Shoot The Conductor

Anshel Brusilow was born in 1928 and raised in Philadelphia by musical Russian Jewish parents in a neighborhood where practicing your instrument was as normal as hanging out the laundry. By the time he was sixteen he was appearing as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also met Pierre Monteux at sixteen, when Monteux accepted him into his summer conducting school. Under George Szell, Brusilow was associate concertmaster at the Cleveland Orchestra until Ormandy snatched him away to make him concertmaster in Philadelphia, where he remained from 1959 to 1966. Ormandy and Brusilow had a father-son relationship, but Brusilow could not resist conducting, to Ormandy's great displeasure. By the time he was forty, Brusilow had sold his violin and formed his own chamber orchestra in Philadelphia with more than a hundred performances per year. For three years he was conductor of the Dallas Symphony, until he went on to shape the orchestral programs at Southern Methodist University and the University of North Texas. Brusilow played with or conducted many top-tier classical musicians, and he has opinions about each and every one. He also made many recordings. Co-written with Robin Underdahl, his memoir is a fascinating and unique view of American classical music during an important era, as well as an inspiring story of a working-class immigrant child making good in a tough arena.

This is a history, a diary, a dossier of a radical's working life and circumstances among some of the most momentous years of the century. Its pages echo with the crash of rubble, of the old regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, of the illusions of the post-Cold War West, of physical landscapes in upheaval. Cockburn's own reflections, both personal and political, are interspersed with letters from Claud Cockburn, Graham Greene, friends and irate readers. There are discussions with Noam Chomsky, dippings into criticism, Colette, transvestism, sexual manners, hate mail.

Southern Populist leader Thomas E. Watson was a figure alternately eminent and notorious. Born before the Civil War, he lived through the turn of the century and past the close of the First World War, pursuing his career in an era as changing and paradoxical as himself. In the nineteenth century, Watson championed the rising Populist movement, an interracial alliance of agricultural interests, against the irresistible forces of industrial capitalism. The movement was broken under the wheels of the industrial political machine, but survived into the twentieth century in various “fantastic shapes...to be understood mainly by the psychology of frustration.” Political frustration transformed Watson as well, from liberal to racial bigot and from popular spokesman to mob leader. In this biography, through careful study of public and private writings, and through objective and tolerant exposition, Mr. Woodward has attempted to solve the enigma of this man who did much to alter his times and who was, in turn, altered by them. “Mr. Woodward’s biography of Watson is a model of its kind. It has all the obvious qualities of scholarship, thoroughness and impartiality. It has, in addition, a sympathetic understanding of broad social movements, a mature appreciation of character, an original interpretation of economic facts and factors, an incisive criticism of political techniques, and a literary style that is always vigorous and sometimes brilliant.”—H. S. Commager, New York Herald Tribune Books “Mr. Woodward’s biography of Watson constitutes the best one-volume history that has appeared of that first crop of social ideals, politically garnered in Populism...Mr. Woodward’s biography is also valuable in that it is something more than the story of Populism. It is a striking portrait of a man.”—W. A. White, Saturday Review of Literature Includes the Author’s Preface to the 1955 Reissue.

Borders Of Blood Smoke Jensen has come to Corpus Christi, Texas, to take delivery of five hundred horses he purchased from an old friend. That's when a Mexican revolutionary, Colonel Bustamante Keno, brazenly crashes the border, slaughters twenty-two innocent U.S. citizens in cold blood, and steals a thousand head of cattle--along with two hundred of Smoke's horses. Going where the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers cannot, Smoke crosses the border in hot pursuit of Keno. The Mexican Federales capture Smoke and the others and place them under arrest. But as soon as the banditos take something near and dear to a Federale commander, the Mexicans decide that Smoke and his fellow prisoners might come in handy after all. They'll fight a fierce and secret little war the only way the Mountain Man knows how: fierce, relentless, and unforgiving to the bitter, bloody end. Because no man steals from Smoke Jensen and lives to enjoy the ill-gotten goods. Not ever.

A wide variety of characters saunter, stalk, run, and sometimes hide in these lively stories about contemporary Southerners. Their experiences revolve around the way life is felt and the way it is lived, reflecting a gap between the plans we make for ourselves and the way things actually turn out. From the jungles of Vietnam to the bayous of Louisiana, from the French countryside to Vicksburg, Mississippi, Ely's stories reveal how human beings' unpredictable, unconscious motivations will have their say no matter what steps are taken to silence them. Certain shadows fall over all the characters - especially the shadows of the Vietnam experience and the struggle between a traditional Southern heritage and the conflicting ideals of contemporary society. The characters in Ely's stories seem powerless to defend themselves against the ever-changing expectations of a modern life, and yet they gain a new humanity and depth when, with dignity, they embrace their limitations.