I thoroughly enjoyed “Agents of Change,” particularly since I have had the privilege of working with Malcom McLean for the past fourteen years. As the article accurately points out, his development of containerized shipping has changed the world. Of interest also is that this “world-changer” continued to be actively involved in developing ways to pick up and deliver freight for less cost. From founding another innovative, successful company only three years ago to exploring entirely new concepts for handling freight today, this pioneering octogenarian continues to exemplify the classic American entrepreneurial spirit.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
directed by Joseph Sargent, Spelling Television Inc./Worldvision Inc., 141 minutes .
It’s not easy to bring to life a group of scientists sitting in shirtsleeves in front of chalkboards in the desert, but this dramatization of the Manhattan Project, originally made for network television (its producer was of all people Aaron Spelling, the man who gave us “Charlie’s Angels”), is utterly absorbing. In one early scene the soft-spoken J. Robert Oppenheimer meets with Gen. Leslie Groves, the zealous military head of the effort, and tries to impress on him how little anyone actually knows about atom bombs as of 1942. At least one expert, he says, has determined that such a device would set fire to the entire earth’s atmosphere and thus end civilization.
directed by Charles Dubin, written by William Luce, 90 minutes, Kino Video .
Emily Dickinson’s was a voice seldom heard. As a recluse who rarely left her hometown, Amherst, and who died with most of her poems unpublished, Dickinson wrote that her work was “My letter to the world that never wrote to me.” William Luce’s play The Belle of Amherst lets her speak through the actress Julie Harris, who with her open face, prim bun, and charmingly dry and earnest wit shapes the poet’s distinctive voice in a beguiling and very personal way.
edited by Dana Heinz, Yazoo Video/ Shanachie .
The musical film short was a long way from the modern music video, and these twenty-two newsreel recitals by musicians from Jimmie Rodgers to Uncle John Scruggs to Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys couldn’t be further from the titillations of MTV. No narrative links together this early-thirties hit parade. Rodgers comes on first, in an eight-minute performance from 1929. He asks for a cup of coffee at a contrived railroad-station restaurant, then sits playing while it brews and an old woman crochets in the rocker next to him. He sings “Waitin’ for a Train,” “Daddy and Home,” and “Blue Yodel.” The Whistler’s Jug Band follows, doing its hit, “Foldin’ Bed”; Elder Michaux leads his gospel choir; a country string band performs on someone’s back steps, a fireside cowboy choir croons “Home on the Range"; Uncle John Scruggs emerges from a hen house to play banjo for his dancing grandchildren.
Verve 314 521661-2 (two CDs) .
Sometime in the mid-1940s the jazz producer and impresario Norman Granz got the idea of preparing a lavish limited-edition set of twelve-inch 78s showcasing the best jazz musicians of the time. It came out it in 1949, its twelve sides by, among others, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell and with cover art by David Stone Martin and photographs by Gjon Mili. It soon went out of print, until now when the whole package has re-emerged faithfully reproduced down to the loose-leaf binding (but reduced to CD size). The music, of which the very best is Hawkins’s far-ranging solo fantasy “Picasso,” takes up less than one CD; Verve has added enough material, outtakes, and other cuts Granz recorded by the same artists to fill out that disk and a second one, offering a fuller and more compelling sampling of late forties jazz than the original did. The music alone makes the album worth having, but so do the more than two dozen gorgeous Mili photographs, and so does the historically accurate presentation.
by David Reynolds, Random House, 544 pages .
In April 1942 a BBC poll found that in Britain “it was probably not an exaggeration to say that a great many people are simply without opinions of any kind or even prejudices, about anything so remote as America.” This would not last. There were already twelve thousand GIs in the United Kingdom, and by the end of the war three million had tramped through. Between 1942 and 1944 the Yanks changed in the British mind from overpaid, sex-obsessed occupiers on perpetual holiday to proven heroes, and to the Americans a fusty, class-ridden nation showed itself tough and unified under the blitz. David Reynolds, author of An Ocean Apart: The Relationship Between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century , shows how the GIs and the British people grew together, presenting a social history of the army that came over, breaking it down to its individuals, and explaining exactly who they were.
by Frederick S. Voss, Smithsonian Institution Press, 218 pages .
The cover of this book shows the painter Floyd Davis’s group portrait of famous war correspondents assembled in the Bar du Scribe in Paris in 1944. Ernest Hemingway grins hugely over his red wine at the The New Yorker ’s tiny Janet Planner, while behind them are clumped a couple of dozen other reporters, photographers, and field artists. Many of them are profiled in Frederick Voss’s text; Voss is the curator for the National Gallery, whose recent World War II art exhibition this book accompanied. Voss presents an entertaining gallery of the major figures who, in word and picture, brought Americans their war—or at least what Army censors allowed them to send of it.