BOOKS

The Thousand Days

Reeves, a political reporter in the 1960s, looks at the man and the dynamics of his Presidency at length and in depth. He finds Kennedy keen but careless, with a “love for chaos, the kind that kept other men off-balance.” The author’s fascination with his subject is contagious as he limns the President’s handling of the daily crises that are so much part of the job. Reeves writes that “what I searched for was what he knew or heard, said or read.” And as the incidents of courage and cruelty mount up, he refuses to explain away Kennedy’s contradictions. By the end, after keeping his guard up against the famous Kennedy charm for nearly eight hundred pages, Reeves arrives at a true liking for the thirty-fifth President, a well-rounded appreciation for him that only this much vivid detail could support.

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The Bird Man

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the fauna of the American interior were as novel and exciting a scientific frontier as the human genome is today. John James Audubon made a lifelong project of becoming the artist-ornithologist who would reveal the birds of America to the world. The obsession took up most of his years, and when he wasn’t studying birds and shooting them and painting them, he was journeying through Scotland, England, and France trying to sell subscriptions to his monumental work, dressed in the garb of a frontiersman as he called on personages from Louis Bonaparte to Sir Walter Scott. His story, absorbingly told by the novelist Shirley Streshinsky, is one of a man who made one aspect of the vanishing wilderness his life.

The hundreds of watercolors he painted for his great project will for the next two years be on tour in a major exhibition that reaches, among other places, the Art Institute of Chicago next May, the New-York Historical Society in May 1995, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in February 1996. In conjunction with the show, an extremely handsome volume of reproductions of the watercolors has just been published, with 470 full-color images and informative essays. Engrossing short texts face most of the full-page plates and point out what the pictures show about both the artist and the birds he was portraying. The quality of the reproductions is exemplary.

Hard Times

Why do we need another survey of the Depression years? For one thing, The Great Depression is the handsomely illustrated companion volume to the fine public television series of the same name. For another, the book seems entirely relevant; we watch the tinkerers of the 1930s scramble to address terrible problems, not knowing that their unborn successors will be plowing the same seas a half-century later. “Boys,” says the New Deal administrator Harry Hopkins, “this is our hour. We’ve got to get everything we want … now or never. Get your minds to work on developing a complete ticket to provide security for all the folks of this country up and down and across the board.” Finally, read this book because T. H. Watkins is a fine writer with perfect pitch for the telling detail. He seamlessly blends official and people’s history through the use of resonant quotation. Listen to FDR bluntly tell a critic why he agreed to finance Social Security through a payroll tax: “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and the unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

IN THIS ISSUE

Gene Smith, whose series “American Characters” makes its debut in this issue, is the author most recently of American Gothic (Simon and Schuster), the grimly fascinating, headlong tale of the Booth family, which gave America its greatest acting dynasty- and its darkest crime.

The Wounded River: The Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D. (Michigan State University Press, 241 pages) is an engrossing chronicle of that struggle told through a young surgeon’s letters. It is featured in this month’s “The Life and Times.”

A Lean Lincoln

As an introduction to the sprawling field of Lincoln studies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely, Jr., offers a compact one-volume biography that gets the sixteenth President engaged to Mary Todd by page 32 and into the White House less than thirty pages later. Even at this pace Neely has real authority as he shows that Lincoln’s politics were practical and his ambition was vaulting but without any grand object through the early years. “At one critical juncture,” writes Neely, “[Lincoln] seriously weighed the choice between becoming a lawyer or a blacksmith!.” Lincoln wrote in 1832 that he had “no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed by my fellow men.” Neely convincingly traces his hero’s evolution from country lawyer and Whig canvasser to congressman, Republican candidate, and President. He doubts that Lincoln ever assumed he would end up the great man he became.

