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I know I'm gambling with my two dollars when I click the "Buy Now" button on a Kindle bargain, but most reads offer some benefit, despite defects that force me to abandon them--I won't spurn an introduction to a historical concept or a shortcut to slumber. However, about every fourth book, I hit the jackpot with a solidly written historical narrative that plunges me into an era--or into multiple eras, if it's a collection. This fortuitous find might be flawed, with uneven pacing or extraneous portions, but its mind-altering content and compelling accounts of past lives make it a winner. Still, since I do most of my reading at night, the story must be challenging enough syntax-wise to serve as a gentle bridge into a good night's rest. Electrifying first-person narratives must be saved for plane trips.
Here are two transformative nonfiction narratives that meet my criteria:
Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck: Despite the clunky title, Paul Collins' book is a treasury of absorbing stories about nearly successful quirky individuals who, after a surge of popularity, have since been swallowed by the last two centuries. (But while I assumed these colorful figures were not well known, my younger daughter said she had run across Banvard's saga in one of her American Girl volumes, from which she picked up much of the history she does retain.) I'm starting on the seventh tale now, and anticipate another absorbing journey into the world of a man who gets a burning idea in his head, often doggedly pursuing the thought over a financial or social cliff.
The titular John Banvard, first a traveling actor on the Mississippi, grew ambitious about building a "moving panorama" of the Mississippi riverbank. (Did you know there were precursors to movies called "moving panoramas"? I didn't either.) In the 1840s, he began his vast project, sketching scenery while borne along the currents in a skiff. Once he collected his pictures, he was ready to start painting his "three-mile" landscape. He devised a system with a roller and grommets and got to work.
His failure hadn't come yet--no, his show was a smash hit, with enthusiastic audiences who flocked to watch the riverside frontier cranked by as the artist rapped out clever narration to piano music. Banvard even took the show to London, where Queen Victoria heard of it and invited the showman to present his wonder to the royals. Eventually the cash-stuffed Banvard built a castle for his family on Long Island. However, "Banvard's Folly" was lost due to another obsessive notion of his that this time utterly failed, drowning the family in lifelong debt.
In each chapter of Banvard's Folly, the author parades before us another disappointed tinkerer who almost made it: the slow-witted forger who hoodwinked the experts, the inventor of a decades-in-the-making musical language; the founding father of the American grape; the brilliant N-Ray trailblazer whose experiments could be replicated by only a lucky few; and the man convinced of a subterranean layer that supported human life. Collins might crank slowly at the opening of a new story, but then the current catches us, and we're off again.
Like Banvard, the author takes us on a placid tour of wild landscapes. However, unlike the fast-talking, yarn-spinning performer, our narrator's voice fades into the background as each tableau comes into view. All we see are the unconventional thinkers interacting in their respective historical contexts. The author does intrude, perhaps, when he imagines sensory details and emotions of particular scenes. But he deftly crafts these pieces so that we glimpse only a receding arm or a hand, and then the show goes on.
In late 1944, a B-24 bomber crash-landed in Borneo, and Judith M. Heimann relates what happened next. The surviving American crewmen, scattered in the rugged jungle, all encounter Bornean tribesmen who can navigate quickly and furtively through dense forests. Cared for by these locals, the men endure, but not without challenges to their health and the looming presence of the Japanese military.
The Airmen and the Headhunters is a drama of incongruous run-ins and partnerships, the intrusion of the outside world on isolated cultures: of the headhunters and missionaries, tribesmen with Americans, Borneans and the Japanese, and a handful of brazen Australian allies with the whole cast. Without giving away too much, I was dismayed at how the island locals were convinced to play a part in the slaying of the Japanese--a part that involved not just the swift dispatching of a determined enemy, but a sliding back into ceremonial beheadings that the tribes had abandoned a decade before when many of them had converted to Christianity. Despite our morally questionable war strategy, however, along with an extended struggle for our American crewmen, Heimann's account is uplifting, hopeful, and crammed with plot twists that would make a riveting R-rated film.
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Discussion (16)
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I've just requested help to address the yawning spaces between my paragraphs.
Note: Most of the viewings in the first 45 minutes are my own, as I address editing and formatting issues.
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I did. This show is mentioned in Jonathan Raban's 1981 account of his voyage down the Mississippi titled Old Glory. Raban thought Queen Victoria might have suppressed a royal yawn as the panorama creaked along, and wondered if Banvard had sensed boredom from the throne and tried to speed up the unspooling of the long canvas. But then Raban was British himself and cynical about a lot of things. I am glad to read your alternate viewpoint, that in fact the show was, for somebody anyway, a hit.
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You know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. Great descriptions and they sound interesting.
Something’s wrong with me, though. I can’t stick with e-books.
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This is so interesting. Banvard made a pile of money off his show, so the commoners apparently loved it.
And so far, we have Banvard showing up in Old Glory, in this book named after his foolish investment, and in an American Girl publication. Do any or all of these qualify him for distinction?
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Thank you, Andrew!
When I first heard of e-books, I wasn't interested, but when I was gifted a Kindle and found out about free books, I didn't hate it. And then when I realized the screen could be propped up on a pillow and would turn itself off when I conked out, I was sold.
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