Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 444 457-2 (one CD) .
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
edited by Joseph Barbato and Lisa Weinerman of the Nature Conservancy, foreword by Barry Lopez, Pantheon, 296 pages . The assignment was simple and clear: Write about a surviving wild area that has special meaning for you. Thirty-one well-known authors accepted and agreed to donate their essays to the Nature Conservancy’s cause. Rick Bass’s essay on his native Texas Hill Country covers sixty years in the life of one family’s thousand-acre hunting ground. Peter Matthiessen can tell his life almost entirely through his involvement with the clam beds, duck blinds, salt meadows, channels, and harbors of “the glacial outwash plain known as Long Island.” Parts of his paradise hang on despite development, but Matthiessen realizes that “the blue water [is] gone, and the clear emerald water, too” in favor of one flat “olive-brown.”
Babe Ruth was born a hundred years ago this year in Baltimore’s “pigstown” section. The first thing to know about the Babe Ruth Museum there is that while Kate Ruth did give birth to him in a little bedroom upstairs, the building was never his home. Mrs. Ruth thought her mother’s three-story brick row house, at 216 Emory Street, would be a finer place to come into the world than the saloon where her husband worked a few blocks away. The upper front bedroom looks pretty much as it did then, respectable and small; the rest of the building is devoted to the baseball exploits of the barkeep’s son. Downstairs has been broken out into a gift shop and multiple displays, starting with twenty-one broad rubber noses, pinned to a white board and which the actor Stephen Lang wore—a different one each day—for the filming of Babe Ruth for TV. The collection also has Ruth’s shotgun, an official Babe Ruth Wristwatch and miniature musical bat, and a wrapper from the Babe Ruth candy bar, which ran into copyright trouble from the makers of the Baby Ruth bar.
by Orlando Romero and David Larkin, photography by Michael Freeman, Houghton Mifflin Company, 240 pages .
Here is a coffee-table book as simple and functional as its subject—mud houses. The photographer Michael Freeman uses sunlight as his best tool to illuminate adobe, and it’s the same Southwestern light that caused Spanish settlers seeking cities of gold to marvel instead at houses made from mud brick that glowed deceptively orange in the sun. His photos are primarily of New Mexico and use the holy Sangre de Cristo Mountains as a backdrop to the earthen dwellings.
Essays by Dave Anderson, Ben Crenshaw, and Dan Jenkins, with commentary by Ken Venturi, The American Golfer/ Triumph Books, 132 pages .
by Philip Makanna, Chronicle Books, 160 pages .
Charles Robbins writes in his preface to this luminous book of World War II airplanes in flight, “We have precious little to memorialize the war: several restored aircraft, a clutch of words from those who fought, and a few images from the past and the present.” Ghosts of the Skies makes the most of these. The photographer Philip Makanna was born the year of the Battle of Britain, but everything he later heard from World War II fliers made him want to become a pilot. His poor eyesight held him back, but his passion shows in his elegant shots of Mustangs, Spitfires, and Helldivers aloft, sometimes on their final journeys. His P-51 floating in pale light looks like hammered sculpture.
I have always had a sense that a war claims many more casualties than those who perish on the battlefields. Each statistic, each white cross or star of David in a military cemetery suggests a mother, a father, a wife, a lover, a child left to grieve. I am sure of it, because I was one of the children. I was left with a hole in my heart and a sense of emptiness and vulnerability that comes from never knowing a father, wounds that will probably never totally heal. I have also had the notion that beneath our studied casualness we Americans must have something that runs deeper. I believe we still share the strengths on which we drew in the dark and sacrificial days of World War II.