January 2011

by Gau Ruckland, photographs by Kathleen Culbert-Aguilar, W. W. Norton, 203 pages

John and Jan Zweifel’s twenty-by-sixty-foot model of the President’s house has charmed more than forty million Americans on its travels around the country, and it makes a weirdly absorbing subject for a coffee table book. There is somethin hypnotic about the Zweifels’ tiny halls of power, a convincing enough national symbol that Dutch terrorists attacked it with axes and pair when the exhibit visited Holland in 1982.

edited by Richard Marius, Columbia University Press, 543 pages.

Richard Marius, a fine novelist and essayist, has drawn on both those skills to assemble this uncommonly good—and uncommonly good-looking—anthology. The poems, by writers ranging from John Greenleaf Whittier to John Updike, have clearly been assembled by a good storyteller; there is an actual narrative momentum to the book, although it also rewards the reader who wishes to sample it at random. Walt Whitman is here, of course, represented perhaps most strikingly by “The Artilleryman’s Vision,” of which Marius says, “Probably no better description of combat emerged from the Civil War.” Ambrose Bierce, who was in the grimmest of the fighting, writes in a moving combination of bitterness and respect on the death of Ulysses Grant; Innes Randolph muses on the three hundred thousand Federal soldiers killed: “They died of Southern fever/And Southern steel and shot;/I wish it was three millions/Instead of what we got.”

by Stephan Lesher, AddisonWesley, 587 pages.

by Gavan Daws, “William Morrow and Company, 448 pages .

17 September 1973

John,

The things that I am going to say in this letter are about twenty years and a whole lifetime late, but maybe that won’t matter once they’ve been said.

I’ve taken the entire responsibility for your death on myself for this whole time. Even now, I intellectually know that there were many mistakes that led to your dying, some of them yours, too. I just have a hard time feeling like it’s not my fault.

We trusted each other, implicitly. We depended on each other. We supported each other. We shared a whole lot in the time that we knew each other: pain, hunger, sickness, triumph, laughter, and more than a little excitement. We even shared a lover, Death. Both of us wooed the bitch, but you won her.

What a deal for you. You know, I’ve never forgiven you for leaving me alone. I’ve been alone and lonely ever since.

Country Country Country Country The Press The Press The Press The Luckiest Man Creationism Creationism

In his excellent article in the October issue (“The Business of America”), John Steele Gordon expounds on some of the reasons for the decline of the American labor movement. There are, however, many more causes of labor’s woes.

Newly powerful unions proved to be just as arrogant and predatory as their bosses had once been, and reaction and retaliation predictably began chipping away at the unions’ newfound power. Labor’s steadfast opposition to new technologies, individual initiative, and modern innovation, particularly among the craft unions, doomed the unions as surely as the dinosaurs.

You have done us a good turn by presenting Tom Howard’s classic photo of the electrocution of Ruth Snyder in its original form (“The Picture Snatchers,” October). Though no one can deny the impact of that long-ago New York Daily News front page, the uncropped image tells a bigger story. In the group of spectators on the right, a woman turns away from the gruesome scene while her male counterparts continue to watch. Only their legs are seen, but they complete the picture of the execution.

As a newspaperman myself, I enjoyed Peter Andrews’s history of U.S. newspapers. However, I must challenge his statement on page 44 that “probably the only journalist to become a head of state was Benito Mussolini.”

How about Warren G. Harding, publisher of the Marion (Ohio) Star , and John F. Kennedy, whose only job in the private sector was as a newspaper reporter?

Also, on page 39, the caricature of Horace Greeley shows that worthy holding a copy of the New York Herald Tribune . But not until 1924 did the Herald and Tribune merge, and by then, of course, Greeley had gone West forever.