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EDITORS’ CHOICE
A gathering of recent books, videos, recordings, and other items of special interest to the readers of American Heritage, selected and recomended by the editors.
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BOOKS
Shadowland
CIA Special Weapons & Equipment: Spy Devices of the Cold War
by H. Keith Melton, Sterling, 128 pages, $10.95 soft cover. CODE: STG-1
In the classic James Bond films, the most greedily anticipated moment isn’t when 007 rendezvous with the beautiful female agent or when the enemy’s island fortress erupts into an orgy of flame. It is when Q unveils his laboratory of new spy gadgets: exploding pens, camera Geiger counters, an Aston Martin with retractable machine guns. Actual Cold War espionage may not have quite equaled Hollywood in technology, but it was very much playing the game, as H. Keith Melton’s quirky new book, CIA Special Weapons & Equipment, shows.
Melton has assembled a collection of excerpts from CIA equipment manuals from between 1947 and 1970, with the help of the Freedom of Information Act. In 1952 the spy world was rocked by the discovery of a bug the size of a quarter in the wooden great seal above the American ambassador’s desk in Moscow; this first-known “passive cavity transmitter” spurred extensive American intelligence research and development in the same way the Sputnik scare later spurred our space program. The result was the array of Cold War tools represented here. While not exactly a Bond jet pack, the cigarette pistol is still an impressive “escape and evasion” device. The “dog doo”-camouflaged radio transmitter (circa 1970)—a little unsuave for movie spying—is shown here life-size. There is also explosive flour, which can be used in baking or ceramics or detonated dry; a rubber airplane that an agent can supposedly assemble in six minutes; a wristwatch camera “as natural, and unobtrusive, as checking the time”; a “blister weapon” disguised as a felt-tip pen; and, for prison escapes, a lock-picking set in a suppository.
This book uses cartoonish CIA artwork demonstrating correct espionage technique and includes a short glossary of agency terms. The foreword, by the former director of central intelligence Richard Helms, gives it a shadowy authority the Bond movies never had.
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The Sage of Incorrectness
Mencken: A Biography
by Fred Hobson, Random House, 650 pages, $35.00. CODE: RAN-12
H. L. Mencken planted several literary time bombs that have brought him back into the public eye in staggered bursts ever since his death. By his instructions, sizable portions of the writer and editor’s private papers were released to the public in 1971, 1981, and 1991, each time sabotaging the works of his earlier biographers. With no more stashes due to emerge, the literary historian Fred Hobson has published an excellent, reasonable account of Mencken’s life, the first to draw on the full mother lode of diaries, letters, notes, and additions.
Mencken was seventeen when, days after his father’s death, he entered the offices of the Baltimore Morning Herald and volunteered for work. He became its star reporter in nineteen months. Hobson argues shrewdly that this was not the end of the father’s influence: He lived on in the strange and often opposed prejudices of his famous son.
By the 1920s Mencken had achieved something unique in America: A critic, not a novelist, was the country’s most argued-about and famous writer. He attacked New England Puritans, the culturally barren South, Methodists, Rotarians, all manner of reformers. He reveled in the foolishness he saw everywhere: “I figure … that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of better sport for the money.” And although he was a collector and user of every unsavory racial epithet, he also advanced the careers of African-American writers from James Weldon Johnson to Walter F. White, worked and associated mostly with Jews despite all his ugly private terms for them, and became the fighting inspiration for the young black novelist Richard Wright.
A stroke stopped his relentless outpouring in 1948. He died eight long years later. This is not the book Mencken would have written (and rewritten), but it is the big, uncringing book he deserved. Hobson concludes with a chapter on Mencken’s lively and notorious posthumous career.
