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EDITORS’ CHOICE
TO ORDER
EDITORS’ CHOICE is 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.
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BOOKS
Train Art
CROSSROADS OF COMMERCE
The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar
Art of Grif Teller
by Dan Cupper, Great Eastern Publishing, 184 pages.
In 1925 the Pennsylvania, the mightiest railroad in a country built by railroads, celebrated its pre-eminence by issuing a wall calendar featuring a painting called Speed and Security that showed the crack Broadway Limited pounding toward Chicago. Every year thereafter until 1958 the calendars appeared, each bearing a vigorous painting of the machines that incarnated the Pennsy’s—and, at that time, the nation’s—power. Because they were also reproduced on timetables by the million, these visions of transport triumphant made Grif Teller one of the country’s best-known painters. But he was by no means the only artist in the railroad’s employ, and his work and that of his colleagues are here sumptuously presented in a highly engaging book that illuminates two of the most American of all industries: railroads and advertising.
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New York Diarist
THE DIARIES OF DAWN POWELL 1931-1965
edited and with an introduction by Tim Page, Steerforth Press, 513 pages.
While reading Virginia Woolf’s less than amusing diary in 1954, the novelist Dawn Powell told her own journal: “People keep diaries because they don’t enjoy exposing themselves in conversation and trust no one to understand.…The entries stop when anything interesting happens or whenever the writer is happy. Diaries tell nothing—chips from a heroic statue.” But some chips are far more interesting than others. Following the successful reissue of Dawn Powell’s novels of thirties New York, the long-neglected author’s diaries continue to stir the revival. The more than five hundred pithily wicked pages are filled with clear-eyed observations of last night’s play or party, the state of her finances, her odd open marriage, and her troubled son, Jojo.
Instead of mentioning FDR’s arrival in the White House, Powell on March 22, 1933, perfectly describes “a fire at Broadway and 8th with black smoke rolling over the block like black plush.…It must have been a clothing store for in the back, amid charred rafters and wrecked furnitures two firemen in great oilskins were trying on brand new straw hats; one big man had a tiny Panama stuck on his head.”
Over the years, Powell and her husband, Joe, lived off and on in a triangular arrangement with her friend and probable lover Coburn Gilman. “My mind is filled with terrors as my closet is with moths,” she wrote in March 1944, the same year a visit from Ernest Hemingway left her “exhausted by his immense gusto—someone who gives out more in six hours than most people do in a lifetime.” Her moods swung, but she never collapsed, and she never lost her feistiness or her descriptive powers, writing of Irwin Shaw in 1963: “He moved to Europe to keep from paying taxes but instead he has been paying out his blood and brains and getting Nothing pumped back in but labels—wines, names, references, dishes, cheeses.” Dawn Powell, who had first run away at twelve when her stepmother burned her notebooks, kept up her diaries until her last months in a Greenwich Village hospital, where she died in 1965.
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Jazz Photos
THE GOLDEN AGE OF JAZZ
by William P. Gottlieb, Pomegranate, 162 pages.
William Gottlieb found the music that was to obsess him when he fell ill in 1936 and a college friend forced him to listen to jazz records during his recuperation: Two years later he secured a weekly jazz-column beat with the Washington Post, where Depression-era budgets forced him to serve as his own photographer. At the Post and later at Down Beat, Gottlieb worked as a jazz writer, but his wife saw his greater talent in his accompanying pictures. The thousands he took for free from the late thirties to the late forties created some of jazz’s iconic images. Even if you don’t know his Billie Holiday, Jimmy Rushing, or Charlie Parker photographs, you’ve seen the postage stamps they modeled for; his portrait of Fifty-second Street on a rain-slicked night in its prime—fading magically from the 3 Deuces club to The Famous Door—became the blueprint for Clint Eastwood’s movie sets in Bird. Gottlieb’s entire collection of fifteen hundred photographs was bought last year by the Library of Congress, to be consecrated as the national treasure it is.
