Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
Home: A Short History of an Idea
by Witold Rybczynski; Viking; 256 pages; $16.95.
During the six years of the author’s architectural education, he writes in the foreword to this arresting book, the subject of comfort was mentioned only once—by an engineer talking about air conditioning. That such a basic need should be ignored in teaching students how to design buildings seemed so surprising to him that he set about exploring the history of comfort.
The concept is not an old one. In fact, the word in the sense we use it did not even exist until the eighteenth century. The precursors of comfort—privacy and intimacy—first became important in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and flourished with the growth of a middle-class devoted to family and home. The first comfortable furniture appeared in the eighteenth century, and when people accepted the idea of arranging chairs and sofas in the room instead of along its walls, “a landmark moment in the evolution of domestic comfort” had been reached.
What constitutes comfort is not universal either. To Westerners, sitting in chairs is comfortable. Most of the rest of the world finds squatting the most comfortable position, and in spite of a lot of theories about climate and poverty, no one really knows how the two different cultural traditions arose.
Certainly fashion has nothing to do with comfort. Rybczynski feels that the current architectural taste for large, open interior spaces is essentially an anticomfort concept, and that budget permitting, most people would, in fact, choose to live in rooms that resemble their grandparents’. This is an intriguing thesis, argued with clarity and wit.
A World of Watchers
by Joseph Kastner; Alfred A. Knopf; 256 pages; $25.00.
According to a recent survey, there are about two million bird watchers in America expert enough to recognize more than one hundred species of bird, and three times that number who can spot at least forty species, making bird watching one of, if not the, most popular outdoor sport in America. It is high time, then, that all these enthusiasts should be treated to a history of their passion. This first such study is a delight.
Indians were bird watchers before the white man ever got here, as witness the acute observations embodied in their bird names. For instance, the Chippe-was called the house wren o-du-na-missug-ud-da-we-shi, which means “making big noise for its size.” All the early explorers mentioned birds, but the first real birder—that is, one who keeps a life list—was perhaps the Virginia clergyman who recorded forty-five species in 1688. Artist naturalists such as Mark Catesby and John James Audubon discovered and recorded many New World birds, and a roster of military men from the Revolution on contributed significantly to American ornithology during their tours of duty at the nation’s outposts.
The enthusiasts were always divided into the protectors and the destroyers (even Audubon worked from dead specimens, which he often ate after drawing), including little boys who collected birds’ eggs. The first formal, nondestructive organization for bird watching was the Nuttall Ornithological Club in Boston, organized in 1873, whose members were expected not only to love birds but to have “qualities of mind and heart that make a man clubbable.” A less elitist group emerged when a bunch of boys from the Bronx started observing birds in such places as the Jerome Avenue Reservoir or the Hunt’s Point dump. This group eventually acquired a member named Roger Tory Peterson, whose bird guides are still today carried around in birders’ pockets. Kastner’s history will be a happy addition to any bird watcher’s library.
Ford: The Men and the Machine
by Robert Lacey; Little, Brown; 778 pages; $24.95.
Robert Lacey’s previous biographies include studies of Henry VIII, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Robert, Earl of Essex. It might seem strange, then, that the author chose to transplant himself to the heart of industrial America for his latest opus, but in fact his subject has as much grandeur, drama, and tragic reverberation as any saga of the house of Tudor.
Ford is clearly the work of an Englishman—people write cheques and ship freight in railcars—but it is just as clearly the work of someone in absolute command of this most American subject. Lacey’s authoritative text follows the fortunes of the nation’s best-known industrial family from Henry Ford’s first glimpse of an internal-combustion engine (it was being used in a soda-bottling plant) through his remaking the modern world with his Model T. With that triumph came the growing megalomania that led to the destruction of his son and industrial heir, Edsel, and finally to his grandson Henry II’s epic struggle to wrest the tortured company from the thugs to whom the founder had bequeathed it. The book ends with another fierce personal conflict, the much-publicized bout between Henry II and Lee Iacocca, and the entire narrative is an absorbing, perceptive study of how people and companies behave.
For all his intimate knowledge of Ford family goings-on, Lacey never loses track of the machinery. The Model T, the Model A, the V-8 engine, the Mustang—all are explained and put in their technological context with ease and fluency. There is plenty of gossip here, but it is informed by the author’s sure grasp of just how the Fords remade our society.
