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.
BOOKS
Back From Bataan
My Hitch in Hell The Bataan Death March
by Lester I. Tenney, foreword by Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale, U.S.N., Brassey’s, 220 pages.
In October 1940 the twenty-year-old Lester Tenney joined the 192d Tank Battalion, hoping to get his year of National Guard service out of the way. When the Guard was federalized, Tenney went to the Philippines. The undersupplied and starving troops defending the peninsula fought bravely, but Bataan was given up in April 1942. As ordered, the troops destroyed their own tanks in a long, sad line; then Japanese planes strafed the unarmed units. Tenney carried a photo of his fiancée inside his boot on the twelve-day, sixty-mile “Death March,” often going days without water in hundred-degree heat. Like many others, he was beaten and forced to watch friends bayoneted, shot, beheaded, or buried alive for collapsing. When an officer slashed him with a samurai sword, his exhausted buddies carried him for miles rather than let him fall out of line. When the prisoners, now racked with malaria and dysentery, were forced into railroad cars, “Filipinos stood along the track and threw rice balls wrapped in banana leaves. … Their actions saved many of us from starvation.”
Tenney spent the rest of the war in a prison camp, shoveling coal under conditions so severe that men sought escape from the work by paying one another to break their bones. Only one in eight survived the march and the equally cruel three-year imprisonment. Tenney chose to revisit this ghastly period largely because of recent claims by some Japanese politicians that their country’s wartime atrocities were “fabrications.” “I feel I have been humiliated again by the Japanese, but this time I can say and do something about it without fear of retaliation.… I want the world to know just how we survivors feel, why we do what we do, why we say what we say, and why we live each day as if it is our last.”
IN THIS ISSUE
The trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, whom Tony Scherman interviews this month, has spent the last decade winning for jazz a permanent place in America’s cultural institutions, festivals, and concerts for young people. The latter inspired his four-part series Marsalis on Music, which airs on PBS beginning October 9. His aim is to share
music’s excitement and mysterious power with young audiences—joined by his own jazz orchestra as well as the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the conductor Seiji Ozawa leading the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. Marsalis uses everything from a basketball and computer graphics to his own peerless horn to get his point across in the four segments—“Why Toes Tap: Wynton on Rhythm”; “Listening for Clues: Wynton on Form”; “Sousa to Satchmo: Wynton on the Jazz Band”; and “Tackling the Monster: Wynton on Practice” (Marsalis on Music, Sony Classical Film & Video, four videocassettes, 220 minutes). The series has a companion book with its own CD, also called Marsalis on Music (W. W. Norton, 175 pages). Marsalis continues to take his music out on the road, as he convincingly describes in Sweet Swing Blues on the Road (with Frank Stewart, W. W. Norton, 191 pages), a book rich with photographs of the players on tour, part road diary and part master class. “We don’t play Dixieland,” Marsalis says. “We play New Orleans music.” He makes that point eloquently on Standard Time Vol. 3—“The Resolution of Romance” (Columbia, one CD), a recording of jazz standards made with his father, the pianist Ellis Marsalis; the Marsalises treat songs like “Big Butter and Egg Man” as if they were the latest, freshest thing. In This House, on This Morning (Columbia, two CDs) shows Marsalis’s more
expansive recent work as a composer for a jazz septet, in the swing spirit of another of his heroes, Duke Ellington. The ambitious, recent Citi Movement is also available from Columbia (two CDs). The unsung Paw Paw, the focus of Richard W. Kaeuper’s article, is one of many craft the naval historian Ivan Musicant covers in his new book Divided Waters: The Civil War at Sea (Harper-Collins, 496 pages). Musicant weaves together surviving accounts by Navy men while giving a masterful view of the U.S. Navy’s growth from Fort Sumter to the surrender.
An American Dream
Thomas Mellon and His Times
by Thomas Mellon, foreword by David McCullough, University of Pittsburgh Press, 478 pages.
A few issues ago our columnist John Steele Gordon wrote about the curious paucity of good business autobiographies. His very slim roster omitted one of the best—for the good reason that until now you couldn’t read it if you weren’t a Mellon. In 1885 Thomas Mellon, the founder of the great Pittsburgh banking fortune, published his memoir with the proviso that it never “be for sale in the bookstores, nor any new edition published,” because it contains “nothing which concerns the public to know, and much which if writing for it I would have omitted.”
But now the family has lifted the restriction, and the University of Pittsburgh Press has issued a big, handsome edition of what deserves to take its rightful place as an American classic. Mellon was a natural writer, and the book is full of engrossing, sharply told scenes. In one, for instance, Mellon describes the pivot on which his entire life turned. He was seventeen, had been raised a farmer, and was spending the morning chopping wood while his father went off to town to arrange the purchase of an adjoining farm that the young man would work. As the morning wore on, he became “nearly crazed” with the vision of the lifetime of farming to which that purchase would condemn him. Finally he flung his ax over a fence and ran into town—ten miles—to collar his father just as he and the seller were chatting about which lawyer to visit to close the deal. Mellon tells this with the verve of a good novelist, as he does the rest of the tremendous career that flowed from his desperate impulse.
It is some indication of the book’s seductive vitality that when Andrew Carnegie got hold of a copy, it inspired him to write his own autobiography, the only other first-person account by one of those nineteenth-century empire builders that comes close to this one.
At the Vietnam Wall
Offerings at the Wall Artifacts from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection
Turner Publishing, Inc., 288 pages.