This book of more than two hundred of Gottlieb’s golden-age photographs, enlarged and with richer duotone prints than its first 1979 edition, opens with a close-up of Louis Armstrong in mid-note and closes with the trumpeter Howard McGhee playing before a handsome, enraptured young man. When he dug out that picture thirty years after taking it, Gottlieb looked at it again, and “I suddenly recognized ‘the kid.’ It was Miles Davis.” For an exhilarating decade, casual encounters with greatness were William Gottlieb’s bread and butter.
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Thurber’s World
JAMES THURBER
His Life and Times
by Harrison Kinney, Henry Holt, 1,238 pages.
In a sense, any biography of James Thurber is superfluous. The facts and circumstances of his life come through so strongly in his writing that anyone familiar with Thurber’s work will also be familiar with the man himself. Whether it was “straight” history (The Years With Ross, The Thurber Album), broadly exaggerated family anecdotes (My Life and Hard Times), or short-story renderings of his own boisterous socializing and troubles with women (as in the Mr. and Mrs. Monroe tales), Thurber mingled fact and fancy to the point where some of his fiction holds more truth than his ostensible nonfiction.
Harrison Kinney has been gathering information on the Thurber conundrum since the 1940s, and he does not appear to have left much of it out of this hefty tome. In the course of his research he has read issues of Thurber’s high school newspaper, tracked down his teachers and classmates, interviewed his brothers extensively, reviewed old New Yorker payment ledgers, compiled a list of dogs Thurber owned, and evaluated disputes over who was in what speakeasy on which night in 1932. Kinney even quotes, for the first time in any book, letters Thurber wrote to a girlfriend, Ann Honeycutt, during an intense, passionate, but unconsummated eight-year affair while his first marriage was breaking up.
More than most people, Thurber inspired fierce attachment and equally fierce antipathy. After a few drinks he got over his painful shyness and turned into a spellbinding raconteur; after a few more he became nasty and vicious, attacking friend and stranger alike until dawn. A charming note of apology, often illustrated with one of his famous dogs, would follow in a day or two, and he would be back in his hosts’ good graces—at least until the next party. This pattern repeated itself hundreds of times, and some previous biographers have felt compelled to recount each instance. Kinney, clearly sympathetic, does his best to excuse Thurber for such outbursts.
With another writer this sort of quotidian documentation might seem excessive. With Thurber it is the key to understanding his creativity. Kinney does a masterly job of picking out the truth from the embroidery in Thurber’s past. In so doing, he gives some sense of the wonderful mixture of the eccentric and the commonplace that gave us Walter Mitty, The Last Flower, and “The War Between Men and Women.”
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IN THIS ISSUE
John H. White, Jr., the author of our story on steam railroads, has written several huge and engrossing illustrated histories. The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car Era to the Coming of Steel (Johns Hopkins, 656 pages) and The American Railroad Passenger Car (Johns Hopkins, two volumes, 704 pages) elegantly cover design and construction. White and his brother, Robert, have just honored the Cincinnati river steamer that helped ignite his lifelong interest in steam with a book all its own: The Island Queen: Cincinnati’s Excursion Steamer (University of Akron Press, 115 pages).
For a coast-to-coast tour of steam railways, John White recommends The 30th Annual Passenger Service Directory (Great Eastern Publishing, 356 pages, $11.95 ), a guidebook to 346 steam and vintage diesel lines, train museums, trolleys, and interurbans, from the fifteen-inch-gauge line at Scottsdale’s McCormick Railroad Park to the Old Wakarusa’s annual pumpkin-patch excursions in Indiana and the Cumbres & Toltec’s sixty-four-mile route between Colorado and New Mexico that reaches ten thousand feet over Cumbres Pass. The steam era also inspired one of last fall’s most beautiful books, The Last Steam Railroad in America ( Abrams, 144 pages, an oversize collection of the 1950s photographs of O. Winston Link. Link memorialized the Norfolk & Western line in its last days before the change to diesel, often using an elaborate synchronized-flash system to capture the darkly gleaming locomotives as they wheeled through small towns in the night. Thomas H. Carver’s text tells the full story surrounding Link’s magnificent pictures.
