." Mr. King added that he'd do a tribute to Mr. Swayze on his CNN program Tuesday night.

A three-time Golden Globe nominee, Mr. Swayze became a star with his performance as the misunderstood bad-boy Johnny Castle in "Dirty Dancing." As the son of a choreographer who began his career in musical theater, he seemed a natural to play the role.

A coming-of-age romance starring Jennifer Grey as an idealistic young woman on vacation with her family and Swayze as the Catskills resort's sexy (and much older) dance instructor, the film made great use of both his grace on his feet and his muscular physique.

It became an international phenomenon in the summer of 1987, spawning albums, an Oscar-winning hit song in "(I've Had) the Time of My Life," stage productions and a sequel, 2004's "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," in which he made a cameo.

Mr. Swayze performed and co-wrote a song on the soundtrack, the ballad "She's Like the Wind," inspired by his wife, Lisa Niemi. The film also gave him the chance to utter the now-classic line, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."

Mr. Swayze followed that up with the 1989 action flick "Road House," in which he played a bouncer at a rowdy bar. But it was his performance in 1990's "Ghost" that showed his vulnerable, sensitive side. He starred as a murdered man trying to communicate with his fiancee (Ms. Moore) -- with great frustration and longing -- through a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg.

The film earned a best-picture nomination and a supporting-actress Oscar for Ms. Goldberg, who said she wouldn't have won if it weren't for Mr. Swayze.

Mr. Swayze himself earned three Golden Globe nominations, for "Dirty Dancing," "Ghost" and 1995's "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar," which further allowed him to toy with his masculine image. The role called for him to play a drag queen on a cross-country road trip alongside Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo.

Among his earlier films, Swayze was part of the star-studded lineup of up-and-comers in Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel "The Outsiders," alongside Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane.

Other "80s films included "Red Dawn," "Grandview U.S.A." (for which he also provided choreography) and "Youngblood," once more with Lowe, as Canadian hockey teammates.

In the "90s, he made such eclectic films as "Point Break" (1991), in which he played the leader of a band of bank-robbing surfers, and the family Western "Tall Tale" (1995), in which he starred as Pecos Bill. He appeared on the cover of People magazine as its "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1991, but his career tapered off toward the end of the 1990s, when he also had stay in rehab for alcohol abuse. In 2001, he appeared in the cult favorite "Donnie Darko," and in 2003 he returned to the New York stage with "Chicago"; 2006 found him in the musical "Guys and Dolls" in London.

Mr. Swayze was born in 1952 in Houston, the son of Jesse Swayze and choreographer Patsy Swayze, whose films include "Urban Cowboy."

He played football but also was drawn to dance and theater, performing with the Feld, Joffrey and Harkness Ballets and appearing on Broadway as Danny Zuko in "Grease." But he turned to acting in 1978 after a series of injuries.

Within a couple years of moving to Los Angeles, he made his debut in the roller-disco movie "Skatetown, U.S.A." The eclectic cast included Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Maureen McCormack and Billy Barty.

Off-screen, he was an avid conservationist who was moved by his time in Africa to shine a light on "man's greed and absolute unwillingness to operate according to Mother Nature's laws," he told the AP in 2004.

Mr. Swayze was married since 1975 to Ms. Niemi, a fellow dancer who took lessons with his mother; they met when he was 19 and she was 15. A licensed pilot, Ms. Niemi would fly her husband from Los Angeles to Northern California for treatment at Stanford University Medical Center.

The Stranger

A pretty good thriller with Orson Welles playing a professor in a small-town college who is about to wed the daughter of a Supreme Court justice (who, explicably, has a sort of British-inflected, gentry accent). Loretta Young plays the Justice's daughter, and seems far too melodramatic, though perhaps it is to be expected in a 1946 film. Edward G. Robinson plays a Mr. Wilson (he does not have a first name) an investigator from the War Crimes Commission who releases a second-tier Nazi in the expectation that he will lead Wilson to the real prey: Franz Kindler.

