This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with a celebrity memoir called Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen.
It won’t surprise any of you, my amused readers, to learn that I had to Google Bruce Springsteen because, immune to popular culture as I am, I had heard of someone with this name who made the kind of music I can’t abide, but, immune to all forms of sporting culture, I didn’t know of a Bruce Springsteen who was a runner, born to do it or otherwise. Wikipedia has enlightened me that they are one and the same, and ‘Born to Run’ is the title of an album, but since the article seems only to name the numerous albums that have made him famous and rich, I am none the wiser as to a particular song that I may have inadvertently heard. The article is long, and I didn’t read all of it because I am no more interested in this person than I was before, but my eye rested briefly on the fact that he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2016.
Ah, I thought, I wonder if an author has ever received this supreme decoration for a civilian in the US…and if so, have I read any of their books?
Why yes, E B White, who wrote the beloved children’s book Charlotte’s Web received the award in 1963 from President Kennedy, and so did Thornton Wilder and Edmund Wilson, in the same year.
(Links on the president’s name take you to the list of awards they dished out, which like the oddity of our own Australian awards, makes ‘interesting’ reading.)
President Johnson gave out a swag of awards in 1964. One for my favourite modernist poet T S Eliot, who wrote The Wasteland, (which I studied at uni). You can find three reviews of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck’s prolific output here on the blog, though not, alas, The Grapes of Wrath which was the catalyst for my love of this author. A poet by name of Carl Sandberg was also honoured, and so was Ralph Ellison who wrote Invisible Man which I read way back in 1999.
Richard Nixon whose period in office coincided with the Moon Landing in 1969 gave the award to astronauts (but no scientists) and the usual miscellany of recipients (but no authors). Perhaps we can gauge the sophistication of his reading tastes by noting that he gave the award to the co-founders of the Readers’ Digest, Lila Acheson Wallace and DeWitt Wallace in 1972. Still, I can count this as one of my #6Degrees, because we’ve all read the Readers Digest in waiting rooms of one sort or another.
James A. Michener got one from Gerald Ford in 1977. I thought I’d read something by him in my youth but none of his fiction titles seem familiar. Modernist poet Archibald MacLeish got a gong too, but he was also 1st Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs which may have had more to do with it.
Jimmy Carter gave the award to playwright Tennessee Williams, and to Eudora Welty who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter.
Ronald Reagan *chuckle* gave one to Louis L’Amour who wrote westerns, but George HW Bush didn’t give any, so we move on to Bill Clinton who recognised Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, a Polish journalist and writer and Simon Wiesenthal who is listed as a Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, but was also a prolific author. Although I’ve read a fair bit of Holocaust literature I’ve never read him.
That’s five presidents who missed the opportunity to enrich my reading!
Next we come to George W Bush who awarded it to The Deputy Sheriff and Tony Blair; a baseball player, a boxer, a golfer, the founder of a cosmetic company and a pope. And Harper Lee, author of Gone with the Wind, that well-loved lament for the Southern Way of Life. I am now embarrassed that I loved this book so much, though in my defence I was young and impressionable and besotted by Clark Gable’s portrayal of Rhett Butler in the film (which I saw first). Wrong, wrong, wrong, and thank you to Jennifer et al for setting me straight! #Rueful frown. What was I thinking? Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read back in 1969 and have never forgotten it. (It also has an eye-candy leading man in the film, Gregory Peck.)
So then we come to Barack Obama, well-known for his love of books and reading. Which writers got a gong from him? Maya Angelou (whose I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is on the TBR); a Holocaust survivor called Gerda Weissmann Klein; and Isabel Allende who I read once or twice long ago but haven’t bothered since. I shall have to count her House of the Spirits for the last of my six, because authors haven’t done too well in these awards…
I was a bit disappointed by Obama’s tally. I was expecting to see those authors who are routinely spruiked for the Nobel Prize for Literature, like Don deLillo (reviewed here), Phillip Roth (reviewed here), Saul Bellow (reviewed here) and Toni Morrison (reviewed here, and more on the TBR).
Obama’s successor who shall be nameless here awarded the medal to a horde of sportspeople and favoured political appointments. Joe Biden hasn’t completed a term yet and may have a late run of authors in his saddlebags so we shall reserve judgment about him. (On the subject of these medals, that is. I have already made up my mind about other failings.)
