by Al Stump, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 464 pages, $24.95. CODE: ALG-1 When Al Stump interviewed a dying Ty Cobb in 1960 and 1961, he got more than he had bargained for. Baseball’s greatest hitter gave the sportswriter a mass of material that could never be used in the autobiography Stump had agreed to ghostwrite. Cobb, it turned out, was not merely mean but psychotically vicious from the very beginning of his professional career, and throughout this new and thorough biography the Georgia Peach does two things with monotonous regularity: lead the league in batting average and beat teammates, opponents, and sometimes total strangers to a pulp. There’s a horrible fascination in learning how Cobb alienated his family and an ever-dwindling circle of friends even as he piled up records and dollars (he played the stock market as shrewdly as he did baseball).
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
by Jim Crain, Chronicle Books, 112 pages, $24.95. CODE: CRN-3 Before they gave way to movies, stereo views brought a spectacular three-dimensional world into Americans’ own homes. These nineteenth-century dual-image photographs (dual because a stereo camera used twin lenses set as far apart as two eyes) have been snatched up by collectors for decades. Now this unique book— it comes with its own 3-D viewer—makes an impressive sampling of Old West pictures available to anyone.
by Ellen Stern and Emily Gwathmey, Harcourt Brace, 135 pages, $27.95. CODE: HTB-1 Over the last 120 years the telephone has become such an essential and all-pervasive part of American existence that a social history of the device may seem too large a topic for a single volume. Stern and Gwathmey have neatly solved the problem by taking a lighthearted approach to the subject. Their book is not an exhaustive study but a nostalgic, campy look at the phone’s significance in our culture, equal parts information and entertainment. The story is broken up into ten chapters; “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You,” devoted to the phone as an instrument of power, is the most interesting and well written. Complementing the main text are engaging phone-related excerpts from works by such writers as Robert Penn Warren, Carl Sandburg, A. J. Liebling, and Helen Gurley Brown.
by Tobias Wolff, Knopf, 256 pages, $23.00. CODE: RAN-25 At the end of the appallingly rigorous childhood he chronicled in This Boy’s Life , Tobias Wolff, with a sense of “relief and homecoming,” joined the Army. “It seemed to me when I got there that this was where I had been going all along, and where I might still redeem myself. All I needed was a war. “Careful what you pray for.” He got his war serving as a lieutenant in the Mekong Delta, and he takes us to it in a series of sharp sketches, perfectly observed and recounted in relaxed, utterly lucid prose. Just as his book is melancholy and hilarious by turns, so do the tales that make it up manage to seem at once surprising and inevitable—and thus nicely emblematic of a time that has yet to find an easy resting place in the national consciousness.
As a service to our readers, items can be ordered through American Heritage, either by using the order form on page 123 or by calling 1-800-876-6556 .
The “weirdly titled book” being held by a smiling woman in the photograph featured in your “Readers’ Album” in the September issue brought back many memories. Flying Saucers Have Landed by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski was a supposedly factual account of Mr. Adamski’s meeting with a man from the planet Venus in the California desert in the early 1950s. George Adamski was one of a number of people during that time who claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials. These people, known as contactées, wrote books, gave lectures, and were frequent guests on radio talk shows. They all described the aliens as beneficent “space brothers” who were coming to earth to warn humanity of the danger our nuclear weapons posed to the order of the universe. Mr. Adamski’s next book, Inside the Space Ships , described his journey around the moon and visits with Venutians, a handsome race of long-haired Nordic people. My parents were fascinated by all this, and we spent many a summer night on our roof in Brooklyn, telescopes in hand, looking for flying saucers.
WHEN THE CIVIL War ended, a second fierce and divisive conflict began, fought on the same battlefields but over a different issue: not political secession but the commercial development of the battlefields themselves. The Civil War took four years to come to a conclusion that was nothing if not decisive; its successor has raged for more than a century, and the controversy that erupted earlier this year over the proposed Disney’s America theme park in Virginia suggests that its Appomattox is nowhere in sight. But if its current campaigns and skirmishes are being fought under our eyes, its earliest incidents are nearly as distant in time from us as the Civil War itself. In a series of assaults from the 1870s until the end of the century, Lookout Mountain in Tennessee was stormed and liberated from a private concern that had established a toll road to the summit. In the second battle of Gettysburg, thirty-three years after Meade expelled Lee from Northern soil, preservationists, after fierce fighting in the courts, managed to oust a tourist trolley that had entrenched itself in the middle of the battlefield.
The year 1963 brought the death of George McCready Price, whom the science writer Martin Gardner described as “the last and greatest of the anti-evolutionists.” The greatest perhaps, but certainly not the last. That year also witnessed the birth of the Creation Research Society and—more generally—the age of scientific creationism. By the end of the decade, battles were being waged over including creationism in public school curricula; the fight culminated in the 1981 court challenge to the Arkansas creationist law. If the proceedings lacked the carnival atmosphere of the 1925 Scopes trial, they compensated by attracting an impressive list of expert witnesses from the ranks of scientists, philosophers, and theologians. Unfavorable court decisions have settled for the moment the issue of equal-time state laws, but creation science as a movement has hardly slowed.