BOOKS

The Massachusetts Miracle

Most people know pretty much how they feel about Christian Science, and this major biography of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, doesn’t seek so much to diminish or elevate as to simply follow her life from a psychological viewpoint. The historian Robert David Thomas has spent the last fifteen years tracing Eddy’s rise from sickly child to mother of a worldwide faith; for much of that time he has labored in the guarded stacks of the Mother Church, which makes his the most complete portrait of Eddy and her followers by an outsider.

In February 1866 the then Mary Patterson slipped on a patch of ice and injured her back. Her subsequent recovery, behind which she discerned a divine influence, strengthened her Christian faith and became the founding moment for her church. After a childhood full of struggles with illnesses both real and imagined and of rebellion against her parents’ Calvinism, the Massachusetts housewife had already explored, among other things, homeopathy, hydropathy, and the teachings of the healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby before she fashioned a religious approach of her own.

Robert Thomas’s life of Eddy respectfully applies modern theories of child development to her gloomy early years on a New England farm. To Thomas, she is not “a monumental hysteric of classical dimensions,” as the critic Harold Bloom recently called her, nor is she the cynical autocrat Mark Twain saw. Mary Baker Eddy constructed a world view based on Christ and self-control that proved extremely attractive to millions. Thomas notes that her church was unique not only in that it was founded and led by a nineteenth-century woman but that its female members still outnumbered men “eight to one by the early 1970s.” This book will be a mild disappointment to debunkers; others will appreciate its careful, sympathetic study of a fascinating woman.

How We Outlived the Bomb

Martin Walker, U.S. bureau chief for the British Guardian and author of a book on the Gorbachev era in Russia, The Waking Giant, has written what should become a basic text in the new field of Cold War studies. The numbing standoff that settled in after 1945 and came to bristle with nuclear menace is still difficult to think of as a single series of events like a great war. But Walker helps by stitching together the worldwide struggles of five decades into one convincing narrative. The familiar rhetoric, suspicion, armaments, and terrors all look different—are almost ennobled—taken as one story with a definite conclusion. “The Cold War was truly a global conflict,” Walker writes, “more so than either of the century’s two world wars…. [It] was also the first total war between economic and social systems,” and “the West prevailed because its economy proved able to supply guns as well as butter, aircraft-carriers and private cars, rockets as well as foreign holidays.”

Walker shows how U.S.-Soviet relations, warm toward the end of World War II, chilled over just one hundred days in 1945 and 1946. He follows the rivalry’s powerful effect on the growth of California and the Pacific Rim, the temporary stasis of détente, the crusade rejoined under Ronald Reagan, all leading up to 1989, when the Eastern bloc gently cracked apart. At the Cold War’s height, “Turks fought in Korea, Algerians fought in Vietnam, Cubans fought in Angola, and American and Russian schoolchildren, whose lessons had been interrupted by nuclear air-raid drills, grew up to die in Saigon and Kabul.” In the conclusion to this intelligent and highly readable history Walker warns that today, as in 1945, the opportunities of our hard-earned peace could be lost and Russia left once more dangerously estranged.

IN THIS ISSUE

In his “In the News” column on health-care and the Congress Bernard Weisberger draws on the thorough history of congressional health-care battles provided by With Dignity: The Search for Medicare and Medicaid by Sheri I. David (Greenwood Press, 194 pages, $45.00, CODE: PGH-2).

Murray Kempton’s new book Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (Times Books, 570 pages, $27.50, CODE: RAN-22) is reviewed in Geoffrey Ward’s column “The Life and Times.” With this collection, such pure specimens of softly reasoned prose as “My Last Mugging,” “The Floating Life,” and “The Champ and the Chump” have been mercifully dug out of the news heap.

The Widow Thompson’s Fence

Set of two folded maps, $18.00: Antietam—Morning & Afternoon and Gettysburg—First Day, CODE: MFC-5

In a small town in upper New York State the cartographer Earl B. McElfresh draws the most precise and handsome maps available of Civil War battle sites. His watercolor scenes of Antietam, Pea Ridge, and Shiloh at first look too naive and softly colored for battlefield maps, like a child’s view out an airplane window. Unroll the Antietam plans—“Morning” or “Afternoon”—and a cheerful, verdant world meets your eye. The legend identifies the clean-bordered patches of plowed ground, corn, stubble, clover, haystacks, woods with stacked cords, and four varieties of fences. This changing landscape was in some cases leveled into bird’s-eye nothingness over generations of mapmaking.

