New Books, Old Books
Tue., June 10, 02:00 PM
“New books” is perhaps a misnomer, because I consider any book new if I haven’t read it yet. Consider Child Star by Shirley Temple Black.
This book was published in 1988, so it’s certainly not new. For whatever reason, I didn’t read it then, so I was glad it had turned up in a second-hand bookstore. Shirley Temple sang and danced professionally from the age of three and acted in movies until she was about twenty-one. I don’t think I saw her first movie, but I’m pretty sure I saw (and enjoyed) the last one. Nearly forty years after that, she wrote an autobiography.
What impressed me from the first was not just her memories of early movie-making, but the research surrounding those memories. Having developed an interest in history while she was in high school, supplemented by the political environment of living in Washington, D.C., as a young wife, she really drew the story together. Thus it was not simply, “Mr. Zanuck told Mother…”; instead she explains just what the economic situation what like in the movie business that motivated him to say that.
The other remarkable feature of the book is that the author isn’t bitter, even when she might have cause to be. Her philosophy seems to be: you can’t change the past; you work through the difficulties, and then you move on. (By comparison, Please Don’t Shoot My Dog by Jackie Cooper, written around the same time about a similar era, left me with the feeling that he retains nothing but bitterness about his career, which included acting, directing and producing.)
Child Star goes up to 1955 and promises that Mrs. Black is working on a second volume. Alas, an internet search reveals no such book; my hope is that she has completed it but reserved it because of the political and international implications of her “other career.”
Like everyone else, I am awaiting Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but that will arrive when it’s ready and not before. I can wait, because nothing I could do would bring the book any sooner.
Meanwhile, I do intend to get Hilary Clinton’s Living History, not because I want to read about Bill’s philandering, but because I believe there’s a whole lot more to the woman than just the man she’s married to. There’s a parallel with Eleanor Roosevelt, whose This I Remember, This Is My Story, and On My Own are among the best biographies I’ve read. Her husband was a philanderer too, but despite some speculation no one ever impeached him for it. Other times, other customs.
The old book I began rereading was Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, for the third or fourth time. One of the first things I look at in this kind of book is the copyright information. I need the time in order to know something about what the author was thinking. Forty years ago one could guess at the future and – in the light of what we know now – be completely and utterly wrong. (They have telephones in cabs, but no one carries a cell phone – or even a CB radio. The height of luxury was live grass instead of a living room carpet. No information as to who mows it.)
This book was published in 1961 – when I first read it – and the copyright was renewed by Virginia Heinlein (his widow), but then she did a new copyright a few years later. There are parts of this I’m not going to like; whenever Mrs. Heinlein adds “never before published” material, it’s out of character and usually spoils the ending for me.
Nevertheless, I’m looking at the background here. The greatest value of reading science fiction – even outdated science fiction – is that it makes you re-think what were indisputable facts. Some of the new thoughts arise through an iconoclast character, rich enough to move away from society and enjoy luxury as he sees it. The other source of new viewpoints comes from the Man from Mars, a human infant abandoned on Mars and nurtured by the Martians, producing a young man both wise and innocent.
Even with its flaws, this book is worth reading. As a matter of fact, it’s one of those “adult” books that, with proper supervision, can be offered to an adolescent.
Yeah, really. Be prepared for questions and discussion.
