zorro, the wild west, and dupont

In this review, I'll tackle three historical books ranging from fiction to non-fiction. The first, Isabel Allende's new Zorro, is a good old fashioned swashbuckler with a handful of mini history lessons thrown in. The second, Larry McMurtry's The Colonel and Little Missie is a casually researched biography of "Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America". The final one I will touch on is Gunpowder, Jack Kelly's enjoyable, yet authentically-researched analysis of the history of that diabolical substance and how it changed world history.

Not having previously read any of their books, I picked up Allende's and McMurtry's new works as much to find out about their authors as their subjects. Allende's story covers the period from 1792 to 1820, when America was still young, and there was still a Spanish Empire. McMurtry picks up where Allende leaves off, giving us the Wild West and the innocence of Victorian popular entertainment that would eventually give way to movies like Annie Get Your Gun.

Zorro, of course, is a legend that has resurfaced innumerable times since he was first introduced in serial form back in 1919. From the first Silver Screen version that solidified Douglas Fairbanks' image as a swashbuckler, through Tyrone Power's classic 1940 version and the deliciously revisionist Zorro, the Gay Blade, to the latest Legend of Zorro due this Christmas, this is one of Hollywood's all-time favorite legends. Borrowing much from The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro in turn lent his cape and mask to Batman. To the classic swashbuckling elements, Zorro adds the distinction of being the defining legend of Spanish California. In turn, each remake has freely added its own embellishments, whether it's George Hamilton's tights, Mask of Zorro's blonde American cavalry officer, or Allende's Shoshone Amazon mother. Since, unlike most legends, Zorro is almost entirely a product of Hollywood, such freewheeling fictionalization is completely natural, and perhaps explains his enduring popularity.

It's where the fiction ends, that Allende falters. Interspersed not-quite-casually among the serenading, duelling, and acrobatics, are a few brief history lessons about the French Revolution, Napoleonic Spain, pirates of the Caribbean, slavery, and the fate of the Native Americans. But to this fan of California history, the lessons come off as preachy, facile, and baldly revisionist, in the well-meaning but simplistic mode of 1980's fiction. Liberal interpretations of history have no place in the romantic fantasy world in which Zorro lives.

Moving on to The Wild West, which is how McMurtry refers to the travelling circus that William F. Cody ran through much of the United States and Europe in the latter half of the Victorian era, we come to the least satisfactory of the three books. As McMurtry admits himself, there's just not much to say about Annie Oakley, and he ends up repeating himself repeatedly. In fact, he repeats tidbits from Buffalo Bill's bio as well, pointing to the possibility that McMurtry has grown too big at this point to even bother with an editor. His research is lax, relying on secondary materials, and replacing any new evidence we may expect to find in a new biography with mere conjectures, based on a youth spent on a ranch in Texas. Stick to novels, Larry.

Gunpowder is my favorite of the three, in no small part due to my equal love for history and engineering. As Kelly points out, the term "engineering" referred originally not to steam locomotives, as I once thought, but to the great siege engines of antiquity and later to the cannon that replaced them. A heady mix of battlefield history, the roots of technology in social forces, the history of chemistry, and a practical how-to guide to gunpowder manufacture, the book balances convincing depth of research into its main subject, tight integration with its historical context, and alternately rousing, amusing, and tragic vignettes that are keenly targeted at his audience. I liked Kelly's history of black powder so much, I think I'll read about white powder next, in Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography.