January 2011

Enchantment Resort can be reached at 800-826-4180 or www.enchantmentresort.com . Another leading spa resort, centrally located at the site of the Schneblys’ original homestead and a short walk from the Tlaquepaque arts-and-crafts village, is Los Abrigados (800-521-3131 or www.losabrigados.com ). Sedona is full of fine dining and fine lodging; one standout for both is L’Auberge de Sedona, in a forested area in Oak Creek Canyon (800-272-6777 or www.lauberge.com ). For full information about the town’s many restaurants and motels and hotels at all price ranges, get in touch with the Sedona-Oak Creek Canyon Chamber of Commerce (800-288-7336 or www.sedonachamber.com ) or the Arizona Office of Tourism (888-520-3433 or www.arizonaguide.com ).

If the history of European settlement in America is short, and that in the West even shorter, the history of Sedona, Arizona, is the blink of an eye. The colorful resort town, surrounded by grand and spacious red-rock buttes and canyons amid bottom-lands of cottonwood and mesquite and agave, received its first white settler in 1876, its name and post office in 1902, paved streets and electricity in the 1950s, and incorporation in 1988. Like many places in America’s past, it grew up as a haven for the pioneers of an unorthodox religious movement. But the movement in Sedona wasn’t Puritan or Huguenot or Shaker or Amish or Mormon; it was—and is —New Age.

In 1683, the poet laureate John Dryden brought the word"  biography" into the English language. He defined it as “the history of particular men’s lives.” That means a lot more than just the details of a person’s life, of course. If the subject is a household name, the biographer must separate the facts from the myths that inevitably sprout like mushrooms out of the folk memory of a great individual. Even more important, the biographer must provide both the background—the vast complexity of the civilization in which an individual lived his life—and minibiographies of important people in that life. And this must all be done without wearying the reader or losing the thread of narration.

Our recent politics have brought the editorial handwringers out in force, decrying a new outbreak of “partisanship,” as when, at the end of the impeachment process, The New York Times declared that “Americans yearn for a Congress that can actually accomplish something. Reverting to more party warfare will hurt both sides. The trick will be for lawmakers to look beyond their trenches to see where the public interest lies.”

Has all the mudslinging that has come to cover Washington really ushered in a dangerous new era of division? The answer is less clear than it might appear to those who managed to spend the Clinton impeachment hearings glued to C-SPAN . An objective observer could even conclude that our two major parties have never been closer on most issues, domestic and foreign.

Want to know my choice for most overrated magazine filler idea? “Overrated & Underrated” is simply one more in an exasperating string of magazine “articles” in which large numbers of purported experts are invited to identify the best this, worst that, or most something else. The content tells readers more about the givers of the opinions than about the subject matter—precisely because the anthology format is too Attention Deficit Disorder-friendly to offer more than assertions mixed with some smattering of background information.

This is true even of two opinion givers with whom I happen to agree, Stephen King on rock bands and Andrew Sarris on movie Westerns.

Most underrated magazine filler idea, at least in the 1990s: substance.

I take exception to Phil Patton’s choice of the most overrated invention, atomic power. Sadly, he seems to have missed the point entirely. Atomic power was not invented for civilian purposes. To fault it because it failed at that is akin to faulting the tank because it makes a poor farm tractor.

Atomic power was invented to end a war. It not only succeeded beyond all expectation but, to the surprise of even its most ardent supporters, succeeded in ending completely what had been an ominous, centuries-long trend toward ever-deadlier, ever-wider conflicts. Without the threat posed by atomic power, one can only guess at what the Korean War would have grown into, but you can be sure that it would never have been limited to that Asian peninsula. Also, if anyone thinks that Europe would look the way it does today without the discovery of atomic power, please write, as I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

Ray Robinson’s nomination of Dickie Kerr as the most underrated ballplayer of all time might spark a lively discussion in the bar after a SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) convention. But as history or baseball analysis it’s pretty flimsy, and Robinson has to know it.

Kerr became something of a popular hero when it was revealed that he’d won two games in the 1919 World Series while eight of his Chicago White Sox teammates were plotting to lose. But even the Black Sox weren’t brazen enough to try to tank a best-of-nine series by losing five straight games, and they didn’t have to. Chicago’s top two pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, were in on the fix, and they could be counted on to lose whenever they had to.