January 2011

The portion of the interview dealing with Emerson’s alleged indifference concerning the death of his five-yearold son, Waldo, and his incapacity “to feel for … another,” is misleading.

In Emerson’s letter to his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, written January 28, 1842, he cries: “My boy, my boy is gone. He was taken ill of Scarlatina on Monday evening, and died last night. I can say nothing to you. My darling and the world’s wonderful child, for never in my own or another family have I seen any thing comparable, has fled out of my arms like a dream. He adorned the world for me like a morning star, and every particular of my daily life. …”

In his journal entry of January 30 in that same year he tenderly discusses the loss. He writes: “Sorrow makes us all children. The wisest knows nothing. It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy. A child so large & generous a nature, that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another.”

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.

Arts & Entertainment Video, four videocassettes, 50 minutes each .

Rhino R2-71970 (six CDs) ; Rhino R4-71970 (six cassettes)

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.

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.

by William Cobbett, edited and with an introduction by David A. Wilson , Cornell University Press, 288 pages .

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.