The Valley of the Fallen
And Other Places
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Few writers can match journalist Donald Katz’s ability to make an exotic locale familiar or transform an ordinary place into something peculiar if not completely weird. The Valley of the Fallen and Other Places gathers a pastiche of stories from around the world, each of which subtly underlines the relationship between geography and politics. Locations, counties, regions of the world emerge as characters in Katz’s panoramic cast–as fully drawn as the unusual people that occupy them–so that one realizes of each particular account, that this could only happen in a place like this.
The setting for each of these pieces–whether home or abroad–provides a resonant backdrop for Katz’s startling perceptions and cultural acumen. He paints a portrait of Spain in which people are dying of political repression and vividly depicts Italy in the throes of a postwar capitalist hangover. Katz describes Arkansas, its history of racial strife notwithstanding, as an “American cultural ark” where respect for old-fashioned gumption and the tolerance for human eccentricity have fostered a renaissance of spirit. He captures the poignant ruin of political ideals gone amuck in the image of columns of Ethiopian children being herded through the night at gunpoint, undergoing political re-education. Katz’s observations of the Sinai, where “beliefs, convictions, even hunches become howling zeal,” contrast with Santa Fe’s “philosophical cogitating and quality-of-life improvement projects” in a New Age mecca that breeds tamer but equally fervent faiths.
The cumulative effect of reading this eclectic collection is one of wonder about the mysterious and dazzling world in which we live, and the way our lives are shaped by our place in it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection of essays written between 1976 and 1992 by Katz (Home Fires), a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, falls squarely within the first-person literary journalism genre. Katz visits foreign political hotspots and out-of-the-way American places, talks to people who are often in grave danger, inserts himself into each environment as thoroughly as possible, and writes to share his reactions and observations. He is in Basque country to report Franco's death, in Ethiopia as the revolutionary forces that toppled Haile Selassie turn inward with indiscriminate cruelty, in Italy during a 1977 uprising of leftist students, and in the Sinai as Israel prepares to return it to Egypt in accordance with the Camp David agreement. Other essays focus on various American subcultures. For example, Katz explores life as a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, spends time with one of the few remaining practitioners of the art of "grappling," catching catfish in the Louisiana bayou by diving beneath the water's surface and pulling the 10-to-60-pound fish to shore by hand, and visits the rural Arkansas home of his great-great-grandfather, where the governor is a 33-year-old politician named Bill Clinton. Katz is an observant reporter and a strong writer. He effectively conveys an Ethiopia filled with pervasive menace, a Louisiana bayou governed by the homilies of eccentric, homespun Cajuns, and an Arkansas filled with a new ethos and new energy. But for all the fine writing, the collection's impact is limited because many of the stories are no longer topical Spain has been transformed, Israel battles not with Egypt but Hamas, and in Africa, AIDS captures headlines. Postscripts would have strengthened the effort.
