A gathering of recent books, videos, recordings, and other items of special interest to the readers of American Heritage, selected and recommended by the editors.
BOOKS
The War in Color
G.I. Victory The U.S. Army in World War II Color
by Jeffrey L. Ethell and David C. Isby, Stackpole Books, 160 pages.
A few years ago, when we started our fiftieth-anniversary coverage of Work War II, we tried to assemble a portfolio of war scenes photographed in color. We scratched together a half-dozen or so examples and gave up, so forced and artificially posed were the subjects, so random the coverage, and so scarce the images. This book gets a different result indeed. And it didn’t happen by chance. Jeffrey Ethell, one of the two authors, describes a twenty-year collecting process supported by hundreds of
sources—official U.S. Army photographers, historians, curators, and GI practitioners. The more than 150 photos reflect many facets of wartime life in vivid, sharply focused vignettes. It is true that thanks to the limitations of early Kodachrome, the sun is
always shining on these sometimes desperate endeavors, and as with most official photographs (the large majority of these come from the National Archives), the subjects were usually made to pose for the camera. Nevertheless the merciless light renders detail with such precision that the pictures can catch the viewer on the cusp of a moment in time. We almost hear the clatter of a truck rumbling over a rudimentary U.S. Army bridge thrown across the Serchio River, and sense the tenderness of a flight nurse caring for her wounded charge, his stretcher lying on a dirt airstrip, under the wing of the C-47 that will bring him to the safety of a hospital in Naples.
The Hollywood Front
When the Stars Went to War: Hollywood and World War II
by Roy Hoopes, Random House, 357 pages.
World War II may have produced more challenging roles for Hollywood stars than an army of producers could ever have dreamed up. David Niven stoically flew back to England, Jimmy Stewart became a combat flier, and Henry Fonda eagerly joined the Navy. The Treasury Department called on celebrities to sell war bonds: Hedy Lamarr sold kisses for $25,000 apiece; the less kissable Charles Laughton set up three coffins marked “Hitler,” “Hirohito,” and “Mussolini” for people to drive nails into “at the cost of one $18.75 bond per nail.” Hollywood also created immensely successful wartime shows; the tireless USO did 428,521 live performances. Everyone was eager to contribute. Even Lucille Ball, in a fittingly absurd incident, reported to the FBI when she heard suspicious noises coming from her new tooth filling. Investigators discovered a transmitter nearby “belonging to a gardener who was, indeed, part of a Japanese spy ring.”
The author has a line on almost everyone in When the Stars Went to War. He generously—and frankly—dishes out sublime details about the filmworthy scandals and impulsive affairs peculiar to Hollywood life during wartime, such as Marlene Dietrich’s liaison with General Patton. But Hoopes also points up the uneasiness many actors felt about having to translate their on-screen hero roles into real life. John Wayne—exempt from service because of a bad shoulder—sulked his way through a meeting with the director and Navy man John Ford; John Garfield was humiliated by his 4-F status. Errol Flynn, who did everything possible to avoid the draft, was then cast in Objective, Burma!, a film in which he wins the war single-handedly. Clearly, Hollywood’s glitter and the war’s very real grit were a strange but transfixing combination.
Yesterday’s Gurus
Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America
by Peter Washington, Schocken Books, 470 pages.
America was settled largely by religious misfits from the Old World, and its centuries of spiritual yearnings and upheavals are more than rich enough to fill this engrossing book by the English writer Peter Washington. The author is fully aware of just how entertaining his material is, but he gets beneath it to reveal the undercurrents in nineteenth-century America that produced each spiritual vogue, from astral light to chromopathy to transcendentalism. None of his characters is more interesting or elusive than the founder of Theosophy, Madame Helena Blavatsky.
“She narrated to us the most inconceivable tales about herself,” Helena’s sister recalled from their 1830s childhood in Russia, “the most unheard of adventures of which she was the heroine, every night, as she explained.” Blavatsky claimed to have spent seven years apprenticing with mystics in Tibet and said she could “precipitate” messages from “Masters” in Egypt. In 1875 an entire bible, called Isis Unveiled, was dictated to her, often while she slept. She founded a church that appealed to that segment
of the self-improving middle classes among which, Washington writes, “nudism and dietary reform linked arms with universal brotherhood and occult wisdom.” Blavatsky went on to command hundreds of franchised lodges worldwide. The book concludes with the only slightly less interesting story of the heirs to her occultist empire, right down to the recent age of Krishnamurti.
