In Review: April 21, 1999
First Arkansas, then everywhere
A biography of mogul Sam Walton by Bob Ortega '80
In Sam We Trust
Bob Ortega '80
Times Books, $25.95
Bob Ortega '80 has written about Wal-Mart for the last few years as
a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. His new book,
In Sam We Trust, on Sam Walton and Wal-Mart, is a hard-hitting, thoroughly
researched look inside a huge corporation and a social history of discount
retailing in America. It is also a portrait of a complicated, wildly shrewd
and successful entrepreneur whom we come to admire, even as the company
he created wipes out half the merchants on America's Main Streets.
Ortega keeps the story skimming along, spinning lively anecdotes, every now and then drawing back for analysis. Occasionally he stops speaking softly and, in making a point, wields his prose like a club, but mostly he lets his stories envelop us, gracefully allowing their meanings to emerge.
We follow the young Sam Walton, with his aw-shucks Southern manner and practiced naiveté, marching uninvited into the headquarters of retail chains, pitching his big idea for a huge discount chain store. Within moments, Walton is bounced back out on the street.
We see Walton at the grand opening of his second Wal-Mart in 1964. He's bought two wagon-loads of watermelons cheap. They crack in the hot Arkansas sun. The donkeys meant for kiddie rides are only good for dung, which oozes with watermelon juice through the parking lot and is tracked into the new store by the hundreds of customers who show up.
We trace the rise of Walton's would-be foil, Joe Antonini, a small ball of self-made corporate charisma, who takes the chairmanship of the ailing K-Mart chain in 1987 with high hopes all around. We watch Antonini lose touch with his stores as he grows enamored of his civic awards, the country clubs he's gotten into, and his starry-eyed retail schemes. Meanwhile, core K-Mart stores -- poorly stocked and poorly run -- keep crumbling. Eight years later, Antonini's shareholders throw him out.
We trail Walton on visits to his growing network of stores. (He visited them with delight, even on vacations.) He browses the aisles, jots down clerks' advice about ways to make the store work better -- a dictator who welcomes criticism. Often, he writes the clerks' suggestions into company policy.
We also sit in on meetings of a New England organizer planning grassroots David-and-Goliath tactics to block Wal-Mart. We stand inside Nicaraguan sweatshops, doors locked to keep workers in until they meet their day's quotas, supervisors shouting and occasionally swinging sticks at the children cutting fabric that Wal-Mart will eventually sell as "Kathy Lee" dresses. Later, we see David Glass, Walton's successor as CEO, grilled by an NBC reporter about Wal-Mart's selling sweatshop goods. Glass fumbles the interview. Wal-Mart executives have a public relations disaster on their hands that drags on for several years.
We watch Walton hula down Wall Street the fall day in 1982 when Wal-Mart's pretax profits reach 8 percent of sales. We watch Walton's Wal-Mart, the most advanced, efficient expression of Americans' desire for more and cheaper goods, become the country's third largest corporation, behind only General Motors and Exxon.
The rhythm and verve of Ortega's storytelling so sweeps us up that only after we have turned the last page do we reflect on how many tough tangles and contradictions he's led us to consider. By then, we feel deeply, wonderfully ambivalent: we fear what Wal-Mart's wild success portends for America, and at the same time, we can't help liking this man from Arkansas, and feel curiously inspired to follow his entrepreneurial lead.
-- Field Maloney '97
The Face of Russia
James H. Billington '50
TV Books, $29.95
In The Face of Russia: Anguish, Aspiration, and Achievement in Russian
Culture, James H. Billington '50, the author of three previous books
on Russia, presents a panoramic view of the country's accomplishments and
travails in painting, architecture, literature, music, and film. The book
is intended as an accompaniment to the PBS television series of the same
title, which is narrated by the author, but it can be read and appreciated
independently. Billington, a Rhodes scholar who taught at Harvard and Princeton
over a period of 16 years and is now the Librarian of Congress, has spent
a good deal of time in Russia and met many artists and intellectuals there.