HWPL has an interesting book on Robinson's career, The cinema of Edward G. Robinson.

On the waterfront

Last Wednesday a book review appeared in the Journal about a book entitled On the Irish Waterfront; the 1954 film was discussed. That prompted me to get the film. Watched it Friday night. Quite good: the acting is really good, and not just Brando (who is excellent): Steiger does a very nice job playing the older Malloy brother, a lawyer who works for, and is controlled by, the longshoremen's union; and Lee Cobb does an excellent turn as the bastard corrupt union leader. Eva Marie Saint also does a nice job (her first big screen role; the film credits have it "and introducing").

Because they believe

Pier Pressure

Fisher, James T. (2009). On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York. Cornell Univ Press



It was into this milieu that a 35-year-old Jesuit priest arrived in 1946, setting out to liberate the waterfront's oppressed longshoremen. Moved by the social-justice teachings of the Catholic Church, the Rev. John Corridan tried to ­inspire the men on the docks to take on the Irish kingpins who held them in grinding poverty. But the codes of the waterfront proved too tough to crack, even for a priest who swore and drank like a longshoremen. The men maintained their silence and rejected Father ­Corridan as an outsider and a meddler.

Undeterred, Father Corridan shifted his focus, ­aiming to expose the criminal waterfront to public scrutiny. He cultivated journalists and fed them vital inside information, starting with Malcolm Johnson, a New York Sun reporter who in 1948 wrote a sensational multi-part exposé, "Crime on the Waterfront." By the early 1950s the publicizing efforts of "the ­waterfront priest" led to the creation of the New York State Crime Commission, an investigative body that gathered 30,000 pages of testimony and evidence that eventually brought down King Joe and his empire.

Mr. Fisher details the dockside story with admirable care, but the story he is most eager to tell is the one about the making of the movie "On the Waterfront." In 1949, a production company bought the rights to Johnson's exposé and hired Budd Schulberg to transform it into a screenplay. Schulberg soon befriended Father Corridan, who showed him the real waterfront. ­According to Mr. Fisher, this dynamic if unlikely partnership—between a secular Jew and a liberal Catholic priest—is the film's essential back-story. Mr. Fisher ­argues that Schulberg was converted by Father ­Corridan, not to Catholicism but to a spiritually based understanding of social justice. As a result, Schulberg acceded to Father Corridan's plea that he write a "Going My Way" with substance—that is, a serious drama that ­addressed themes of morality, betrayal and redemption.


Despite the controversy, "On the Waterfront" has proved to be of enduring value. The same cannot be said of the New York waterfront. For while the Irish kingpins were trying to fend off prosecutors, they were working to stymie efforts to modernize the waterfront's decrepit piers. With the advent of modern container ships in 1956—just two years after "On the Waterfront" opened—New York's port lost all commercial logic and the Irish waterfront began a swift journey to extinction.

A reputation made

Once popular, an author has a built-in audience. Witness Dan Brown, whose Da Vinci Code made his name: his new book, The Lost Symbol, has 231 holds in the large print version, and 688 on the regular-type version.

Equally, Pat Conroy's new book, South of Broad, has 569 holds on first copy returned of 203 copies. Nicholas Sparks is also an established favorite; his latest, The Last Song, has 390 holds on first copy returned of 57 copies.

Publishing thrives, perhaps even survives, on this phenomenon: guaranteed readers.

Under the volcano

Quite strange, though less so than the book. A dissolute Englishman who has just resigned his diplomatic position drinks endlessly, and dies. The story is fine enough, the acting quite good: Albert Finney shines as the drunkard, Jacqueline Bisset is fine enough as a pretty woman, and Anthony Andrews is quite English as Hugh Firmin.

The story is simple enough; the acting and the Mexican settings are what make it work.

Surviving in the City, Against All Odds

Kidder, Tracy. (2009). Strength in what remains : a journey of remembrance and forgetting. New York : Random House.



