Allegory of the Cave

Every once in awhile a movie comes along that truly captures the imagination, and for me that was Beasts of the Southern Wild. It is gratifying to see it has received so many Oscar nominations, including best actress for young Quvenzhane Wallis.

This film is startling in so many ways. Foremost is the humane way Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar have depicted the extreme poverty of this bayou community. It makes you squeam watching little Hushpuppy make a meal for herself when she can't find her father, and flinch at her pain when stuck by a catfish her father forces her to strike with her tiny fist. Yet, this little girl stands tall, literally growing in front of your eyes from beginning to end of this film. Innocence gives way to world-wise young lady with the full impact of the storm is felt.

While this film is ostensibly a response to Katrina, the director breaks apart any sense of a conventional time and place, reminding me a little of Faulkner's The Old Man from If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. The local teacher (Miss Bathsheba) fills little Hushpuppy's head with antediluvian aurochs that lead her to imagine a post-climate-change world that she has inflicted upon the community by striking back at her father, in which these huge porcine beasts have been unlocked from the Antarctic ice and set free on her bayou plain. But, unlike Malick's dinosaurs in The Tree of Life, these beasts fit with the semi-hallucinogenic world Hushpuppy lives in.

Zeitlin and Alibar have gone with non-actors from the local community, giving this film an authenticity few others have achieved. There are holes, some gaping, as the writers grope to try to connect the "Bathtub" community with the outside world. It probably would have been better to keep them isolated in their semi-primitive state like the band of cave dwellers Miss Bathsheba alludes to. I was surprised to see A.O. Scott view it is as Spielbergian, on a budget, as this film is about as un-Spielbergian as you can get. However, I did question the sentimentality Zeitlin squeezed from some of the scenes.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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