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On Dragsters
High Performance The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing, 1950-1990
by Robert C. Post, Johns Hopkins University Press, 448 pages, $35.95. CODE: JHP-2
One Sunday morning in 1949 a group of hot rodders got together near Santa Barbara, California, to race their souped-up cars down a straightaway, and for the first time ever, they were doing so legally, with police approval. That was the modest birth of drag racing. Within a few years drag strips had opened all over the nation, specially designed needlelike vehicles had evolved just to drag race, and the fearless people driving them were shooting from zero to 180 miles an hour in less than nine seconds before stopping almost as fast. The sport was deadly dangerous, deafeningly noisy, totally unrespectable, and wildly expensive. Why did anyone do it? Robert C. Post is ideally situated to ask that question. He is both a former drag racer and a respected historian of technology, and editor of the scholarly journal Technology and Culture. In his engrossing account he tells the whole story of drag racing and its many colorful characters, including Don (“The Snake”) Prudhomme, Shirley Muldowney (who nearly died and kept at it), and Big Daddy Don Garlits (who blew his foot off and didn’t give up). He describes how the fantastic machines evolved (usually not scientifically at all) and how a whole subsport spun off: “funny car” racing. Through it all he asks the many provocative larger questions the subject makes unavoidable. What does the spread and persistence of this utterly useless activity tell us about our relationships to cars and to machines in general? About technology as something having to do with purpose and progress? You may read the book to ponder such questions or just to get a sense of an activity so seductive that a driver named Paula Martin could say, after almost burning to death while racing, “I will race my car again … because of the sheer and unequivocal feeling of joy I experience when I go fast.”
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THE TALL SHIPS PASSING
Hulls and Hulks in the Tide of Time
The Life and Work of John A. Noble
by Erin Urban, John A. Noble, and Allan A. Noble in association with the John A. Noble Collection, 269 pages, $75.00. CODE: NOB-1
The marine artist John A. Noble once refused to join an exhibition sponsored by the National Maritime Historical Society, explaining, “The work of these sailboat and historical buffs probably has its place, but I really hate like the devil to be confused with them. I draw only contemporary things—things I have seen and which I may have the background to interpret.” Born in Paris in 1913, the son of an American expatriate painter, he found his lifelong subject in the rotting hulls of abandoned sailing ships at Port Johnston, a onetime coal port on New York Harbor’s Kill van Kull. There he observed and recorded ghostly vestiges of the last days of sail.
The views reproduced here are black-and-white lithographs (Noble apparently liked working in a medium seamen could afford), and they appear with commentary excerpted from the artist’s essays and letters—which are fluent enough to suggest that Noble may actually write better than he draws.
Noble was by all accounts a difficult and irascible man. He railed against maritime museums as “little Disneylands” and scorned America’s frenzied embrace of Operation Sail during the Bicentennial, since the same year the Army Corps of Engineers was blasting and removing tall ships sinking in the mud at Port Johnston. In 1976 the last of the retired seamen housed at Sailor’s Snug Harbor on Staten Island moved out, but in the eleventh hour, thanks in part to Noble’s noisy protest, the buildings there were saved. Noble’s drawings, prints, and writings are now housed there. This volume, a catalogue raisonné of his prints, also serves as a personal and idiosyncratic cruise through America’s maritime past.
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Ship, Sea and Sky
The Marine Art of James Edward Buttersworth
by Richard B. Grassby, Rizzoli, 128 pages, $35.00. CODE: RIZ-4
Although he is widely esteemed to be in the first rank of American marine painters, little is known about James E. Buttersworth. He was born in England in 1817, the son and grandson of marine artists; he emigrated to New York around 1847; he died in 1894. No letters or family papers have survived, and the author speculates that he may not have been fully literate (both his stepmother and his wife signed their children’s birth certificates with an X). Nevertheless, Buttersworth produced an eloquent body of energized, light-filled canvases depicting all manner of ships: naval vessels, packets, brigs, pilot boats, yachts. Fifty-two paintings are reproduced here, all of them in color. Richard Grassby, an art historian who specializes in marine painting, writes with ease and authority about the particular demands of the genre and about the tricky business of earning a living selling art in New York in the mid-nineteenth century.
In Buttersworth’s work the sky is always black with gathering clouds and the sea agitated, but Grassby resists the impulse to find meaning lurking in any of this. As he concludes, the artist was simply supremely skilled at composing ships, sea, and sky and at suggesting the busy human energy driving every maritime endeavor.
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The Fate of a Nation
Paul Revere’s Ride
by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 445 pages, $27.50. CODE: OUP-6
David Hackett Fischer’s splendid new book is satisfying on every level from adventure tale to civics lesson. Paul Revere is indeed at the center of the story, but Fischer’s meticulous reconstruction of his ride has a larger purpose: in restoring to a shopworn allegorical figure the decisive role he actually played in great events, the author means to remind us of the importance of contingency in history. If Paul Revere hadn’t ridden when he did, if he hadn’t spread the word of the British expedition coming from Boston with a particularly effective combination of courage and intelligence, the Middlesex militia could not have rallied with the speed and in the numbers that it did—and the American Revolution might not have broken out on April 19, 1775.