Vietnam in Pictures
Tim Page’s Nam
introduction by William
Shawcross, Thames and Hudson, 120 pages.
The English photographer Tim Page got to Vietnam while the American buildup was still gathering momentum, settled into the life of a war corespondent, and liked it—liked the raffishness and the easy drugs and the danger. He got very close to the fighting; this is what happened when U.S. aircraft attacked the U.S. Coast Guard vessel he was aboard: “Here’s two [P]hantoms and a B-57 strafing us with twin Vulcans blazing, giving us a stem-to-stern strafing. They hit some gas drums, which started cooking off, and I watched a guy get his hand blown off. The skipper went up to the bridge to try and signal to the jets that we were friendlies and they blew him away. They made nine passes, and blasted the living hell out of the ship. Everybody on board was killed or wounded, I had pieces of commo wire coming out of my head like porcupine quills, a bone sticking out of my arm and countless shrapnel punctures.” Page left, came back, took a piece of shrapnel in his brain in 1969, then left for good, bringing away with him a literature of photographs that are perhaps the very best to come out of the Vietnam War. This fine collection is back in print after more than a decade, and its images are as urgent, immediate, and unsettling as they were when they first began to be published a generation ago. Page shows us the full spectrum of the war: fire, machinery, tired men,
cheerful men goofing around with Playboy magazines and beer, a child weeping over his mother, dead on a truck bed, and tanks grinding off through the haze down a straight, dusty road past the shrill white curl of a human spine.
Mean Federalist Streets
History of My Own Times
by William Otter, Cornell University Press, 248 pages.
Federal-period America produced autobiographies by preachers, surgeons, philanthropists, politicians, war heroes, and newspaper editors, but the people who worked anonymously with their hands left few histories behind. William Otter’s is a powerful exception, but then Otter would be the first to insist he was no ordinary man. He was both a prominent plasterer and a ruffian.
Born in England in 1787, he ran away to sea at age eleven when his father whipped him for not weeding the garden. Ice sank his ship off Greenland; Otter was rescued by a second vessel and later impressed into His Majesty’s navy, which he deserted. He wound up in New York City, where he began his American education with a local plasterer and also with a city gang, the Highbinders. His book reads something like a Dickens story until 1806, when the poor, buffeted English boy sheds his innocence by joining in an anti-Irish riot. From here on follow stories of an American lout, cutting school, running with the gang, starting fights in grogshops, and eluding the watchman. One night he lay in wait for a local grocer who had clubbed him: “I let slip a war-hawk and missed him, the stone took a keg, and spent its idle force there; he came to the door and looked up and down the street… I prepared for another shot, and let slip another, and hit him on the jaw and knocked him down.…” This is not the usual fare in autobiographies of the time.
The rest of Otter’s life is a similar rowdy mix of working, drinking, and tribal violence against Irish and blacks. This side of life is rarely given voice in accounts of the period, let alone such an agile voice. The gap between Otter’s fluent history and his brutish actions keeps the book as absorbing as a good period novel.
Cold Warrior
Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
by Peter Grose, Houghton Mifflin, 641 pages.
Allen Dulles’s life, as this fat biography makes clear, both reflected and shaped the American century we still inhabit. Born in 1893 into a family of diplomats and high government officials, Dulles and his even more famous brother, John Foster, showed up in all the right places from the start. At the end of the First World War both attended the Paris Peace Conference; later they worked for the powerful Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell; and eventually they stood at the ramparts of the free world, from their respective positions as director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of State. Peter Grose, a former executive editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and a New York Times bureau chief, never met Alien Dulles, but he tackles his subject’s professional and personal life in cool, graceful prose that serves him well as his defense against the charm of the man.
Grose’s story of the exhilarating World War II days of the founding of the Office of Strategic Services is as good as any novel—or better. The postwar period, when the two Dulleses grow into their careers as the classic cold warriors, is, in Grose’s measured recounting, less than heartening. By the end of Alien Dulles’s life, in 1969, we can see that what the author calls “the CIA’s propensities to dabble in the politics and social frameworks of other lands” may eventually bring it all down. “Since Alien had never shown aptitude or interest in the workings of a large bureaucracy, the centrifugal forces accelerated unchecked,” he writes.