McElfresh works not only with historians but also with an agronomist who identifies from war photographs what was growing where. By consulting farmers’ damage claims, the team has added buildings, crops, orchards, and fences that were missing from all previous surveys. In researching his new Gettysburg map, McElfresh discovered that a stone wall mentioned in regimental histories appeared on no maps of the site. A farmer had built a road through it shortly after the war. Similarly, McElfresh and a Park Service expert were able to eliminate a rail fence that had guarded the Widow Thompson’s orchard on maps of Seminary Ridge since 1868, when it had been transposed with another fence nearby.

McElfresh’s beautifully exact scenes hide their scholarship as gracefully as they tell us what these places were in the months before armies collided over them: unsuspecting farm towns in their bloom. The fields, he says, are “as they were … before they became world famous.”

RECORDINGS

American Song Classics

Both of these new collections of small masterpieces by two major American composers feature the Indiana-born baritone Thomas Hampson, a master of all sorts of song, joined by a top American soprano. The results are uniformly superb. Samuel Barber (1910-81) wrote to his mother when he was nine: “I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure…. Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football—please.” He stayed serious, penning the inward, intimate music of a poet of tones, and was at his most compelling when setting poetry he loved. The pianist John Browning began making this album three years ago by recording twenty songs with Hampson; before he was done, Browning was uncovering songs never published, recording all the ones for female voice with the soprano Cheryl Studer, and bringing in the Emerson String Quartet for Barber’s best-known song, a softly unsettling adaptation of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Of the forty-seven songs in all, nine are to wondrously varied words by James Joyce, including a haunting evocation of a couple’s nonmeeting at a country hotel set to an oddly stirring tango tune. An array of others treat clear-eyed but impassioned love poems by Theodore Roethke and Robert Graves. The music throughout is terse and elegant and lovely, the performances and recording as fine as you could hope for.

The Copland disc contains two sets of songs. The first, sung by Hampson, consists of ten archetypal old American songs, orchestrated in open-spirited, utterly accessible, and timeless Copland style. Among them are two minstrel tunes, a humorous 1884 presidential campaign song (“The Dodger”), a lullaby, two ballads (including “Long Time Ago”), and the sweetly pious Shaker song “Simple Gifts,” familiar from Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring. The second set of songs is a collection of eight utterly winning settings of Emily Dickinson poems. Copland’s music highlights and reflects the smooth surfaces and dangerous undercurrents of the poems while retaining all their fresh energy. Dawn Upshaw sings beautifully, and the orchestral playing is precise and warm and full.

San Francisco

Richard Saul Wurman’s indispensable San Francisco Access guide has just been joined by a stunning colleague. Although the new Knopf guide is not as strong on the restaurants that make up so prominent a part of the city’s life—or the coffee bars that currently hold the inhabitants in near-religious thrall—it is an ebullient production, ablaze with colorful maps, charts, diagrams, reproductions of paintings in the great Huntington collection, portraits of local sons and daughters, posters from the Haight’s psychedelic glory days, a cutaway revealing the inner workings of those ravishing little cheek-by-jowl Queen Anne houses that are unique to the town, as well as one that shows its other famous habitat, the Mont-St.-Michel of federal pens, Alcatraz. The guide was originally published in French, and although the translation occasionally shows through (a pagoda-topped telephone booth is described as a “callbox in the Chinese quarter”), there is a fine brief anthology of writers praising this most beguiling of cities. “But oh, San Francisco!” Dylan Thomas writes his wife, Caitlin. “It is and has everything. Here in Canada, five hours away by plane, you wouldn’t think that such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down the city hills. The lobsters, clams, & crabs. Oh, Cat, what food for you. Every kind of seafood there is. And all the people are open and friendly.”

