Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb combined explication of nuclear physics with sinuous narrative to show the evolution of the Manhattan Project; Dark Sun tells the story of the much more powerful bomb that came later, and follows the growth of the nuclear rivalry on both sides. A recurring figure in Rhodes’s account is Curtis LeMay, who supervised the 1944 Tokyo firebombings and the first atomic tests, watched the hydrogen bomb destroy Bikini Atoll, and recommended pre-emptive strikes on the Soviet Union as head of the Strategic Air Command during the Cuban missile crisis. Rhodes’s history makes much of the recent debate over the Hiroshima bombing seem beside the point: After the more destructive firebombing of Tokyo, he believes, it took Truman five untroubled minutes to decide to use the new weapon.
Dark Sun adds to the weight of evidence that the Rosenbergs were spies and breaks more ground about the alarming extent of Soviet atomic espionage, which one Soviet cipher clerk rightly called “mass production.” In addition to fleshing out the Soviet side, Rhodes’s book reveals the truth beneath the nuclear bluff: In 1947 America had no atom bombs ready, and the Soviet Union would remain woefully unprepared until 1960. But the terror helped keep the peace throughout, as this book expertly shows.
All About Gotham
The Encyclopedia of New York City
edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, Yale University Press, 1,350 pages.
“New York is the only real city-city,” wrote Truman Capote, who occupies a seventeen-line biography on page 179 of this 1,350-page book. It also is the only American city that belongs to the whole country; if there were no New York, we would be a nation of hicks. But there is a New York, and even if you think you hate it, you’re better off for having it as your near or distant neighbor. From Dutch times, New York has been known for buckshotting visitors and residents alike with an endless variety of vivid, disconnected experiences, so the arbitrariness of an alphabetical approach to the city’s history is fitting—and, indeed, satisfying. Turn one corner, and there are morgues (the first began operating on June 21, 1866) and Morgan Stanley; jump uptown 300 pages, and you’re keeping company with a handsome Brandywine Bowl made by Gerrit Onckelbag about 1710 (under “silver”) and Paul Simon, who not only graduated from Queens College and put in a brief appearance at Brooklyn Law School, but composed “The 59th Street Bridge Song"—from which bridge, F. Scott Fitzgerald (page 414) wrote, New York is always “seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.” This spirited and fascinating compendium, handsomely illustrated and heavy as a piano, serves as ratification of another Fitzgerald thought, spoken through Tom Buchanan: “Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry. I’d be a God Damn fool to live anywhere else.”
A Ship’s Life
Chronicles of the Frigate Macedonian: 1809-1922
by James Tertius de Kay, Norton, 336 pages
“In her time,” writes the author in this engrossing biography of a warship, “the Macedonian was recognized the world over as the most important prize of war ever taken by the American Navy—a distinction she holds to this day.” It is all but impossible to imagine the euphoria that overtook the United States when, early in the War of 1812, her tiny, fledgling navy began capturing British frigates; it is equally difficult to appreciate the despair this negligible loss to its fleet precipitated in England. At the war’s outbreak, the London Times described the American navy as “a few fir built frigates with strips of bunting, manned by sons of bitches and outlaws.” A few months later the same paper was wailing, “Oh, what a charm is hereby dissolved! What hopes will be excited in the breasts of our enemies!”
But the fierce action in which the United States under Commodore Stephen Decatur captured the three-year-old Macedonian is only the beginning of de Kay’s epic. With energy, high good humor, and an engaging familiarity with the various characters who animate his tale—the brilliant showoff Decatur; the Macedonian’s captain, John Surman Garden, whose arrogant contempt for Americans causes him first a costly humiliation and then a devastating one; a calculating Commodore Matthew Perry; the persevering Uriah Phillips Levy, first Jewish-American commodore—de Kay takes the reader from the Barbary Coast to Ireland during the terrible days of the famine and to the waters off Japan. And finally to City Island in the Bronx, where the gallant Macedonian ended her days as a saloon.
