Myth busting

Editor’s Note: In a bizarre confluence, all of our regular weekend writers are unable to write their regular columns this week — I don’t think that has ever happened before. Maria Padhila should be back in the saddle with a polyamory/relationship article next weekend; for now, we offer you Carol Van Strum’s latest (awesome) book review. — Amanda

By Carol Van Strum

We need the books that affect us like a disaster … . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka, 1904

Compared to even the frailest old parchments and papyrus or crumbling stone tablets, our high-tech reading devices seem appallingly ephemeral. What are the chances of digital literature being readable after two thousand years of weather and electromagnetic radiation? Of course some of them are unreadable even now, thanks to metastasizing illiteracy, and the best are quickly out of print.

To counter that trend, be boldly subversive: buy books, the real thing, new or used. Smell them, caress them, READ them, quote them, give them as gifts, donate them to libraries, keep them alive. Here are some you may never see on best seller lists or TV trailers. These are books that undermine our most persistent beliefs and certainties, and are above all great fun to read.

Everyone knows Medea killed her children. But how do we know?

The same way we know that Richard III murdered his nephews. We know it because the best playwright of the age chose to tell us. Shakespeare got his plot from Holinshed, and followed the orthodox Tudor line about the House of York, which was almost certainly innocent of those murders. Euripedes took his from Eumoleus and improved it, and according to various sources was paid five talents to make the sorceress Medea into a child murderer.

Drawn from a wealth of scholarly sources, Kerry Greenwood’s Medea: A Delphic Woman Novel (Poisoned Pen Press, 2013) stands all our certainty about her on its head. Young Princess Medea of Colchis, virgin priestess of Hekate, well versed in spells and herbal potions for healing, birth and death, enjoys a life of devotion to the Dark Goddess, untouched by any man — until young Jason makes landfall in the good ship Argo. Medea’s abrupt sexual awakening is as delightful and vividly erotic as our wildest fantasies, coupled as it is with subversive defiance of her father, the king.

Medea’s tale is told alternately by herself and by Nauplios, the fisherman and childhood pal of Jason who accompanied him on the voyages of Argo. Nauplios’s account of their voyages, also drawn from ancient sources and varying significantly from accepted myth, is colored by conflict between his devotion to Jason and his own secret love for Medea.

And the children? Far from murdering them as the Corinthians paid Euripedes to say, Medea desperately tries to save her kids from the wrath of the Corinthians after she killed their king and princess in a jealous rage over Jason’s infidelity. Seeking sanctuary in the temple of Hera, she witnesses the horror of her children stoned to death by the Corinthians.

“This sacrilegious act — the murder of children in the temple of the Mother herself — brought down the wrath of the gods on Corinth,” Greenwood notes in an Afterword, “and there was a plague, which the Corinthians dealt with by sending fourteen of their children every year to that same temple to live in mourning for the crime of the Corinthians in murdering Medea’s children.”

Medea brings a mythical figure to life, replete with the lusts and joys, the griefs and errors of judgment all of us are heir to: a far more credible and sympathetic portrait than Euripedes’ one-dimensional monster. In similar fashion, Greenwood paints an alternate, unexpected portrait of the great Egyptian queen Nefertiti in her earlier historical novel, Out of the Black Land. Both novels reflect prodigious research, seamlessly woven into sensuous, thrilling adventure stories.

Greenwood’s wide-ranging scholarship also enriches her two lighthearted mysteries series, each with a delightful and unlikely female protagonist: the exuberant, uninhibited 1920s flapper, Phryne Fisher, and the voluminous, voluptuous contemporary baker, Corinna Chapman. Supporting casts — male, female, animal and vegetable — are as varied and wonderful as their histories, from early aviation and jazz, magic and spiritualism, Great War survivors, Wobblies and Red-raggers in Melbourne to the discoveries of yeast and contraception in Ancient Egypt, and muffin recipes, diet fads and child abuse in modern Australia.

Greenwood tosses in Gilbert and Sullivan, G.K. Chesterton, Wallace Stevens, and the inimitable Terry Pratchett for a brew like no other. Healthy doses of good sex, good food and good humor flavor even the sappiest of happy endings, a perfect antidote to gloom and despair.

Any of her books is a great introduction to Greenwood, who is also an advocate for Australia’s Legal Aid Commission, “is not married, has no children and lives with a registered Wizard.” Which of course begs the question what department in Australia registers wizards, but some mysteries are better unexplored.

And then there is baseball, another source of myth and urban legend.

Everyone knows Jackie Robinson first broke the color barrier in major league baseball, right?

Well, not quite. As Tom Dunkel points out in Color Blind, The Forgotten Team that Broke Baseball’s Color Line (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013) the first black players on a major league team were the Walker brothers, who played for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884. Their brief major league careers succumbed to racist policies that separated white and black baseball for the next forty years, until an enterprising car salesman in Bismark, North Dakota, put together a minor league team of the best players he could hire, regardless of color.

In the mid-1930s, at the height of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Chrysler dealer Neil Churchill’s Bismark Grays, with some of the greatest Negro League and future Hall of Fame players, took minor league baseball by storm. The story of Churchill’s exceptional, openly integrated team and its often flamboyant members, is a startling, lively interlude in the sorry history of racism in America. You don’t need to be a baseball fan to appreciate the wild and wooly era of independent baseball that pitted local players against a prison team one day and a bearded Holy Roller club the next.

The same era comes vividly to life in Troy Soos’s Mickey Rawlings baseball mysteries, now shamefully out of print, which unfold against the turbulent, often ugly backdrop of U.S. political, social, and racist history between and during two world wars. The last in the series is Hanging Curve, featuring Cool Papa Bell and other real-life Negro League players who would later star in Bismark.

Baseball, the national pastime, mirrors the best and the worst of the attitudes and events that shaped both today’s national news and the stories by which we define ourselves.