As soon as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was completed, people began leaving small objects there, and the National Park Service quietly began saving them in a Maryland warehouse. The collection, which now comprises tens of thousands of artifacts, is not open to the public; this book is the best view most of us will have of what is in it. Nobody making one of these offerings—a scribbled note, a worn baseball glove, a package of Kool-Aid and homemade cookies, a framed sonogram snapshot of a first grandchild—expected that it would be preserved or exhibited; each object represents an intensely private message to one of the names etched into the black granite. In this almost wordless book the most eloquent of these objects have been lovingly photographed and placed on the page, heartbreaking testament to war’s legacy of grief and loss, and to the Wall’s strange power to bring together the living and the dead.
Vietnam War Lit
Aftermath: An Anthology of Post-Vietnam Fiction
edited by Donald Anderson, Henry Holt, 272 pages.
By the time Saigon fell, Americans were so sadly familiar with the war’s televised jungle patrols, booby traps, napalmed earth, and body bags that little seemed left to learn about it, especially from a novel or story. But twenty years after its end, the missing part of the war—the world inside the helmet—has its own literature: “Hooper’s heart leaped as the shock of the blast hit him. Then the sound went through him and beyond him and into the trees and the sky, echoing on in the distance like thunder. Afterwards there was silence. Hooper took a step forward, then sank to his knees and lowered his head to the wet grass. He spread his fingers through the grass beside his head. The rain fell around him with a soft, whispering sound. A bluejay squawked. Another bird called out, and then the trees grew loud with song.” So writes Tobias Wolff, a veteran of the U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam. Almost half of the fourteen writers included here are war veterans; the rest are prominent novelists—John Gardner, Barry Hannah, Louise Erdrich, and Maxine Kumin—proof that the Vietnam story has evolved over a generation into a respected genre.
One after another the contributors to Aftermath try to get around what Philip Caputo has called “a formless war against a formless enemy.” Thorn Jones’s celebrated 1993 story, “The Pugilist at Rest,” is told by an epileptic former Marine. “I opened a sandalwood box and took my various medals out of the large plastic bag. … I took a whiff of the box and smelled the smells of Saigon—the whores, the dope, the saffron, cloves, jasmine, and patchouli oil. I put the Thai sticks back, recalling the three-day hangover that particular batch of dope had given me more than twenty-three years before.” Jones’s story, like a few of the others by combat survivors, at first seems to have an exaggerated, almost stylized savagery. Then you read the note at the end and learn that all but one of the men in Jones’s unit died in the war.
VIDEO
Irish Roots
Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America
written and directed by Paul Wagner, Shanachie Entertainment, 111 minutes.
Between 1846 and 1851 one million Irish died of starvation and disease; their countrymen who fled to America took any work they could find. “People need not expect a great deal of enjoyment when they come here,” one D. Mclntire wrote home. “Nothing but work. Work away.” Women outnumbered men in the exodus, and they were often employed as governesses. The men competed with slaves for jobs in New Orleans, dug the Erie Canal, and moved west by the thousands, building railways. One in five voters was Irish-born in the New York City of the 1870s, and they turned the notorious slogan “No Irish Need Apply” into one of the popular songs of the decade. Interviewing historians in America and Ireland, and making good use of nineteenth-century pictures and heartfelt letters home, the film’s makers create a powerful sense of the “chain immigration” made possible by new Americans sending cash back home. A fine original soundtrack played on Irish instruments and evocative readings by Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne fill out this transatlantic drama, which premiered on PBS in June.
RECORDINGS
Sinatra for the Troops
Frank Sinatra: The V-Discs
Columbia/Legacy C2K 66135 (two CDs).
Here are fifty-three Sinatra recordings that were first waxed to be sent to troops at the front in World War II; many of them have never before been released to the general public (a musicians’ union ban on recording meant that they couldn’t be made commercially available at the time). The singer’s Dorsey years were behind him, his Nelson Riddle years well ahead of him, and he had both that light, silken early voice and much of the power and swagger that came later. In addition to standards like “All of Me,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and “My Romance”—mostly backed by Axel Stordahl’s orchestra—the troops got to hear Sinatra’s first recording of “Nancy (With the Laughing Face),” plus numbers they probably wouldn’t associate with him like “Stormy Weather,” “Over the Rainbow,” and the Brahms Lullaby, as well as novelties like “(There’ll Be a) Hot Time in the Town of Berlin” (“I’m going to take a hike through Hitler’s Reich and change that heil to gimme some skin …#8220;) and “Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como” (“They’re really comin’ fast, who knows I may be past…”). Will Friedwald writes in his fine notes: “The records were so coveted that at one point during the war, one shipful of sailors even christened their PT boat the ’Oh Frankie’; the ship had an adjoining dinghy which naturally became the ’Oh Frankie, Junior!’” Listen to these and you’ll understand why.
First Songs of the Century
Treasures of Tin Pan Alley
by lan Whitcomb, Mel Bay Publications, Inc., book and cassette.
Ian Whitcomb came over with the same British invasion that brought the Beatles to our shores, and in 1966 he produced a rock single that shot to the top of the charts: “You Turn Me On.” And then he got lost in Tin Pan Alley. This energetic Briton became one of the most sedulous scholars of the great era of American popular song that began at the century’s turn and crested during the First World War. He kept performing—ragtime instead of rock—and now he has distilled a quarter-century’s worth of work into an anthology of the finest songs of the era: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “You Made Me Love You,” “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night,” Jerome Kern’s gorgeous “They Didn’t Believe Me,” and the lilting, melancholy “Till We Meet Again.” (After they wrote the waltz in 1918, Raymond Egan and Richard Whiting thought it was just another wartime potboiler, writes Whitcomb, but “when the song was published, there was no stopping this three-quarter-time juggernaut; five million copies were sold within the year. The song was the last big bestseller in sheet music.”) All the tunes appear just as they did in their original sheet music, and in case your keyboard skills have corroded some, Whitcomb also supplies a cassette of his own canny, lively, fond interpretations of them.