IN THIS ISSUE
The works of H. P. Lovecraft, although considered horror classics by critics and devotees, remain hard to get in bookstores. One publisher, Arkham House, has specialized in Lovecraft titles for decades. At the Mountains of Madness and other favorites (not available through American Heritage) can be had by writing to: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., P.O. Box 546, Sauk City, WI 53583.
A Club’s Life
From the Age That Is Past: Harvard Club of New York City: A History
by Ormonde de Kay, Harvard Club, 490 pages.
While James Tertius de Kay (see directly above) was writing his saga of the Macedonian, his brother Ormonde, a long-time contributor to this magazine, was busy tracing the history of an institution that has so far enjoyed a life span seventeen years longer than that of the frigate. The Harvard Club of New York City was founded in 1865 and, Harvard being Harvard, has had its share of impressive and intriguing members. Ormonde signed up to chronicle their interaction with their school’s club, and soon found himself so absorbed in the story that it took him five and a half years and 1,257 pages of typescript to relate. But just as his brother did with the far-ranging warship, Ormonde has marshaled an immensity of disparate facts into a lively, coherent, and consistently readable narrative.
RECORDINGS
Great Gershwin
I Got Rhythm: The Music of George Gershwin
Smithsonian Institution Press RD 107 (four CDs)
As everybody knows, George Gershwin not only was a king of popular song but also created some of the best music ever for American stage and screen, left an indelible mark on the concert world, and wrote the material for generations of jazz musicians. How do you do justice to all that in one set of CDs? If you are the smart people at the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings, you assemble four discs and devote one to popular song, one to stage and screen, one to the concert hall, and one to jazz—and you pick and package the selections with Smithsonian’s usual style and canniness. Popular Song offers twenty-two recordings made between 1924 and 1982, including Ethel Waters’s strutting “I Got Rhythm,” Fred Astaire and Benny Goodman’s ultra-suave “Who Cares?,” and Lena Horne’s seductive “The Man I Love.” The twenty-two cuts on the On Stage and Screen disc range from classics like Astaire’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and Jolson’s “Swanee” (which is far more bracingly joyous than you might recall) to the wonderful discovery of one Tessa Kosta and the Russian Art Choir belting out an utterly Slavic “Song of the Flame” from a little-remembered 1925 show of that name. Jazz means Billie Holiday’s tremendous 1936 “Summertime” and later work by Goodman, Artie Shaw, Chet Baker, Erroll Garner, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and others. And Concert Hall lets us listen in on the master himself, at the piano in “Rhapsody in Blue” in 1927, at the celesta in “An American in Paris” two years later, and playing solo five of his piano pieces. He does them all with authority and utter Tightness. And the presence and immediacy of his playing is fully conveyed in surprisingly rich, full remastered sound.
VIDEO
On the Road
Route 66: An American Odyssey
directed by John Paget, Pacific Communications, 54 minutes.
In 1926 a twenty-four-hundred-mile national highway was begun as part of a program to replace the scanty system of market roads between Chicago and Los Angeles. Route 66 eventually delivered the Grand Canyon and Hollywood, the Petrified Forest, Las Vegas, and underground caves, while along it ran a sideshow of diners, tepee-shaped motels, miniature-golf courses, and dinosaurlands. The “Mother Road,” in John Steinbeck’s phrase, made possible the Okies’ escape west from the dust bowl. The director of this documentary turned up a couple of sixty-year-old jalopies, abandoned and flaking next to the highway, that still had “California or bust” scratched in their fenders. Route 66 had its own theme song—Bobby Troup composed half of it in his car, after almost writing about Route 40—and in the early sixties the road starred in a weekly television series, in which two young guys drove its length seeking girls and adventure. By then, though, interstates were replacing 66. It was eventually abandoned, but the lights didn’t go out completely. The film, chiefly narrated by Michael Wallis, author of a history of Route 66, ends with the recent efforts of hundreds of small-town associations to declare the highway a national historic road. Today about 85 percent of the old 66 is there in one form or another. John Paget saw it in style from a 1969 Cadillac while making this film, and he has a collector’s eye for roadside attractions. Lovers of the Mother Road can now happily travel it in their living rooms.
