January 2011

by Pat Ross, Viking, 230 pages, $29.95 . CODE: PEN-5

It is a staple of the evening news that the American small town and its classic main street are vanishing, victims of population shifts, malls, and superstores. The travel writer Pat Ross has chosen to study ten places where Main Street still thrives. She begins by revisiting her own hometown of Chestertown, Maryland. Now as ever, activity stops for each sailboat that passes through the drawbridge there, and Stam’s drugstore still serves a superior milkshake. In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Ken Weeks’s father, Robert, started Weeks’s Barber Shop in 1905 and brought his son into the business in 1940; Ken Weeks still won’t allow a phone in the place. In Sheridan, Wyoming, Ross met Dan George, owner of Dan’s Western Wear, who could remember when his Main Street contained signs reading, NO INDIANS ALLOWED . Despite this, George told Ross, “Sheridan hasn’t changed that much.”

a film by Kerry Michaels and Stuart Math, Direct Cinema, 28 mins., $24.95 . CODE: DCV-4

River of Steel is an engaging, concise film “about how the New York City subway system was built, and how it came to redefine the very meaning of urban scale.” That’s a lot of ground to cover in less than half an hour, and the latter issue is just touched on rather than fully investigated. But the filmmakers make their point: Modern New York simply would not have been possible without its subways.

directed by Alan Lomax, American Patchwork Series, PBS Home Video, 60 mins., 524.95 . CODE: MVD-8

At the start of this engaging hour-long documentary, a historian describes Cajun culture as “something new that happened only here in Louisiana.” That’s certainly true, as this program makes clear. The video is part of the American Patchwork Series, in which Alan Lomax—writer, director, producer, and narrator—traces specific forms of American music and the culture that fostered them. To present the Cajun world, Lomax combines a lively soundtrack with historical background, live performances, trips through the bayous, and interviews.

directed by Frank Capra, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, narrated by Walter Huston, Questar Video, 3 hours 53 mins., $59.95 . CODE: QSV-1

Rhino R2 71780 (three CDs), $49.98 . CODE: RHR-14

Smithsonian/Folkways 40801 (one CD), $15.00 . CODE: SMF-1

by Andie Tucher, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 244 pages, $34.95 . CODE: UNC-6

In the early 1830s a new style of newspaper arrived, aimed at the urban working-class reader. Scandals and horrors were suddenly, for the first time, front-page news. According to Andie Tucher’s excellent account, the penny press’s defining moment came in New York in 1836, when an infatuated drygoods clerk was accused of ax-murdering a young prostitute. The case seized the city, and each of New York’s penny editors claimed to have the captivating true account. James Gordon Bennett, the flamboyant, Scottish-born editor of the New York Herald , wrote that at the crime scene he had viewed the “perfect” body, which “surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medicis.” After the suspected murderer went free to Texas, letters were found in which he had offered to seduce a man’s wife, providing grounds for divorce, in exchange for alibi testimony in his own case.

by Arnold Schwartzman, Simon Wiesenthal Center, 160 pages, $29.95 . CODE: WEI-1

by Curtis Peebles, Smithsonian, 368 pages, $24.95 . CODE: SIP-2

In 1947 a private pilot reported seeing nine objects moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it” as he flew over Mount Rainier, in Washington State. A rash of similar reports followed, prompting an Air Force investigation, and a craze was on.

The editors reply: Since the whistle was in such decidedly naval company on the charm bracelet—aircraft carrier, anchor, and so forth—we assumed that its World War II-era wearer would have meant it to signify a bosun’s call. But a good many readers with ties to the Navy would not suffer so traditional a fixture being reduced to a mere abstraction by landlubbers. Here, with our apologies, is the real thing.