Billington structures his story around one overarching thesis, which at first seems simplistic and general, but which becomes insightful and convincing by the book's end. He argues that Russian creators -- artists, architects, writers, composers, and filmmakers -- have passed, historically, through three identifiable stages of development. First, they have adopted an exemplary model of a new art form from a foreign civilization; second, they have come up with an original and stunning interpretation of their own; and third, they have tended to break apart their newly created form and to fall -- energy spent and spirit broken -- into a self-destructive pattern.
Billington traces the herculean ambitions and tragic ends of five renowned Russians -- icon painter Andrei Rublev, architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli (who built both the Winter Palace and Tsarskoe Selo), writer Nicholas Gogol, composer Modest Mussorgsky, and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Gogol, in the middle of the night of February 12, 1852, burned the manuscript of Part Two of Dead Souls, in which he had tried to depict the evolution of the main character, Chichikov, into a positive hero. The next day, Gogol stopped eating, and eight days later he died of starvation. Of his perceived failure in creating a positive hero he wrote, "Until you become like them yourself, until you acquire a few good qualities by your perseverance and strength of character, everything you produce by your pen will be nothing but carrion."
At the same time, The Face of Russia also follows the threads of the three perhaps most significant influences on that nation's arts -- Russian Orthodox Christianity; the harsh climate and Russians' reverence for it and the natural world; and the languages, political systems, and cultures borrowed from the West. Billington shows how Stalin appropriated the form of the icon to help strengthen the mythologies of the Soviet state, and how the emphasis that Russians place on the religious notion of forgiveness continually reasserts itself -- in Russian Orthodox communion, in Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov," in Tchaikovsky's opera Mazepa, and in Yeltsin's plea for forgiveness from the parents of three young men who died accidentally during the August coup of 1991.
At the book's end, Billington suggests how the stages of development in Russia's arts might inform the course of her future. The reader is left with a palpable sense of the mystery that pervades Russian culture and of the wonder and unknowability of both past and future.
-- Christen Kidd '96
Wide-ranging essays by Garrett
Bad Man Blues: The Portable George Garrett
George Garrett '52 *85
Southern Methodist University Press, $19.95
George Garrett '52 *85 doesn't mind when people call him "the dean
of American historical novelists." But after more than 40 years as
a writer -- most of them spent on college campuses -- he sees the wry side
of the honor.
"Dean?" he says, laughing. "That sounds awful, like an administrator."
Not that the amiable Garrett is complaining. A few months shy of his 70th birthday, he is just making the point that he sees himself in slightly different terms than the imposing "dean" might imply.
"I think of myself as a writer who happens to write some books that are set in other times," he says.
Garrett is speaking by telephone from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. The long-distance conversation is a bit of a concession -- the telephone interview, he once joked, is "the lowest form of interview" -- but he shows no signs of impatience with it.
A week earlier, Garrett had sent a 10-pound box of his books to Princeton along with a hand-written note asking only that they eventually be returned ("by the cheapest and slowest means"), a strikingly modest gesture in an age in which writers often arrange interviews through publicists and expect to be treated like a cross between Leonardo DiCaprio and a crown prince of Luxembourg. That sort of unpretentiousness has endeared him to other writers, who praise his good nature as highly as his celebrated "Elizabethan trilogy" of historical novels, Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun.
Novelist Richard Bausch rightly describes Garrett's new Bad Man Blues as the work of "a wonderful, complex, engaging, outrageous, mischievous, and deeply wise man" with a talent for creating a beguiling array of voices. But that does not tell the whole story of this rich collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which amounts to an index to the gifts and interests of an author whose passions range from Renaissance literature to professional boxing.
