So Prigohzin, the hot-dog vendor turned mercenary chief turned his Wagner Group column around on the M4 highway to Moscow, belying a few unguarded moments of hope this morning that pointed to the end of Putin’s dictatorship.

That means the kids who posed happily this morning on television in Rostov-on-Don with Wagner Group tanks will wind up looking like the Soviet novelist Alexander Sohlzenitsyn, seen here as a zek–a political prisoner–in Stalin’s Gulag.

If we are lucky, Prigohzin will wind up the way the Romanov family did in Yekaterinburg in 1918, where the Bolsheviks held them captive in an immense home, the Ipatiev House.

This is the wall of the room in that home’s basement where the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, used pistols to murder all of them.

In the decades after 1918, so many devout Russians visited the home to pray that the local communist party chief ordered it torn down in 1977. His name was Boris Yeltsin. All Saints’ Church stands on that site today, memorializing a beautiful but profoundly clueless family.

Prigohzin, a war criminal, deserves pistols but no churches. CNN ran thankfully blurred footage of his mercenaries interrogating a prisoner by smashing his hands and feet with a sledgehammer. The man did not survive Prigozhin’s boys, most of them recruited from Russian prisons.

But I was rooting for him for just a few hours on Saturday, if only in the hope that the hole his Wagner Group had left behind in Ukraine would be filled by Ukrainian soldiers.

I was reminded, too, of Operation Market Garden—in someways similar t0 but in more important ways vastly different from Saturday’s event—in the fall of 1944, where Field Marshal Montgomery came up with what sounded like a brilliant idea: Drop paratroopers into Holland and drive into Holland with British armor along the excellent Dutch roads and then force a Rhine crossing into Germany.

It was a disaster. Market Garden included two South County 101st Airborne soldiers; one, Arroyo Grande’s Art Youman, was promoted to sergeant by Easy Company’s Richard Winters for his conduct and the other, a young lieutenant, Oceano’s William Francis Everding, was killed as the Germans retook the town his regiment had liberated. After Market Garden’s failure, most of Holland, except for the south, was reclaimed by the German Army, the Wehrmacht. But the difference between 1944 and 2023 lies in the character of the would-be liberators. I offer these photos as proof.

But the Dutch thought all of their progressive, prosperous and historically brilliant nation had been liberated. For a few days, they were jubilant, just like the kids taking selfies Saturday with the Wagner Group tanks. Hitler had been defeated, or so it seemed and, for a few hours, it must’ve looked like Putin was about the be defeated, too.

And so now Vladi Putin, two inches shorter than Hitler but in every other respect his doppelganger–down to kidnaping children to raise them Russians, just as Hitler did Eastern European children to raise them as Aryans–might have just enough breathing space to reconsolidate his power and turn his attention again to the important business of destroying Ukrainian churches.

But there’s one hopeful sign, macabre as it is.

The most famous sniper of World War II was named Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Red Army soldier credited with killing 300 German soldiers who were part of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

She has a modern-day counterpart, a Marine, who goes by the pseudonym “Charcoal.” She has another nickname that once belonged to Pavlichenko:

“Lady Death.” Like her predecessor, Charcoal is Ukrainian.

I don’t think it’s possible to tell you how much I love this book. It was so inspirational and so instructive—about horses and horse-racing, about which I know little–but being immersed inside stables and jockey’s locker rooms and the Santa Anita grandstands, with smells ranging from liniment to buttered popcorn, was one of the most vivid reading experiences of my life.

What’s just as impressive as the racehorse is the book’s author.

Laura Hillenbrand was essentially paralyzed by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (her New Yorker account of her disease is haunting) and she persisted in researching and writing a book interrupted by days when all she could bring herself to do was crawl out of bed to fix a bowl of corn flakes.

Although I come from a family familiar with horses—my father and my sisters—I am not. (I raised chickens.) But the writing of Hillenbrand and of Elizabeth Letts (The Perfect Horse) was so powerful that it led me to write perhaps the best essay I’ve ever written, “Sheila Varian’s Perfect Horse,” about a “blocky little mare,” an Arab, who became the national champion cow horse in 1961.

Central to the Hillenbrand book and to its film adaptation is the great match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in 1938. It figures, oddly, in a recent event in our lives: my much-loved brother-in-law, a Naval Academy grad and retired Navy Captain, died recently. When my wife, her sister Robin, her brother Dana and my son John went to Virginia for the funeral, they encountered something I’ve heard of before. They were Californians and once that was discovered, some of the East Coasties snubbed them. Not all of them, to be sure, but there was a discernible distaste in the air, as if those who had known and loved Captain Steve the longest were pretty much Neanderthals.

The film Seabiscuit was on the television yesterday and, of course, I misted up during the final sequence when the ‘Biscuit, recovered from the injury that had nearly led to him being put down, wins the 1940 Santa Anita Derby. It’s glorious filmmaking.

But it’s not the centerpiece. For me, that would be the 1938 match race between the little California horse and the Kentucky-bred and East Coast darling, War Admiral, a magnificent athlete.

The way that race was run made me feel better about being a Californian; the way the film portrayed it—down to the elegant pre-race narration by historian David McCullough—reminded me of the mare Ronteza, Sheila Varian’s Arabian, Sheila took on twenty male competitors and Ronteza took on twenty Quarter horses in 1961 and they beat them all. There is nothing I love more than a good underdog—in this case, underhorse—story.

Forty million Americans listened to the great match race call that day in 1938. That’s because of the point Hillenbrand’s book makes: Seabiscuit was their horse, the underdog champion of an underdog people—Hitler dismissed Americans as “a mongrel race”— in the transition years between Depression and War, when they would prove that they were champions, too.

