by Cassie Brown
Doubleday & Co.Charts, photographs, and sketches by a survivor 391 pages, $12.95
On the night of February 18,1942, two hundred and three young American sailors drowned, suffocated in oil, were battered to death on rocks, or died of exposure in one of the worst—and least publicized—disasters in U.S. naval history. No enemy action was involved. Three vessels, the destroyers U.S.S. Wilkes and U.S.S. Truxtun and the supply ship U.S.S. Pollux, ran aground in a storm on the south coast of Newfoundland. There were one hundred and eighty-five survivors, and they owed their lives to the extraordinary gallantry of the people who lived in two small nearby villages.
Eight men from Lawn and most of the men of St. Lawrence endangered themselves on the icy rocks and the stormlashed beach to effect the rescue. They lifted survivors one by one off ledges in rope slings, racing the rising tide; they formed a human chain out into the debris-choked waves to pull in oilencrusted sailors; and they hauled everyone still alive on horse-drawn sleds back through the wind and snow to town. There, the women took over. They stripped and rubbed the young men, trying to force oil out of their stomachs and scrub it from their skins. They packed heated rocks around them, and gently spooned hot soup into their mouths.
Cassie Brown has reconstructed this event in explicit technical detail from court records and has also interviewed survivors, some of whom she located through St. Lawrence women who have kept in touch with the young men they nursed back to life. She is sharply critical of legal shortcuts taken by the wartime Navy, which appear to have ruined the careers of several brave men. Perhaps this gripping book will at last help to right the injustice.
An American Bestiary
by Barbara Klaw
by Mary Sayre Haverstock
Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 198 illustrations, including 73 plates in full color, 248 pages, $35.00
There are no anthropomorphic morals in this bestiary. It is simply a book of American animal paintings, often giving us glimpses of the artists’ most relaxed, intimate work. Ranging from the peaceable-kingdom to the howling wilderness views of the animal world, the images are as gentle as a kitten painted as a thank-you note or as ominous as circling buzzards. The paintings are splendidly reproduced in this enticing book.
No Castles on Main Street American Authors and Their Homes
by Barbara Klaw
by Stephanie Kraft
Rand McNally & Company 90 photographs, 239 pages, $9.95
“The places I loved or hated between the ages of three and thirteen compose an inexhaustible landscape of memory,” Ellen Glasgow once wrote. This landscape of memory is what Stephanie Kraft explores for us in her compact, unusual book about the homes and hometowns of thirty American authors.
In well-chosen pictures and neat, graceful essays she shows how and where the writers lived, and how deeply rooted they were in their home territories. For instance, William Faulkner, working in Hollywood and furiously homesick for Oxford, Mississippi (his Yoknapatawpha County) once wrote that he yearned to be in his own kitchen “with my family around me and my hands full of Old Maid cards.” Sherwood Anderson, talking of the countryside around Clyde, Ohio, where he grew up, recalled his boyhood sense of “awe before the facts of life in meadows.”
Kraft also tells us how the hometowns reacted to becoming literary subject matter. Sinclair Lewis’ neighbors in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, for example, were shocked when Main Street (set in the thinly disguised town of Gopher Prairie) appeared. Two years later they renamed their central thoroughfare “The Original Main Street.”
