Reviews

Recent Works by Florida State University Faculty

All Horses Great and Small

Leonardo's Horse. By R.M. Berry. 347 pages. Normal, Illinois: FC2. $13.95.

     English Professor R.M. Berry's novel Leonardo's Horse begins in 1519 with the Renaissance Man's visions of flying glasses, cutlery, onions, leeks and garlic and a kidney bean lodged in his eye. He's dying, surrounded by seemingly psychotic servants and obsessed with his abandonment of a colossal statue of a horse in Milan that has come to signify his life's work. In a parallel plotline, R-, Leonardo's 20th Century erstwhile biographer, spends a hot, harrowing day sitting with a one-eyed dog under a billboard of a 30-foot woman in a huge yellow '55 Buick Roadmaster, being gassed by Army helicopters in a failed AIDS demonstration with its own PR firm. R-'s aborted historical tome of Leonardo's life flounders into fiction as it plunges him so deep into debt and ruin that he and his long-suffering and occasionally weird wife are forced underground to reinvent their already shaky identities.
    Leonardo's Horse is deft, funny and real. In the end the novel is an unflinching stare at failure, with both protagonists eventually looking square in the eye the thought that-as one character nags and the entire novel seems to conclude-"isn't it just possible your life amounts to horse shit?"
-Kim MacQueen

 

Can't Touch This

Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. By W.T. Lhamon Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 269 pages. $24.95.

    M.C. Hammer probably won't be remembered for his stellar rapping ability, but his dancing is another story. Hammer & Co.'s moves in his early '90s videos are a hip-hop tour-de-force of some pretty remarkable moves. In Raising Cain, English professor W.T. "Rip" Lhamon notes that Hammer's moves are the same wheel-steps and running-in-place popularized in the 1820s by black entertainers at Catherine Market in New York City. Historians agree that Catherine Market, where blacks performed "Jim Crow dances" for crowds paying in cash or fish, was one of ministry's earliest showplaces. Chroniclers of the time wrote that the dances showed the "genius for contentment" of those who toiled in "organic harmony" for Massa, while latter-day critics have decried minstrelsy's inherent racism. Lhamon argues against such a simplistic view of blackface dancing, noting that the slippery nature of minstrelsy in popular culture can also work against racial stereotyping. Lhamon examines the lore cycle of minstrelsy from its marketplace origins to present day music videos, concentrating on the form's development in the 1830s. The book's learned yet conversational tone makes Raising Cain engaging whether or not the reader agrees with its central premise. His popular-culture deconstruction of the video of "Say, Say, Say," Paul McCartney's horrific 1983 duet with Michael Jackson, is worth the price of admission alone.-K.M.
 

Onward Christian Soldiers

The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition. By Justin Watson. 292 pages. New York: St. Martin's Press. $35.00

    The Christian Coalition might be one of the most misunderstood lobbying forces in politics. Interchangeably confused with the Radical Right, the Moral Majority, or in the words of Jerry Falwell, "Fundamentalists with a big F!", the group has in fact come to stand for nearly every conservative, religious, family-oriented bill on the docket. In fact, the title "Christian Coalition", and this analysis by Justin Watson, refer specifically to the 501(c)(4), nonprofit organization begun by Pat Robertson following his failed 1988 presidential bid. The CC's central mission is to bring Christian beliefs to the political forefront and restore America to a homogenous nation under God.
    The confusion is valid; in fact, the organization's chief goals of restoration and recognition are contradictory in themselves. As portrayed by Watson, an instructor in religion at FSU whose doctoral dissertation became this book, the CC aims to capitalize on the supposed persecution of evangelicals while at the same time restoring Christian values-and only Christian values-to American political life. The first stance paints Christians as victimized by religious pluralism while the second denies its legitimacy. Equally vexing are the personal politics of Robertson and Ralph Reed, the group's first two leaders, which aren't exactly homogenous. Robertson has been called exclusionary and anti-Semitic, while Reed's been credited with co-opting the idea of religious pluralism to fit the religious right's agenda.
    Whatever side you lean toward, Watson's book is an eminently fair, even-handed background account of the history, present and future of what is by all accounts a fascinating organization within a phenomenal political movement.-K.M.