VIDEOS

World’s Fair

It is usually true in the editorial world that every story will be improved by a bit of cutting, but when this documentary on the 1939 New York World’s Fair was pruned to fit into an hour-long time slot on PBS, it was diminished by the process. In its full form the movie manages to give those who missed it a very real sense of why virtually everyone over the age of fifty-five seems to have radiant memories of this fair. It sparkled briefly between the twin darknesses of Depression and war, and the poignancy of the hopes for an industrial Utopia that it embodied echoes in Jason Robards’s perfect-pitch narration. Indeed, we see movies, taken with the family’s Kodak Keystone, of ten-year-old Jason enjoying the fair as he absorbs its gospel of aerated bread and city planning and catches a glimpse of the surprisingly naked young women in the amusement area.

The movie’s cast is pretty impressive—Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Mickey Rooney, Billy Rose, Howard Hughes, Ethel Merman, Queen Mary—but the fair itself is the star here, shown to advantage in splendid color footage of sinuous buildings jetting rainbow arcs of water while teardrop-shaped vehicles glide past and crowds of people, oddly modern-looking in their summer clothes, take it all in. It is some indication of the potency of what they were seeing that when the present writer brought his son and daughter, then aged sixteen and fifteen, to see this movie, the two kids emerged in tears, filled with near-desperate longing to be in Flushing Meadows a lifetime ago.

RECORDINGS

The First Lady of Song

Perhaps three singers stand above all others as the defining vessels for the great outpouring of American popular song in this century: Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, and Ella Fitzgerald. Sinatra and Astaire have been well anthologized on compact disc for years; now Ella gets hers, on the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday, in 1993. The GRP set consists of thirty-nine numbers she recorded when she was under contract to Decca, from 1938 to 1955; the Verve set offers fifty-one songs recorded for that label between 1949 and 1966. The Decca tracks show a brilliant natural musician growing and maturing while never losing the airy charm in her voice, performing with a wide variety of bands and artists, including Chick Webb, the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and Louis Armstrong. The Verve set brings us Ella at her peak. It was for Verve that she recorded her “songbooks,” whole albums devoted to the likes of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and Duke Ellington. Both sets are handsomely packaged with excellent, full notes and essays.

Great Quartets

Three of the best string quartets ever composed by Americans, newly recorded by one of the nation’s best chamber ensembles. Samuel Barber’s quartet, written in 1936, when he was twenty-six, has as its heart the aching adagio popularly known in an orchestral version as “Adagio for Strings.” Charles Ives’s first quartet, written in 1896—he was twenty-one and a student at Yale—bears the title From the Salvation Army and uses themes based on hymn tunes. His second quartet, from a decade and a half later, is one of the composer’s difficult, dissonant, craggy masterpieces, and its dense poetry emerges and grows with repeated listenings. In it the four instruments represent four men “who converse, discuss, argue (in re ‘Politick’), fight, shake hands, shut up—then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament.” Thus its three movements are headed “Discussions,” “Arguments,” and “‘The Call of the Mountains.’” The discussion in the first movement seems to be a sectional one, as snatches from “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” are opposed by “Dixie,” which is interrupted by “Marching Through Georgia” before “Hail! Columbia” draws all together. The argument of the second movement runs heated and fast and occasionally violent; it ends “allegro con fistiswatto.” The third movement builds slowly to majestic broadenings in such a dramatic fashion that you can picture four men hiking up a large hill and reaching rocky clearings and long views. The performances of all three pieces could hardly be better.

BOOKS

Truth and Fiction: Historical Novels

It’s just the same old familiar story: Paul Alexander, a Greek soldier serving with the Belgian army in the opening weeks of World War I, is grievously wounded but survives to make his way to Bourbonville, Tennessee, where he becomes head of the Dixie Railroad’s car-building shops. Marius’s big, engrossing, and wholly unique novel is not only about the fierce early decades of this century that largely created the nation we inhabit today but about the process through which one becomes American—what is gained and what is lost. Funny, violent, and quiet by turns, the book shines throughout with a poetic sensibility that understands and conveys the current of melancholy that flows beneath the surface of all change.

