Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History
by C. Vann Woodward; Louisiana State University Press; 157 pages; $12.95.
In this wry and mellow memoir, the Yale historian C. Vann Woodward reflects on his choice of career, on the books he has written, and on his critics. The book is, in fact, dedicated to the critics, without whom his life would have been simpler but less interesting, he says. The enormous popular success of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, his seventh book, astonished him. And because it reinterpreted the then-accepted history of Reconstruction, the book also brought angry protests from Southern critics. He was labeled an ideologue, a moralist, a radical.
Thinking back over his career, Woodward muses about the influences and motives that have led him to write “history-with-a-purpose.”
Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture
by Chester H. Liebs; New York Graphic Society; 259 pages; $19.95.
Everyone knows that the automobile has remade the way our world looks, but people are only just beginning to pay serious attention to this enormous transformation. A dedicated “windshield archeologist,” Liebs examines the miles of strips outside every American city, and in auto showrooms and drive-ins, in gas stations and motels, he finds much of the history of our century—and a certain jumbled beauty as well. The captions to his well-chosen pictures often reveal the true fondness that fuels his scholarly inquiry, as in a “rare color view of a taxpayer strip.”
The United States Navy
by Edward L. Beach, Captain, U.S.N. (Ret.); Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 592 pages; $24.95.
Beach brings a novelist’s skill, a historian’s authority, and the experience of a lifelong naval career to this splendid narrative history. There are lots of rousing scenes of courage on the quarterdeck here, but the author also has a subtler and more complex story to tell: the impact of new technology and the Navy’s subsequent struggle to reinvent itself, which in its quiet way was every bit as heroic as any broadside duel.
The Lives of Lee Miller
by Antony Penrose; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 216 pages; $29.95.
Lee Miller, the celebrated American model, lover, and photographer of the nineteen twenties, thirties, and forties, lived the troubled, adventurous life of a heroine in contemporary fiction. As revealed by her son Antony Penrose in a tone of loving, suppressed fury, she whirled like a tornado through Europe between the wars, touching down here and there, leaving havoc in her wake. The book is beautifully wrought and generously illustrated with striking examples of her work—celebrity portraits, surrealist set pieces, gritty, haunting scenes from World War II—and with photographs of Miller herself at her most, and her least, lovely.
The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic
by William Lee Miller; Alfred A. Knopf; 373 pages; $24.95.
When the founders of our nation worked out the “ancient tangled matter of religion and state,” they secured for us a freedom unique in the world, freedom of religion in both personal and institutional terms. We are immensely proud of this, and, Miller says, we should be. In this sophisticated and delightful book, the author examines the three most important contributors to this radical idea—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Roger Williams. The Founding Fathers debated fiercely whether public virtue could be assured without an established religion, and the resonances of these battles still sound today. Paradoxically, Miller shows that this first freedom has resulted not only in our great religious diversity today but also in an American devotion to traditional religion that is unmatched in other Western nations.
