FICTION
Snowbound, by Richard Wheeler, $12.99 An acclaimed author of more than 50 novels of the American West, Richard Wheeler brings readers “Snowbound,” the biographical account of John C. Fremont’s daring venture to find a railway route along the 38th parallel to the Pacific Ocean and the country’s future.
Despite Fremont’s court-martial following the Civil War and his resignation from the Army, some of the nation’s most powerful men stand behind him. With that in mind, Fremont sends his wife ahead to California by ship, gathers some of the men who had served with him in the Civil War, and heads west over the Wet and Sangre de Cristo mountains of southern Colorado to find a land route to California.
Seen through the eyes of several members of the group, the harrowing trek slowly unfolds.
Dr. Benjamin Kern marvels at the almost-mystical hold Fremont seems to have on his men and at the logic of Fremont traveling in winter because trains will one day do the same. He’s also impressed with how Fremont chooses his men based not on their pedigree but their knowledge of the out-of-doors.
But the doctor also fears that, given Fremont’s lack of consideration for the horses and mules, he will treat the men in the same manner.
By January, the weather is taking its toll on the men. Mile by mile, day by day, hour by hour, their strength gradually flags. Yet Fremont’s grip never loosens.
Based on thorough research, “Snowbound” is a powerful story of one man’s obsession and the hold it comes to have not only on the men who follow him but the nation’s future.
NONFICTION
Theatre, by David Mamet, $22 Before David Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” he was an idealistic member of a scrappy Chicago theater company — a devotee of Method acting pioneer Constantin Stanislavski and Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Then he got cynical.
“It took me many years as a director to acknowledge that not only did I have no idea what the above were talking about, but that, most probably, they didn’t either,” Mamet writes in “Theatre,” a cranky collection of essays that take on pretentious directors and subsidized productions.
“Nobody cares what you feel,” he advises actors who are more concerned with their characters’ motivations than whether the paying audience laughs and cries when it’s supposed to and keeps coming to the theater.
Liberal theatergoers may blanch at Mamet’s dramaturgical and political conservatism: “Champions of so-called theory, whether feminist, Marxist, multicultarist, or other, in an attempt (supposedly) to cleanse expression of bias, are involved in a postmodern rendition of book burning.”
But fans of his friendlier, funnier prose collections like “Writing in Restaurants” (1987) will find his cutting wit, as ever, on point. Could one expect less from a director whose theory of stagecraft is summed up in an essay called “On the Uselessness of the Rehearsal Process”?
