Applebome, Peter

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APPLEBOME, Peter

PERSONAL: Born in New York, NY; married Mary Catherine Bounds; children: Ben, Emma. Education: Duke University, graduated, 1971; Northwestern University, M.A. (journalism), 1974.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Harcourt, 15 East 26th St., New York, NY 10003-4793. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Journalist. Staff member for periodicals in Texas, including Corpus Christi Caller, Dallas Morning News, and Texas Monthly Magazine, 1976-86; New York Times, New York, NY, from national correspondent to bureau chief, 1986-89, bureau chief in Atlanta, GA, 1989-94, national education correspondent in Atlanta, beginning 1994, currently in New York, NY, office.

AWARDS, HONORS: Winner, Bad Hemingway Competition, 1987.

WRITINGS:

Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, Time Books (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Georg R. Sheets, L. Douglas Wilder, and Charles Reagan Wilson) The Grand Review: The Civil War Continues to Shape America, Bold Print (York, PA), 2000.

Scout's Honor: A Father's Unlikely Foray into the Woods, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, New Republic, and Texas Observer.

SIDELIGHTS: A transplanted Northerner, journalist Peter Applebome has spent several decades living in and writing about the South. His Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture is the offshoot of a series of newspaper articles that Applebome wrote for the New York Times in 1994. Here Applebome posits that many of the South's ideas are behind U.S. thought in the 1990s. "Only the blind could look at America at the century's end and not see the fingerprint of the South on almost every aspect of the nation's soul," Applebome declares in his book. Among the topics he discusses in Dixie Rising are the appeal of former columnist Lewis Grizzard, national conservatism, racial preoccupations, country music, the gun ownership debate, and the spread of states' rights groups and Southern Baptist congregations.

In the words of David Greising, the Atlanta bureau chief of Business Week, Applebome "delivers a nuanced, insightful, and sometimes even affectionate appreciation of the South." Greising also remarked on the work's weaknesses, maintaining that "Applebome sometimes confuses coincidence with cause and effect." Karal Ann Marling in the New York Times noted that "Mr. Applebome has marshaled impressive firsthand evidence to prove his point, but beneath the slick political surface of his argument lurks a corrosive cultural crisis that has not been so much analyzed as viewed in passing, from the front seat of a speeding pickup truck." In the New York Times BookReview, historian William H. Chafe described Dixie Rising as a "thoughtful and provocative book," one that "offers a striking thesis and a searching question."

Applebome completed a much more personal book, Scout's Honor: A Father's Unlikely Foray into the Woods, which is about his changing relationship with his son, Ben. Unlike his father, who was into sports as a youth and was not a fan of nature hikes and camping, Ben fell in love with the Boy Scouts at an early age. Applebome had always thought that the Scouts were rather "dorky," and he objected to the uniforms the boys were forced to wear, which he considered emblematic of a kind of "faux fascism." Nevertheless, he did not want to be seen as a bad father, so when Ben became involved in the Scouts, Applebome dutifully joined in on the activities and was a Scoutmaster for three years. To his own surprise, he came to appreciate what the Boy Scouts could do for young boys, although he never got used to the lack of indoor plumbing when his troop went camping. Writing about his experiences with his son in Scout's Honor, Applebome not only tells some humorous and touching anecdotes about the father-son bonding experience, but also provides some history about scouting and insights about the recent controversy involving the organization's refusal to allow homosexuals into its membership.

Although a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Applebome "too easily dismisses" the homosexual issue involving the Scouts, the critic praised Scout's Honor as an "engaging book" that is a "loving and often amusing description of his son's scouting adventures." Christian Science Monitor writer David Conrads, meanwhile, found Applebome's history of scouting to be "fascinating," especially the fact that the Boy Scouts were founded not in America, but in England, by the rather eccentric—and, Applebome implies, homosexually suppressed—Robert Baden-Powell. The author also talks about two early American Boy Scout leaders, naturalist Daniel Carter Beard and writer/artist Ernest Thompson Seton, both of whom were almost as quirky as Baden-Powell. But the highlight of the book is Applebome's conversion from someone who believed in competitive sports to a father who comes to realize the benefits of a less macho viewpoint. As Applebome described his changing attitude, "I liked being in a group that . . . wasn't about whose kid was going to be treated like royalty because he had the best fastball and whose was just tolerated because he wasn't a star." In the end, becoming involved in Scouting proved to be just as important in easing Applebome's journey through a mid-life crisis as it was for his bond with his son.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 18, 2003, Don O'Briant, "Scouting As a Bridge between Father and Son."

Booklist, October 15, 1996, p. 401.

Business Week, December 2, 1996, p. 22.

Chicago Tribune, June 8, 2003, "Scout's Honor."

Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 2003, David Conrads, "On My Honor, I Will Do My Best; Peter Applebome Thought He Was Prepared for Fatherhood, till His Son Wanted to Be a Boy Scout," p. 20.

Dallas Morning News, July 23, 2003, David Tarrant, "For Author's Son, Scouting Wasn't Just a Phase After All."

Economist, February 15, 1997, review of Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, p. S11.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1996, p. 1284.

Library Journal, September 15, 1996, p. 82.

New York Times, December 20, 1996, p. C37.

New York Times Book Review, December 1, 1996, p. 26; June 15, 2003, Diane Scharper, review of Scout's Honor: A Father's Unlikely Foray into the Woods, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, September 23, 1996, p. 62; April 7, 2003, review of Scout's Honor, p. 58.

Washington Monthly, November, 1996, Jon Meacham, review of Dixie Rising, p. 51.