|
EDITORS’ CHOICE
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
The First Father
A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children
essay and notes by Joan Paterson Kerr, Random House, 288 pages.
That Theodore Roosevelt displayed even more boyish vitality as a father than as our youngest President comes splendidl) clear in his letters to his children, for whon he was confidant, reporter, and often co-conspirator. He and the First Lady returned to the White House after being away in 1903, and he wrote his son Kermit, “Mother … was met [upstairs] by Archie and Quentin, each loaded with pillows and whispering not to let me know that they were in ambush; then as I marched up to the top they assailed me with shrieks and chuckles of delight and then the pillow fight raged up and down the hall.” Many such passages bear out the fond remark of a friend quoted in David McCullough’s foreword: “You must remember that the President is about six.”
Roosevelt was an inexhaustible troop leader around the house, but his more fatherly letters—weighing a military versus a civilian career or cautioning against homesickness—offer definite, clearly reasoned advice any worried child would want to hear. And, of course, even for his children TR was a vivid writer, as in his dispatches home from Panama: “The huge steam-shovels are hard at it; scooping huge masses of rock and gravel and dirt previously loosened by the drillers and dynamite blasters, loading it on trains.… They are eating steadily into the mountain, cutting it down and down.”
|
Man of Action
Memoir of the Bookie’s Son
by Sidney Offit, St. Martin’s Press, 165 pages.
Buck Offit was a conventional father in Oriole Park, Baltimore, except that he took phone bets at the kitchen table, carried fat rolls of bills, routinely flushed scraps of paper down the toilet, and “spoke from the corners of his mouth in the diction of the underworld.” So writes his loving son Sidney in this luminous memoir of Depression-era Baltimore. Sidney’s mother stored shoeboxes of cash in the wall the way other housewives mothballed the family’s sweaters. One spring afternoon in 1934 Buck was beaten in front of his son by three men trying to drag him into a car: “I am aware of my father kicking and swinging and finally coming up with the lid to the garbage can. There is the metallic sound of the aluminum can rolling on the pavement and my father’s voice, ‘You take me, you take me dead.’”
“Parlay the winner” is how Sidney and his brothers explained their father’s occupation to friends, without understanding the phrase themselves. “I’m doing what I wanna do, Sid,” his father explained. Offit was disappointed to learn that his father wasn’t Gatsby or Rothstein, but Buck turns out to have been more honorable than they. He entered the business at the time of the crash and lived into the time of Off-Track Betting and legal casinos on reservations. In one of their last conversations, Sidney Offit finally asked his father for a tip, on the 1992 Belmont Stakes. “The price is right,” the old man said, prescient as ever. “Bet ‘Strike the Gold.’”
|
How They Ran Boston
The Boston Irish: A Political
History
by Thomas H. O’Connor, Northeastern University Press, 363 pages.
In 1993 Boston’s Mayor Ray Flynn declined a run for a fourth term in favor of a higher position—representative to the Vatican in Rome. With that the city lost its eleventh Irish mayor since 1885, making way for an Italian-American, Tom Menino.
This book proudly asserts that the Boston Irish are different from their counterparts in New York or Chicago or Baltimore. To survive in and eventually conquer such a hostile, Anglo-Saxon Protestant town required a special tenacity and bred a peculiarly resilient political culture, the author claims. In 1834 the city had only two hundred registered Irish voters; in 1885 it elected the first of its procession of Irish mayors, beginning with Hugh O’Brien and Patrick Collins, who were born in the old country and came to America in the exodus that brought a third of the country’s population to America. Their generation was succeeded by Boston-born Irishmen like John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, father of Rose Kennedy, and James Michael Curley, who served four terms as mayor and one as governor between 1914 and 1949, inspiring the novel The Last Hurrah, and Kevin White, whose career followed the national arrival of Boston-Irish leadership in the sixties. The 1983 election to succeed White would have surprised many past bosses for its high tenor and for its pairing: MeI King, an African-American South End resident, against Ray Flynn, an Irishman from the South End. Flynn won.
O’Connor’s history of Boston-Irish politics is knowledgable and picturesque.
|
|
VIDEOS
Silent New York
Regeneration
directed by Raoul Walsh, Kino on Video, 72 minutes.
Traffic in Souls
directed by George Loane Tucker, Kino on Video, 88 minutes.
Raoul Walsh made such rowdy gangster films as White Heat and The Roaring Twenties, but before that he had to help invent the genre. He did so with Regeneration, his 1915 adaptation of the novel My Mamie Rose, by the former gangster Owen Kildare. It begins on the day of the death of young Owen’s mother in their Lower East Side tenement, then follows the ten-year-old keeping a terrified watch for his drunken father at night. After one family fight the title announces: “So the days pass in the only environment he knows.” Owen will soon join and then lead a gang, and no one will ever bully him again.