Fischer does not make his case through argument but through narrative, a headlong tale told so effectively that its momentum carries the reader right on through the lively endnotes. On the way there is courage and carnage (it’s easy to forget how very brutal things got that spring afternoon) and even a good deal of humor before Lord Percy’s exhausted redcoats finally stagger back into Boston while, writes Fischer, “the sun was setting on the ruins of an empire.”
Throughout the book Fischer measures Revere against another man who believed in liberty and the rule of law: Thomas Gage, the unhappy commander of all the British forces in North America. “We have much to learn from these half-remembered men,” he writes, “—a set of truths that our generation has lost or forgotten. In their different ways, they knew that to be free is to choose. The history of a free people is a history of hard choices. In that respect, when Paul Revere alarmed the Massachusetts countryside, he was carrying a message for us.” |
Born to Shop
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture
by William Leach, Pantheon Books, 510 pages, $30.00. CODE: RAN-13
Reading Land of Desire, one can’t help recalling how Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s heroine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, explained her yearning for that particular store; “nothing very bad could happen to you” at Tiffany’s, she promised herself. In meticulous, fascinating detail William Leach tells us how stores came to inspire such feelings. As Henry Adams limned Chartres, so Leach builds the great cathedral of commerce, the American department store, from ground up, showing how its very walls, tempting glass display windows, quasi-religious offerings of concerts and chorales, and, not least, its wide range of merchandise (Bloomingdale’s once had a four-story building devoted to the manufacture of pianos) changed the nature of American consumerism and, therefore, our culture.
“After 1895, stores, museums, churches, and government agencies were beginning to act together to create the Land of Desire,” Leach writes, “redirecting aspiration toward consumer longings, consumer goods, and consumer pleasures and entertainments.” Clearly the author doesn’t enjoy this lush flowering of twentieth-century consumerism as much as Holly Golightly and her fellow shoppers have. From the first “democratization of desire,” with its roots in the founding of this nation, Leach unearths a sinister legacy: “It fostered anxiety and restlessness and, when left unsatisfied, resentment and hatred.” And from that, the author believes, flows “the American refusal to face death as a fact of life.”
One suspects the author believes these insights to be the most valuable part of his book—the heart of it, in fact. But for the reader, especially the Holly Golightlys among us, its value and enormous pleasure lie in the raw material Leach has assembled: the stories of the Wanamakers and the Strauses, the pioneering window-display artists (including L. Frank Baum, whose Wizard of Oz, Leach tells us, is an allegory of American consumerism), and the sleek, fearless women buyers, who reached the top of their field decades earlier than one would have imagined.
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VIDEOS
A Lost Time Re-created
The Age of Innocence
directed by Martin Scorsese, Columbia Tristar Home Video, 138mins., $95.95. CODE: BAT-1
See Martin Scorsese’s fine movie not just for its absorbing and tough-minded exposition of how a social organism moves to protect itself against the incursions of potentially destabilizing outsiders but also for some marvelously persuasive, full-blown visions of the Manhattan of a little more than a century ago: a teeming scene of Broadway; an inaugural Upper Fifth Avenue mansion patrolling the level, still unbuilt wastes north of Forty-second Street like a gorgeous, solitary battle cruiser. Equally impressive is the way the film takes those nineteenth-century interiors with their bibelots and vitrines and swags and close-hung paintings—the crowded rooms that embody the Victorian at its most drably claustrophobic when we see them in the old photographs—and gives them the darkly shining burnish of life, as their owners move through them with ease and casual pride.
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Sodom by the Sea
Coney Island
directed by Ric Burns, Direct Cinema, 68 mins., $39.95. CODE: DCV-3
“If Paris is France,” George C. Tilyou wrote in 1886, “then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world.” That was hyperbole, of course, but in a few years Tilyou was to build Steeplechase, an amusement park, that, with its two increasingly grand rivals, Luna and Dreamland, would help make the turn-of-the-century Coney the most famous resort in the world. Running full blast on a hot summer Sunday, the riotous spit of land could dazzle three hundred thousand visitors with its rides and bands, its full-blown re-creation of a Boer War battle fought by hundreds of veterans fresh from the fighting in the Transvaal, and its shows featuring aerial voyages that were no less than a prophecy of how the twentieth century would unfold. Ric Burns, the director, whose other works include the highly praised documentary The Donner Party, collaborates with the the editor of this magazine, who has nursed a lifelong obsession with Coney, to tell the story of the rise and decline of the resort. The film centers on the turn of the century, when the island was at its imperial zenith, and includes some astonishing early footage (the death by electrocution, for instance, of Topsy the Elephant in Luna Park); but it also offers a compelling glimpse of Al Lewis, familiar as Grampa of “The Munsters,” going into the pitch he used to part the crowd from its dimes back on the boardwalk a lifetime ago.
