January 2011

by James Welch with Paul Stekler, W. W. Norton, 320 pages .

The novelist James Welch was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in eastern Montana and grew up hearing stories about how his great-grandmother had survived the U.S. Cavalry’s massacre of 173 Blackfeet, mostly women and children, on January 23, 1870. Welch approached this book and the documentary screenplay that inspired it by asking himself why the fabled slaughter of George Armstrong Custer and his troops six years later was so much better known than that one. Did Custer’s end require so many retellings? Perhaps not, but the story of the victors who defeated him needed one.

by Arthur Quinn, Crown Publishers, 352 pages .

“This is the story of two men,” the author writes, “—of how they achieved great power and how through their implacable rivalry they destroyed each other.” The gold rush brought every sort of prospector to California, including political fortune seekers hoping to ride the movement for statehood all the way to the U.S. Senate. William Gwin, a former Southern planter, stepped off the steamer Panama at San Francisco in June of 1849. He traveled up and down the territory promoting statehood, attended the Constitutional Convention at Monterey in 1850, and (along with the explorer John C. Frémont) became one of the state’s first two senators.

edited by James Barbour and Fred Warner, University of New Mexico Press, 320 pages .

by Thomas Kunkel, Random House, 512 pages .

The first issue of The New Yorker appeared on the newsstands seventy years ago last February. It would have taken a prescient reader indeed to see in the publication’s feebly hectic contents the embryo of the most influential magazine in American history. How Harold Wallace Ross ranted and prodded and provoked his creation into becoming something that approached his platonic vision is the subject of this briskly told, wholly absorbing biography.

“A more unlikely literary avatar than Harold Ross is hard to imagine,” writes Thomas Kunkel, “for he was a man of spectacular contradictions.… Ross’s personal reading ran to dictionaries (Fowler’s Modern English Usage , particularly) and true-detective magazines. He was a prototypical Westerner whose magazine embodied Eastern urbanity. He was a coarse, profane man with a near-perfect ear for language.”

by Lee Server, Chronicle Books, 108 pages

As pulp magazines died off after the Second World War, the lurid paperback arose and flourished in their place. The first softcovers were nonlurid hardcover titles repackaged for an audience grown used to portable Army editions. Very quickly, however, publishers discovered a large market for paperback originals with titles like Nude in Mink ; Lady, Don’t Die on My Doorstep ; Hitch-Hike Hussy ; and Benny Muscles In , lascivious and streetwise stories that made steady work for a generation of writers. The Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt had early success writing about molls and gumshoes; John Faulkner’s novels of backwoods brothels were shorter and sexier than his brother William’s books. The genre’s first star was Mickey Spillane, with his pitiless hero, Mike Hammer.

by Patrick McGrew and Robert Julian, Abrams, 288 pages.

by Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, Houghton Mifflin, 220 pages.

Rhino R2 71806 (six CDs).

by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., University of California Press, 656 pages.

by Ann Douglas, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pages.

“Culture follows money,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson in the 1920s, and few eras could have borne him out more completely. Ann Douglas takes that maxim to heart in her history of the decade as it was played out in New York. She stitches together anecdotes and personal histories from 120 of the era’s leading players—from Dorothy Parker to Duke Ellington to Josephine Baker to Walter Winchell.