January 2011

by Don Cook, Grove/Atlantic, 432 pages .

The “long fuse” the British writer Don Cook refers to is the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France, a conflict that kept the English monarchy from focusing too hard on its American colonies. When it was over, in 1763, the crown departed from Sir Robert Walpole’s policy of “salutary neglect” and initiated a series of measures intended to maximize the colonies’ earning potential for the Empire. The Americans, who had grown used to semiautonomy while the great European powers battled, saw the new taxes as an assault on their New World freedoms. With help from King George III, Cook argues, the European struggle “laid the long fuse that would eventually splutter into revolution.”

by Buster Keaton, Kino Video, 75 minutes each . The General; Our Hospitality.

Buster Keaton was born a century ago next month, and his greatest
films are seventy years old. But how modern they seem, and how much more appealing their star’s stoicism than, say, Charlie Chaplin’s coy and cloying self-adoration. Kino Video is releasing scrupulously remastered versions of his movies. All of them are worth seeing, and several are wonderful, but Our Hospitality and The General are also interesting because both are historical exercises. The former, set in the morning time of steam railroading, begins with a long, hilariously arduous trip south behind a Best Friend of Charlestonish steam locomotive (the sign on a storefront in the 1830 Manhattan from which Keaton departs suggests his shrewd and funny eye for the American past: the enterprise deals in—or is owned by— FISH, SALT & PLASTER ).

by Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Cornell University Press, 192 pages .

by Suellen Hoy, Oxford University Press .

Unlike other American obsessions—with violence, or race, or celebrity—the national preoccupation with cleanliness has brought true benefits and set a standard for therest of the world. Suellen Hoy’s book is a history of American social progress, especially since the Civil War, which for her purposes is the Dark Ages.

by Robert Michael Pyle, Houghton Mifflin, 338 pages .

by Richard Lischer, Oxford University Press, 344 pages .

Richard Lischer, Professor of Homiletics at the Divinity School of Duke University, argues in this excellent study of Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetoric that once the civil rights leader became generally admired by both black and white Americans, his followers softened many of his published sermons, editing out his less universal references and less harmonious moments on the pulpit to fit the image of the preacher of Gandhian love. A vital part of him was lost in the process, contends Lischer, who began the project after a student told him she found the great orator’s words “pretty dry” reading. Lischer was puzzled and was moved to use audiotapes to correct the sanitized transcripts and to analyze King in his full, heated eloquence. “As no preacher in the twentieth century and no politician since Lincoln,” he writes, ” [King] transposed the Judeo-Christian themes of love, suffering, deliverance, and justice from the sacred shelter of the pulpit into the arena of public policy.”

The Library of America, 912 pages .

The Library of America, 970 pages .

Quentin Anderson, Julian Clarence Levy Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Columbia University, argues in his best-known book, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History, that the writings of three of our most representatively American authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry James, embody a distinctly American grand refusal of history and social roles. Those authors, he says, proposed an alternative way of being, free of the burdens of the past and the constraints of human relationships, a radical conception of the self as unaided and undivided, “imperial” in its ability to absorb all of reality. Andersen’s most recent book, Making Americans: An Essay on Individualism and Money, takes in America’s cultural history from the Jacksonian era to the present and broadens the discussion to include, among others, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, John Dewey, Henry Adams, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, and William Carlos Williams.

Wyatt Harp, the most famous of all frontier lawmen, has been the subject of at least two dozen Hollywood Westerns. The mere mention of his name immediately evokes the image of a sharpshooting marshal bringing law and order to the wild towns of the West. “This may not be Dodge City,” said a spokesman for the U.S. Marines occupying war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, “but Wyatt Earp’s in town.”