Sunday, December 17, 2006

Myth Makers

"There are men, and there are legends, and in rare instances the two converge," writes Buddy Levy in American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Berkley, $15). That was certainly true for Davy Crockett. Born in the disputed territory of Tennessee in 1786, he "wrestled bears, spun yarns, managed to get himself elected to offices for which he was only dubiously qualified, and perished, achieving martyrdom and immortality," at the Alamo. Levy recounts Crockett's eventful life as well as examining his transformation into myth. At the frontiersman's death, he had already been the subject of a play, an unauthorized biography and a newspaper serial. Just two months after the Alamo, his own publishers released a fake diary that they claimed had been discovered among the fort's ruins. More than 100 years later, American kids went nuts for Fess Parker's version of the man. "Literally everything went Crockett," writes Levy, "dining sets, lunchboxes, thermoses, and ice cream cartons, pajamas and bear rugs and chairs, puzzles and game boards and tricycles and bicycles, guitars and fiddles and even barbaque [sic] grills 'for Frontier Living.' " By the end of the craze, Crockett had become "the most commercially lucrative individual figure in history, bigger even than GI Joe, Superman, and Spider-Man."

Even more so than Crockett, William "Buffalo Bill" Cody crafted his own legend. "A child of the frontier," writes Louis S. Warren in Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (Vintage, $16.95), "he grew up by turns Pony Express rider, prospector, trapper, Civil War soldier, professional buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and cavalry scout." Or so he claimed. Warren takes as his subject how "Cody adapted and reconciled life to story" as he invented himself as a frontier impresario, creating the Wild West show and taking it around the world. Cody deliberately blurred the line between fact and fiction, manufacturing incidents in order to dramatize them in his show. Take, for instance, his response to the news of George Armstrong Custer's death, at a time when Cody had taken a break from the stage to serve as an Army scout: "Dressed in a black velvet stage costume, he swooped into a skirmish with a Cheyenne war party, killing and scalping a Cheyenne subchief named Yellow Hair. . . . Within months, Cody was reenacting the episode in a play he commissioned . . . wearing the same stage velvet and waving the real scalp at the drama's climax." By the time of his death in 1917, writes Warren, Cody had become "both the premier symbol of the natural frontier and a hero of artifice among the most modern people on earth."

Robert E. Lee had little to do with his own hagiography. A wounded South and conciliatory North needed to elevate him to the pantheon of American heroes. "As an icon," writes Roy Blount Jr., in Robert E. Lee: A Life (Penguin, $13), "he has enabled Americans of the South and also of the North to feel that somehow the American family was too decent to have brought upon itself four years of domestic carnage." The man who led the Confederate Army "was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. In theaters of grinding, hellish human carnage he kept a pet hen for company. He had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle. None of this seems to fit," complains Blount. In this brief biography, Blount attempts to suss out Lee's pe{scheck}rsonality, which Robert Penn Warren once called as "smooth as an egg." Lee "appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy. Not according to him. According to him, he was not fine enough."

· Robert Farris Thompson's Tango: The Art History of Love (Vintage, $15.95) is "an energetic, vivid account of the music, movement, poetry and songs that evolved into the beautiful, difficult and sensual dance that is tango today," writes Liz Lerman.

· A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus (HarperPerennial, $13.95), a National Book Award-nominated novel about a bitter post-9/11 divorce, is "pungent yet oddly lovely," writes Jonathan Yardley.

· "Rich in anecdote yet sparingly written," Richard Reeves's President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (Simon & Schuster, $16), writes Jon Meacham, "puts us in the room with a president who lived what Reeves calls a 'life imagined.' "

· Heroes: A History of Hero Worship, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Anchor, $16.95), according to Jennifer Michael Hecht, is "gloriously packed with meaningful curiosities, the kinds of things that make a historical moment flash into being."

-- Rachel Hartigan Shea