January 2011

Like those life-size cardboard effigies people pose with at amusement parks, the firmly erect figure in the center of this photo seems almost too real to be true. But it is indeed Harry Truman, stopping to greet a family of visitors to his Independence, Missouri, library. As Dennis Cropper, of Radford, Virginia, explains: “In May of 1960, when I was in the seventh grade, my parents took me out of school for a brief vacation, and with my dad’s Aunt Pearl we went to Independence, Missouri, to visit the new library built to house President Harry S. Truman’s papers. I kept asking if we would get to see the former President, but my family was not too optimistic. Dad said, ‘He’s probably not there, and if he were, we wouldn’t be able to see him.’

The best American guidebook to Cuba is Insight Guides: Cuba (APA/Houghton Mifflin, 283 pages), which covers walking Old Havana, meeting prostitutes ( jineteras ) at the Tropicana nightclub, where to see the world’s best cigars rolled by hand, and where to watch Hemingway’s ninety-six-year-old fishing-boat skipper eat his lunch. Cars of Cuba (with an essay by Cristina Garcia and 53 photographs by Joshua Greene, Abrams, 64 pages) shows what’s left of Richard Reinhardt’s lost Cuba- how, long after the Revolution, curvy, chrome-rich DeSotos, Studebakers, Roadmasters, and Pontiac Chieftains still prowl Castro’s exhausted island.

Although I enjoyed Mark C. Carnes’s article “Hollywood History” (September), I must take issue with his assessment of Shakespeare’s historical accuracy in Henry V. Carnes accuses Shakespeare of “omitting the fact that Henry V slaughtered hundreds of French prisoners at Agincourt,” but in scene 6 of act 4, Henry V gives the command “every soldier kill his prisoners”; in the scene following, Gower reports, “the king most worthily hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner’s throat. O, ‘tis a gallant king!” It was not Shakespeare who rewrote history (although he did do so on occasion), but Sir Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh who cut this unflattering incident from their filmed versions of Henry V. Professor Carnes should know better than to expect accuracy from movies.

Professor Maddox replies: Let me take up Mr. Lorah’s complaints one by one:

1. The USSBS . For my allegation that the survey was “cooked,” I referred readers to Robert P. Newman. He has a devastating chapter in his new book showing how Paul Nitze set out to demonstrate that conventional bombing would have caused Japan to surrender by November 1, and shaped the survey to achieve that goal. Newman makes his case convincing by showing instance after instance of shoddy interviewing of Japanese officials, and of misrepresentations of what these officials really said. This would have been impossible for me to do in a sentence or two. It is traditional scholarly practice, when an author does not have space to develop a minor point, to refer readers to his source so that they may pursue the matter further if they choose to do so.

Smithsonian Institution Press/BMG RD 104 (two CDs) .

Rhino R2 71984 (seven CDs) .

Columbia/Legacy CXK 66955 (seven CDs) .

Three new releases present high points of jazz history in attractive, definitive packages. The Duke Ellington set contains selections from the Duke’s best Victor, Bluebird, and RCA recordings —which is to say many of his best recordings ever—beginning in the late 1920s, when his band and its sound seemed to appear from nowhere fully formed, through pathbreaking records like “Mood Indigo,” “Creole Rhapsody,” and “Concerto for Cootie,” and right up to works from the 1960s. The emphasis is on the earliest period, as it should be, the twenties and thirties, when the Duke and his band were defining sophistication and elegance and swing. If you want one set that conveys the brilliance and range of Duke Ellington’s music, get this one.

directed by Raoul Walsh, Kino on Video, 72 minutes .

directed by George Loane Tucker, Kino on Video, 88 minutes .

Raoul Walsh made such rowdy gangster films as White Heat and The Roaring Twenties , but before that he had to help invent the genre. He did so with Regeneration , his 1915 adaptation of the novel My Mamie Rose , by the former gangster Owen Kildare. It begins on the day of the death of young Owen’s mother in their Lower East Side tenement, then follows the ten-year-old keeping a terrified watch for his drunken father at night. After one family fight the title announces: “So the days pass in the only environment he knows.” Owen will soon join and then lead a gang, and no one will ever bully him again.

by Thomas H. O’Connor, Northeastern University Press, 363 pages .

In 1993 Boston’s Mayor Ray Flynn declined a run for a fourth term in favor of a higher position—representative to the Vatican in Rome. With that the city lost its eleventh Irish mayor since 1885, making way for an Italian-American, Tom Menino.

by Sidney Offit, St. Martin’s Press, 165 pages .

Buck Offit was a conventional father in Oriole Park, Baltimore, except that he took phone bets at the kitchen table, carried fat rolls of bills, routinely flushed scraps of paper down the toilet, and “spoke from the corners of his mouth in the diction of the underworld.” So writes his loving son Sidney in this luminous memoir of Depression-era Baltimore. Sidney’s mother stored shoeboxes of cash in the wall the way other housewives mothballed the family’s sweaters. One spring afternoon in 1934 Buck was beaten in front of his son by three men trying to drag him into a car: “I am aware of my father kicking and swinging and finally coming up with the lid to the garbage can. There is the metallic sound of the aluminum can rolling on the pavement and my father’s voice, ‘You take me, you take me dead.’”

essay and notes by Joan Paterson Kerr, Random House, 288 pages .

That Theodore Roosevelt displayed even more boyish vitality as a father than as our youngest President comes splendidl) clear in his letters to his children, for whon he was confidant, reporter, and often co-conspirator. He and the First Lady returned to the White House after being away in 1903, and he wrote his son Kermit, “Mother … was met [upstairs] by Archie and Quentin, each loaded with pillows and whispering not to let me know that they were in ambush; then as I marched up to the top they assailed me with shrieks and chuckles of delight and then the pillow fight raged up and down the hall.” Many such passages bear out the fond remark of a friend quoted in David McCullough’s foreword: “You must remember that the President is about six.”