A GATHERING OF RECENT BOOKS, videos, recordings, and other items of special interest to the readers of American Heritage, selected and recommended by the editors.

As a service to our readers, items can be ordered through American Heritage, either by using the order form on page 123 or by calling 1-800-876-6556.

Telethon

Over the last 120 years the telephone has become such an essential and all-pervasive part of American existence that a social history of the device may seem too large a topic for a single volume. Stern and Gwathmey have neatly solved the problem by taking a lighthearted approach to the subject. Their book is not an exhaustive study but a nostalgic, campy look at the phone’s significance in our culture, equal parts information and entertainment. The story is broken up into ten chapters; “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You,” devoted to the phone as an instrument of power, is the most interesting and well written. Complementing the main text are engaging phone-related excerpts from works by such writers as Robert Penn Warren, Carl Sandburg, A. J. Liebling, and Helen Gurley Brown.

But the book’s greatest charm lies in its array of vintage illustrations. The fullcolor pages feature everything from a 1916 telephone-company card that was a proper way to inform friends of your new phone number to a weird hand-colored German postcard (one of the few non-American items in the book) that features four babies hanging happily from the wall and connected by telephones. In between are advertisements, movie posters, and other images with all the classic phone metaphors.

If this book is meant to draw any conclusion at all, it’s the one attributed to the screenwriter David Freeman on page 96: “The social and business rituals that have grown up around the telephone are almost as important as the device itself.”

You Are There

Before they gave way to movies, stereo views brought a spectacular three-dimensional world into Americans’ own homes. These nineteenth-century dual-image photographs (dual because a stereo camera used twin lenses set as far apart as two eyes) have been snatched up by collectors for decades. Now this unique book— it comes with its own 3-D viewer—makes an impressive sampling of Old West pictures available to anyone.

Early California, painted so romantically by artists of the time, hovers before you raw and fraught with dangers as recorded by the traveling stereophotographers. An 1865 view shows a typical former gold-rush town, Placerville, California, with a wagon dragging across a rutted Main Street lined with flimsy Western facades. A picture from 1880 brings you face-to-face with a sad-looking old man who’s been posing too long in the sun. “Cassiano Indian,” the caption reads, “136 years old.” A frontier scene of the next year shows two hanged men dangling in three dimensions from a frontier gallows. The transcontinental railroad comes together in a 3-D series—from granite cutters to track layers to locomotives bridging plunging ravines. The 3-D viewer feels at first like someone else’s glasses, but then the pictures spring out at you with their still-astonishing vistas receding persuasively to the horizon.

Fortress Europe

At the close of the Second World War the German army left behind a scattered ghost civilization of fifteen thousand concrete works along the Atlantic Wall. A great number had been built to guard against the Allied invasion that had finally come via the Channel in June 1944; for fifty years since they have sat mute and nearly indestructible as the beaches returned to summer playgrounds and the burned cities were rebuilt. The French architecture critic and philosopher Paul Virilio first published this illustrated treatise on the bunkers and their meaning in 1975, to accompany an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre. This reissue exquisitely reproduces Virilio’s moody duotone photographs of the stark concrete towers, firing slits, and observation posts.

“During my youth,” Virilio writes, “. . . I would not discover the ocean, in the Loire estuary, before the summer of 1945. . . . recovering peace and access to the beach were one and the same event.” For many of his generation peacetime brought their first encounter with the ocean as German mines and munitions were slowly cleared away. The German works remained, and Virilio spent more than a decade cataloguing them. Some stand like parking garages on dunes, some like the modernist slabs you might see on a La Jolla hillside or on the drive out Long Island to Montauk. Virilio’s text, although sometimes given to the ethereal, reads just enough into these objects to animate them to their fullest as mournful and alien symbols of a brutal past.

State History

The author of this rewarding book, a professor of African-American history named Donald L. Grant, worked on it for nearly fifteen years. After his death his son took over and finished what clearly had become the project of a lifetime. Together the Grants have produced a unique work, the only history of a state from founding to modern times as seen from the vantage of its black citizens. Georgia was an apt choice for such a groundbreaking volume. After 1865 it claimed the most blacks of any state, later gave birth to the modern KKK, saw the rise of the great black colleges and universities that nurtured generations of post-Civil War leaders, and in its native son Martin Luther King, Jr., gave the world a man for all seasons.

