Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
An American Aristocracy: The Livingstons
by Clare Brandt; Doubleday & Co. ; 297 pages; $19.95.
By the time two generations of Livingstons had finished acquiring land in the Hudson Valley—by purchase and by marriage—the family holdings had reached one million acres. Although most of the clan cast their lot with the patriots at the time of the American Revolution, they should not be mistaken for democrats. As Tocqueville pointed out, men’s taste for liberty and their taste for equality are two quite different things. The family reached its peak with Robert R., “the Chancellor,” an architect of the Declaration of Independence and the man who administered the presidential oath to George Washington. He also negotiated the Louisiana Purchase and financed Robert Fulton’s steamboat. Subsequent Livingstons (generation after generation of Roberts and Margarets) eschewed politics when the social implications of political democracy became clear, and the family “drew up and circled its wagons.” Their concern was to perpetuate a pseudo-feudal system of tenants on their vast landholdings. It was almost as though, the author writes, they lived “with one foot in their own century and the other planted firmly in the Middle Ages.”
Over the generations, their insularity, family feuds, and the changes in the world around them have reduced the land-proud family to insignificance. Though there is still a core of family members clustered around the original manor, their rituals now seem anachronistic, their family hauteur absurd. Clare Brandt has written a fine family history, funny without meanness, absorbing and graceful.
Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace
by William Broyles, Jr.; Knopf; 284 pages; $17.95.
In 1969 William Broyles was a young Marine lieutenant fighting the Vietcong. He lived through it, came home, and in time got to be editor-in-chief of Newsweek. The war was far behind him. But he found it wouldn’t let him rest; he had left something in the bitter hills south of Da Nang, and fifteen years later he went back to find it. For a month he traveled through Vietnam—three thousand miles by car and jeep, ferry and sampan. On the way he spoke with hundreds of people: Communist party officials, soldiers who had fought him, mountain tribesmen, men and women who kept the supplies flowing over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, somebody who had survived My Lai, somebody who had survived the far less publicized Vietcong massacres.
He wanted to find out what sort of people he had gone to war against, what their experience had been, what we had left behind in their country (little enough —some rusting war machinery, and the Amerasian children whose features will be our most enduring legacy in Vietnam), and how a peasant society managed to stand up for year upon year against B-52s and Huey gunships. In the end he learned a great deal, as we do from his superb record of the journey. Part military memoir, part travelogue, part elegy for the dead of both sides and informed throughout with coolly expressed passion, Brothers in Arms is as fascinating as it is moving.
Connecticut Railroads: An Illustrated History
by Gregg M. Turner and Melancthon W. Jacobus, edited and with a foreword by Oliver Jensen; The Connecticut Historical Society; 317 pages; hardcover, $39.95/paperback, $25.95.
As everybody knows, American railroads are not in terrific shape just now, and the rise, flourishing, and disintegration of train travel in Connecticut is a paradigm for the same phenomenon across the country. Under the able guiding hand of Oliver Jensen, a founder and longtime editor of American Heritage, the authors tell the story of railroads in their native state with good humor and verve. The narrative is enriched by scores of fine photographs of the ravishing equipment that gives steam power an eternal aesthetic advantage over longhaul trucking.
Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants
by Philip Langdon; Knopf; 224 pages; hardcover, $30.00/paperback,
$19.95.
Fred Harvey was the pioneer. His chain of restaurants along Western rail lines was established to feed passengers in the early, dinerless days. He led the way by providing decent food, served by neat, wholesome Harvey Girls. The increasing industrialization of the country created more and more demand for such fast, inexpensive food away from home, and architects devised buildings to both tempt and hurry the customers: white (as in White Castle) to imply cleanliness, backless seats to keep diners from eating too slowly. With cars came carhops so the customer didn’t have to be seated at all. For more leisurely stops, the Howard Johnson chain featured a New England-church architectural motif to appeal to homey values. The final stage is the totally standardized food of the McDonald’s chain, vastly successful and much emulated. In this lively, generously illustrated book, Philip Langdon shows us the buildings as well as describing how and why their styles evolved.
The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune
by Richard Kluger; Knopf; 816 pages; $24.95.
To thousands of readers the newspaper was known simply as the Trib, and when the New York Herald Tribune died in 1967, its devotees grieved as for a friend. Created by a merger of James Gordon Bennett’s Herald and Horace Greeley’s Tribune early in this century, the paper, at its best, raised journalism almost to the stature of literature. Its competition in New York was always The New York Times and, unable to match the Times in completeness, the Trib emphasized style and spirited writing. Many readers who didn’t share the paper’s commitment to the Republican party read it for its quality. Included in the roster of its employees are most of the journalists whose names are remembered by nonjournalists: Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, Red Smith, Heywood Broun, Virgil Thomson. Richard Kluger, a former literary editor of the Trib, weaves the turbulent history of the families who owned the paper, and the relationship of a great paper to its city and nation, into a fascinating social and business history of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A Field Guide to America’s History
by Douglass L. Brownstone; Facts on File, Inc.; 325 pages; $9.95.
Wherever Americans have gone in this country, they have left traces of their passing. Rusting railroad spurs, the particular slope of a hillside, faint traces of paint on the sides of brick buildings—all are eloquent of the past. The language they speak, however, is a subtle one. In this useful and clearly written guide, Douglass Brownstone shows how to become fluent enough to summon up from such diverse clues as discarded bottles, twists of barbed wire, and Greek Revival storefronts an accurate picture of how and when the people who came before us lived their lives.
