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SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 , 2020. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ RE C
CROOKED
HALLELUJAH
By Kelli Jo Ford
Grove. 288 pp.
$26BY DIANA ABU-JABERThere are countries within
countries and one of the most
fundamental of all is the country
of family. In “Crooked Hallelu-
jah,” a collection of interwoven
story-chapters, Kelli Jo Ford
takes her readers on a compelling
journey through the evolving ter-
rain of multiple generations of
women.
The book opens in 1974, in the
Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma,
where 15-year-old Justine lives
with her single mother, Lula.
Seven years earlier, Justine’s
blue-eyed father dropped Lula
and Justine off at a church ser-
vice and never returned. Lula
relies on the precepts and stric-
tures of her faith to guide them,
but Beulah Springs Holiness
Church is tough and inflexible —
proponents of faith healing, vi-
sions and eternal marriage, to
name a few. And Lula’s daughter
is more interested in worldly
enticements than sainthood. One
day, Justine manages to track
down her missing father who has,
it turns out, remarried and had a
child. His response is to invite her
to Six Flags amusement park for a
family outing.
The very idea of letting Justine
go on an excursion with the man
who abandoned her devastates
Lula and sends shock waves
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C3A maternal
bond that
never breaks
BOOK WORLDBY ANN HORNADAYT
here was a moment, just be-
fore Lee Grant accepted the
Academy Award for her sup-
porting performance in the
iconic 1975 movie “Shampoo,”
when she knew her life had changed.
She was making her way to the stage,
and a thought blazed its way into her
consciousness.
“It was probably the end of my great,
beautiful, gorgeous 12 years in Holly-
wood,” Grant recalled recently, noting
that she was 49 when she won her
Oscar. “I realized, as a woman actor,
that my career was probably really
over.”
Grant was speaking at AFI Docs,
where she was honored at the Guggen-
heim Symposium for her work directing
documentary films, which defined most
of her career through the 1980s and
1990s. Six of those features will screen
over the next six weeks through AFI
Silver’s virtual cinema, as the program
“20th Century Woman: The Documen-
tary Films of Lee Grant.”
Now in her 90s, Grant appeared at
the Guggenheim Symposium by way of
Zoom, looking every bit as hip as she
was 50 years ago, when she was part of achapter in American cinema that
changed the medium and the business
but also reinvigorated a career that had
been cut viciously short during the
McCarthy era.
Grant had just made a smashing film
debut in William Wyler’s 1951 drama
“Detective Story” when she spoke at the
funeral of the actor J. Edward Brom-berg, noting that the stress of being
called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee most likely led to
his early death. For the next 10 years,
she was blacklisted as a suspected
communist, even though she wasn’t
ideological. “I married a communist
writer,” she explained, adding that it
SEE HORNADAY ON C3PHOTOS BY HOPE RUNS HIGH FILMSLee Grant, seen at top in
199 7, made her debut as
a documentarian in 1981
with “The Willmar 8,”
which followed women
in the late 1970s who
were striking against the
bank where they worked
in a Minnesota town.Lee Grant’s success behind the lens
The Oscar-winning actress
who was once blacklisted
is now lauded for her
documentariesBY PAUL FARHIOn her syndicated public-
affairs show in May, Sharyl Attkis-
son took a stand on hydroxychlo-
roquine: The anti-malarial drug,
which President Trump had tout-
ed as a treatment for covid-19,
had been unfairly maligned by
“the left-leaning press,” she sug-
gested. The scientific communi-
ty’s uncertainty about it? Just a
politicized debate, she argued.
As for reports of safety con-
cerns raised by the Food and Drug
Administration and other ex-
perts, Attkisson interviewed a De-
troit cardiologist who dismissed
them as “fake news” and “fake
science.”
When she interviewed Trump
himself a week later, he told her
that he’d seen “tremendous re-
ports” and “incredible studies”
about its effectiveness. Attkisson
didn’t ask for details nor raise any
questions about the fatal heart
arrhythmias that have been asso-
ciated with its use.
Whatever the underlying mer-
its, Attkisson’s report and inter-
view were consistent with much
of the commentary about the
pandemic emanating from her
employer, the Sinclair Broadcast
Group. In its national opinion
programs, Sinclair — the owner of
191 TV stations, one of the largest
groups in the country — has
stayed largely faithful to Trump’s
pronouncements about the virus.
It’s a strain of coverage seen at
its most extreme last week when
another Sinclair host, Eric Bol-
ling, interviewed a former medi-
cal researcher peddling a bizarre
and baseless conspiracy theory
that Anthony S. Fauci — the na-
tion’s top infectious-disease ex-
pert, whom Trump and his allies
SEE SINCLAIR ON C2TV network
pulls story,
still allies
with Trump
Sinclair nixed dubious
segment, but coverage
remains friendlyA retrograde, barely disguised attempt to instill fear in women
As if dragging the
country into a
tiki-torched,
kidney-pool
HGTV show
nobody asked for,
President Trump
this week
introduced his
Twitter followers
to the “Suburban Lifestyle
Dream,” which can best be
described as — let him explain:
“I am happy to inform all of
the people living their Suburban
Lifestyle Dream that you will no
longer be bothered or financially
hurt by having low income
housing built in your
neighborhood,” he wrote on
Twitter. He was referring to his
desire to repeal a fair housing
rule — signed into law in 1968
and strengthened under the
Obama administration — that
was created to make sure federal
funds didn’t support
discriminatory housing
practices. But he was also
continuing an imagined
dialogue with a very specificgroup of voters:
“The Suburban Housewives of
America must read this article,”
he’d tweeted the week before,
linking to an opinion column
bashing the housing rule. “Biden
will destroy your neighborhood
and your American Dream. I will
preserve it, and make it even
better!”
Trump, the only president for
whom “unbridled capitalism”
could refer to either an
economic philosophy or a
grammar lesson gone terribly
wrong, was telegraphing
multiple things with these
phrases. One: that Suburban
Housewives of America are the
demographic that his advisers
have told him he needs to
wrestle back from Joe Biden to
win the election. (In a recent
NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll,
66 percent of suburban women
said they disapproved of the job
Trump was doing overall.) Two:
that he assumed this
demographic would respond
well to barely disguised racial
SEE HESSE ON C2Monica
HesseJABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump wants to repeal a fair housing rule that was created to ensure
federal money didn’t support discriminatory housing practices. His tweets about it,
aimed at “the Suburban Houswives of America,” telegraphed a particular tone.