Book Fever
By Marcia Loy June 20, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

A pole, a horse and a bridge

Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them from their shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you.

—William Gladstone


This week’s column features a remarkable man, a remarkable horse and a remarkable bridge.

Endurance, Alfred Lansing, 1959. One of my twentieth-century heroes was Ernest Shackleton (the other was Branch Rickey) and probably the main reason I took a trip to Antarctica last December. Shackleton had been to the continent in 1901, with Robert Falcon Scott.

They didn’t like each other. They were—if you will—polar opposites. Scott was aloof and artistocratic; today leadership courses are taught based on Shackleton’s ability to inspire men. They both experienced bad luck on their voyages. Scott perished, along with the four men he took with him to the pole. In 1914 Shackleton took a group of 27 men to Antarctica. They hoped to be the first to cross the continent. Instead, they were surrounded by pack ice that eventually broke up and sank the Endurance. This is the remarkable story of the 2 ˝ years they spent on the ice. 

Excerpt: Never was there a worse night. As the darkness deepened, the wind increased and the temperature dropped ever lower. Again an actual reading was impossible, but it was probably at least as low as 8 below. It was so cold that the seas that broke over them froze almost as soon as they hit. Even before the darkness was complete, it became apparent that the sea anchor could not hold them up into the wind effectively. The boats continually dropped off into the trough of the waves where they were swept broadside by the seas. The boats, the men—everything was soaked, then frozen. Most of the men tried to shelter themselves under the tent cloths, but the wind repeatedly tore them loose.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Laura Hillenbrand, 2001. Next to baseball, I love horseracing, always have. And Seabiscuit has always been my favorite horse. Although he ran his last race before I was born, I heard about him from my dad. This is a fascinating story of how three men and a funny little horse came together to make history. The parts that deal with horseracing in Mexico are equally fascinating.

Excerpt: They had come from nowhere. The horse, a smallish, mud-colored animal with forelegs that didn’t straighten all the way, spent nearly two seasons floundering in the lowest ranks of racing, misunderstood and mishandled. His jockey, Red Pollards, was a tragic-faced young man who had been abandoned as a boy at a makeshift racetrack cut through a Montana hay field. He came to his partnership with Seabiscuit after years as a part-time prizefighter and failing jockey, lugging his saddle through myriad places, getting punched bloody in cowtown boxing rings, sleeping on stall floors. Seabiscuit’s trainer, a mysterious, virtually mute mustang-breaker named Tom Smith, was a refugee from the vanishing frontier, bearing with him generations of lost wisdom about the secrets of horses. Seabiscuit’s owner, a broad, beaming former cavalryman names Charles Howard, had begun his career as a bicycle mechanic before parlaying 21 cents into an automotive empire.

The Great Bridge, David McCullough, 1972. In addition to writing marvelous biographies, which “Book Fever” covered in an earlier column, McCullough writes great history. The library has his The Path between the Seas, the story of the building of the Panama Canal.

The Great Bridge is, of course, the Brooklyn Bridge, the brainchild of John A. Roebling, an engineer who immigrated to America from Germany. Nothing like it had been built. It was considered the Eighth Wonder of the World when it was opened in 1883. Roebling had died in a freak accident back in 1869 and his son, Washington, had taken over as chief engineer.

Excerpt: To begin with it was to be the largest suspension bridge in the world. It was to be half again the size of his [Roebling’s] bridge over the Ohio at Cincinnati, for example, and nearly twice the length of Telford’s famous bridge over the Menai Strait, in Wales, the first suspension bridge of any real importance. It was to cross the East River with one uninterrupted central span, held aloft by huge cables slung from the tops of two colossal stone towers and secured on either shore to massive masonry piles called anchorages. These last structures alone, he said, would each take up the better part of a city block and would be heavy enough to offset the immense pull of the cables. . . . The towers, the “most conspicuous features,” would be identical and 268 feet high. They would stand on either side of the river, in the water but close to shore, their foundations out of sight beneath the riverbed. Their most distinguishing features would be two Gothic arches—two in each tower—through which the roadways were to pass. These arches would rise more than 100 feet, like majestic cathedral windows, or the portals of triumphal gateways.

Next week: a final look at history. Coming in July: more fiction. Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública. She can be contacted at marciabookfever@hotmail.com.