Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
Franklin of Philadelphia
by Esmond Wright; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 404 pages; $25.00.
For most of his political life, Benjamin Franklin strove mightily to preserve the bonds between Great Britain and her American colonies, to keep that “fine and noble China vase, the British Empire” from cracking. When he saw that he must fail in the effort, he strove even more to make sure the revolution succeeded, even if it meant wheeling and dealing with every selfish interest in France, Spain, and Holland. For Esmond Wright in his acute biography, Franklin is the American as heroic fixer—zestful, humorous, open to any man’s ideas but always testing them against his own sense of the reasonable and humane, sometimes overly relishing his own craftiness but, in the end, knowing that nothing could be accomplished without consultation and consent. Wright is especially good in showing us how well Franklin knew men’s psychology; no one understood better the pride and arrogance and bad faith of the British bureaucrats and how this distorted and finally dissipated all their efforts.
Even though the title was later given to Washington, there is no question in Wright’s mind that Franklin was the first American. This was perhaps best expressed by Balzac, who said, with the wit one genius owes another, that Franklin “was the inventor of the lightning rod, the hoax and the republic.”
Symbols of America
by Hal Morgan; Viking; 239 pages; $35.00.
This is a browser’s book, a coffee-table book for trivial pursuitists, a delight. Hal Morgan has collected more than one thousand pictures of American trademarks, divided them by theme, product, history, and design, and served them up with an intelligent text. They show our prejudices (exterminators in the 1890s were symbolized by Chinese eating rats); they illustrate changes in custom (“Heroin” was a trademark for an 1898 proprietary drug); and they point up our infatuations (the noble Indian, after he was conquered, became a symbol for practically anything). The 1870 devil emblem for Underwood Deviled Ham is the oldest registered food trademark still in use in the United States, and it is shown in all its design versions.
Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century
by Laura Shapiro; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 280 pages; $16.95.
About a hundred years ago there erupted in America the same passion for food and its preparation that exists here today. It was then called the domestic science movement, and its aims couldn’t have been more different from those of today’s eager gourmets. The idea was to standardize food, to make it pure, scientific—and tasteless. Fannie Farmer (“the mother of level measurements”) and the Boston Cooking School led the way in “disdaining the proof of the palate.” In this witty and delightful book, Laura Shapiro explores the reform forces that, in the name of science and progress for women, introduced such items as gelatin-marshmallow salads into our national cuisine.
Edison’s Electric Light: Biography of an Invention
by Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, with Bernard S. Finn; Rutgers University Press; 263 pages; $35.00.
Thomas Edison’s light changed the world so quickly and dramatically that it is not surprising that its origins are the stuff of myth. But the true story is much more human and only a little less glorious than the legends. Two historians of technology reconstruct the stages of the invention, beginning when Edison first announced that he would shortly produce a light bulb and ending four long years later when a commercial incandescent lighting system finally began operation, in New York in 1882. An initial period of wild overconfidence was followed by months of groping, frustration, hype, intense hard work, breakthroughs, and a growing understanding of the basic science of electricity. Even after the bulb’s traditional birthday, everything from fixtures to generators had to be invented, built, and strung together before the invention had any practical significance. When all that was done, the world would never be the same again.
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
by Barry Lopez; Charles Scribner’s Sons; 464 pages; $22.95.
The far, far north is another world on earth, a place where night and day and nature and distance and human life as we know them are obliterated and replaced by something different and wonderful. Barry Lopez, author of the prizewinning study Of Wolves and Men, spent four years traveling across the upper reaches of North America and beyond. When he returned, he wrote a masterful volume that combines natural and human history to explore not only the land of the Arctic but the strange fascination it has held for subarctic man over the centuries. In doing so he throws light as well on modern man’s troubled relationship with our dazzling planet.
The Language of the American South
by Cleanth Brooks; University of Georgia Press; 58 pages; $9.95.
American speech arrived with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English settlers who emigrated to the New World, Cleanth Brooks argues in three wise and charming essays gathered into this small book. Since then the mother tongue has evolved much more than the daughter tongue. This is most noticeable in the American South, where people at every education level cling tenaciously to their local pronunciations and rhythms of speech. Perhaps most astonishing is Brooks’s conviction that black Southern speech also, or even especially, is derived from early English locutions rather than from African ones. Citing examples from writings as various as Uncle Remus and the work of Flannery O’Connor, Brooks demonstrates the vitality and particularity of this old British-based Southern language. These essays were originally delivered as lectures at Mercer University in Georgia.