The strength of Grose’s biography lies, however, not so much in its detailing of the good and bad times of a spy network as in its careful delineation of character and context and how these strands wove the world we live in.
Lardner Decoded
The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring W. Lardner, 1914–1919
edited by George W. Hilton, Stanford University Press, 631 pages.
When Ring Lardner wrote his classic baseball stories in the 1910s, he seamlessly mixed his fictional players with real ones, setting their adventures in the context of the actual major and minor leagues of the time. For dedicated readers part of the fun has always lain in identifying the real-life people and events that pop up in the adventures of Jack Keefe (hero of the “You Know Me Al” stories) and Lardner’s other homespun characters.
Now George W. Hilton, a UCLA economics professor who usually writes about railroads, has gone through the corpus from Lardner’s golden age and footnoted every name, place, and incident that has some connection to real life, even speculating about whom fictional characters might be based on. In addition, Hilton discourses on such Lardner precursors as William Makepeace Thackeray and delves into the historical statistics of the Central League’s Terre Haute club.
The profusion of information can be daunting at first, but it’s easy to skip and skim or to read the stories first for Lardner’s masterly narrative and then again for Hilton’s exhaustive background. After eight decades the tales remain as charming as ever, and the annotations will multiply the enjoyment for any reader, new or old.
Nature Essays
Heart of the Land
Essays on Last Great Places
edited by Joseph Barbato and Lisa Weinerman of the Nature Conservancy, foreword by Barry Lopez, Pantheon, 296 pages.
The assignment was simple and clear: Write about a surviving wild area that has special meaning for you. Thirty-one well-known authors accepted and agreed to donate their essays to the Nature Conservancy’s cause. Rick Bass’s essay on his native Texas Hill Country covers sixty years in the life of one family’s thousand-acre hunting ground. Peter Matthiessen can tell his life almost entirely through his involvement with the clam beds, duck blinds, salt meadows, channels, and harbors of “the glacial outwash plain known as Long Island.” Parts of his paradise hang on despite development, but Matthiessen realizes that “the blue water [is] gone, and the clear emerald water, too” in favor of one flat “olive-brown.”
Matthiessen hopes his waters and salt meadows can be redeemed; Jim Harrison feels cautious optimism in Gray Ranch, New Mexico, camping on the site where “a hundred years ago… 400,000 cattle had perished to starvation.” Thomas McGuane fishes Idaho’s Snake River, Louise Erdrich visits the tall grasses of North Dakota and recalls her father stalking deer in the woods or cornfields with a fiberglass bow. Philip Caputo offers the compact, preserved beauty of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard as models for the rest of the country, which, in fifty or a hundred years, will also run out of room but will want to remain somewhat wild.
It took editorial nerve to solicit essays not just from environmental activists but from hunters as well. These essays make the strongest case for conservation because they are eloquently personal and mostly free from abstract platitudes.
RECORDINGS
American Laughter
Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor
read by Tony Randall, The Mind’s Eye (four cassettes).
If you find that most American comic writing before Abraham Lincoln seems meant for a mysterious lost race of chucklers, then this sampler is for you. No humorist before the sixteenth President appears except for Benjamin Franklin. Russell Baker, the New York Times columnist and author, has collected works by familiar names from Artemus Ward to Molly Ivins. In Robert Benchley’s masterfully disappointing tale “Uncle Edith’s Ghost Story,” Uncle Edith repeatedly has to tell some interrupting brats to shut up as he works to his story’s anticlimax. There are dark epigrams from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, domestic dialogues between a mother and daughter by Erma Bombeck, and Art Buchwald’s 1950s press-conference spoof inspired by Ike’s state visit to Paris (“Jim, whose idea was it for the President to go to sleep?” “How many blankets were on the bed?”). Lincoln himself shows up; his “Cables From the White House” is much funnier than Artemus Ward’s “How Old Abe Received the News of His Nomination.” And the master Mark Twain makes several welcome appearances. It’s worth hearing Tony Randall shift gears from his clipped, Broadway delivery into a plausible rural Missouri accent when reading Huck’s father’s drunken tirade: “And they call that a gov’ment?” There are thirty entries in all.
