January 2011

My stint as an Army journalist a few years earlier (1951–53) than Geoffrey Perret gave me no insight into the MacArthur legend. I fear, however, that his search for the “real” MacArthur (February/March) has brought him under the mystique and glossed his journalistic vision.

How does the failure of President Hoover’s orders to reach him absolve MacArthur of the brutal acts he carried out against the Bonus Marchers and their wives and children?

Perhaps Mr. Ferret’s 1958 naiveté could lead him to believe that the veterans with whom he shared a flight to the Philippines doubted the fighting ability of the scouts. I suspect, rather, that they were commenting on MacArthur’s folly in allowing those men to be committed to that hopeless task.

I also find it incredible that Mr. Perret describes MacArthur’s inability to distinguish between truth and untruth as “denial.” There is a word for those who believe their own lies, and it is not “denial.”

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.

Lorraine Glennon, editor in chief , Turner, 713 pages .

CD-ROM (for Windows and Macintosh), Vicarious, Inc..

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.

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).

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.

We are writing in response to a letter in the December 1995 issue in which Clark E. Finks claims that the song used in Glory to portray Union camp life—“The Bonnie Blue Flag”—was inappropriate. In defense of Richard Snow, and whoever else provided historical advice for Glory , the song in question was originally an Irish melody, “The Irish Jaunting Car,” before Annie Chambers-Ketchum wrote the lyrics to “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” Moreover, while a prisoner of war in Selma, Alabama, the Union colonel J. L. Geddes of the 8th Iowa Infantry wrote lyrics to the same melody, which he titled “The Bonnie Blue Flag with the Stripes and Stars.” This version soon became a popular Northern answer to the Southern song. One verse states:

Your September 1995 issue featured a profile of the right wing in “HomeGrown Terror,” a feature on the militias of 1940, by Philip Jenkins. In a way, you devoted some equal time for the left-wing terrorists of our history in a review of The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired With John Brown (the six Unitarians, eccentrics, and liberal Protestants who funded John Brown’s murderous Kansas and West Virginia raids), reviewed by Geoffrey C. Ward in “The Life and Times.” To continue your fair-minded policy, I look forward to future reviews of the powerful, mostly secret influence of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), as revealed incontrovertibly now in the release of several tons of formerly secret Soviet documents on the CPUSA.

by William P. Gottlieb , Pomegranate, 162 pages .

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.