A celebrity memoir has sparked my meanderings through the recipients of the American Medal of Freedom — that’s my #6Degrees for this month!
Image credit: Readers Digest Feb 1966, from eBay
Waypoints is an intriguing work of fiction that will appeal to readers who are comfortable with having a delayed understanding of what’s going on in the text. If you’re ok with reading what seems to be randomness (but isn’t) you will enjoy Waypoints, even if — like me — you have to read and re-read and re-read again and again to join the dots, and then discover that the author has been playing games and sucked you into tracking something that was established as trivial at the outset.
At first glance, the cover design for the Australian edition of Welsh author Carys Davies doesn’t seem to have anything to do with The Mission House. But it does: those eucalyptus leaves symbolise the ubiquity of things — and people — that are out of place. Just like the central character in the novel when he notices that these leaves are everywhere in the Indian town where he has sought refuge. Hilary Byrd feels out of place in the modern world, but postcolonial India isn’t a place for him either.
Testament of Friendship is about Brittain’s friendship with another author, Winifred Holtby, from their meeting as students at Oxford to Holtby’s death at the age of thirty-seven. But there is more to it than that: Brittain is famous for her groundbreaking Testament of Youth, (1933) a classic of WW1 literature which exposed the impact on civilians, especially women. Vera’s friendship with Winifred was forged in the devastation of WW1 when she had lost her fiancé, her close friends and her brother. Winifred’s death in 1935 was yet another loss, and this memoir was Vera’s tribute to a friend she loved dearly.
But this year, I learned via Book Twitter that Michelle de Kretser was awarded the Folio Fiction prize for Scary Monsters, (
‘Mrs Meiners has gone to get chalk’ is a shocking story… it took my breath away.
In a review of the Booker-longlisted novel An Island (2020) by South African author Karen Kennings’, academic David Atwell suggested that An Island is a useful successor to The Smell of Apples, an ‘ethically-centred’ 1990s study text on uncovering apartheid-era secrets. In 
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott (Text Publishing/Atlantic Books): 
Long, long after the German occupation of Italy and the partisan resistance to the Nazis and the local fascists, its shadow remains. And as with so much of what is unspeakable from World War II, silence reigns over painful and divisive events in Dominic Smith’s latest novel, set in the fictional town of Valetto.
Alerted to the death of notable Croatian author Dubravka Ugrešić (1949-2023) by a Tweet from 
Seasons in Hippoland was a serendipitous loan from a Bayside Library display. It has an arresting title, a moody cover image and an author name that I (sort of) recognised…
Victoriana is a country ruled by an Emperor-for-Life who is dying from an illness not officially acknowledged in a land where truth and facts are decided by the Emperor. The elite goes along with the charade. Their children are conditioned to conform. It is a land of truthful lies, where reality has uncertain meaning.
I nearly didn’t read this novel. I had a bad feeling about it based on the cover art of my 1978 Penguin edition, and then the first paragraph features a character using some truly awful, awful racist language. But because I made a hesitant decision to keep reading 
The 1959 Angus & Robertson cover is entirely different. I don’t know who did the cover art but it clearly signals the ‘noir’ character of its contents. The ‘big smoke’ is Sydney in the 20s and 30s, and this Sydney is ‘.. is a character. It talks. It works on its own. It plays fair and it plays foul.’ Niland’s Sydney is peopled by characters living in poverty, and they are not blessed by affectionate communities or loving families as in the fiction of his wife 
Chosen as a contribution to 
I’m reading some rather heavy-duty NF books at the moment, so I was in the mood to read something less demanding. As you know from my recent post about 
I wonder if the catalyst for poet John Kinsella’s latest book was the 50th anniversary of the voyage of the sailing ship ‘Fri’…
Those of us who cared about this did what we could in our own ways. We campaigned with a barrage of letters and protests; we boycotted French products. We let our politicians know about our fury. Despite generally cordial relations with France, o
Matthew Hooton’s Typhoon Kingdom is a terrific book which deserves more attention than it’s had. I bought it last year in a sale at UWAP, 
(Now I’m on a mission to source a copy of Matthew Hooton’s first novel