January 2011

It was a breath of fresh air to read Geoffrey C. Ward’s column ("The Life and Times,” April) about the two latest “books” concerning the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son. I recently saw Noel Behn, the author of one of these works, on a network news magazine. He was standing in front of the crime scene and expounding on his thesis that Lindbergh’s sister-in-law had killed the child.

As the network interviewer listened intently and with great seriousness, I watched at home with a sinking feeling in my stomach. The most outrageous claim Mr. Behn made with the straightest of faces—and which went wholly unchallenged—was his assertion that Charles Lindbergh buried his own son in a shallow grave to begin the cover-up.

As the father of two young sons I know that is absolutely impossible.

Mr. Ward’s article says what I’ve been feeling since watching Mr. Behn’s theater-of-the-macabre performance: it is time to give up these morbid fascinations and let the baby rest in peace.

Columbia/Legacy 57596 (three CDs), $42.98. CODE: BAT-23

Fletcher Henderson invented the big band and defined its sound practically single-handedly; he led one of the most polished and innovative jazz orchestras of the age, bringing through its ranks such giants as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young; and his arrangements became the foundation of Benny Goodman’s success and the swing-music craze that followed it. Yet today he is the least remembered of the great bandleaders. Why? He was “afflicted,” as the jazz historian James Lincoln Collier put it, “with an almost pathological lack of self-assertiveness.” He couldn’t control the stars who made up his band and was a terrible businessman. He constantly let events overtake him.

directed by Nancy Porter, American Experience/Shanachie Entertainment Corp., 60 mins., $19.95. CODE: SHA-1

“They were like gods from outer space,” Gore Vidai says about the famous 1930s aviators, meaning Lindbergh and Earhart above all. This perceptively sympathetic documentary points out that though Earhart was the most celebrated woman pilot of her age, she was probably not the best. The demands of celebrity stunted her abilities as a flier and in the end exposed her to impossible risks.

produced by Robert Drew, American Experience/Direct Cinema, 60 mins., $29.95. CODE: DCV-4

Robert Drew’s look inside the White House must have had a remarkable effect when it first aired, in 1963, when viewers were used to generations of newsreels. It didn’t show the Chief Executive signing legislation to martial music; Drew followed the President and the Attorney General at the height of the government’s integration battle with Alabama’s governor George Wallace, who had pledged to “stand in the schoolhouse door” of the state university.

produced by Mike Vraney, Something Weird Video, two volumes, 90 mins. each, $20.00 each. Vol. I: CODE: SWV-1 ; Vol. II: CODE: SWV-2

by David Laskin, Simon & Schuster, 460 pages, $27.50. CODE: SAS-11

Edith Wharton touched on the contradictory nature of writing in an observation she made of Henry James, calling him “a solitary who could not live alone.” A Common Life , David Laskin’s chronicle of the friendships of four pairs of legendary American literary figures—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter, and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop—is a deftly written exploration of the professional and personal dynamics that accompanied these relationships and of the necessity of these ties. Laskin delves deep into the eight lives, and his book’s success lies equally with his graceful writing and his excellent research.

by Frederick Allen, HarperBusiness, 500 pages, $25.00. CODE: HPC-1

For all of Coca-Cola’s global power and status, its most telling historical image is of a basement in 1866 downtown Atlanta. There, sweating over a brass kettle of sugary broth, Coke’s early inventors funneled their sweet liquid through a filter of river-bottom sand. From such wobbly beginnings Coke was lucky ever to have lasted into the twentieth century.

Secret Formula is Coca-Cola’s complete history as told by the former CNN commentator Frederick Allen (no relation to the managing editor of this magazine). It follows the caramel-colored syrup through the early experiments of the Atlanta pharmacist “Doc” Pemberton, past the market savvy of its early promoters, and on to the triumphant, world-beating success of the eventual giant corporation. Allen reveals how the company rebuffed governmental challenges about added cocaine (a discernible ingredient until 1903) and patches holes in the story of the disastrous “New Coke.”

by Donald L. Grant, edited with an introduction by Jonathan Grant, Birch Lane Press, Carol Publishing Group, 624 pages, $27.50. CODE: CPG-1

The author of this rewarding book, a professor of African-American history named Donald L. Grant, worked on it for nearly fifteen years. After his death his son took over and finished what clearly had become the project of a lifetime. Together the Grants have produced a unique work, the only history of a state from founding to modern times as seen from the vantage of its black citizens. Georgia was an apt choice for such a groundbreaking volume. After 1865 it claimed the most blacks of any state, later gave birth to the modern KKK, saw the rise of the great black colleges and universities that nurtured generations of post-Civil War leaders, and in its native son Martin Luther King, Jr., gave the world a man for all seasons.

by Paul Virilio, Princeton Architectural Press, 214 pages, $34.95 soft cover. CODE: PRP-1

At the close of the Second World War the German army left behind a scattered ghost civilization of fifteen thousand concrete works along the Atlantic Wall. A great number had been built to guard against the Allied invasion that had finally come via the Channel in June 1944; for fifty years since they have sat mute and nearly indestructible as the beaches returned to summer playgrounds and the burned cities were rebuilt. The French architecture critic and philosopher Paul Virilio first published this illustrated treatise on the bunkers and their meaning in 1975, to accompany an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre. This reissue exquisitely reproduces Virilio’s moody duotone photographs of the stark concrete towers, firing slits, and observation posts.