NONFICTION
The Words of Extraordinary Women, Selected and Introduced by Carolyn Warner, $12.95, paperback Perhaps Shirley Temple Black said it best: “Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank.”
Or maybe Lady Bird Johnson said it best: “The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.”
So many women say it so well on so many subjects — politics, arts, humor, success, family, faith, education — that businesswoman Carolyn Warner has collected their pithy thoughts and compiled them in a slim, useful volume, “The Words of Extraordinary Women.”
Useful, because as Warner, founder of Corporate Education Consulting, says, the right quotation can nail home your point in just about any setting.
Useful also just for the humor: “My husband said he needed more space. So I locked him outside” (Roseanne Barr); or grit: “I have never been contained except that I made the prison” (African-American poet Mari Evans); or wry insight: “Beware of the man who praises women’s liberation. He is about to quit his job” (Erica Jong); or brilliance: “Silence may be as variously shaded as speech” (Edith Wharton).
The voices span the years; the women are known and unknown. Helpfully, Warner has supplied a biographical index identifying each one.
The book is often inspiring. Every page stops you, urging a moment of reflection, as when Margaret Mead offers a reminder: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
FICTION
Nashville Chrome, by Rick Bass, $24 Fame is something you wish only for those at the very top of your enemies list, at least according to “Nashville Chrome,” a darkly engaging “reality-based” novel that might make you think twice before trying out for “American Idol.”
Rick Bass, an O. Henry Award winner, based the novel on the lives of siblings Maxine, Bonnie and Jim Ed Brown, whose peerless vocal harmonies, at least according to him, were much imitated but never matched, not even by the Beatles, who were mesmerized by the rustic trio.
So why don’t we remember the Browns? Their flame flickered and died in the early 1960s, which turned out to be a blessing to Bonnie and Jim Ed, though it was Maxine’s undoing.
Bass, who spent five years working with the Browns on the project, launches the tale in Poplar Creek, Ark., where the family, though humble, lived a life of sometimes extravagant misfortune. The novel is fairly short but richly written. There are times, to be sure, when a reader hears a loud Faulknerian echo — but there are far greater sins.
Bass has clear sympathy for those whose fate is to haunt some A-list or another. “There is no right or wrong to greatness,” he writes, “there is only the forward movement of it, and those who possess the most of it are the least in control of it.”
Yet you’re left with the impression that the desire for fame might well be considered a form of mental illness. The next time you feel the urge to hire a publicist, you might be better off hiring an exorcist instead.