The author certainly is not afraid to take chances. All through the book Paul’s closest companions are his two friends Guy and Bernai, both killed in the fighting before Antwerp. They continually appear before him, the one deeply devout, the other a charming flaneur, to comment on his life—and to represent what he is leaving behind in his progress from the Old World toward the New. This device, which could so easily have become both mawkish and showy, remains plausible and ultimately very moving—as is much else in this stirring and richly imagined chronicle of war, love, race, work, and that old thief, time.

by Noah Gordon, Dutton, 519 pages.

The winner of the first James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction (awarded by the Society of American Historians) begins with Robert Cole, a young Scottish physician, fleeing his homeland with a price on his head to practice medicine in the suppurating Irish slums of Boston before heading west to frontier Illinois. There he becomes an indispensable fixture in a growing community and raises a deaf son, Shaman, who against very stiff odds becomes a fine physician too.

There’s a great deal of history in this book—Indian, medical, military, political—all of it woven fluently into the arc of a career that carries its protagonist through the rising sectional conflict to the ghastly field hospitals of Gettysburg. It is by no means the least of Noah Gordon’s achievements that he manages to make Dr. Cole’s grueling medical procedures so immediate that we fully share in his joy and wonder when the advent of surgical anesthesia changes everything.

by Annie Dillard, HarperCollins, 397 pages.

An unusual epic, at once huge and intimate, about the settling of the West begins in 1855, when Ada Fishburn and her infant son, Glee, step ashore on “the rough edge of the world,” where the dark trees run straight down to Puget Sound, and it ends in the lean years of the 189Os, with Jim Hill’s Great Northern having tied the state of Washington to the coming century and Glee a middle-aged man tending bar in Seattle. In between we follow the fortunes of dozens of vividly drawn men and women, but what gives the book its power is not the large cast, or even the tremendous changes that the second half of the last century worked on the far West, but rather the beauty and clarity of the writing and the author’s sure sense of the pace, talk, and enthusiasms of other times, of the sadness of withered enterprise, of the violence and beauty of life.

Machine Politics

The Society of Saint Tammany, born in the 1780s, became a machine that dominated New York City politics for a century and a half. By 1857 it had such unprincipled control of local government that the state had to move in to take over the police force; Tammany simply kept up its own police, and they met in open battle. Two decades later Tammany’s Boss Tweed had so mastered graft that a single county courthouse ended up costing nearly twice as much as the federal government had just paid for Alaska. And in the scalding summer of 1900 a Tammany ring including the mayor actually cornered the city’s market on an essential commodity—ice—and instantly doubled the price.

These are but a few of many amazing stories in this tremendously entertaining but ultimately very serious account of Tammany Hall’s years. It is serious because, as Allen writes, “the Hall must also be seen as an integral part of America’s political coming of age.” It provided essential jobs and services otherwise nonexistent, and endured and adapted until hard-learned reforms finally made it obsolete. And that didn’t happen until the 1960s.

The Most Popular Man in America

He began his career at the turn of the century doing rope tricks in circuses and on the vaudeville stage. When he died in a plane crash in 1935, he was the most popular man in America, a movie star and a humorist, and a political commentator whose syndicated column reached forty million people every day. “He is what Americans think other Americans are like” was how one observer analyzed his appeal. Others, Yagoda writes, noticed that “the older and more worldly he got, the more socially at ease he was with senators and tycoons, the worse the grammar and spelling in his columns became.”

Rogers’s determinedly folksy style can seem quaint to contemporary readers, but in this lively, well-written, and handsomely illustrated biography, Yagoda explores the ways in which he still serves as an American icon. When at the Democratic Convention in New York last year the actor playing Will Rogers in a musical on Broadway stepped up to the microphone and delivered a speech Rogers had given in 1931, it brought down the house.