Upbeat Piano
Fascinatin’ Rhythm
American Syncopation
Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 444 457-2 (one CD).
In his notes to this rousing collection of piano pieces that are all unalloyedly American in their play with lively rhythm, the pianist Alan Feinberg writes, “Whereas race, sex and class sharply divided society earlier in the century, in the music world there was a warm interest and lively discourse between the different styles of musical endeavor. James P. Johnson was friends with Gershwin and Godowsky. Horowitz and Tatum compared their ‘Tea for Two’ arrangements.” He demonstrates the energy let loose when pop and classical collided—one of the many cultural collisions that make American music so rich and varied—by juxtaposing on the disc works by, among others, Gershwin, Fats Waller, Henry Cowell, Scott Joplin, Percy Grainger, Bud Powell, Duke Ellington, Conlon Nancarrow, and Jelly Roll Morton. He shows Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the nineteenth-century American Liszt, to have been the grandfather of stride piano, and Bix Beiderbecke to have been inspired by Ravel. Best of all, he gives us a broad catalogue of great American rhythm played with perfect dash and verve.
VIDEOS
Usonian Man
The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright
written and directed by Murray Grigor, Direct Cinema, 75 minutes.
It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother, a schoolteacher, who wanted him to be an architect, and his father, a clergyman, who taught him that “a symphony was an edifice of sound.” Wright grew up to become both our greatest architect and our most prominent articulator of the art as well. Early on, he said, “I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypocritical humility.” He chose the former, and this film by the Wright Foundation (narrated by his granddaughter, the actress Anne Baxter) backs him up. The film follows the evolution of Wright’s art more than of his life, the camera panning lovingly through each structure while Baxter’s cultured voice or the architect’s (from his wonderful recorded lectures) explains his discoveries.
An hour and fifteen minutes doesn’t leave room to linger on the tragedies in Wright’s life, but the film does note his failed marriages and the fires that destroyed the first two of his homes at Taliesen. An early masterwork, the 1903 glass-atriumed Larkin Office Building in Buffalo, survives only in photographs and in film taken by Wright and included here. However, from the low-slung Prairie House to the concrete origami of the Guggenheim Museum almost seven decades later, Wright’s restless life was a creatively triumphant one, as this fine documentary makes clear.
Third Reich Filmmaker
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
directed by Ray Müller, Kino Video, 181 minutes.
No one interested in World War II should ignore this profile of the German director Leni Riefenstahl, who for six decades has defended the brilliant and notorious film work she did for the Nazi regime. In making this fascinating movie, the director Ray Müller found her as commanding an actress in her nineties as she was in the 1930s German “mountain” films that first brought her Adolf Hitler’s admiration. Her romantic climbing pictures mixed heroism with German fable, and Hitler hired her to do the same for his Party Congress of 1933, resulting in Victory of the Faith—a film Riefenstahl now repudiates on aesthetic grounds—and later Triumph of the Will and Olympia, which remain potent and infamous masterworks. Olympia, her epic tribute to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, produced many of the innovations that made modern sports coverage possible, even while it did the Nazis’ work.
In this new documentary she holds court for three hours while Müller intersperses her autobiographical monologues with scenes from her movies. Like millions of her fellow Germans, Riefenstahl later declared she “didn’t know” of the party’s atrocities. Müller cross-examines her about the Third Reich period but smartly leaves the viewer to judge the full extent of her beliefs. The film’s spark comes from the struggle between these two directors—Riefenstahl wanting to give final shape to her amazing life, Müller not quite letting her off.
IF YOU’RE IN
The Hartford Area
Enoch Kelsey’s crumbling house was scheduled for demolition when in 1979 the advance guard of the recently constituted Newington (Connecticut) Historical Society and Trust asked if it could try to uncover some unusual wall paintings rumored to be there. The members, most in their mid- to late sixties at the time, could hardly have envisioned the work ahead.
The group’s first foray into the simple, circa 1799 dwelling uncovered remarkable floral sprays and garlands that had been lying dormant under a half-dozen layers of wallpaper. This led to a thirty-day reprieve for the house, a successful first stab at fundraising, and the gift of a meadow to re-site the structure from Dr. Gideon Wells. Its roof temporarily removed, the old house made an overnight journey to a new setting.
