(Bloomsbury, $28)
John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers “has always been more than just a John Wayne movie,” said Douglass K. Daniel in the Associated Press. Yet in this new book about the deeper story behind the film, journalist Glenn Frankel has found layers of significance that make must-reading for anyone interested in the myths that America chooses to tell itself. Ford, after all, didn’t snatch the movie’s plot from thin air. He was adapting a 1954 best seller based on a Texan’s actual years-long search for a niece who’d been abducted at age 9 during an 1836 Comanche raid. When Cynthia Ann Parker was “rescued” from the tribe 24 years later, she was regarded by some as a heroic survivor, by others as a white savage. In Ford’s rendering, she simply became a secondary figure.
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Ford clearly understood that dynamic, said Stephen Whitty in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. He took Wayne, one of cinema’s biggest stars, and had him play a very odd hero—a man so offended by the idea of interracial rape that he decides he must kill the niece he set out to save. That plot choice marks The Searchers as “the most radical Western ever made,” said J. Hoberman in The New York Times. “No American movie has ever so directly addressed the psychosexual underpinnings of racism” or so daringly challenged the myths of the West’s conquest. Frankel asks us to see Cynthia Ann Parker’s story as having made an epic journey of its own, recast by each era for new purposes. His “revelatory” work brings that larger drama to life.
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”