Mary Colter, the subject of Michael S. Durham’s story on the architecture of the Grand Canyon’s rim, owes much of her rediscovery to Virginia L. Grattan’s fine biography, Mary Colter: Builder Upon the Red Earth (Grand Canyon Natural History Association, 131 pages).
The displaced Lakota Sioux Lost Bird, the subject of Gene Smith’s “American Characters” column, has finally got her own full biography, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee, by Renée Sansom Flood (Scribner, 384 pages).
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Homage to the Motel
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Motels in America
by John Margolies, Bulfinch, 128 pages.
Is there any American living today who does not find at least a grain of comfort in the idea of a motel? For all their well-established synonymity with roadside seediness, there is something unquenchably cheerful about these children of the automobile, the foursquare doll’s-house cabins, the low run of cinder-block dwellings beneath the neon signs that still advertise FREE TV. John Margolies, a lifelong student of highway vernacular, has assembled a delightful scrapbook of brochures, postcards, and photographs that traces the motel’s evolution from cabin camps to “tourist courts”—often with quite substantial little heated bungalows clustered in a vaguely resortlike configuration—and the rise of the chains, culminating with the hegemony of Holiday Inn, to whose embrace 96 percent of American motel users have yielded.
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Encyclopedic History
OUR TIMES
The Illustrated History of the 20th Century
Lorraine Glennon, editor in chief, Turner, 713 pages.
OUR TIMES
Multimedia Encyclopedia of the 20th Century
CD-ROM (for Windows and Macintosh), Vicarious, Inc..
Here is a massive, well-researched, and handsome history of the century in a novel form, all in bits and pieces. Each year from 1900 to 1994 gets six or eight oversize pages, and into these pages are poured perhaps a dozen text blocks about people and events of the year (1947 includes the Marshall Plan, the invention of the transistor, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jackie Robinson, and Matisse’s last collages), photographs and illustrations, lists of births and deaths, and more. It works surprisingly well, partly because it is thorough, well written, and presented with graphic clarity and partly because of two added highlights. First, each year gets one page devoted entirely to a single document of the time, and the selections are uniformly imaginative and absorbing, including testimony in the Leopold and Loeb case and at the Nuremberg trials, Helen Gurley Brown’s definition of “the single girl,” and O. J. Simpson’s “suicide” note. Second, each decade is introduced with an essay by a prominent writer on a major historical theme. The first is the novelist D. M. Thomas’s graceful summing up of Freud; the last, the journalist and historian Taylor Branch’s broad reflections on freedom around the world in the 1990s. Perhaps the most impressive is the great British critic Stephen Spender’s portrait of 1930s totalitarianism, its seductiveness made palpable by his account of his own brief affair with communism.
The work is also available in CD-ROM form; the CD-ROM is thoughtfully put together and attractively produced and contains everything in the book plus the full text of The Columbia Encyclopedia, but it cannot replace the pleasures of a solid book that offers so much on every page.
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The Integration Fight
SILVER RIGHTS
A True Story from the Front lines of the Civil Rights Struggle
by Constance Curry, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 290 pages, $21.95. CODE: ALG-2
A brief introduction, taken from the writings of Alice Walker, sheds light on this book’s slightly mysterious title: Speaking of the civil rights movement, Walker explains, “Older black country people did their best to instill…poetry into this essentially white civil servants’ term…so that what one heard was ‘Silver.’” A bit misleading perhaps. Nothing in this powerful, gripping, and immensely moving account of one family’s attempt to enforce freedom of school choice as guaranteed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act suggests that the stalwart Mae Bertha Carter or her sharecropper husband, Matthew, altered the name of the shield they brandished. As they moved forward to enroll their seven youngest children in the schools of Sunflower County, Mississippi, their epic needed no injection of poetry. It is all there in the details of their own story, told in clean, passionate prose by their long-time friend and ally Constance Curry.