Outside of a memorable ferryboat fire and some drunken fights, this gangster film is a relatively quiet character study. Owen may be a gang leader, but Walsh implies he can be saved, cutting between the twenty-five-year-old with his mug of beer and the ten-year-old Owen gulping milk. The woman who saves him works at a settlement house. Under her attention he gives up the gang and his beer-hall sneer. Any student of old New York will be intrigued by this film, but even more perhaps by its accompanying Edison short, The Police Force of New York City, ten minutes of the real 1910 men in blue stopping runaway carriages in Central Park, chasing down (on bicycle!) a speeding touring car, performing a harbor rescue, and showing off their trained dogs.
Traffic in Souls plays unashamedly on an American obsession of the 1910s- white-slavery rackets—in the grand style of horrified titillation that Hollywood later perfected. How many white slavers actually lured how many young women into brothels may never be reckoned, but everyone from temperance activists to hungry novelists like William Faulkner seized on the lurid idea. George Loane Tucker’s 1913 film gleefully cuts between fresh-looking young victims and the whorehouse where they later end up, staffed by stumpy women counting stacks of bills. The film lays out an impressively complete system of madams, dupes, and dapper go-betweens in Panamas. Mary, the film’s naive heroine, is abducted at a dance club. Most of the story follows one brave cop’s dogged search for Mary, his sweetheart’s little sister. Fast-moving and full of wonderfully seedy New York locations, Traffic in Souls is as cautionary as Regeneration but takes more delight in the sordidness.
|
|
RECORDINGS
Pinnacles of jazz
Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington
Smithsonian Institution Press/BMG RD 104 (two CDs).
The Heavyweight Champion
John Coltrane: The Complete Atlantic Recordings
Rhino R2 71984 (seven CDs).
Miles Davis: The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, 1965
Columbia/Legacy CXK 66955 (seven CDs).
Three new releases present high points of jazz history in attractive, definitive packages. The Duke Ellington set contains selections from the Duke’s best Victor, Bluebird, and RCA recordings —which is to say many of his best recordings ever—beginning in the late 1920s, when his band and its sound seemed to appear from nowhere fully formed, through pathbreaking records like “Mood Indigo,” “Creole Rhapsody,” and “Concerto for Cootie,” and right up to works from the 1960s. The emphasis is on the earliest period, as it should be, the twenties and thirties, when the Duke and his band were defining sophistication and elegance and swing. If you want one set that conveys the brilliance and range of Duke Ellington’s music, get this one.
John Coltrane and Miles Davis, two of the last real giants of jazz, are caught at their peaks on their two new collections. The Coltrane box comprises all his recordings for the Atlantic label; made between 1959 and 1961, they include all the material that was first released on Giant Steps and My Favorite Things, two of the last serious jazz albums to attract a broad general audience. Coltrane was pushing the frontiers of music at the time, producing “sheets of sound,” experimenting with modal harmonies, struggling to wring every expressive possibility from his music. As the jazz historian Lewis Porter writes in his liner notes, “These recordings … have the freshness of discovery. They’re full of lightness and grace—buoyant, yet at the same time fiery, passionate, and deep.”
Coltrane had played with Miles Davis off and on in the 195Os, and they pursued similar paths in the early 1960s before the latter broke off into near atonality and jazz fusion. In 1965 Davis played an engagement at a Chicago nightclub called the Plugged Nickel with one of his great groups: Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. The five drove one another to dizzying heights as they took improvisation on standard tunes as far as it seemed it could go. When they play “Stella by Starlight” they seem first to be dissecting the tune and then wandering around inside it, feeling it from within and watching as snatches of other tunes float by. In “My Funny Valentine” Miles seems to move right past the music to the feeling behind it, as glasses and cash registers clink in the background. This utterly absorbing, very challenging collection is marred only by overindulgent graphic design that makes the liner notes unreadable.
|
IN THIS ISSUE
The best American guidebook to Cuba is Insight Guides: Cuba (APA/Houghton Mifflin, 283 pages), which covers walking Old Havana, meeting prostitutes (jineteras) at the Tropicana nightclub, where to see the world’s best cigars rolled by hand, and where to watch Hemingway’s ninety-six-year-old fishing-boat skipper eat his lunch. Cars of Cuba (with an essay by Cristina Garcia and 53 photographs by Joshua Greene, Abrams, 64 pages) shows what’s left of Richard Reinhardt’s lost Cuba- how, long after the Revolution, curvy, chrome-rich DeSotos, Studebakers, Roadmasters, and Pontiac Chieftains still prowl Castro’s exhausted island.
The men of the San Patricio Battalion chronicled by James Callaghan only recently received their own full-length history, Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick’s Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War by Robert Ryal Miller (University of Oklahoma Press, 232 pages). The rediscovered Civil War memoir in Geoffrey C. Ward’s column “The Life and Times” is Rebel Private, Front and Rear: Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier (Dutton, 223 pages). American Album, American Heritage’s classic gallery of photographic Americana between 1839 and the First World War, gets its due in this month’s “Letter from the Editor” (American Heritage Publishing, 352 pages).
|
|
