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BOOKS WE THINK YOU’LL LIKE
by Barbara Klaw
Over the past fourteen years, AMERICAN HERITAGE has been proud to publish many excerpts from important new books selected with the guidance and counsel of Barbara Klaw, a member of our Board Editors, who has also edited the selections. We will continue to run such excerpts; and in addition we begin with this issue a regular column in which Ms. Klaw will briefly recommend other recent books that we think will engage the attention of our readers.
Autobiography of Values
by Barbara Klaw
by Charles A. Lindbergh
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
81 potographs, $12.95
When Charles Lindbergh realized he was dying in 1974, he asked his publisher, William Jovanovich, to aft as editor for the autobiography he wouldn’t be able to finish. Jovanovich, with the help of Judith A. Schiff, has now assembled the mass of incidents, thoughts, and judgments Lindbergh had been jotting down, sifting, and revising for almost twenty years.
It is a fascinating book. Lindbergh’s passion for science and technology clashed constantly with his surprising yearning for the primitive. All his life he promoted aviation, believing that (lying would benefit mankind, but he lived to experience the frightening detachment of dropping bombs from planes on human beings.
As a reporter and observer, Lindbergh is eloquent. The reader is riveted when he tells of the kidnapping of his son. Lindbergh’s discussion of how he selected his wife and avoided the press long enough to woo her is amusing. And there is an unforgettable account of a visit after World War II to an underground German rocket plant with its own crematorium for slave laborers who had been worked to death. As a philosopher, Lindbergh sometimes seems an innocent, and there is nothing here to answer the charges of anti-Semitism to which he laid himself open before the Second World War. But in this book a complicated American hero shows us the contradictory and often unhappy processes of his mind.
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On Becoming American
by Barbara Klaw
by Ted Morgan
Houghton Miffin, $10.95
It is flattering to read about a sophisticated French nobleman who has decided he’d rather be an American. Ted Morgan, a Pulitzcr Prize-winning journalist, was born Sanche de Gramont—le comte Sanche de Gramont. Raised, educated, and employed in both France and America, he decided in his forties that he’d had enough of his native country. The French were smug and rigid, he felt, and so he went through the lengthy business of becoming an American citizen. Scrambling the letters of “de Gramont,” he arrived at Ted Morgan—thoroughly American, comfortably unaristocratic. In this amiable book, he ranges through the American past and present, observing thoughtfully and with crisp affection his adopted land.
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The Children of Bladensfield
by Barbara Klaw
by Evelyn D. Ward
The Viking Press
40 photographs, $14.95
This book is a child’s-eye view of the Civil War, and of life before and during it on a modest Virginia estate called Bladensfield. Evelyn Ward wrote her reminiscences when she was an old woman to document for her descendants a vanished way of life. The childhood she describes with the precision of Laura Ingalls W’ilder was merry and loving, and her book-sunny, brave, and sad—is haunting. Peter Matthiessen, a grandnephew of the author and therefore one of the children of Bladensfield, contributes a graceful essay on the family and Bladensfield today.
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The Making of the Wizard of Oz
by Barbara Klaw
by Aljean Harmetz
Alfred A. Knopf
115 illustrations and photographs, 16 in color, $12.95
There’s nothing very deep here, just wonderful reading. It’s a play-by-play description of how Film No. 1060 was made in the days when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ground out movies by the dozens, shuffling writers, directors, and actors around like Parcheesi pieces. It’s fun to learn how they adjusted, readjusted, and re-readjusted L. Frank Baum’s book, how they plucked actors out of their stable, how they created a convincing tornado and menacing trees. MGM tried to borrow Shirley Temple from 20th Century-Fox to play Dorothy, and chose Judy Garland when they couldn’t get her. Judy, by the way, was the next-to-lowest-paid star in the film. Only the dog Toto earned less.
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