Mr. Kidder’s subject, Deogratias, whom he calls Deo, arrives at Kennedy Airport with $200 in his pocket. He speaks no English and knows no one. Lost, homeless and haunted by nightmares, he squats in abandoned Harlem tenements and later sleeps in Central Park. He becomes suicidal.

“Better, he thought, to be in Burundi, if Burundi were at peace, than to live on the wrong, impoverished planet in New York,” Mr. Kidder writes. “This place made you feel like you were simply not a human being.”

Mr. Kidder’s book is a story about survival, about perseverance and sometimes uncanny luck in the face of hell on earth. Deo is a Tutsi who managed to escape the vicious civil war between his people and the Hutus in Burundi and neighboring Rwanda in 1993 and 1994. Being a Tutsi was a distinct liability; the Hutus were at this point killing Tutsis indiscriminately.

It is just as notably about profound human kindness. It is about the selfless strangers who helped Deo in America, who gave him places to live, helped him find jobs and ultimately helped him attend Columbia University and Dartmouth Medical School.

Tracy Kidder


If “Strength in What Remains” is slightly less immediate than those earlier books, it may be because, paradoxically, Mr. Kidder is too fine a writer. Like John McPhee, whom he has acknowledged as an influence, Mr. Kidder makes a fetish of the nonfiction writer’s craft, generally for the better but occasionally not. His clear, perfectly buffed, shyly self-satisfied sentences can be curiously distancing.

I'm going to look at his books.

Mr. Kidder doesn’t push too far, doesn’t linger on horror and insanity. You feel safe in his hands; he’s not going to push your face into the mire or insert atonal notes into his score. Thus you occasionally long for a pricklier, less predictable writer, a Paul Theroux or a William T. Vollmann. A writer acquainted with his own dark impulses, that is, who can let out, when needed, a sickening howl.

Excerpt: ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
The Sunday Book Review on ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
Paper Cuts Blog: Questions for Tracy Kidder (August 28, 2009)


A clinic in Burundi opened by Deo, the subject of Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains.”

The soloist

Good performances by Foxx and Downey as the principals in the story of an LA reporter who stumbles upon a homeless man playing Beethoven on a two-string violin, befriends him, and writes about him in his newspaper column. He, STeve Lopez, wrote a book. I remember reading about him years back.

Vantage point

Vantage point


Interesting idea. US television (GNN, a fictional network) is carrying the US president (played aloofly by William Hurt, who sort of looks presidential) appearance in a plaza in Salamanca, Spain, at a summit of Western and Arab nations. As he is introduced and starts to speak, he is shot, twice. He is rushed off in an ambulance. Moments later a bomb explodes. A few more moments later a Secret Service agents bursts into the television truck and demands to see its tapes, and spots suspicious activity.

The film backs up to seconds before 12, and tells the same story from a different person's perspective 7 other times.

At first, the movie is gripping, the story well told. An interesting idea: how do different people see the same sequence of events? However, by the fourth or fifth, the cumulative effect becomes tiresome rather than illuminating.

After the teevee's perspective come others: Dennis Quaid's Secret Service agent, Thomas Barnes, just-returned to the job after a medical leave (having taken two bullets in protection of the president some unspecified time back); Forest Whitaker's tourist with a hand-held camera, who catches action and befriends a little girl who bumps into him and loses her ice cream; the President, who actually than actually having been shot is ensconced in a hotel room, his double having taken the bullets; one of the terrorists; and so on.

A big car chase scene follows Barnes spotting one of his fellow agents in a Spanish police uniform (he calls Washington on his cellphone, and describes the "rogue agent"). Meantime, one of the bad guys has infiltrated the hotel where the President is staying, and works his way up to POTUS's floor. A co-conspirator detonates a vest-bomb to create a diversion, and that first bad guy guns down all remaining agents, both outside and inside POTUS's room. POTUS is kidnapped, there is much shooting, more car chasing, and in the end the good guys win.

