BiblioVault - Books about 1868-1952

Chasing Good Sense

A Boy's Life on the Frontier

Homer McCarty and Coralie McCarty Beyers

University of Utah Press, 2018

In this creative memoir, Homer McCarty adopts the voice of seven-year-old Buck to recollect his own life growing up in rugged southern Utah Territory in the late 1800s. Although Buck’s reflections are necessarily imprecise—gathered from fragments of memory and then embellished freely—the stories he tells are an honest look at life on the frontier.

In the spirit of Huck Finn, Buck embarks on adventures and mischief with his loyal friend, Earl. Naïve, eager, and inquisitive, he seeks to make sense of his world. McCarty’s portrayal of the period is often humorous, capturing the intimacy of place and family through a young boy’s eyes.

McCarty completed this work in 1948. Had it not been for a series of fortuitous events and the dedication of his granddaughters, including Coralie Beyers, these pages would have been lost. Thanks to her efforts, her grandfather’s lively, entertaining book is now available for readers to relish and enjoy.

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Intimate

An American Family Photo Album

Paisley Rekdal

Tupelo Press, 2012

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Asian American Studies. Native American Studies. INTIMATE is a hybrid memoir and "photo album" that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, INTIMATE creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal's Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis's murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.

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Old Calabria

Norman Douglas

Northwestern University Press, 1996

First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive and exciting account of adventure travel. Captivated by the pagan quality of the mezzogiorno, Norman Douglas plunged into Calabria, the southernmost and most backward part of Italy (a province that was still largely devoid of any form of modern amenity). He endured extremes of climate, scaled mountains, rode in carriages driven by villainous coachmen, and traversed remote stretches of country where murderous groups of banditti were known to roam. As Jon Manchip White points out in his introduction, it "makes good reading, but it must have constituted a protracted and frightening ordeal--frightening, that is, to anyone except someone like Douglas, possessed of a more than normal share of guts and fortitude."

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Unspeakable

A Life beyond Sexual Morality

Rachel Hope Cleves

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling clarity in the life of British writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952), who was a beloved and popular author, a friend of luminaries like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence, and an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves’s careful study opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment—until they didn’t.

Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.

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