For all its literary craftsmanship, Bad Man Blues is a witty book, particularly in its nine brief essays on universities, including Rice, Wesleyan, and Princeton. Garrett's Tiger stripes run deep: His middle name is Palmer, and he may be distantly related to Edgar Palmer '03, who gave the old Palmer Stadium to the university. He received a master's degree from Princeton in 1956 and a Ph.D. in 1985, he has served as a resident fellow in creative writing and as a senior fellow of the Council of the Humanities, and his daughter Alice is a member of the Class of 1982.
That background allows him to write with humor and authority about topics as varied as Joe Brown, his beloved coach on the now-defunct Tiger boxing team, and his efforts to get by as a visiting teacher in Princeton (a "tough town to have no money in"). Garrett recalls with droll amusement that, in the '70s, his students took their work almost too seriously: "All the students at Princeton seemed to be very well trained as critics. They went after symbols like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit." And yet one of those students was not too self-conscious to tape a message to his office door, explaining that she could not keep an appointment with him because "my analyst has just died."
In other essays in Bad Man Blues, Garrett writes engagingly about subjects that include football, storytelling, and his father, a fearless small-town lawyer who effectively destroyed the Ku Klux Klan in central Florida. In his short stories, he evokes places and times that extend from London in 1626 to the United States in the era of Michael Jackson.
That's about as wide a range of forms and subjects as you are likely to find in a modern collection. Yet for all its thematic diversity, Bad Man Blues has a satisfying unity rooted in a moral seriousness that does not preclude moments of hilarity. Throughout the book, Garrett shows a refreshing ability to laugh at himself without ceasing to view writing as a vocation instead of a job.
"Something I always try to get across to student writers is that what they are doing and trying to do is only different in degree, not kind, from the art and craft of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare," Garrett says. "However briefly and weakly, we share the experience of all the great writers of all time. Whether we succeed or fail is not irrelevant, but neither outcome can deprive us of the privilege and honor we have enjoyed in sharing the experience of creation, of telling, with all the storytellers who ever were or will be."
-- Jan Harayda
The life of a female African-American entrepreneur
A number of years ago Bill Sydnor '69, writer and executive producer
of the documentary film Our Inspiration: The Story of Maggie Lena Walker,
returned from Los Angeles to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. He was
in search of a film subject, and he hoped to find a local story with national
appeal. His mother suggested Maggie Walker, an African-American entrepreneur.
Sydnor had written his senior thesis on African-American leadership in Virginia,
and his mother's idea interested him. He gained access to archived documents
on Walker, and as he read her inspirational speeches and learned about her
remarkable rags-to-riches life, he knew he'd found an ideal subject.
Walker (1867-1934) was born out of wedlock to a white journalist and an illiterate former slave. Despite childhood poverty, she attended school and trained to be a teacher. She also joined the Order of St. Luke's, a benevolent society set up to take care of the sick, widowed, and orphaned, of which she eventually became grand secretary. In that position she started a newspaper, a department store, and a bank: she was the first woman founder and president of a chartered bank in the U.S. and probably the world. She worked to advance women's rights and received letters and visits from the likes of Booker T. Washington and Eleanor Roosevelt.
In Our Inspiration, which was aired by Central Virginia Public TV, Sydnor uses Walker's speeches and writings, hymns and traditional African-American songs, photographs, maps, and other historical documents to tell the story of Walker's life. This wealth of background information helps put her achievements in the context of larger political and national trends: African-American poverty in post-Civil War Richmond, the legislation of segregation in 1890s Virginia, progressivism, the women's suffrage movement, and the Harlem Renaissance all touched Walker's life.
In addition to her public successes, the documentary also details her personal tragedies: the death of her stepfather when Walker was eight, which left the family penniless; the death of her husband, Armstead, who was shot accidentally by their son Russell; and Walker's poor health, which crippled her in later life.