As far-fetched as it might seem, events of the last eight years have shown that wild schemes are planned, and can be executed. Technology is featured in a way that is intriguing: cellphones to call around the world; smart phones used to remotely shoot the president and detonate bombs. Alas, technology could not rescue this film. The Times review didn't mince words.

Demanding Rights, Courting Controversy

Black Maverick. By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. University of Illinois Press, 304 pages, $35


In the 15 or so years of the civil-rights movement, no incident evoked more outrage than the torture and killing of Emmett Till, the spirited 14-year-old who left Chicago in August 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi.

15 years? Wonder how he defines the Movement. 1955 to 1970? The fight for the giving of full civil rights to all Americans, blacks included, began long before 1955.

Read an excerpt from ‘Black Maverick’

The murder brought national disgust upon Mississippi, especially after thousands of mourners viewed Till’s open casket and noted the barbarities wrought upon the boy. State authorities felt pressured enough to put two suspects on trial, and civil-rights leaders believed that this time, just once, maybe, justice might be done.

Howard in 1955 holding the arm of the mother of murdered youth Emmett Till. Also pictured, Rep. Charles Diggs and witness Amanda Bradley.





One of them was T.R.M. Howard—physician, landowner, activist, orator and the subject of “Black Maverick,” a compelling biography by David T. Beito and his wife, Linda Royster Beito. “Black Maverick” is a necessary biography, too: Howard played an important part in the Emmett Till story, and in the entire civil-rights era. He deserves to be better known.

I am not familiar with the name.

Famed civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was Howard’s protégé, as was (later) Jesse Jackson. In the most public period of his career (Howard died in 1976, at age 68), Jet magazine tracked him every month and Ebony highlighted him in a story on “The New Fighting South.”

As the Till trial date approached, Howard was poised to take action. He made his home a command center, welcoming Till’s mother, hosting journalists and providing safety for witnesses he’d rounded up with promises of safe passage to Chicago after the trial. Guards roamed the premises, and Howard slept with a .45 at his pillow, a submachine gun at his feet. The “not guilty” verdict returned by the jury dismayed many but inspired Howard to take the case to the public. He delivered speeches in Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York decrying lawlessness in the South and berating J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, whom he accused of foot-dragging whenever a black victim was involved. Hoover replied with a public letter rejecting Howard’s “intemperate and baseless charges.” Liberal white journalist Hodding Carter (the father of Jimmy Carter’s White House adviser) had once called Howard a “one-man uplift movement.” Now he wrote: “I wouldn’t want to gamble on Howard’s life expectancy in the Delta.” In the end, Till’s murderers were never convicted.

What a sorry chapter in US history.Awful. Tragic. Horrible.

With Howard so prominent back then, people might wonder why he has virtually no place in the popular memory of the civil-rights movement. The Beitos have an explanation. Other aspects of Howard’s life, they argue, tainted his legacy: sexual profligacy; becoming an abortionist, his penchant for big cars and fancy clothes, his anti-communism.

A flamboyant Second Amendment, ­anti-communist capitalist doesn’t please journalists and historians searching for civil-rights martyrs.

Quite a value judgment to make.
T.R.M. Howard at his desk at the Friendship Medical Center in Chicago (1975).

Israeli Writer and Iconoclast

Amos Kenan




Mr. Kenan, who fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war but also belonged to the anti-Zionist and anti-religious Canaanite movement, consistently roiled Israel’s political and cultural waters as a columnist, novelist, playwright, painter, sculptor, screenwriter and filmmaker. Somehow he maintained a career as a restaurant critic as well.

Quite a Renaissance man.

He was a scathing critic of Israeli religious leaders, and when the mood suited, extended his range beyond Judaism. His play “Friends Talk About Jesus” was banned from the stage by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1972 for being unacceptably contemptuous of religion.

As the struggle for Israeli statehood gathered momentum, he joined the Lehi, referred to by the British as the Stern Gang, the most extreme of the underground paramilitary organizations in Palestine.