Fighting virtually alone among their neighbors, who feared, justifiably, to take on the Mississippi establishment of 1965, undaunted by the twin threats of bullets and economic disenfranchisement, the Carters saw their children enter the grade and high schools of Drew, Mississippi, and eventually graduate from the state’s once impregnable “Ole Miss.”
Recalling days of misery in her barely integrated grade school, one of Mae Bertha’s daughters says, “Now I know why she told us, ‘You got to stay in school and do your best, because no one is going to give you anything. It’s going to be hard and then it’s going to get harder and you’re going to hang in there.’”
Constance Curry first encountered the Carters in 1966 while working for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. It is clear that what began as legal and financial support for these beleaguered heroes has developed over the nearly thirty years since into a mutually supportive relationship between Curry and the entire Carter family, from whom she received multifold what she gave. So will the reader.
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Understanding Sherman’s March
MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
The Story of Soldiers & Civilians
During Sherman’s Campaign
by Lee Kennett, HarperCollins, 418 pages.
Two years into the bloodiest war in American history, a Georgia girl could still tell her diary, “So far Georgia has been free from the polluting tread of the Vandals.” William Tecumseh Sherman, eyeing the southern Appalachians from Lookout Mountain on April 30, would soon change all that, first with a fierce campaign to take Atlanta and then with a drive, as he told a friend, to “strike out for the sea.” The military historian Lee Kennett takes stock of just who and what was in Sherman’s path that spring and summer, especially of who he himself was. Kennett confidently lays out the dispositions of mountain terrain, precious rail lines, and native crops, filling in the picture sketched by the 1860 census, in which slaves represented almost half the state’s wealth.
Kennett’s Sherman is not the unhinged drunk of some accounts. He is hard-drinking and melancholic but tightly focused on his mission to take apart the Western & Atlantic Railroad. “If the general’s mind was essentially sound…it nevertheless ran in its own fashion.…if it benefited the operations of his army, he might seize railway cars, put journalists in irons, refuse to feed starving civilians, stop the movement of evangelists and the shipment of religious tracts to his army.” Sherman had a grudging respect for the Southerners dug in against him that he did not feel for Northern abolitionists or even Southern Unionists. “The devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired,” he wrote to his wife, Ellen. After the war, writes Kennett, the song inspired by Sherman’s march, in which even Georgian turkeys were happy to be seized by the bluecoats, sold five hundred thousand copies. “So constantly was it played that the general, whose very appearance was an invitation to the band, developed an almost physical loathing for it.” Kennett’s history gives a terrific sense of Sherman’s total campaign and its legacy.
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He Hated Ben Franklin
PETER PORCUPINE IN AMERICA
Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution
by William Cobbett, edited and with an introduction by David A. Wilson, Cornell University Press, 288 pages.
The political writer William Cobbett arrived in America from England in 1792, a republican in a new republic. In less than two years the country changed him into an embittered monarchist. “Instead of that perfect freedom” promised by Thomas Paine, Cobbett said he had found “a set of petty, mean, despots, ruling by a perversion of the law of England.” Writing under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, he lit into almost every democratic figure and fad in Federal America. He cautioned women: “Politics is a mixture of anger and deceit, and these are the mortal enemies of Beauty. The instant a lady turns politician, farewell the smiles, the dimples, the roses; the graces abandon her.…” He attacked the French Revolution, which offered “a striking and experimental proof of the horrible effects of anarchy and infidelity.” And he turned to his favorite subject—his cranky, hyperbolic self—in “The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine,” skewering Benjamin Franklin and his other enemies along the way. The editors have mostly chosen longer pieces but also include a taste of Cobbett’s short, poisonous portraits of Thomas Paine, Noah Webster, and Thomas McKean, as well as his “Last Will and Testament of Peter Porcupine” (“I leave my body to Doctor Michael Leib, a member of the Legislature of Pennsylvania, to be by him dissected [if he knows how to do it] in presence of the Rump of the Democratic Society”). Having made himself the most widely read pamphleteer in a country that largely repelled him, Cobbett traveled back to England in 1800. At his death thirty-five years later, Karl Marx called him “the greatest pamphleteer England has ever produced.”
