January 2011

recorded in the field by Alan Lomax, Atlantic 7 82496-2 (four CDs), $63.92 . CODE: BAT -4

Rhino Records (each volume a separate CD), $16.98 per volume: Vol. 1—George & Ira Gershwin, R2 71503 ( CODE: RHR -6);

Vol. 2—Johnny Mercer, R2 71504 ( CODE: RHR -7);

Vol. 3—Rodgers & Hart, R2 71505 ( CODE: RHR -8);

Vol. 4—Irving Berlin, R2 71506 ( CODE: RHR -9);

Vol. 5—Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn, R2 71507 ( CODE: RHR -10).

Rounder Records CD 1091-1094 (four CDs), $63.92 . CODE: BAT -3

directed by Dick Powell, CBS/Fox War Classics Collection, 98 mins., $19.95 . CODE: BAT -2

directed by Ric Burns, Direct Cinema, 68 mins., $39.95 . CODE: DCV -3

directed by Martin Scorsese, Columbia Tristar Home Video, 138mins., $95.95 . CODE: BAT -1

See Martin Scorsese’s fine movie not just for its absorbing and tough-minded exposition of how a social organism moves to protect itself against the incursions of potentially destabilizing outsiders but also for some marvelously persuasive, full-blown visions of the Manhattan of a little more than a century ago: a teeming scene of Broadway; an inaugural Upper Fifth Avenue mansion patrolling the level, still unbuilt wastes north of Forty-second Street like a gorgeous, solitary battle cruiser. Equally impressive is the way the film takes those nineteenth-century interiors with their bibelots and vitrines and swags and close-hung paintings—the crowded rooms that embody the Victorian at its most drably claustrophobic when we see them in the old photographs—and gives them the darkly shining burnish of life, as their owners move through them with ease and casual pride.

by Richard B. Grassby, Rizzoli, 128 pages, $35.00 . CODE: RIZ -4

Although he is widely esteemed to be in the first rank of American marine painters, little is known about James E. Buttersworth. He was born in England in 1817, the son and grandson of marine artists; he emigrated to New York around 1847; he died in 1894. No letters or family papers have survived, and the author speculates that he may not have been fully literate (both his stepmother and his wife signed their children’s birth certificates with an X ). Nevertheless, Buttersworth produced an eloquent body of energized, light-filled canvases depicting all manner of ships: naval vessels, packets, brigs, pilot boats, yachts. Fifty-two paintings are reproduced here, all of them in color. Richard Grassby, an art historian who specializes in marine painting, writes with ease and authority about the particular demands of the genre and about the tricky business of earning a living selling art in New York in the mid-nineteenth century.

by William Leach, Pantheon Books, 510 pages, $30.00 . CODE: RAN -13

Reading Land of Desire , one can’t help recalling how Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s heroine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s , explained her yearning for that particular store; “nothing very bad could happen to you” at Tiffany’s, she promised herself. In meticulous, fascinating detail William Leach tells us how stores came to inspire such feelings. As Henry Adams limned Chartres, so Leach builds the great cathedral of commerce, the American department store, from ground up, showing how its very walls, tempting glass display windows, quasi-religious offerings of concerts and chorales, and, not least, its wide range of merchandise (Bloomingdale’s once had a four-story building devoted to the manufacture of pianos) changed the nature of American consumerism and, therefore, our culture.

by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 445 pages, $27.50 . CODE: OUP -6

David Hackett Fischer’s splendid new book is satisfying on every level from adventure tale to civics lesson. Paul Revere is indeed at the center of the story, but Fischer’s meticulous reconstruction of his ride has a larger purpose: in restoring to a shopworn allegorical figure the decisive role he actually played in great events, the author means to remind us of the importance of contingency in history. If Paul Revere hadn’t ridden when he did, if he hadn’t spread the word of the British expedition coming from Boston with a particularly effective combination of courage and intelligence, the Middlesex militia could not have rallied with the speed and in the numbers that it did—and the American Revolution might not have broken out on April 19, 1775.