At the same time, influenced by the poet Yonatan Ratosh, he joined the Canaanites, a small but influential group of artists and writers who hoped to build a Hebrew rather than a Jewish state in the biblical land of Canaan that would embrace both Arabs and Jews. It regarded Judaism and Islam as retrograde, and dissociated itself from the Jewish Diaspora. He was a founder of the group’s magazine, Alef.

History Boys

" Centers around eight boisterous-yet-talented schoolboys hoping to gain admittance to England's most prestigious universities. They are aided on their quest by two teachers, a shrewd young upstart and an inspiring old eccentric, whose opposing philosophies challenge the boys to confront the true meaning of education and the relative values of happiness and success."

Even without understanding all of the dialogue (my pesky American ears could not understand all the spoken English), I thoroughly enjoyed this film.

The students are studying for the entrance exams to Oxford University colleges, and are tutored by Hector, an old fuddy duddy teacher of long standing (who likes to fondle his students's genitalia as he gives them rides on his motorcycle - something they all accept), and a teacher brought specifically to tutor them.

Checking Out

"On the eve of his 90th birthday, a celebrated thespian summons his three grown children to his Manhattan apartment for a celebration they will never forget. When the party's over, he plans to make his 'final exit.'"


Fun movie. The cast works well together.

Baseball’s Hall of Fame (and Infamy)

Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Zev Chafets.
Illustrated. 237 pages. Bloomsbury. $25.

Took it, started reading it.

Over the years the Baseball Hall of Fame, the shrine in Cooperstown, N.Y., that held its annual induction ceremony on Sunday, has been so fraught with controversies about who deserves admission and who doesn’t that Red Smith, the great sports columnist, once wrote that the only solution was to blow up the place and start over.

In his new book, “Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame,” Zev Chafets suggests that part of the problem is that the whole institution is built on a foundation of deceit: a falsified creation myth that asserts, all evidence to the contrary, that our national pastime was first played on the bucolic pastures of Cooperstown and that a leathery, rag-stuffed orb bought from a local farmer for $5 might be the game’s Holy Grail, the very first baseball.

I've gotten to that part. Just as absurd as the idea that Abner Doubleday laid out a baseball diamond (something he never spoke of, and that his obituary did not mention) is the idea that that orb was the first baseball. Yet baseball is built, and lives, on myth.

Equally hypocritical is Rule 5 of the hall’s election requirements, the character clause, which specifies that admission should be based not just on a player’s record and ability but also on his integrity, sportsmanship and virtue. This is the bar that has been used to exclude Pete Rose (gambling) and Mark McGwire (performance-enhancing drugs), along with troublesome, mouthy characters like Dave Parker and Dick Allen, and that may eventually be used to banish Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and anyone else tainted by accusations of steroid use.

But the brand of moralizing practiced by the Hall of Fame has always been highly selective and inconsistent. At the time of the annual induction ceremony in 2007, Mr. Chafets writes, the hall included “a convicted drug dealer, a reformed cokehead who narrowly beat a lifetime suspension from baseball, a celebrated sex addict, an Elders of Zion conspiracy nut, a pitcher who wrote a book about how he cheated his way into the hall, a well-known and highly arrested drunk driver and a couple of nasty beanball artists.”

That’s just among the living members. The roster of deceased immortals (some inducted before the character clause went into effect) includes Ty Cobb, one of the very first members, famously a sociopath, possibly a murderer and a notorious racist who was also a card-carrying, torch-waving member of the Klu Klux Klan, as were Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby. The hall is full of gamblers, brawlers and defendants in paternity suits, and there are numerous drunks, starting with Grover Cleveland Alexander, who Bill Veeck, the colorful baseball executive, once said pitched better drunk than sober.

Doc Ellis once said he pitched a game while tripping on LSD.

Despite its title, though, “Cooperstown Confidential” is not especially gossipy or tabloidy. Most of the dirt Mr. Chafets exposes has been dug up before, and he relies less on new reporting than on other books, especially “The Politics of Glory,” Bill James’s more thorough 1994 history of the hall, and Nicholas Fox Weber’s recent “Clarks of Cooperstown,” a history of the wealthy local family that founded and still controls the Hall of Fame.

