Books in Brief
Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena by Julia Reed (Random House, 180 pp., $22.95). In Queen of the Turtle Derby, Vogue writer and Mississippi native Julia Reed claims that the South “lends itself–hurls itself really–to caricature.” She builds an amusing case, describing such real-life characters as the attorney general in Louisiana who argued chickens aren’t animals; the Atlanta woman who saw Jesus in a Pizza Hut billboard; and the country singer who said his fried lobster tail wasn’t fattening since it only sat in hot oil for a minute or two.
The book’s twenty-two essays are drawn mostly from Vogue and the New York Times magazine. Particularly witty is “Mysterious Ways,” in which Reed writes that southerners subscribe to John Keats’s concept of negative capability. Southerners know that “man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” If they can’t hold God responsible for whatever strange thing has happened, there’s always that old standby, the Devil. “It’s easier than trying to figure out why we lost the war, why we remain generally impoverished and infested with mosquitoes and snakes and flying termites.”
Darker essays present the paradox of the South being the area of the country where violent crime is most rampant–and simultaneously the most religious region of the nation. Others examine the southern preoccupation with pageantry (the book’s title alludes to this), dating in the South, and southerners’ zest for country cooking. Queen of the Turtle Derby is a breezy read that helps explain just what goes on below the Mason-Dixon Line.
–Rachel DiCarlo
1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs–The Election That Changed the Country by James Chace (Simon & Schuster, 323 pp., $25.95). The presidential election of 1912 was one of the pivotal elections in American history, transforming politics for decades. As James Chace argues in his well-researched account, the 1912 contest “introduced a conflict between progressive idealism . . . and conservative values” that still exists.
The 1912 election was a clash of giants, pitting four of the most formidable figures in American public life–Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, and Debs–against each other. Chace’s portrait of Roosevelt is especially engaging. When Taft, the protégé Roosevelt had handpicked to succeed him, failed to carry out progressive policies, Roosevelt decided he would challenge Taft. Rejected by the Republican party convention, Roosevelt abandoned the GOP and ran as the candidate of a new third party, the Bull Moose Progressives, thus ensuring Wilson’s “accidental election” with only 41 percent of the popular vote. In vivid detail, Chace recounts Roosevelt’s spectacular coast-to-coast whistle-stop campaigning.
Chace’s discussion of the personalities and rivalries of these four presidential contenders is both provocative and illuminating, leaving few aspects of their private prejudices or public careers unexamined. Thus, for example, Chace discusses the liberal Wilson’s deep-seated racism, concluding that Wilson “never abandoned his condescending attitude” toward African Americans, and was “in essence a white supremacist, holding a romantic view of the courtesy and graciousness of the antebellum Southern plantation owners.” Rich in its historical insights, anecdotes, and analysis, 1912 makes a wonderful read, especially in a presidential election year such as this.
–David G. Dalin