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U-boat Duel
The Enemy Below
directed by Dick Powell, CBS/Fox War Classics Collection, 98 mins., $19.95. CODE: BAT-2
Beneath a turquoise South Atlantic sky, a Buckley-class destroyer escort under the command of Robert Mitchum fights a single-ship duel with a German U-boat. Although the German skipper, Curt Jurgens, says the Hitler-is-a-madman-who-has-disgraced-our-profession-of-arms stuff that was pro forma for World War II movies in 1957 (when this one was made), he is nonetheless a canny, almost clairvoyant seaman who is determined to come out of the engagement alive, and the moves and countermoves become increasingly complex and perilous. Shown the movie a couple of months back, one North Atlantic destroyer-escort veteran exclaimed at the beginning, “How the hell did I miss this when it came out?,” then watched hypnotized as Mitchum dropped his depth charges and fired his K-guns, every now and then murmuring, “That’s just the way it was.” When the movie ended, he said, “Wonderful!” and then added, with proprietary satisfaction, “Wasn’t the DE a fine-looking warship!” |
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RECORDINGS
A King of Jazz
Jelly Roll Morton The Library of Congress Recordings
Rounder Records CD 1091-1094 (four CDs), $63.92. CODE: BAT-3
Jelly Roll Morton was one of the brilliant originators of jazz who in the opening decades of the century brought together ragtime, blues, march music, dance music, field hollers, spirituals, and more and fused them into the great American art form. He was the first great jazz pianist and composer and a bandleader through the 1930s, first in New Orleans and later in California and Chicago. In 1938 the musical archivist Alan Lomax recorded a long series of interviews and recording sessions with him at the Library of Congress. In them Morton described and demonstrated what he and other musicians had done: how ragtime had learned to swing, how a nineteenth-century quadrille had evolved into “Tiger Rag,” how a “Spanish tinge” had inflected much of the music. All the music from those sessions is now available complete on CD for the first time, in the clean, clear sound modern remastering makes possible and including numbers previously unissued because of sexually explicit lyrics. It is revelatory. Morton was a sublime musician; he commanded an astounding battery of styles and techniques and an ability to squeeze truly remarkable beauty and emotion out of a piano. He swings Verdi and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” sings scat in early New Orleans style, bangs out the raunchiest sporting-house songs and then the saddest laments, delivers a novelistic “Murder Ballad” half an hour long, talks over his playing in a spoken voice so lovely and rhythmical it sounds like gentle singing, delivers a catalogue of blues performances, and tosses off the styles of a dozen other musicians. The four hours of music on these discs adds up to both a kaleidoscopic history of early jazz and a rich, stirring anthology of one of the geniuses of American music.
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The Popular Composers
Great American Songwriters
Rhino Records (each volume a separate CD), $16.98 per volume:
Vol. 1—George & Ira Gershwin,
R2 71503 (CODE: RHR-6);
Vol. 2—Johnny Mercer,
R2 71504 (CODE: RHR-7);
Vol. 3—Rodgers & Hart,
R2 71505 (CODE: RHR-8);
Vol. 4—Irving Berlin, R2 71506
(CODE: RHR-9);
Vol. 5—Duke Ellington & Billy
Strayhorn, R2 71507 (CODE: RHR-10).
The people at Rhino Records, the premier compiler of old popular music on CD, have come up with the happy idea of a series of discs devoted to classic versions of great songs by the great American songwriters, one disc of twenty songs to each songwriter. On the Gershwin disc, Tony Bennett sings “How Long Has This Been Going On,” Jo Stafford swings “Embraceable You,” Chris Connor breathes “But Not for Me,” Ella and Louis pair up for “They All Laughed,” Bing Crosby croons “Somebody Loves Me,” Sylvia Syms knocks out “Love Walked In,” and so on. The selections all seem just right: On the Johnny Mercer album, who else but Sammy Davis to sing “That Old Black Magic,” and who better for “Hooray for Hollywood” than that great nightclub-voice-gone-Hollywood Doris Day? Other high points: On the Rodgers and Hart album, Chet Baker’s “My Funny Valentine” and Billy Eckstine’s “Blue Moon”; on the Ellington and Strayhorn, Harry James’s classic “I’m Beginning to See the Light” (with Kitty Kallen) and Mel Tormé’s suave “Take the ’A’ Train”; on the Irving Berlin, Ethel Waters’s unforgettable “Heat Wave” and Fred Astaire’s seductive “Change Partners.” Listen to any one of these discs, and you may want the rest and then grow impatient for future installments.
