A MATTER OF TASTE

I didn't care for it. I prefer the wine of Sonoma.

Though you wouldn’t guess from the title, Martha Gellhorn’s The Wine of Astonishment is a war novel in which the lead character experiences such horrors as the Battle of the Bulge and Dachau. It originally appeared in 1948 with this Bantam edition and its James Avati cover art coming in 1949. Gellhorn was a towering literary and journalistic figure who reported from Civil War Spain, D-Day Normandy, and Vietnam, and who today has a prize named after her—The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. She also married Ernest Hemingway. The Wine of Astonishment isn’t something we’ll read, because we stopped with war literature a while back, but we may try one of her other books.

Bantam Books, Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, Martha Gellhorn, James Avati, Ernest Hemingway, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

January 17

1950—The Great Brinks Robbery Occurs

In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.

January 17

1977—Gary Gilmore Is Executed

Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

January 16

1942—Carole Lombard Dies in Plane Crash

American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.

January 15

1919—Luxemburg and Liebknecht Are Killed

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.

January 14

1967—Summer of Love Begins

The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.