Drawing on the widest range of archival evidence, the Grants provide enough fascinating firsthand testimony and anecdote to fill a dozen novels. There is this stirring tale of Richard Robert Wright, for instance, born a slave: “When Gen. O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, visited [his] school and asked what he should tell the children of the North, young Wright, then twelve, responded, ‘Tell them, General, we’re rising.” And to read this snippet about Hosea Williams, a tough veteran of the struggles of the 1960s, is to want to know more: “His home was on the plantation next to archsegregationist Marvin Griffin’s spread. Griffin’s brother, Cheney, became Williams’ friend and early partner in hustling and financed his way through Morris Brown College.” Down through the centuries stories of pride and shame mingle in this unusual history, contradictions, the authors point out, that still prevail.

Alone Together

Edith Wharton touched on the contradictory nature of writing in an observation she made of Henry James, calling him “a solitary who could not live alone.” A Common Life, David Laskin’s chronicle of the friendships of four pairs of legendary American literary figures—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter, and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop—is a deftly written exploration of the professional and personal dynamics that accompanied these relationships and of the necessity of these ties. Laskin delves deep into the eight lives, and his book’s success lies equally with his graceful writing and his excellent research.

For Hawthorne and Melville, their first meeting at a rain-drenched picnic in the Berkshires in 1850, when America’s history was short and its communities cared little about literature, was quite a substantial mutual discovery. Though Melville played the role of the suitor in their friendship, once expressing a wish for an endless roll of paper between his and Hawthorne’s desks and watching with pain and joy as Hawthorne far surpassed him in popularity, it is clear that Hawthorne, too, was encouraged by knowing a fellow serious writer in an otherwise barren environment. Edith Wharton, who started her career late in life, courted the already established Henry James for support, and the genteel James experienced both “dread and relish” during his visits with her. She upset his delicately balanced life, and for that he was both grateful and resentful.

The plain and shy Eudora Welty seems an odd companion for the glamorous, flighty Katherine Porter, who thrived on attention and could be infuriatingly unreliable, but the two admired each other’s work and boosted each other, however clumsily. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop had the most destructive of all these friendships. These two alcoholic poets—Lowell also a borderline psychotic—came perilously close to what would certainly have been a disastrous marriage. Their union, one friend noted, would have left the world with “two fewer poets.” Still, even after they kept a purposeful distance, their influence on each other was marked and powerful. The same can be said of every one of these absorbing pairs.

The Duel

Robert Drew’s look inside the White House must have had a remarkable effect when it first aired, in 1963, when viewers were used to generations of newsreels. It didn’t show the Chief Executive signing legislation to martial music; Drew followed the President and the Attorney General at the height of the government’s integration battle with Alabama’s governor George Wallace, who had pledged to “stand in the schoolhouse door” of the state university.

The film is best remembered for its record of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s high-pressure phone negotiations, conferring with both Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Wallace while his young children race around his Washington office. What was often forgotten before the film was rebroadcast last year is how balanced it is as history: after memorable scenes of the Attorney General, Wallace comes on and looks just as youthful and dedicated. He sweeps down the staircase of the governor’s mansion and lifts up his young daughter for a kiss; then he casually explains in the car why decency demands that he make his stand for States’ Rights by keeping two black students from entering school. In his prime Wallace could be oddly winning too, as Drew unintrusively shows.

New commentary by Katzenbach and one of the university students has been added; it seems superfluous. Even in this day of live television legal showdowns the Kennedy-Wallace face-off remains compelling on its own.

RECORDINGS

The Original King of Swing

Fletcher Henderson invented the big band and defined its sound practically single-handedly; he led one of the most polished and innovative jazz orchestras of the age, bringing through its ranks such giants as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young; and his arrangements became the foundation of Benny Goodman’s success and the swing-music craze that followed it. Yet today he is the least remembered of the great bandleaders. Why? He was “afflicted,” as the jazz historian James Lincoln Collier put it, “with an almost pathological lack of self-assertiveness.” He couldn’t control the stars who made up his band and was a terrible businessman. He constantly let events overtake him.

Born in 1897, he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1920 and went to New York to seek a career as a chemist. Failing to find work, he became the house pianist for a music publisher and became popular enough at it that he was talked into auditioning for a bandleading job. In the first years of his band he had a superb arranger in the saxophonist Don Redman; after Redman left, Henderson ended up doing much of the arranging himself—and found he was brilliant at that too. But by 1934 he had lost his finest musicians and couldn’t get bookings, and he sold some of his best arrangements to Benny Goodman, who used them to fashion the sound of his brand-new band.

The whole arc of Henderson’s career is here in ebullient music, from Don Redman’s first arrangements of 1923, which evolve from standard popular dance music into powerful swinging jazz, to early thirties masterpieces like the adventurous bravado display piece “Queer Notions” and the all-time big-band hit “Christopher Columbus.” The music is simply wonderful.