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The Musical Melting Pot
Sounds of the South A Musical Journey From the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta
recorded in the field by Alan Lomax, Atlantic 7 82496-2 (four CDs), $63.92. CODE: BAT-4
In 1959 the folklorist Alan Lomax, who two decades before had recorded Jelly Roll Morton’s remarkable musical reminiscences (see above), spent the summer taping every sort of folk music of the American South. There, he wrote, “the rich and contrasting musical cultures of Northwest Europe and West Africa have lived together for more than 300 years, with little interference from learned or official culture. Their illegitimate offspring—minstrel songs, the spiritual, ragtime, jazz, blues, bluegrass, cajun, country, gospel and rock—became regional, then national, and finally international idioms.… These Sounds of the South, the outcome of two centuries of friendly musical exchange between blacks and whites, amount to something of a cultural triumph.” These recordings—originally issued on seven LPs and now squeezed onto four CDs—capture the broad variety of that music at a time when it was still vital in some of its most ancient traditions but could be captured on up-to-date stereo equipment. Lomax uncovered primal-sounding fife-and-drum music and unaccompanied blues singing that seemed to reach back centuries, ecstatic church choruses both black and white, chain gangs doing their prison work songs, virtuosic bluegrass bands, Ozark balladeers. Some of his discoveries went on to considerable fame; they included the blues singer Fred McDowell and the band the Mountain Ramblers. All of them are worth hearing. You won’t soon forget the sound of the residents of St. Simons Island, Georgia, singing as they once did when heaving timber onto old sailing schooners: “O Ratty, join the band—Hanh! O run along, come join the band.…” The set contains full and very informative notes in an extremely handsome book.
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BOOKS
Love Quadrangle
Lost Love: A True Story of Passion, Murder, and Justice in Old New York
by George Cooper, Pantheon, 272 pages, $23.00. CODE: RAN-14
George Cooper, a former professor of law at Columbia University, has rescued a sensational nineteenth-century New York murder case by telling it through original diaries, reportage, letters, and courtroom testimony. Behind the jealous-husband-slays-wife’s-lover story Cooper finds four interesting, accessible people: an adventuring newspaperman, Albert Deane Richardson; his mistress, the actress Abby Sage; his wife, Lou; and Sage’s husband, Daniel McFarland, who, after divorcing her, shot Richardson dead in the counting room of the New York Tribune in November 1869.
Cooper reconstructs the parallel stories of the two marriages, and their collision takes on a noirish inevitability. Richardson makes his name covering the West while his wife writes lonely letters from home; Abby Sage escapes from her hard marriage into acting while her husband gradually comes unhinged. Richardson moves into the boardinghouse where McFarland and his wife live and, according to Sage’s courtroom testimony, does her “many kindnesses.” In February 1867 McFarland goes into one of his abusive rages, and his wife leaves him. A month later he makes his first attempt on Richardson’s life; the journalist refuses to press charges for fear of scandal and writes Sage after his wounding: “I should have been your helper and comforter and shield, to have brought you into such a storm … if I live, I am going to see you safely out of it. If I should not live to go into harbor with you, the Father will take care of your sunny head.” Out of a sensational murder tale, Cooper gleans the inspired love story.
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Ms. America
Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women’s Landmarks
by Lynn Sherr and Jurate Kazickas, Times Books, 592 pages, $18.00. CODE: RAN-15
The authors published their original version of this fifty-state guide in 1976. Now they’ve gone back to fill in the picture, demonstrating again that “no state in the Union is without its female contribution to our national heritage, but you wouldn’t know it from reading most standard tour books.”
From the first entry under “A”Athens, Alabama, with its plaque on a church wall memorializing a former slave who toured Europe as one of the Jubilee Singers—down to the last listing, where the Torrington, Wyoming, Burge Post Office is named for Ethel Burge, a single homesteader who opened the town’s post office, this is a browser’s delight. Not surprisingly, houses predominate: Margaret Sanger’s home in Fishkill, New York, Amelia Earhart’s birthplace in Atchison, Kansas. But there are also the less expected memorials, including a bridge, a cave, a hospital, and the nation’s first kindergarten, all of which mark the struggles and accomplishments of American women.