Songs of Hard Times

The twenty-one selections on this album evoke all the common emotions of the depths of the Great Depression; it is a companion to the PBS documentary series of the same name. Rudy Vallee’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” leads off; nothing that follows is more bitterly stirring (“They used to tell me I was building a dream…”), but plenty is more surprising. Henry Ford’s factory orchestra indulges his immigrant work force with a “Hungarian Varsovienne” folk-dance number. Ted Lewis leads a stubbornly upbeat “There’s a New Day Comin’” (“While the cobbler’s shoein’, the baker will bake, although when the brewer’s brewin', we’ll all get a break”)—released six days after Roosevelt’s inauguration and three days before the new President asked Congress to repeal Prohibition. The blues queen Memphis Minnie offers “He’s in the Ring (Doin’ the Same Old Thing)” in triumphant tribute to Joe Louis. The jaunty theme song to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, “Dawn of a New Day,” is here; so are a lot of familiar standards, including Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” and Louis Armstrong’s “All of Me.” An uncanny coincidence adds special poignance to the Casa Loma Orchestra’s cheery “Happy Days Are Here Again”: the band cut the tune on Monday, October 29, 1929.

Moving Music

How can you possibly tell the story of jazz in ninety-seven minutes? Well, you can’t, of course, but this documentary makes a first-rate effort, touching every important base, however briefly, with intelligence and verve. Narrated by the actor Lloyd Richards, it begins with the seeds of jazz in slavery, traces the rise of the music in New Orleans, and carries through all the way to the fusion fad of the 1970s and the reaction that followed. A dozen musicians, some with very long memories, talk on-screen; they include Wynton Marsalis, Milt Hinton, Doc Cheatham, Billy Taylor, and Bud Freeman. But the scads of old filmed footage are the most remarkable part. Brief scenes of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, with musicians playing on the streets and children dancing, are followed by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in the teens, an actual glimpse of Bix, some early Armstrong, the Ellington band in the thirties featuring Cootie Williams’s trumpet section’s suave choreography, and much more. Dozens of jazz immortals perform on-screen, among them Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Mingus, Basie, Monk, Coltrane, and their many unforgettable sidemen. Don’t expect to see numbers performed whole, but do expect to be thrilled by a lot of great fragments in a very coherent whole package.

The War to End All Wars

This fine series was made for television during the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict, and although documentary filmmaking techniques have become considerably more sophisticated in the thirty years that have passed since then, World War I retains its original power virtually intact. Narrated by Robert Ryan with a calm conviction that is impressively at odds with the jackboots-across-Europe bombast too often employed at the time, the film takes the viewer through the tragic tug of alliances that put nations at one another’s throats to the somber peace that followed the Allies’ pyrrhic victory. Along the way there is a great deal of remarkable footage, among it glimpses of terriers being trained to go after the cat-sized rats that shared the wretched trenches of the Western Front with the soldiers, and scenes of tank trials shot close in enough to make clear why those strange, huge quadrangles were so fearsome when they first clawed their way onto the battlefield.

The Confident Man

Theodore Roosevelt wrote so much during his life that no two anthologies of his prose are likely to turn out the same. This new Roosevelt reader differs from the Roosevelt Cyclopedia of half a century ago in that its entries are much longer than the many quotable bits in that book. Here the inexhaustible TR is held to twelve general subjects but still has his say about his exploits with the Rough Riders and in the African bush, on “hysterics” promoting free silver, and on the “moral perversion” of Tolstoy; we follow up his election loss of 1912 with the mighty distraction of his Amazon expedition, and we hear the former President’s views on conservation and the proper role of women. Roosevelt’s writing comes most alive when he is expunging a political foe in a fervent speech (“For Mr. Bryan we can feel the contemptuous pity always felt for the small man unexpectedly thrust into a big place”) or recounting some deadly adventure, especially among the Rough Riders: “O’Neill took his cigarette out of his mouth, and blowing out a cloud of smoke laughed and said: ‘Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me.’ … As he turned on his heel a bullet struck him in the mouth and came out the back of his head; so that even before he fell his wild and gallant soul had gone out into the darkness.”

The editor has not tried to whittle Roosevelt into a model American for the nineties. Passages on the white race’s triumph in settling the continent and on “the Negro Problem” help present the whole man.