Selected and edited by Ann Banks Alfred A. Knopf Photographs 320 pages, $13.95
The Federal Writers’ Project, operating under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration in the latter years of the Depression, is best known for its series of excellent—and still indispensable- guides to the states of the nation. What is not as well known is the fact that hundreds of the project’s researchers and writers—among them Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Richard Wright—were given the task of interviewing thousands of working Americans all over the country, recording their feelings, fears, experiences, and the rhythms of their language. The result was the largest body of first-person narratives ever collected in the United States. And for nearly forty years the material lay almost untouched and all but forgotten in ancient files.
Now, after months of diligent rummaging, Ann Banks has pulled out and brought together eighty of these life stories, told in the words of the men and women themselves—factory hands and slaughterhouse workers, Harlem prostitutes and Chicago jazzmen, tobacco farmers, granite workers, union organizers, vaudeville troupers, peddlers, and circus hands. Woven together skillfully with background material, the narratives of First-Person America provide a richly satisfying tapestry of life as it was lived during the first forty years of this century—and at times achieves the rank of native poetry along the way, as in the words of an old hardrock miner: “I guess that if a man has miner’s blood in him, he can’t never make it on top of the ground. He’s like a mole: he can tell his way around by the kind of rock he’s in, but the wind don’t make no sense.”
—T.H.W.
The Treasure of the Concepcion
by Peter Earle Viking Illustrations, maps 274 pages, $12.95
On October 31, 1641, the stormbattered Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, flagship of the Spanish silver fleet, struck a reef off the coast of Hispaniola. She took to the bottom with her perhaps as much as 140 tons of silver. Of course, men immediately set out to recover the treasure, but despite all that greed, chicanery, and courage could accomplish, none had any luck until, nearly fifty years after the event, a resourceful Boston sea captain named William Phips decided to try. He got an astounding quarter of a million pounds and a knighthood for his pains.
This is the stuff of a wonderful yarn, and we are fortunate that Peter Earle keeps this in mind throughout his account of the great treasure hunt. Without jettisoning any of his fine scholarship, the author runs out a splendid tale full of adventurers highborn and low, pirates, smugglers, priests, rakes, mutineers, and heroes. Earle pursued his story so carefully that he managed to unearth seventeenthcentury documents which proved vital in the recent rediscovery of the wreck by Burt Webber, a modern-day Phips every bit as single-minded as the original. Phips left enough behind him to allow the book to end with a happy Webber continuing to bring up millions of dollars worth of Spanish treasure from the 350-year-old wreck.
—R.F.S.
The Face of Lincoln
Compiled and edited by James Mellon Viking Photographs 201 pages, $75.00
No face is better known to us than Lincoln’s, and so it might seem that this big volume—containing all 120 existing photographs of him, interspersed with quotations from his writings and from those who knew him best—would be a flossy redundancy, gotten up for the Christmas trade.
Instead, it is a triumph. Lincoln knew the value of publicity: he had his picture taken at least 136 times. Sixteen of those poses have long since vanished, and all but 29 of the rest exist only in imperfect form—as second-, or third-, or fourthgeneration copies, faded, retouched, or otherwise abused by time. It was Richard Mellon’s good, simple notion to track down and meticulously reproduce the finest example of each surviving portrait before it, too, disappears. The book is large (each page measures 113/8 by 14½ inches) and the painstaking printing, supervised by Professor Richard Benson of Yale, is superb.
Lincoln, wrote his law partner, was “cold, precise and exact"; so were the cameras that captured him. In this book we see him, almost for the first time, as a real human being, with all the mythologizing words out of the way. He is at once shrewd, self-contained, ambitious, tough—just the sort of man to meet and master the worst crisis in our history.
The earliest portrait was made in 1846, the year Lincoln first went to Congress. He is every inch the eager young office seeker: neatly dressed, dandified even, his hair gleams from brushing and only his enormous hands betray his awkwardness. By the time his last photograph was made by Alexander Gardner in the victorious spring of 1865, the big, blunt features that seem grotesque in so many intervening pictures have somehow been gentled and his expression softened to near sweetness. This book is an ideal gift for anyone interested in photography, in Lincoln, or in the great war whose ghastly passage may be read across his face.