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IN THIS ISSUE
Alan Shepard tells in this month’s cover story of his first small step into space, in 1961; a batch of new books coming out in time for July’s moon-landing anniversary takes the story from there. Shepard’s own version, from which our article was adapted, is Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon (Turner Publishing, 365 pages, $21.95, CODE: TPC-1), coauthored with his Mercury Seven crewmate Deke : Slayton, who died last year. “This is a very tough place,” Shepard told I Mission Control upon stepping onto the moon’s surface as part of Apollo 14. Despite all the years of training, the experience of standing on the moon still moved him to tears, while his fellow astronaut Ed Mitchell reported that “the presence of divinity became almost palpable.” A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin (Viking, 688 pages, $27.95, CODE: PEN-1) tells the full story, sometimes hour by hour, of the Apollo missions Shepard’s glorious first ride made possible, including Shepard’s own famous lunar golf shot ten years after his first voyage.
Having read Brock Yates’s tribute to the mighty Duesenberg, you’ll want to acquire one for yourself, and since they regularly trade at over a million dollars there’s a certain pleasure in going through the Illustrated Duesenberg Buyer’s Guide by Josh B. Malks (Motorbooks International, 128 pages, $16.95 soft cover, CODE: MTB-1), reading the brisk, straightforward descriptions of these sublime machines as though you were trying to decide between a Chevrolet Suburban and a Jeep Grand Cherokee. “If you’re buying your Duesenberg to keep forever, then buy the body that you love. If you intend to resell in the future, remember that the issue then will not be what you like, but what people prefer to buy.” Open cars generally bring the higher prices, but everything in the authoritative guide to the various coach builders looks tasty, hardtop or not. Beware retro-fitted superchargers; know your serial numbers; don’t expect effortless gear shifting; and don’t count on getting more than eight miles per gallon. The editors were reassured to learn from the bibliography that “Duesenbergs are so impressive that every respectable periodical has to do an article about one every so often.”
And once you’ve made your selection, you’ll need the Duesenberg Model J Owner’s Companion (Motorbooks International, 192 pages, $19.95, CODE: MTB-2), a compilation that includes the Model J “Owner’s Instruction Book,” which gives a pretty good idea about what made these cars special: “The green signal light at the right side marked ‘Bat’ when burning approximately every 1500 miles reminds you that the battery should be inspected.…The red signal light at the left side when burning approximately every 60-80 miles indicates that the chassis lubricating mechanism is operating and immediately afterward the green signal light should flash showing that oil is being delivered to the various shackle bearings.” Chassis and engine are all carefully diagrammed, and there’s a selection of advertisements showing the terrifyingly confident people about whom could be said: “He/She drives a Duesenberg.”
Our conversation between Willie Morris and William Ferris fits into a very long tradition of Southern self-examination, and that tradition is documented and celebrated in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by William Ferris and Charles Reagan Wilson (University of North Carolina Press, 1,634 pages, $69.95, CODE: UNC-4). The volume considers the American South in all its aspects, through an inventory of hundreds of entries on the region’s politics, cuisine, myths, music, literature, and habits of belief.
Joseph E. Persico writes in this issue about the haunting trail he followed in tracking down the full story of the world’s most momentous war-crimes proceedings for his new book Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (Viking Penguin, 520 pages, $25.95, CODE: PEN-2). The book, just published, brings to life the trials and the terrible characters who sat in the dock at them—Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop, Streicher, Speer, and the rest—and explores the implications of the whole event both for the world order of the decades that followed and for our very understanding of humanity.
Bruce D. Porter’s recent book War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (The Free Press, 380 pages, $27.95, CODE: FEP-1) expands on and amplifies the points made by Professor Porter in “The Warfare State.”
The subject of Geoffrey Ward’s column this month is The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America by John Demos (Knopf, 315 pages, $25.00, CODE: RAN-10). Gene Smith writes in “American Characters” in this issue about the obscure world of nineteenth-century women’s baseball; the subject is also illuminated by Gai Ingham Berlage’s new book Women in Baseball (Praeger Publishers, 224 pages, $22.50, CODE: PGH-1). The author has unearthed a parallel history of the national game, from the first Vassar nine in the 1860s to the All American Girls’ Professional League of World War II.
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