The Johnstown Flood

It's been continuously in print since 1968. Mine is an original hardback. Author David McCullough has a mixed catalog. But something about the tragedy of Johnstown brought out his better qualities. His movement between cold hard facts, and first hand accounts mixes seamlessly with his smooth but dark prose.

"The cold was nearly as cruel as it had been the night before. Pitch-blackness closed down over the mountainsides that crowded so close; but across the velley floor bonfires blazed, torches moved among the dark ruins, and the rivers and big pools of dead water were lighted by the fire that raged on at the stone bridge."

It’s all on Google books of course

Wayne Ude

Wayne wrote the book Becoming Coyote in 1981. In the middle of a cultural punk movement in music and literature he delved into American Indian culture. In the book he literally and figuratively takes the title into the text.

"For years I'd walked suspiciously around the idea, sniffing at it, kicking my leg up occasionally and pissing on it so I'd be able to find it again, then wandering away for a while knowing that the piss smell would help me identify it when I came back. Now I was ready to accept the idea, to piss on it not just so I could find it again, but to mark it as mine, within my boundaries."

He totally contorts, reshapes and abuses the metaphor in every way possible. It's really a very strong passage in a totally underrated book.

Max White

It was printed in 1946, after his well-received novel "Tiger -Tiger." The Book "In the Blazing Light" was about the life of the artist Goya. While unauthorized biographies of today exist to tarnish, or propagandize, at the time this book of drunken debauchery and violence was somewhat unique. Time Magazine wrote a telling review here. The title is taken from a quote on the title page:

"This was the conduct of a man who feared nothing, not even death. He, whose eyes were getting dimmer, lived constantly in the blazing light of his own genius."

Blazing light is not an entirely unique term. But using it zoomorphicly is odd. Even more oddly he may have stolen it from Sir William Jones in an article written about British Lawyers in 1830. It's in the public domain and can be downloaded here.

"His studies were so various, yet so deep; his knowledge so universal, yet so profound, and his abilities so extraordinary, yet so unlimited, that nothing that the human mind had compassed, however deep and metaphysical its researches had been, whether employed in developing the hidden principles of matter, or of disclosing the secret laws of nature, or of searching into the deep and mysterious truths of philosophy; nothing, however infinite and vast; nothing, however subtle and obscure, but he threw upon it the blazing light of his own genius, or grasped it in the powerful embrace of his gigantic intellect."