About fifteen minutes’ drive from Hartford, the restored Kelsey House is well worth a visit, if only for the sparkling paintings that appear in every room. Even more remarkable than the unusual freehand floral trellises that climb whole walls and the garlands that border the windows are four oval landscapes painted onto the walls of the southwest parlor. Here the unknown artist added trompe l’oeil frames and, to complete a primitive illusion, painted the very nails from which they appear to hang. The folk art authority Nina Fletcher Little visited the house and pronounced these works a major find.
Enoch Kelsey House, 1702 Main Street, Newington, Connecticut, is open on weekends May through October from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M. and by appointment (203-666-7118).
IN THIS ISSUE
For information about subscribing to the Prodigy on-line service, which carries the weekly American Heritage Picture Gallery feature (described in this month’s Letter From the Editor), call 1-800-PRODIGY. Prodigy also offers a host of news, shopping, reference, entertainment, and chat services and full Internet access. Madeline Rogers, who is in charge of American Heritage Picture Gallery, is also the editor of Seaport magazine, put out three times a year by the South Street Seaport Museum. Seaport takes as its subject several centuries of New York waterfront life, covering the history of everything from speakeasies, dance halls, and sailors’ brothels to the New York Yacht Club and the Port Authority. Two decades old, it demonstrates that there’s far more to the city’s maritime culture than scrimshaw and dirty songs. A thirty-five-dollar three-issue subscription to Seaport also buys you a museum membership. The museum is at 207 Front Street in Manhattan (212-748-8600).
As Viola Hopkins Winner’s feature on Henry Adams and the automobile makes clear, few of Adams’s thoughts went unrecorded, and very little of his correspondence isn’t graceful and original. His collected letters from this period, in which he makes his peace with the car and the worse shocks of the new century, are published by Harvard University Press in The Letters of Henry Adams: Eighteen Ninety-two to Nineteen-eighteen, volumes 4–6 (2,400 pages).
For more about the Shakers at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky (the subject of this month’s travel column), and at other settlements around the country, try Architecture of the Shakers, by Julie Nicoletta (Countryman Press, 176 pages). Her subject is broader than the title suggests: The chapter on dwelling houses describes life in Shaker residences, and the one on offices and stores details the Shakers’ business dealings with the outside world. By the 1860s, she writes, the Shakers were selling their furniture wholesale to stores in Boston and New York; by the 1880s the demand for their chairs was so great that Shakers in Mount Lebanon, New York, flouted the sect’s strict laws governing separation of the sexes and let men and women work side by side to speed up production rather than turn away income. Even as they created a market for simple, virtuous designs, the Shakers themselves occasionally succumbed to the desire to display a little wealth and sophistication: After a cyclone had destroyed the Trustees Office in Union Village, Ohio, in 1886, it was remodeled with marble floors and sinks, a mansard roof, and a cupola. The text is illustrated with beautiful color photographs by Bret Morgan.
Geoffrey C. Ward’s column “Life and Times” takes up Ian Frazier’s Family (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 386 pages). The book is an extraordinary history of Frazier’s ordinary American clan, which he traces back to Midwestern preachers, wheelwrights, and farmers and, beyond that, to their old-world roots in Yorkshire and Scotland and Bern. Frazier sifts through the story of his family on both sides, the small and everyday no less exquisitely realized than the larger events that intrude, such as the Danbury raid in the Revolution or the Battle of Chancellorsville.
CD-ROM ROUNDUP
In the last year or so CD-ROMs have begun to deluge bookstores and computer stores. Quite a few of them, especially at the beginning, have been hastily assembled arrangements of pre-existing material, throwing together sound, pictures, movies, and text in a format slower and harder to use than any book ever published. But lately CD-ROMs have been created with greater and greater thought and sophistication, and several recent titles stand out as of interest to the readers of American Heritage.