In photographs Walker resembles a well-to-do Victorian matron, but her opinions often sound ahead of their time. About women working, Walker said: "A woman's activities should be no more circumscribed to domestic duties than it is sensible to say every man should be a merchant. Let a woman choose her own vocation." She encouraged African Americans to support African-American businesses, and she had great faith in the power of capitalism to change society: "Business is this civilization's greatest science. Let us form our own St. Luke businesses and compete with the Anglo Saxon, not only for the sake of self-preservation, but for grasping the meaning of the civilization in which we live." What emerges is a picture of a woman who inspired others through her personal successes and her lifelong commitment to bettering civilization.
-- Tamsin Todd '92
The Interceptor, by Richard Herschlag '84 (Ballantine, $6.50) -- I approached this book with some trepidation. Generally, I do not think about sewers. I also have trouble envisioning any of the engineers I know as a Tom Clancy-esque action hero. Perhaps this is a measure of (1) blithe artsy ignorance of functional things and (2) the character of the engineers I know (sorry), but suffice it to say, Herschlag's thriller challenged my preconceptions. Professional thrillers, as a genre, have moved beyond the Crichton doctors and Grisham lawyers -- and there's room for Herschlag, a former Manhattan borough engineer, to write a detailed page-turner about a Manhattan borough engineer who uncovers a wide-reaching political conspiracy. Murder, sex, engineers, and lots of thought-provoking information on sewers: who couldn't give this first novel a hearty endorsement?
-- Lesley Carlin '95
Romantic Weekends: New England, by Patricia and Robert Foulke '52 (Hunter, $16.95) -- Without a budget to visit the many attractive-sounding spots in this guide, it is impossible to adequately assess the Foulkes' recommendations. However, this guide from a couple who have been together for 45 years and written about travel for 20 is sure to be useful. To appeal to a broader audience, the Foulkes loosely define a romantic weekend as "a weekend spent outside your normal routine of home and work" that stimulates your imagination and provides relaxation and renewal. Aside from inns, they recommend places to eat and things to do.
-- Lolly O'Brien
Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet Union and Europe, by Rensselaer W. Lee III '59 (St. Martin's, $26.95) -- A look at illegal trade in nuclear materials in the Newly Independent States and Europe and its threats to international security and stability. Lee is an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Design for Manufacturability Handbook, by James G. Bralla '50 (McGraw-Hill, $125) -- The second, revised edition of this resource details the principles and procedures for designing products to ensure easy and economical manufacture. Bralla is a manufacturing consultant.
Taken for Granted: The Future of U.S.-British Relations, by Philip Seib '70 (Praeger, $35) -- Examines the future of Anglo-American relations in the context of post-Cold War developments. Seib argues that the U.S. and Great Britain would benefit from a reappraisal and reaffirmation of their historical ties. He is a professor of journalism at Southern Methodist University.
Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era, by Herman Belz '59 (Fordham, $18) -- An interdisciplinary analysis of the political and constitutional climate during the Civil War. The author studies Lincoln as the focus of contemporary controversy and subsequent historical debate over the character of Civil War Constitutionalism. Belz is a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park.
The Liberal Civil War: Fraternity and Fratricide on the Left, edited by Jim Tuck '51 (University Press of America, $39.50) -- Explores the internal struggles and external actions of the liberal community, including labor unions and Americans for Democratic Action, during the early years of the Cold War. Tuck is a historian and syndicated columnist.
From Revenue Sharing to Deficit Sharing: General Revenue Sharing and Cities, by Bruce A. Wallin '70 (Georgetown, $19.95) -- A historical account of the General Revenue Sharing Program which also argues for reconsideration of a program of federal unrestricted aid. Wallin is an assistant professor at Northeastern University.
The Valuation of Technology: Business and Financial Issues in R&D, by F. Peter Boer '61 (John Wiley & Sons) -- A professional reference guide to the financial issues relating to research and development and to analytical tools for the assessment of new technologies. Boer is a professor of management and engineering at Yale.
Plastics Compounding: Equipment and Processing, edited by David B. Todd *52 (Hanser Gardner, $128) -- A handbook presenting comprehensive treatment of the various types of plastics-compounding equipment available and a description of polymer processing. Todd is a chemical engineer.
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