January 2011

My thanks to Tony Scherman for an authoritative history of the roots of country music (November issue). But I disagree most strongly that country music is in, or is about to begin, a decline.

Having been involved in country radio for ten years, I would pose this question: If you compare a Buddy Holly song to a Metallica song, is rock on the decline? The contrast between the two is as distinct as the difference between Hank Williams Senior and “The Tractors.”

Country is not in a state of decline. Rather, like any other form of music, it is evolving. Dwight Yoakam bemoans “loss of contact with that white rural experience.” Is this the same man who owns a multimillion-dollar horse ranch in California?

directed by Lloyd Richards, starring James Earl Jones, Kino Video, 118 minutes

Even before he gave Darth Vader his rumbling menace in the Star Wars films, James Earl Jones had one of the world’s most familiar voices. His great challenge in this one-man off-Broadway show was to use it to make his audience hear the even deeper and nearly as recognizable voice of Paul Robeson. He succeeded. Jones takes you on a fascinating twohour tour through an unparalleled life, telling the story of Robeson’s rise from perfect minister’s son to Rutgers’s first African-American football star, frustrated young lawyer, Broadway actor, singer, movie star, exile, worldrenowned concert singer, and civil rights advocate, a man repudiated for his opinions and accepted again only late in life. The script is full of his humor and articulate anger. It passes lightly over his Cold War defense of the Soviet Union, implying that in a kinder age he would have been entitled to even his most radically naive opinions.

Columbia/Legacy C4K 57176 (four CDs) .

Smithsonian/Folkways 40068-71 (four CDs).

by M. G. Lord, William Morrow and Company, 326 pages.

From the day Barbie was created, her reign as the queen of dolls has been troubled and controversial, but she has always been popular. Ruth Handler, cofounder with her husband of Mattel Toys, found the inspiration for Barbie on a trip to Switzerland in the mid-fifties, when she saw a German-made doll named Lilli with the body of a pinup and icy-blonde looks. The Handlers transformed Lilli into a California girl and submitted her to a motivational researcher for a battery of marketing tests. Then Mattel unleashed her on America in 1959. She has never left.

Forever Barbie exhaustively documents Barbie’s life, starting in her made-in-Japan years, when women handsewed her tiny costumes, follows the countless changes in her wardrobe, and delves deep into her central paradox: She is a very sexual doll based on male fantasy ideals but created by a woman for girls. The combination has perplexed, excited, and angered generations of girls and women.

by Leo N. Miletich, Texas A&M University Press, 240 pages

Texas was still a rough state in 1895, but it did not formally sanction prizefighting. Still, the Dallas sportsman Dan Stuart could not have known the crisis he would cause when he announced he would hold a bout between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons for the world’s heavyweight championship. As a nod to the law, he advertised the match not as a fight but as a “fistic carnival.” The power struggle that followed, with Texas’s governor, Charles A. Culberson, makes terrific reading. The Dallas Pastors’ Association denounced the “brutalizing” event, and the governor threatened to shoot the “felons” who gathered to see it. Stuart considered moving his “exhibition” to Mexico or to the Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. Corbett volunteered to paint himself red and wear feathers.

by Norman Johnston, with Kenneth Finkel and Jeffrey A. Cohen, University of Pennsylvania Press, 116 pages .

Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary began in 1821 as a revolutionary experiment in prison reform and ended in the 1970s as a dangerously crowded relic. When it first opened, it was the most influential prison in the country, holding 250 prisoners in solitary confinement under a house regimen of enforced individual reflection and religious instruction—a far cry from the harsh British corporal punishments of nonetoo-distant memory. Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1831, was intrigued by it; Charles Dickens, visiting ten years later, was not: “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body. . . .”

edited by Arnold Rampersad; David Roessel, associate editor, Knopf, 576 pages.

“What is poetry?” Langston Hughes asked as an old man. “It is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words.” Not all of the 860 poems collected here fit that model of compression; many are dashed-off sketches or riffs, but they can make an evocative record of what was in the air at the time. Hughes’s work begins in the Jazz Age, takes up the radical styles of the thirties, joins in the revival of patriotism of World War II, and ends in the triumph of the civil rights movement. It can be strong or silly, bluesy or strident, rhapsodie or childlike. The book starts with “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the poem with which Hughes announced himself in 1921, when he was nineteen.

by John Gary Brown, University Press of Kansas, 246 pages.

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s article “Passing” reports on the outpouring of letters and calls she has received from readers of her book The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (Simon & Schuster, 271 pages). That response testifies to the volume’s fascination and power. It is a gripping exploration of the phenomenon of “passing” as illustrated by her discovery of its devastating effects within her own family.

The work of the Herter Brothers—those master craftsmen, decorators, and cabinetmakers to the latenineteenth-century elite—is the subject of a handsome picture history from Harry N. Abrams Publishers and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age , by Katherine S. Howe, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger (Abrams, 272 pages).