I was delighted to see The Caine Mutiny listed as the most underrated novel in your May/June issue. I first read the book shortly after I got out of the Navy, and I couldn’t put it down. Everyone I knew said the same thing. I found it compelling in a way no other novel has ever been for me before or since. I hope John Steele Gordon’s praise will bring Willie Keith, Capt. Queeg, and the rest to a new generation of readers.
In labeling Moby Dick the most overrated novel, John Steele Gordon asks “But have you met a Captain Ahab?” The answer, I suppose, is no. But so what? I have never met a Cheshire cat, a young girl like Pearl in The Scarlet Letter , or a man who changed into a giant insect. I have never met a man who faintly resembled Sherlock Holmes. I hadn’t realized that meeting literary characters outside of the works in which they appear was a criterion in responding to great literature. Now I see where I must have gone wrong. May I please place the following advertisement in your personal column? “Moderately old reader seeks fascinating adventure with Don Quixote. Send photo and résumé. Please no phone calls.”
P.S. How about this for a category: “Most overrated idea for an annual features idea in a well-loved history magazine”?
I AM WRITING HERE ABOUT AN AMERICAN PLACE, BUT NOT ABOUT Thomas Jefferson’s town, where I live, or about the South, to which I have devoted my working life. Rather, I am writing about that new American place we cannot see but whose effects we increasingly feel, Cyberspace. That place, simultaneously metaphorical and tangible, has touched every part of the United States. As information surges along networks of copper and glass, weaving ever-tighter webs across the country and the world, those networks define a space at once empty and densely populated, desolate and hopeful. By its very nature, Cyberspace is space amid other places. It touches them all but is possessed by none. At one level, Cyberspace is merely bits of electronic information, zeros and ones, stored on computers and networks. At another level, it is more concrete, addresses and linkages whose names people know and can read. And at the sites where people interact with one another, Cyberspace becomes physical, filled with color, sound, and image.
Introduction:
THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1860S WITNESSED A DRAMA NOT SO VERY DIFFERENT IN SCALE AND CONSEQUENCE from the great struggle that had marked the early years of the decade. The two biggest corporations in America, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, had armies of men at work in mountains and desert, building two lines that, when joined, would become the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. While the CP pushed east from Sacramento through the high passes of the Sierra Nevada, the UP built west from the Missouri River.
This immense project was not only an epic of logistics, organization, muscle, and endurance but also an opportunity to get very, very rich. The government had issued land grants along the right-of-way and low-interest bonds underwriting construction costs of up to $48,000 a mile in mountainous regions; thus encouraged to make a race of it, the lines did, passing each other in the spring of 1869 and keeping right on going, side by side, until the government called a halt to the work and chose a meeting spot.
EVERY MOMENT OF THE PRESENT is aboil with countless potential futures, and Americans—who tend to be future-loving folk—have been trying to limn them for generations. Some of the more extravagant results appear here. They have been assembled by the writer and architect Norman Brosterman, who has long been fascinated by visions of things to come created by illustrators for science fiction and popular science magazines, by industrial designers as prototype studies, and by the occasional newspaper artist in a moment of inspiration. The examples here are gathered in Brosterman’s book Out of Time: Designs for a Twentieth-Century Future , which Abrams will publish in November. The book accompanies a show of the drawings organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service that will tour the country during the next three years.
It was all over by 9:30 a.m. Colonel Rall mortally wounded, the last of his Hessian troops, driven out of the town by the Continentals and surrounded in a desolate winter orchard, dropping their muskets to the ground.
Washington rode up to the group of sullen captives; Hugh Mercer joined him, his round Scot’s face radiant. “That’s the last of them, sir. Trenton is ours.”
Washington squinted into the cloudy, smoky sky. “It will be a hard journey back.” He looked down at the Germans. “See that the prisoners are killed.”
Mercer blinked. “All of them, sir?”
The Hessians stared uncomprehendingly at the two; in the midst of the group a score of women tried to comfort a few frightened towheaded children.
“Sir, there are…” Mercer trailed off.
Washington smiled a wintry smile. “Women and children, General Mercer? Yes. Kill them first.”
One hundred and seventy-five years ago the Erie Canal opened and New York—not Boston, not Philadelphia—became America’s gateway to the burgeoning West. By the Civil War it was the largest city in America, exercising a cultural hegemony it enjoys to this day. “Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861,” the big, handsome new show running at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 7, 2001, charts that rise in more than 300 works gathered from 84 lenders. Among them: a maple and rosewood cabinet by Gustave Herter; a compote from the immigrant glassmaker Christian Dorflinger; a daguerreotype of the loyal city-singer Walt Whitman; and a wonderful 1855 view looking south across Forty-second Street and the reservoir that once stood on the present-day site of the New York Public Library.
It was September 1945. I was seven. Sunday morning promised as much excitement as I could handle with our Pine Orchard pickup team playing an important sandlot baseball game against our archrivals, Hotchkiss Grove. My father threw a monkey wrench into my plans when he announced that we were going to New Haven to meet Babe Ruth and ride the train with him to Hartford for a hitting exhibition.
I protested that there was nothing more important than facing the Grovers, but Dad, who was the sports editor of the New Haven Register , put his foot down and demanded that I get dressed immediately.
We met the train on schedule, at ten-thirty, to be exact, and with many grumblings I made my way to the dining car. “We’re going to have breakfast with Babe Ruth, so try not to spill anything,” my father warned.
The Roosevelt townhouse was only three blocks from Hunter College’s main building at Park Avenue at Sixty-eighth Street, and, one day in 1940, Eleanor just walked in off the street. The door she opened was the entrance to Echo, the college magazine. I was one of the writers, and I happened to be in the office with two other girls on the staff. We were flabbergasted. She was completely alone, without a secretary, Secret Service agent, or companion of any kind. She was looking for someone to talk to, she said, and she had slipped into a side entrance to avoid meeting up with the crowds one always encountered in the main lobby.
We dropped everything and asked her to sit down on the couch. I sat next to her, and the other two leaned on a desk facing us. Mrs. Roosevelt explained that she was a neighbor of ours and was out for a walk, and she wondered if she could rest awhile and chat with us if we were not too busy. Not too busy! We were overwhelmed and gave her our full attention.