Page 30 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 2 Winter 2013

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REVIEWS
The Pink Nectar Café
by James Bishop Jr. ’54
New Territory Arts,
128 pages, $12.95
Reviewed by Mark Bell
Whether describing a chilling encounter
between a hunter and mountain lion, or a
miracle elixir served in a Sedona saloon,
James Bishop Jr.’s The Pink Nectar Café
is a collection of intensely local and often
dream-like vignettes drawing from the
myths, people, and places of the American
Southwest. Bishop’s narratives intercon-
nect by virtue of their independent and
particular mystery, concluding each of
the dozen stories with the refrain “Let
the mystery be!”
For Bishop, mystery is a sublime, es-
sential component one must internalize
in order to comprehend a subject with
“the sheer scale of the open West.” The
ability to appreciate mystery on its own
terms allows for a broader celebration of
the mystery that defines Bishop’s Ameri-
can Southwest, where “what is imagined
is real. . . and what is real is imagined.”
At times a journalist, at other times a
mythologist, Bishop takes on a broad
range of interests and themes. However,
his writing sharpens and his themes gal-
vanize when telling the story of Everett
Ruess, a young Californian who sought
a life of solitude and adventure in the
canyon country of Utah and Arizona.
The trope of the young man who
forsakes the excesses of the modern
world for the vast wilderness will no
doubt be familiar to those who’ve read
Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Calling
himself “Nemo,” Ruess sets off for the
desert upon graduating high school in
1931. Occasionally, he passes through
a town to stock up on provisions and
correspond with his family, sharing his
poetry and experiences in “perhaps the
most lonely and desolate area anywhere
in North America, south of Alaska.”
In 1935, Ruess disappears forever
– mysteriously, of course. His life and
death endure, however, like the other
unresolved riddles populating Bishop’s
stories; and by virtue of their mystery,
they give meaning to Bishop’s American
Southwest.
The Right-Hand Shore
by Christopher
Tilghman ’64
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
368 pages, $27
Reviewed by Mark Bell
In The Right-Hand Shore , Christopher
Tilghman ’64 returns to the Eastern Shore
of Maryland and the withering Mason
family plantation, The Retreat. Tilghman,
the director of the Creative Writing Pro-
gram at the University of Virginia, shows
that he’s a writer’s writer, a skilled crafts-
man who observes a trained patience as
he deliberately unspools the story of the
land and his characters.
The Eastern Shore is, by virtue of its
geography, a place that time seems to
have overlooked. In his novel, Tilghman
writes it as a place defined by its idyllic
isolation, where even the Civil War “existed
only as distant catastrophe and not inti-
mate tragedy; there was no reason for any
Union army to drive down the peninsula,
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse ’73
of Rhode Island recommends Robert
Caro’s The Passage of Power, “an LBJ’s-
eye view of JFK’s election, presidency,
and assassination and the early days
of the Johnson presidency. It’s a fan-
tastic book; how key Johnson was to
President Kennedy’s election; how
roughly handled he was by the Kennedy
administration; how skillfully he took
power when it came without warning;
and how with that power he drove the
moribund civil rights bill through Con-
gress. Caro really gets the politics right.
“Another is Troublesome Young Men,
Lynne Olson’s tale of the Conserva-
tive insurrection that brought down
the Chamberlain government on the
eve of World War II. Although her
subject is politics, this is really an
adventure story – very well told.”
What are you reading?
COURTESY SHELDON WHITEHOUSE ’73
On Virtues: Quotations and
Insight to Live a Full, Honorable,
and Truly American Life
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse ’73
This collection of quotations speaks
to the forms and principles of Ameri-
can democracy and laws, and to the
courage, optimism, and sacrifice that
ennoble the great American experiment.
The quotes, collected by Senator White-
house over a 20-year period, include
words from philosophers and artists
to authors and politicians to activists
and intellectuals.