by Erin Urban, John A. Noble, and Allan A. Noble in association with the John A. Noble Collection, 269 pages, $75.00 . CODE: NOB -1 The marine artist John A. Noble once refused to join an exhibition sponsored by the National Maritime Historical Society, explaining, “The work of these sailboat and historical buffs probably has its place, but I really hate like the devil to be confused with them. I draw only contemporary things—things I have seen and which I may have the background to interpret.” Born in Paris in 1913, the son of an American expatriate painter, he found his lifelong subject in the rotting hulls of abandoned sailing ships at Port Johnston, a onetime coal port on New York Harbor’s Kill van Kull. There he observed and recorded ghostly vestiges of the last days of sail.
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by Fred Hobson, Random House, 650 pages, $35.00 . CODE: RAN -12 H. L. Mencken planted several literary time bombs that have brought him back into the public eye in staggered bursts ever since his death. By his instructions, sizable portions of the writer and editor’s private papers were released to the public in 1971, 1981, and 1991, each time sabotaging the works of his earlier biographers. With no more stashes due to emerge, the literary historian Fred Hobson has published an excellent, reasonable account of Mencken’s life, the first to draw on the full mother lode of diaries, letters, notes, and additions. Mencken was seventeen when, days after his father’s death, he entered the offices of the Baltimore Morning Herald and volunteered for work. He became its star reporter in nineteen months. Hobson argues shrewdly that this was not the end of the father’s influence: He lived on in the strange and often opposed prejudices of his famous son.
by H. Keith Melton, Sterling, 128 pages, $10.95 soft cover . CODE: STG -1
In the classic James Bond films, the most greedily anticipated moment isn’t when 007 rendezvous with the beautiful female agent or when the enemy’s island fortress erupts into an orgy of flame. It is when Q unveils his laboratory of new spy gadgets: exploding pens, camera Geiger counters, an Aston Martin with retractable machine guns. Actual Cold War espionage may not have quite equaled Hollywood in technology, but it was very much playing the game, as H. Keith Melton’s quirky new book, CIA Special Weapons & Equipment , shows.
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AFTER HALF A CENTURY, IT IS HARD TO APPROACH FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, EXCEPT through a minefield of clichés. Theories of FDR, running the gamut from artlessness to mystification, have long paraded before our eyes. There is his famous response to the newspaperman who asked him for his philosophy: “Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat—that’s all”; there is Robert E. Sherwood’s equally famous warning about “Roosevelt’s heavily forested interior”; and we weakly conclude that both things were probably true.
The same qualities that make Alvin Smith a good father-in-law evidently make him a good friend, too. When he turned 70 last year, his wife, Blanche, planned a small party, but it didn’t stay small for long. Once his college pals got word of it, they came in from everywhere, and the celebration had to shift from the corner of a restaurant to the entire main floor of a midtown clubhouse.
At dinner, it fell to me to offer a toast, and I vented the expected bromides in a satisfactory fashion, but, during the rest of the evening, I became increasingly fretful. I felt I’d missed an important opportunity.
Alvin Smith entered college with the class of 1944. He started out majoring in industrial management; he ended up in the Military Intelligence Service as a Japanese interpreter. One of his classmates had carried a rifle through the Normandy hedgerows; another had been wounded in a B-17 over Germany—hurt badly enough that he still didn’t want to talk about it with someone who hadn’t teen there.
It begins with three telegrams to my mother, one sent on the day of my birth from Camp Young, near Indio, California, where he was in desert training, although, as it turned out, the unit never went to North Africa.
All correspondence was read and approved or disapproved for mailing prior to making its way to the addressee, so there is scant indication of troop movements or other military matters.
My parents were from New Castle, Pennsylvania, a town with a wartime population of about fifty thousand, and home to steel, bronze, and a few other heavy industries. My father’s father and his uncle, Reuben, owned a small family steel mill, which is still in operation today. My parents met while my mother was in college in Erie, Pennsylvania; my father was a senior at Georgetown University when he enlisted in the Army.