January 2011

by Douglas A. Yorke, Jr., John Margolies, and Eric Baker , Chronicle Books, 132 pages, $18.95 . CODE: CRN-8

by Mark Twain , Random House, 418 pages, $25.00 . CODE: RAN-40

IN 1990 THE FIRST 665 ORIGINAL manuscript pages of Mark Twain’s great river novel were found wrapped up inside a steamer trunk in California, ninety-three years after they had disappeared. Twain had given them to a collector, James Fraser Gluck, and the rediscovery of these pages by Gluck’s granddaughter provoked a seventeen-month court battle over ownership.

A rescue squad is a visible institution that can give a community a sense of self as well as a sense of security. In 1988 Julian Wise’s idea was picked up by James ("Rocky") Robinson in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy, one of the oldest African-American communities in New York City, had been hit hard by poverty and drug violence. Fed up with twenty- and thirty-minute response times on the part of the city EMS system, Robinson, himself an EMS supervisor, and fellow EMS veteran Joe Ferez launched the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps (BSVAC).

ON A WARM MAY AFTERNOON IN 1909, the quiet along the river in Roanoke, Virginia, is broken by cries for help. Two canoeists have capsized. Bystanders rush to the banks, throw branches toward the foundering men. It is in vain. The swift current carries them under; they drown. A nine-year-old boy watches them perish.

This childhood memory, not just the watery death but the utter helplessness of those onshore, would haunt Julian Stanley Wise into adulthood. “Right then, I resolved that I was going to become a lifesaver,” he said. “Never again would I watch a man die when he could be saved.” His resolve led Wise to a lifetime of organizing ordinary citizens to respond to emergencies. Today, 450,000 volunteers, organized into squads modeled on Wise’s idea, provide ambulance and rescue service to more than two-thirds of the United States.

The alert reader (and, for that matter, the near-comatose one) will notice that this month’s cover story on American taxation arrives at a conclusion that will not be anathema to the chairman of the company that pays my salary. And, given the current vigor of the flat-tax debate that he did so much to initiate, I thought it might be worthwhile to say something about how this particular article came to be.

One of the frustrations of planning future stories for a magazine that appears eight times a year and cannot match the scorching pace and big staffs of the weeklies lies in the difficulty of calculating what subjects will have a hold on the public imagination some months down the road. Often enough a story commissioned in the heat of the current concerns has all the urgency of OUR IMPERILED INTERURBAN SYSTEM when it comes time to print it.

THE RISE OF THE SMALL, ANNOYING DOG