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IF YOU’RE IN
Minneapolis
When a seven-year-old Minneapolis boy named Earl Bakken saw the movie Frankenstein in 1931, it inspired him to pursue a career in electrical engineering. This might sound as plausible as Platoon’s making you want to join the Army, but Bakken went on to a very distinguished career in the field. His most important and lucrative invention even had Frankensteinian overtones: the portable, battery-powered cardiac pacemaker, which uses electrical impulses to regulate the human heartbeat.
In 1975 the inventor-entrepreneur opened the Bakken Library and Museum (“A Museum of Electricity in Life,” as it is officially described) in a Tudor-style mansion overlooking Lake Calhoun in his hometown. Its collection includes more than ten thousand books, manuscripts, instruments, and machines relating to the history of electricity and magnetism and their use in medicine. This fall the museum returns to its origins with an exhibit on Frankenstein itself—the myriad forms the story has taken since Mary Shelley published it as a novel in 1818 and what it has meant to us through the years. Displays will include a first edition of Shelley’s work; a seventeenth-century edition of a book by the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, whom Shelley cited as one of Victor Frankenstein’s influences; apparatus used by Galvani, Volta, and other scientists whose work inspired Shelley; antique and modern electromedical devices; and Frankenstein movie posters and comic books.
“‘It’s Alive!’: The Science and Myth of Frankenstein” will be at the Bakken Library and Museum, 3537 Zenith Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55416 (612-927-6508) through August 1996. The Bakken is open by appointment Monday through Friday from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Admission is three dollars for adults and two dollars for students and senior citizens.
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Underrated Jazz Great
CLIFFORD BROWN
The Complete Blue Note and Pacific Jazz Recordings
Blue Note/Pacific Jazz, boxed set of four CDs, $66.98. CODE: BAT-56
THE JAZZ TRUMPETER CLIFFORD BROWN was only twenty-six when he died in a highway accident in 1956, but already he was a master who could play warmly and furiously at once, sending out a stream of triplets at breakneck tempo without losing his intimate tone. He falls between two other giants of fifties trumpet: He was a hard-bop player more lyrical than the speedy Gillespie and less subdued than Miles Davis, a lost genius admired and copied ever since by a cult of trumpeters from Lee Morgan to Freddie Hubbard to Wynton Marsalis. Before he formed his famous quintet with the drummer Max Roach, he did the work collected here, for Blue Note and Pacific Jazz, with the saxophonist Lou Donaldson, the band of the drummer Art Blakey, and others.
“And now, that great trumpet sensation Clifford Brown,” shouts the emcee at Birdland on disc three, the first of two covering an appearance with the Blakey band in 1954. The group doesn’t disappoint, especially on tunes by its pianist, Horace Silver, and on Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet vehicle, “A Night in Tunisia,” which Brown eagerly attacks. “Yes, sir, I’m gonna stay with the youngsters,” Blakey says with approval of Brown and his band before the final number.
When a Village Voice interviewer recently asked the saxophonist Sonny Rollins to choose between a Clifford Brown CD and one by today’s young trumpeter of the moment, Roy Hargrove, he chose “Brownie” but cautioned, “We have to give Roy a chance to develop.” The two recordings were by trumpeters almost exactly the same age.
