New from the University of Chicago Press: Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life, by Barbara Young Welke (University of Minnesota). A description from the Press:
During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry–branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.
The shock of Welke’s loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document—with its literal meaning, “the course of life”—had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children’s and families’ lives.
Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.
A sampling of advance praise:
“What a profound, heart-rending, heart-healing work of history! But Writing with Fire transcends history. It is at once a landmark account of the way institutions shaped the lives of ordinary people in the twentieth-century US and an offering of searing, intimate stories of grief and those who have summoned the strength to go on living. Welke has wrought something entirely unique: a scholarly tour de force, a moving memoir, and a literary masterpiece.” -- Dan Bouk
“A brilliant and exquisitely rendered work of history, Writing with Fire is also a revelatory exploration of love, loss, and the creation of meaning. Welke braids together three stories whose juxtaposition powerfully testifies to the inseparability of our intellectual and intimate lives. This study of life-altering tragedy and its contributions to human knowledge is a gentle, wrenching masterpiece that changed how I see the world.” -- Serena Mayeri
“From events that barely made it into one-inch news stories, from academic developments scarcely acknowledged, and from her own grief at the death of her young daughter, Welke spins a profound, eloquent, and brave narrative that enables us to comprehend lives not our own―and also our own. Writing with Fire is an important history, which deploys the creative research skills of the legal historian and the journalistic skills of the oral historian to make a remarkable literary narrative that changed my mind about how history can be written.” -- Linda K. Kerber
“Writing with Fire is a remarkable book, scrupulously scholarly and highly personal, objectively rational and deeply emotional. Welke has braided three strands of contemporary life, difficult, even impossible, to contemplate: the maiming and death of children in fire; the death of her own child and her response to that death; and the course of twentieth-century professional life, which has come to define the contemporary academy and dictate the disciplined subjectivities deemed appropriate to its purposes. Placed amongst those purposes, Welke’s book seems strange, even awkward. How can these strands of life, these emotions, these realities, belong among the discourses of dispassion and data we have been taught to practice? In fact, our estrangement is Welke’s greatest achievement. There are no neat resolutions here, no tidy explanations of lives damaged or destroyed while worlds spin on regardless. But as the fragile strands she presents for our inspection entwine, and if we are patient, perhaps a new and different sensibility will awaken, in which unspeakable pain can yet become knowledge for those who remain.” -- Christopher Tomlins
More information, including the TOC, is available here.
-- Karen Tani
