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"Cooke, John Byrne"
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On the road with Janis Joplin
In 1967, as the new sound of rock and roll was taking over popular music, John Byrne Cooke was at the center of it all. As a member of D.A. Pennebaker's film crew, he witnessed the astonishing breakout performances of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival that June. Less than six months later, he was on a plane to San Francisco, taking a job as road manager for Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. From then on, Cooke was Joplin's road manager amid a rotating cast of musicians and personnel, a constant presence behind the scenes as the woman called Pearl took the world by storm. Cooke was there when Janis made the difficult decision to leave Big Brother and form a new band. He was with her when the Kozmic Blues Band toured Europe in the spring of 1969, when they performed at Woodstock in August, and when Janis and Full Tilt Boogie took their famous Festival Express train trip across Canada. He accompanied Janis to her friend and mentor Ken Threadgill's 70th birthday party, and was at her side when she attended her tenth high school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas. This intimate memoir spans the years he spent with Janis, from her legendary rise to her tragic last days. Cooke tells the whole incredible story as only someone who lived it could.
Book
IN THE WAKE OF THE LONE EAGLE
John Byrne Cooke reviews \"Chasing the Glory\" by Michael Parfit.
Book Review
He Died With His Boots On
RICHARD SLOTKIN is professor of English at wesleyan University and the author of three schol arly books, including one called Re- generation Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. In it, Slotkin...
Newspaper Article
He Died With His Boots On
[HENRY STARR] was an Oklahoma outlaw of Cherokee ancestry around the turn of the century. He was the nephew of Belle Starr, the celebrated horse thief and outlaw, and his specialty was robbing banks, because, as his cousin Bob Dalton advises him in [Richard Slotkin]'s tale, \"that's where the money is.\" Condemned to hang for killing a lawman, Starr's sentence was commuted and he was paroled, whereupon he turned once more to robbing banks. He was shot and captured in 1915 during a daring double bank-robbery in Stroud, Okla., but he was soon paroled again. This time he tried going straight. He made at least two movies about his outlaw career, A Debtor to the Law and Evening Star, but eventually he found the lure of the outlaw trail irresistible, and he met an outlaw's end.
Newspaper Article
Philip Caputo and the Backwoods of the Heart
For a time it seems that [Philip Caputo] is merely telling a story already familiar to us from televison movies and the nightly news, and telling it no better than we have heard it told before. A reader coming directly to Indian Country from A Rumor of War might conclude that Caputo is a better reporter than storyteller. This would be a mistake. He is capable of compelling prose and fine storytelling, as Horn of Africa and DelCorso's Gallery, his other novels, demonstrate. But in Indian Country there is nothing as good as the passage in DelCorso's Gallery where he describes the eyes of a group of murderous Lebanese militiamen as \"eyes in which the fragile spark of divinity had been extinguished and replaced by a phosphorescence like the glow of animal eyes at night.\" Or this, describing the nature of the war in Beirut: \"The beast was loose in the streets-that was the fundamental truth of this war. It was the spirit of the beast [Nick DelCorso] feared, not anything so occult as the spirit of the devil; the spirit of the everlasting beast in man.\" And Caputo's most memorable character is still Jeremy Nordstrand in Horn of Africa, whom he sums up in a single, devastating sentence: \"He lacked restraint and he couldn't love.\"
Newspaper Article
Philip Caputo and the Backwoods of the Heart
IN THE prologue to A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo's much-acclaimed memoir of serving in Vietnam as a Marine lieutenant, he wrote, \"So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.\"
Newspaper Article
Dee Brown's Tale of Convicts and Confederates
The characters are an interesting lot, each with quirks and peculiarities. [Dee Brown]'s first-person narrator is Belle Rutledge, an actress who quickly becomes involved in spying for both sides, sometimes dressing herself in men's clothing. Eventually her greater loyalty swings to the Confederacy, not because of politics or ideology but because of Major Charles Heywood, the foremost conspirator and soon Belle's lover. Brown carries off the 19th-century women's writing style well, but in the end his perhaps too-conscientious fidelity to the style hinders rather than helps the story. Belle is a wonderful character, well-suited to appeal to 1980s readers. She is a double agent, an actress who has appeared in \"racy\" skits and danced in tights, a headstrong young woman unconcerned with conventional morality, yet she writes like Jane Austen. She proclaims at the outset that she is setting down her own version of the story because she is \"the only one who moved through the three sets of knaves and knows the whole truth.\" If, in pursuit of that truth, she were to say also, \"Convention be damned, I'll tell this my own way,\" no modern reader would blink. But she never shakes off her self-imposed Victorian restraints, and one result is that it is difficult to feel much passion in her affair with Charley Heywood-the central personal drama in the novel. Heywood remains remote, and it's never clear if he returns Belle's affections or is merely using her for his own ends.
Newspaper Article
Western Writers at Home on The Range
AT THE 33rd annual convention of the Western Writers of Americans, held recently in Fort Worth, Texas, there seldom was heard a discouraging word. Editors and literary agents attending the meeting reported that the popularity of the western has risen steadily in recent years and now surpasses that of most other types of category fiction.
Newspaper Article
Where the Buffalo Roam
IT IS a daring thing for a writer to trav- el to a strange land halfway around the world and tackle its most enduring myths, but Greg Matthews, an Austra- lian, has done just that, not once but twice. In his first novel, The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he tried with mixed suc- cess to give new life to one of America's best-known literary characters.
Newspaper Article
In the Wake of the Lone Eagle
SOON after his historic flight to Paris in 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew around the United States. It was a victory lap and a tour to promote aviation. He landed in all 48 states, logged 22,000 miles and had the skies virtually to himself. Now thousands of travelers fly over the American landscape every day, and most take little notice of the scenery below them.
Book Review