Somehow the 1942 photo below is consistent with Seabiscuit’s legacy. The statue dedicated to him was installed at Santa Anita in 1941. The following year, the racetrack became an assembly center for Japanese Americans, headed for desert camps, who slept in the track’s stables. Here, internee Lily Okuru, Japanese American— poses alongside the Biscuit. The horse and the young woman, and her people, shared remarkable similariies: They were unappreciated, sometimes reviled, banished, loyal without reservation to those who loved them, courageous in combat—whether on Caliornia racetracks or Italian battlefields—and Seabiscuit, like 120,000 of Lily Okuru’s people, were Californians.

The great American fiction writer Cormac McCarthy died today. I know him best from his Western novels and even more from the two films made from them that stand out to me: All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men.

My favorite Western writer is Larry McMurtry, whose ear for the American language is so clear in both his books and the films/television series adapted from them, including The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove. You can curl up inside a McMurtry dialogue and rest there awhile, in admiring silence, until someone like Gus McCall finishes what he has to say, just as you can in True Grit, by Charles Nelson Portis, Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger, or a novel long forgotten, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, by Robert Lewis Taylor, which won the Pulitzer Prize after its 1959 publication. All of them are Westerns, all of them fall, in unexpected ways, sweetly on the ear.

McCarthy wrote westerns, but they weren’t meant for the ear. A McCarthy paragraph is an adventure—I’m reminded of Faulkner or Kerouac—because you don’t know, when you go in, how the paragraph will end once you see daylight again. His writing reminds me, in fact—which is why I used that word—of Vin Scully’s comment on the brilliant but erratic Dodger centerfielder, Willie Davis: “Every fly ball is an adventure.”

McCarthy’s novels are stunningly visual—they are movies that run inside your head— and so they must have been simple to adapt to film, because, in a way, he’d already framed and shot the scenes in his mind in the same way one of our finest directors, John Ford, did in films like My Darling Clementine and The Searchers.

All the Pretty Horses, with Matt Damon and Henry Thomas (the little boy in E.T., and he is excellent in this film), two Texas cowboys and close friends who make the mistake of heading south to Mexico for new jobs, is a vivid example of McCarthy’s vision. It’s also one of the most heart-breaking love stories I’ve ever seen. Here’s the trailer:

All the Pretty Horses is at least redeemed a little by the survival of its protagonist, but his own personal life is about all he has left. Despite what he’s gotten himself into, you can’t help but root for Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men. Mexico, and jealous fathers, are the forces that doom Matt Damon. In No Country, it’s an even more elemental force: Javier Bardem. It’s no coincidence, I guess, that my favorite filmmakers (The Big Lebowski, Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona) the Coen Brothers, were the best choice to bring this McCarthy novel to the screen. Again, the trailer:

Since Tommy Lee Jones figures in No Country for Old Men, he stars, as well, in a third film that is not based on a Cormac McCarthy novel—it was in part inspired by Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Jones, one of our finest actors and one of our finest movie horsemen (see the street scene in Lonesome Dove when the cavalry scout is quirting Newt)—is a cowboy who takes the body of an undocumented worker, his friend, back to his village in Mexico. Along the way, he confronts the Border Patrol agent, played by Barry Pepper (the American sniper in Saving Private Ryan) who took his friend’s life. It’s a small film, with a punch, and as gorgeously filmed, for the barrenness of much of the landscape, as is All the Pretty Horses. Northern Mexico is a kind of costar.

Here is the scene from Lonesome Dove:

And here is the trailer for Three Burials:

I flatter myself in suggesting that this blog post is like a Cormac McCarthy paragraph, but the final point is the most important: I have two friends from my graduating class at AGHS (1970) who write Western fiction, John Porter and Mike Knecht, and they are good.

I cannot write fiction. I would lose the thread of my characters’ backstories by Chapter Three when, I like to joke, I’d put all of them on an airplane and fly it into the side of a mountain.

But John, whose characters are resolute and often doomed—he makes you want to follow them anyway—and Mike, whose characters grab you in the opening sentences, where at least one was staked to an anthill, don’t need my airplane. These two know how to write and they know how to finish the thread of the stories they begin. That takes time, more time, and rewriting, and then more rewriting.

Writing is easy, as the famous saying goes: You just open a vein and let it bleed onto the page.

The best part is that both write Westerns because they know what they’re talking about. John, who’s written film scripts, as well, is the manager of a Huasna Valley ranch that’s been in his family since the 1840s. Mike knows cowhorses—the best thing I ever wrote was about a cowhorse, a mare named Ronteza—but Mike writes of them with precision and simple, powerful elegance. His love for horses is deeply moving.

So these are the men who immediately came to mind when my son Thomas told me that Cormac McCarthy had died today, at 89. At 71, I can think of few friends who amaze me as much as these two.

Thank you, John and Mike, for the gift of your friendships.

Here’s Jimmy’s three-minute vacation to Rio.

Astrud Gilberto, the Brazilian singer who popularized “The Girl from Ipanema,” died this week. She’s performing the song here in 1965.

Which reminded me of another Brazilian standard, “Mas que Nada,” performed by Nossa, a French “girl group,” but the video was made in Rio de Janeiro.

I keep posting the Nossa video and then taking it down because—well, you’ll see. I would argue that the boy in the video is gorgeous, too.

But this is such a wonderful version of a wonderful song. It makes me happy.

And Astrud Gilberto’s singing is still cool, after all these years.