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Thomas Cahill

Monday, Nov. 13

If Henry Ford thought that “[h]istory was more or less bunk,” it’s only ’cause he never lived to read the works of Thomas Cahill, a historian who, one might argue, debunked the very notion of history.

Well, the notion of history as broad sweeps of grand things, anyway. Not content with a past bound to the study of fat heads and fugitives (ahem), of evil and ill and catastrophe, Cahill instead has turned to what was good about all that then, so that we might get a grip on a better now.

To Cahill, “history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.”

In Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (Random House), Volume 5 in a prospective seven-set series he calls “The Hinges of History,” Cahill covers the High Middle Ages, when humankind came outta the Dark of man, and focused its bleary head on women.

Dig it: Hildegard, and mistress Dangerosa, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the genetic source of Richard the Lionheart’s great height; and, yes, Mary, the be-all whose cult and worship paved the way for bestowing the dignity all women deserve.

Like his best-selling The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels; Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter; and How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Cahill not only covets History’s blind side, he also blindsides History.

And isn’t it about time that past got sucker-punched?

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Edward P. Jones

Tuesday, Nov. 14

Awards seemed to have been invented for Edward P. Jones. Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004, and his first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, not only won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway, bit it too was short-listed for the National Book Award.

With All Aunt Hagar’s Children (HarperCollins), the bestselling scribbler seems to have outdone himself. Oh, the awards haven’t yet come in — the book only hit the stands at August’s end — but the accolades sure have. Writing in the NY Times, Dave Eggers, who considers The Known World “to be one of the best American novels of the last 20 years,” says “there are too many breathtaking lines to count.” In the Seattle Times, Michael Upchurch writes that Jones “calls to mind” no lesser minds than “Eudora Welty and Alice Munro.” And these are but the tip of a very formidable iceberg of accoladation.

Featuring 14 stories, five of which originally ran in The New Yorker, this collection — like its predecessor Lost in the City — is D.C.-set and bound, to the dirt, to the pavement, and, yes, to the past. Call it The Wire on a literary tangent; Pelecanos unplugged; Baldwin rewriting The Rights of Man. But call it when you see it. That’s what Jones does. Insightfully.

See Industry for more Book Fair coverage. Book Fair coverage continues next week with capsules on a dozen other literary luminaries who are slated to read.

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