The Clarks were something: the grandfather was not just a bigamist, but a trigamist, and, perhaps, even a quadrigamist, who ran off to Europe to avoid the US law; in France he married anew. And the family feuded.

As he readily admits, Mr. Chafets, a former columnist at The Daily News and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is not a baseball expert, and it sometimes shows. He says that Jim Bunning pitched one no-hitter when he in fact hurled two, one of them a perfect game.

What shows is awful copyediting. Bunning might be the stupidest man in the Senate, but he did pitch a no-hitter in each league.

Mrs Henderson Presents

Great acting, great story, music, great fun.

Genius In Exile

One morning in September 1940, a newly arrived European musician paid a visit to the conductor Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles and found him ­discussing Gustav Mahler with his fellow-exile Bruno Walter. The visitor went on to lunch at the new home of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, where he worked on some chamber music with Mann’s son Michael, a ­viola player. In the evening, he dropped in on Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood, assisting in a run-through of his violin concerto.

For a brief and unrepeatable moment, an eyeblink in cultural history, the City of Angels contained the future of classical music.

Classical music is, of course, a misnomer: something is classical because it is valued for its transcendence, and is from an earlier age. This classical music is really Western European orchestral music. Much as I like it, some of it, anyway, I can not help but notice that it is a bunch of white men that are its stalwarts, its stars. Surely there was much more other music around that qualified as beautiful, transcendent; just depends where we look.

For the duration of World War II, Los Angeles was at the cutting edge of musical creation. How the frontiers of a rarified art ­relocated to a place ruled by sun, surf and superficial movies is the subject of “A Windfall of Musicians,” ­Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s engaging study, based in the main on survivor interviews and documentary archives.

The influx was provoked by Adolf Hitler, whose ­seizure of power on Jan. 30, 1933, soon enough meant the banishment of modern art and Jewish musicians from German public life. Hollywood offered exiled ­writers a chance of employment, luring in the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, the best-selling “Grand Hotel” novelist Vicki Baum and Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the World War I classic “All’s Quiet on the Western Front.”

Musicians sought sanctuary first on the East Coast, with its venerable symphony orchestras and prestigious ­universities, drifting west in disillusion with the deep ­conservatism they encountered. Los Angeles, for all its open-air lifestyle, was no paradise. ­Schoenberg ­partnered Charles Chaplin and George ­Gershwin on the tennis court but found himself teaching music to ­“superficial and external” students, many of them ­concerned more with their credits than the ­challenge of art. Appalled by the ubiquity of commercialism, ­Schoenberg told the artist Oskar Kokoschka that he was living in a “world in which I nearly die of disgust.” Lotte Lehmann, a serene Lieder singer, wrote a novel called “Of Heaven, Hell and Hollywood,” leaving no doubt about the infernal realm she now inhabited.

I have searched high and low for the book, but it is not to be found, alas.

Ms. Crawford, who has spent much of her working life teaching and making music in Southern California, brings a physical familiarity to her narrative and a keen eye for poignant detail, the shock of the new. She quotes Vicki Baum’s first impression: “I stayed drunk for weeks with this sun and air and the beauty of the hills.” Ms. Crawford makes too much of minor figures like Ernst Toch and perhaps too little of Kurt Weill, whose Hollywood visits require deeper research. ­Nevertheless, “A Windfall of Musicians” is valuable for its account of how the West became a cultural force in America, a rising counterweight to the ­tradition-stifled East.

Up to a point, that is. In 1997, the trustees of the ­University of Southern California decided to rename the Arnold Schoenberg Institute building after a recent ­donor and vacate its contents. Vienna rescued the composer’s archives, his scores, his letters and his paintings, housing them in a purpose-built Arnold Schoenberg Centre. With this crowning slur to history, Los Angeles was cleansed of its modernist accident, or aberration.