Lost Tribes and Promised Landsi The Origins of American Racism
by Barbara Klaw
by Ronald Sanders Little, Brown, $15.00
Occasionally a new work of history appears that is so adventurous and elegant that the reader is awed. This is such a book. Ronald Sanders’ subject is how the Europeans who settled the New World had acquired the prejudices against Indians, blacks, and Jews that they brought here with them. In searching out the roots of American racism, he ranges back hundreds of years and among many peoples with a confidence and immediacy that seem to lay the past open before us. One intriguing speculation that is explored here is that Columbus’ family may have been conversas—Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity.
Not light reading, this one, but richly rewarding.
The Faustball Tunnel, German POWs in America and Their Great Escape
by Barbara Klaw
by John Hammond Moore Random House, $8.95
When you dig a secret escape tunnel, what do you do with the dirt? One group of German POWs held at Papago Park, Arizona, during World War II solved the problem by building a faustball (a form of volleyball) court inside their compound. Their guards were delighted; it was the first cooperative gesture these particular die-hard Nazis had made. On the twenty-third of December, 1944, three months after work started on the athletic field, twenty-five German naval officers and seamen wriggled through the 178-foot tunnel to freedom.
Their freedom turned out to be brief, but this intriguing account, drawn from newly declassified military records, reminds us of how little we know about the half-million POWs held in the U.S. from 1942 to 1946. The peculiar cat-and-mouse game between captive and captor—all conducted within the confines of the Geneva Convention—is revealing and entertaining.
The States and the Nation
by Barbara Klaw
Published by W. W. Norton and the American Association for State and Local History. Each volume has a 16-page photographic insert., maps, and a bibliography. Just published: Arkansas by Harry S. Ashmore; Illinois, by Richard J. Jensen. $8.95 each
Bicentennial boredom set in for most of us long before the end of 1976, but there are some Bicentennial projects still in the works that are too good to dismiss. This series of state histories is one. Forty-three of these small, attractive books have appeared so far. The authors are natives or devotees of their states, and have written lively and warm interpretive essays rather than formal histories. By the end of 1978, the series will be complete—fifty-one matching volumes. (Washington, B.C., is the extra one.)
The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics
by Barbara Klaw
Edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams. Co-published by Smithsonian Institution Press and Harry N. Abrams. Over 750 plates, including 90 pages in color. Hardcover, $27.50; paperback, $12.50
Newspaper comics—typically irreverent and blunt—were beloved by the American public long before they were recognized as a serious native art form. One of the problems, according to the useful text that accompanies this great feast of comics, is that the early strips tended to appear in newspapers that bettereducated Americans didn’t read, such as the Hearst papers. Art critic John Canaday, who writes the foreword to this book, says that he followed his favorite comics as a boy in Texas by pawing through his neighbor’s trash, because his father wouldn’t allow a Hearst paper in the house.
Nowadays, comic strips are admired for their narrative power, their artistic originality, and the inventiveness of the language that bubbles out of their dialogue balloons. (Goon, heebie jeebies, horse feathers, zowie, and glug were all originally comic-strip phrases.) In the years covered in this collection, 1896 to the present, an astonishing range of artists have tried their hands at drawing comics; John Held is here, and the New Yorker cartoonist Rea Irvin, and even Dr. Seuss. The connoisseur’s comic is unquestionably Krazy Kat, that gentle soul who meandered through George Herriman’s strip for thirty-one years.
In terms of both nostalgia and discovery, this sumptuous collection is positively seductive.
