Steve Kemper’s biography of Frederick Russell Burnham, A Splendid Savage, is new in hardback from Norton. I interviewed Kemper a few years ago about A Labyrinth of Kingdoms, his biography of Heinrich Barth.
Norton’s blurb for A Splendid Savage:
A life of adventure and military daring on violent frontiers across the American West, Africa, Mexico, and the Klondike.
Frederick Russell Burnham’s (1861–1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as “the American scout.” His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors. His skills led to his unusual appointment, as an American, to be Chief of Scouts for the British during the Boer War, where his daring exploits earned him the Distinguished Service Order from King Edward VII.
After a lifetime pursuing golden prospects from the deserts of Mexico and Africa to the tundra of the Klondike, Burnham found wealth, in his sixties, near his childhood home in southern California. Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all. His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of many best-selling exotic tales, remarked, “In real life he is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance.”
Among other well-known individuals who figure in Burnham’s story are Cecil Rhodes and William Howard Taft, as well as some of the wealthiest men of the day, including John Hays Hammond, E. H. Harriman, Henry Payne Whitney, and the Guggenheim brothers.
Failure and tragedy streaked his life as well, but he was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown, where the future felt up for grabs and values worth dying for were at stake. Steve Kemper brings a quintessential American story to vivid life in this gripping biography.
According to Hyperallergic,
Researchers at the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) have attributed another painting to the hands of Bosch that was previously classified as a work by a student or a follower. The newly authenticated Bosch has turned up in Kansas City, owned by the esteemed Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is renowned in particular for its extensive collection of Asian art. Acquired by the museum in the early 1930s, “The Temptation of St. Anthony” (c. 1500–10) depicts the saint, marked by the Tau cross on his cloak, filling a jug with water and surrounded by Bosch’s classic, bizarre beasts. The small panel, which remained in storage for years, will make its public debut at the Noordbrabants Museum in Hieronymus Bosch — Visions of Genius, an exhibition nine years in the making that brings together around 40 works from collections around the world.
From On the Slain Collegians: Selections from the poems of Herman Melville. Edited, and with woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi. Noonday Press, 1971.
Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of…recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it…
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
James Joyce’s death mask, by Paul Speck (1941)
Last year, I talked to Derek Pyle about his production Waywords and Meansigns, a collaborative music project that recreates James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in a range of musical genres by all kinds of musicians. In our interview, he revealed that there would be a second volume adaptation of the Wake this winter:
Biblioklept: When do you anticipate the completed project being released?
DP: So we’re actually doing two separate editions of Waywords and Meansigns; both will be unabridged, all 17 chapters. When we first put out the call for musicians, there were so many folks we didn’t want to turn away. So the first edition will debut very soon — 4 May 2015. Then the second edition will debut sometime during the coming winter, with a whole new cast of musicians.
And so well that coming winter is here now—on JJ’s birthday. So Here Comes Everybody! Check it out.
From J.A. Cuddon’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Penguin, 1979)
Biblioklept 