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January 2011
Mark C. Carnes wrote our article “Hollywood History” after he finished editing a new collection of essays on the subject by sixty noted historians, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt, 304 pages). The book looks considerably further back than the founding of our Republic: It opens with Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of the evolutionary science in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park . My Darling Clementine , John Ford’s inspired 1946 interpretation of the Wyatt Earp story that John Mack Faragher calls the best of the lot, is available on video (CBS-Fox Video).
BSO Classics 171002 (one CD) .
On October 2, 1917, the one hundred members of the Boston Symphony crammed into two igloo-like structures built in an auditorium in Camden, New Jersey, and played the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.
by Pasquale Spagnuolo, St. Martin’s Press, 102 pages .
Pasquale Spagnuolo, a native of Italy who spent fifty-five years grooming the likes of Johnny Carson, Winston Churchill, and James Thurber in his shop on West Forty-third Street in New York City, gives an endearing glimpse into the proud and meticulous world of the immigrant barber. When his wife, Connie, became ill, he writes, “to occupy my time and not feel sorry for myself, I wrote this book, after jotting down notes for more than twenty years.” In it, he tells all the most amusing tales of his career.
by Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Doubleday, 432 pages .
If only important times could always inspire social histories as fine as this one. The authors begin with the infamously abrupt collapse of the Third Republic and the four-year occupation, following with tempered admiration de Gaulle’s exile activities in England and Algeria while the American government tries to sort out which of the French commanders to recognize.
by Francis M. Naumann, Abrams, 256 pages .
In a letter to the poet Tristan Tzara, a founder of the Dada movement, the artist Man Ray commented: “All New York is dada and will not tolerate a rival.” New York Dada makes a strong case that 1910s New York, bursting with chaotic and often insolent creative attitude, was an ideal haven for the eccentric Dada movement, which was born of just such urges. Dada, founded by a group of European artists who fled to Switzerland during World War I, was based on the idea of rejecting all restraints to achieve complete artistic freedom. The movement made its way quickly to New York, bringing along modernists like Joseph Stella, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp, who was so enchanted with New York’s skyscrapers that he declared them more beautiful than anything in Europe and was disappointed that he couldn’t live in one.