The closest thing to a general American history yet on CD-ROM is Smithsonian’s America (Creative Multimedia, for Windows), an “Interactive Exhibition of American History and Culture” taken from a show the Smithsonian Institution mounted in Japan in 1994. It’s very much a museum show rather than a detailed history, but it is one that covers the
American past in the broadest way with surprising effectiveness. It breaks down into eight main sections: “American Ideals and Images,” “The Peopling of America,” “Entertaining Americans,” “Politics and Protest” (which includes the Revolution and the Civil War), “The Western Frontiers,” “Conquering Time and Space,” “Americans at Home,” and “Looking American.” Under “The Peopling of America,” you might select “Coming to America” from among several choices and then, under that, “Native Americans.” You will then hear a good basic introduction to the subject while being shown engrossing archival photographs of Eskimos building an igloo, an 1879 Zuni village, and more. Then you’ll be offered eight artifacts to see or hear, including a Sioux shirt, an Edison film of a Pueblo dance, and a recording of a Zuni harvest dance. This handsome, intelligently conceived, and entertaining CD might be just the thing to draw children into a greater curiosity about the nation’s past.
Family Tree Maker Deluxe Edition (Banner Blue Software, for Windows) makes it easy to delve into your own family’s past. It starts with an attractive and simple-to-use database for recording complete family information,
making the basic work of recording genealogy clear and uncomplicated. It automatically presents the information in trees of any person’s ancestors and descendants, in lists of relations, and in other ways. It offers scrapbook pages indexed to any relative or event that can include images and sound as well as text. Best of all, it has a guide to finding genealogical information, listing dozens of important sources, many of which—state birth and marriage records and more—are available themselves on CD-ROM from the same company.
One use in which CD-ROM technology can offer definite advantages is in exploring and enjoying music. Antonin Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 (Voyager, for Macintosh) includes not only a full recording of the New World Symphony but also a reduced score that scrolls by as the music plays, written musical commentary and analysis that also unfolds with the performance, demonstrations and illustrations of every instrument and musical term used, and full historical background to the composition, including a wealth of information and illustration on Dvorák’s travels in America. A whole new way to enter the world of a symphony.
Or the world of a movie. Voyager’s Salt of the Earth (for Macintosh) includes the full film of that title (albeit in modest-resolution near-stop-action), an underappreciated Hollywood saga of striking New Mexico miners made in 1953 by a group of blacklisted filmmakers. It also gives the full screenplay, which you can follow along with, and, to back that up, there’s a wealth of information on the movie and the moviemakers—biographies, reviews, historical and critical essays, and more—and hundreds of photographs both from the film’s production and from the actual 1950 strike it was based on.
For movies just as historical but far lighter, you can do no better than Ephemeral Films (Voyager, for Macintosh and Windows), a window to an America that no longer exists and probably never did. From a 1956 Hollywood-style musical extravaganza that promises the American housewife G.M. cars and futuristic glamour to a comforting lesson in conformity for troubled teens (Shy Guy, 1947), this collection of promotional and educational shorts provides a road map to 1930s to early 1960s culture the way corporations and government wanted you to see it. Who can argue with the value of having dinner with your family every night—even as the narrator lauds the fact that “these boys greet their dad as though they were genuinely glad to see him” and later suggests that “pleasant, unemotional conversation helps digestion.” The selection of films has previously been offered on videotape; the CD version adds a sly and informative on-screen text.
Warplanes: Modern Fighting Aircraft (Maris Multimedia, for Macintosh or Windows), yields a multimedia database of information on more than five hundred warplanes—practically every one built since 1976—plus thirteen hundred fullscreen photographs, seventy minutes of live-action video, interactive models of some two dozen aircraft, and three flight simulators. The simulators permit you to pilot an A-10 Thunderbolt in the Gulf War, an Israeli C-130 resupplying an army unit behind enemy lines, and a Soviet SU-27 in a practice dogfight against MiG-21 drones. The disk is the first in a series of six that its makers promise will add up to “the most comprehensive survey of military aircraft published in any media.”
Down on the water and two hundred years earlier, Stowaway! (Dorling Kindersley Multimedia, for Windows), an adaptation of Stephen Biesty’s book of the same title, offers an interactive tour of an eighteenth-century warship, painted in great, playful detail. You can move fore and aft and up and down through the ship and zero in on crewmen and their activities and various pieces of equipment. Meeting the surgeon, you’ll visit his sick bay, emergency ward, and operating theater and learn about the diseases he confronted, the tools he used, and his terrible job during battle. The level of information and its presentation are directed at children and young adults; they should also enjoy the game that’s thrown in, which invites them to track down a stowaway.
