Rhino Records R2 71550 (three CDs), $44.98 . CODE: RHR-11
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
[Publication of the Ohio Historical Society] One-year subscription (6 issues) for $22.50 . CODE: OHO-1
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, piano and conductor, Deutsche Grammophon 431 625-2 (one CD), $16.98 . CODE: BAT-12 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, conductor, Deutsche Grammophon 431 698-2 (one CD), $16.98 . CODE: BAT-13
by Richard B. Trask, Yeoman Press, 638 pages, $35.00 . CODE: YEO-1 Richard B. Trask, a photographic archivist who has spent most of his life obsessed with the death of President Kennedy, has amassed an unusual collection of photographers’ stories and seldom-seen pictures of the tragedy. His extensive text covers the whereabouts of every member of the motorcade’s three camera cars, plus the remembrances of the amateurs at work that day. Many of the pictures seem fresh and unfamiliar. We see the whole sequence in which Lyndon Johnson grimly prepares to take the oath of office aboard Air Force One, and we get the numb, claustrophobic mood in the cabin. When Jack Beers was photographing Oswald at the Dallas jail, he had no idea that the blur to his right was Jack Ruby stepping in to kill the assassin. A half-second later the Dallas Times Herald ’s Bob Jackson, to Beers’s left, got the supremely famous picture of Oswald being shot. Being slower than Beers won Jackson the Pulitzer Prize.
by Mikal Gilmore, Doubleday, 403 pages, $24.95 . CODE: DOU-1 Capital punishment had enjoyed a ten-year hiatus in America when a lean convicted killer named Gary Gilmore hounded the state of Utah into carrying out his death sentence in 1977, and his execution became a national event. Now Gilmore’s youngest brother, the Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore, has found a fresh and powerful approach to the whole strange story to which Norman Mailer previously devoted more than a thousand pages in his “true-life novel” The Executioner’s Song . Mailer’s account was told in the clipped, stoic speech of Gary’s Western family; this version is driven more by the Gilmores’ wildness.
The American Experience, PBS, October 11 (9:00-11:00 P.M. Eastern Time) and October 12 (9:00-11:30 P.M. ) .
by Jon A. Maguire and John P. Conway, Schiffer Military/Aviation History, 256 pages, $59.95 . CODE: SFF-1
by Walter J. Boyne, Simon & Schuster, 415 pages, $25.00 . CODE: SAS-8 The air war began with a trio of Stuka dive bombers attacking Polish railroad bridges and ended with a lone B-29 opening its bomb-bay doors over Nagasaki. “The difference in capability between the slow, angular Stuka,” writes the veteran airman Walter J. Boyne, “its very shape a swastika in the sky, and the beautiful silver B-29 cruising high over Japan is a perfect example of the expansion of airpower that took place in six years of war. The relatively small 250kilogram bombs the Stukas used at Dirschau related directly to the past; the 23-kiloton yield of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb used at Nagasaki cast a terrible shadow for the future.”