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Presidents Speak
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRESENTS HISTORIC PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES, 1908-1993
Rhino R2-71970 (six CDs); Rhino R4-71970 (six cassettes)
Every president of the century except McKinley speaks in this lengthy collection of recordings, and hearing their words together makes vivid the course of oratory and politics in this century. The earliest selections, such as Taft on trusts and Theodore Roosevelt on Standard Oil, are short takes from standard stump speeches, specially recorded to be sold as 78s. For the most part they have all the excitement of a college lecture. In 1931 Herbert Hoover nervously stumbles through an address on unemployment relief. That is followed, as night by day, by the confident Franklin Roosevelt giving his first fireside chat: “My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” From FDR we also get an impassioned campaign speech, after which Truman’s cheerful informality in accepting the 1948 Democratic nomination ushers in a new sound: the brash tone of television talk. Ike gives his famous words on the military-industrial complex; Kennedy talks about the Cold War, in what Khrushchev called “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt” LBJ invents the Great Society, and Nixon the Silent Majority; Reagan pays tribute to Gorbachev beneath a bust of Lenin in Moscow. The intended audience for this collection is probably libraries and professors, but it should hold far wider interest.
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VIDEOS
Protecting the President
THE SECRET SERVICE
Arts & Entertainment Video, four videocassettes, 50 minutes each.
If you have ever watched the President’s limo fleet roar by or met the cold eye of one of his bodyguards, you’ve seen the Secret Service at familiar work. You may find it a surprise to learn that the Service was actually formed by the Treasury Department in 1865 to fight counterfeiting. Guarding the U.S. currency remained the Service’s main job until Congress changed the law in 1901, after the death of President McKinley. Since then the Secret Service has kept watch over Presidents, saving several, tragically losing one, and making possible the Presidency itself for one, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not only did FDR survive an assassination attempt in 1933, but the Secret Service helped him disguise his disability from the public by building him ramps, customizing his plane and railroad car, helping him appear to walk on stage, and quick-changing his clothes for him on a mattress between appearances. One of FDR’s old agents describes seeing a projectile fly into the President’s open car during a rainy tour of New York City in 1944: he lunged in after it and flung himself on what turned out to be a bagel. Color home movies show the tunnels and bomb shelters dug between the White House and Treasury Building during World War II. The former agent Glint Hill painfully remembers slipping while trying to reach Mrs. Kennedy on the back of the President’s Lincoln in Dallas in 1963. Michael Deaver, over whose right shoulder John Hinckley, Jr., fired his shots at President Reagan, co-produced the series, and the veteran reporter Ike Pappas, in whose presence Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, narrates.
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Three Charlatans
F FOR FAKE
starring, directed, and written by Orson Welles, Janus Films/HomeVision, 98 minutes.
“This is a film about trickery,” says Orson Welles at the start of his wildly stylized portrait of the century’s greatest known art forger, Elmyr de Hory. The project began as a loose series of interviews with the coy old painter by his biographer and neighbor, the American writer Clifford Irving. But as they were filming, on the Spanish island of Ibiza, Irving himself was Grafting a hoax even more impressive than getting a fake Modigliani into a museum: the Howard Hughes “autobiography” caper. While Irving pays tribute to de Hory’s successes, you watch his handsome face for signs of the forming plot. Irving explains straight-faced that de Hory lives “in his own world” and is unreliable.
Welles was drawn to de Hory as a fellow “charlatan” and was truly awed by Irving’s manuscript forgery, which he pronounced a greater hoax than his own 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast. But in the background of this film about authorship in the art world looms Welles’s own claim that he deserves undisputed credit for his masterpiece, Citizen Kane. (In one of the film’s many asides Joseph Gotten explains that he was to star as a Howard Hughes figure before Welles decided to take over as the Hearstian Kane.) F for Fake is a sometimes maddeningly quick-cutting meditation on “chicanery” and authorship; the shifting stories show both the indulgence and the fascination of Welles’s best work.
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