Wallace Baine takes on history in entertaining new book “The Last Temptation of Lincoln”
Details
Thursday, July 9, 7:30 p.m. Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. Free.
Contact: Wallace Baine at wallacebaine@gmail.com
SANTA CRUZ — Well-known arts journalist Wallace Baine has always depended on accuracy and fairness in his long career covering the Santa Cruz County arts scene for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. But in his new writing project, “The Last Temptation of Lincoln,” he is unleashing his wit and imagination with a look at history that no historian could endorse as strictly factual.
“Temptation” is a collection of inventive and visionary stories starring some of the most iconic figures in history, from Abraham Lincoln to Benjamin Franklin to Oscar Wilde. These stories insert a sense of supernatural intervention or what-if speculation into the historical record to challenge many of the fundamental narratives of history with irony and humor.
What if the “Declaration of Independence” were written not by Thomas Jefferson but by a brilliant and precocious teenage orphan girl? What if a paranoid President Richard Nixon ordered a secret trip to the moon to pick up the American flag that Apollo 11 had accidentally toppled as it left the moon’s surface? What would an American colonist tell his neighbors if he were vaulted into the 21st century and then back again to his own village? Implicit in these entertaining tall tales are new ways of looking at our shared past, and of laughing at the myths we still cling to today.
Baine will discuss “Temptation” at a special booksigning Thursday, July 9 at Bookshop Santa Cruz at 7:30 p.m.
Wallace Baine has been an arts writer, film critic, columnist and editor for the Santa Cruz Sentinel since 1991. He is a two-time winner of the national American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors (AASFE) Excellence in Writing competition for his well-known Sunday column “Baine Street,” and has won several awards for his arts coverage from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA).
His work has been syndicated in newspapers nationwide and his fiction has appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader and the Chicago Quarterly Review. He is the author of the book “Rhymes with Vain: Belabored Humor and Attempted Profundity.” His play, “Oscar’s Wallpaper,” which premiered on stage in Santa Cruz in 2015 is adapted from one of the stories in “The Last Temptation of Lincoln.”