January 2011

by Roger Hall, Gordon Dodds, and Stanley Triggs, David R. Godine, Publisher, 140 pages, $75.00. CODE: DGD-1

In the introduction to this handsome volume the authors write, “To be a photographer in the nineteenth century was, in a way, to be midwife to our modernity.” Born in 1826 in Scotland, migrating to Canada in 1856, and setting his photographic stamp on dozens of towns and cities in Canada and the United States, William Notman certainly was, if not midwife, at least meticulous chronicler of a world that grew to be our own.

Splendidly reproduced photographs are allowed the full-page or double-page space their finely observed detail needs. And within this framework we see a Canada bursting from the genteel security of its colonial bonds. A studio portrait of Montreal’s mayor in 1873 shows a man fully aware of the dignity of his office but wearing what might be a caveman’s long robe of fur.

A piece in our November 1992 issue titled “Into the Face of History” featured a remarkable set of haunting portraits of Plains Indians assembled by Dr. James Brust, an amateur collector who had found one photograph by John H. Fouch and then had to keep going- until he uncovered a treasury of them. Until then Fouch’s work had been virtually unknown. The story caught the eye of the San Francisco Chronicle , which reprinted it, and there Laurel Patton, the owner of a T-shirt company called yours truly , saw the photos. Now Fouch’s powerful portraits have yet another life, on handsomely reproduced T-shirts. The plan is to market them in museum shops and possibly overseas. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Indian causes. You can call 1-800-584-0160 for information on price and to find out which portraits are available (they are not available through American Heritage ). As one of our colleagues said, “You’ve read the article; now wear the T-shirt.”

an illustrated biography by Eleanor Dwight, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 296 pages, $39.95. CODE: ABS-2

by Mel Watkins, Simon & Schuster, 652 pages.

Although studies continue to appear on the African-American origins of the blues and jazz, there has been little comparable—or memorable—work on the history of the black American comic tradition. In the 1970s MeI Watkins, a writer and former editor at The New York Times Book Review , had an ambitious, even risky, idea for a comprehensive study of African-American humor, “from slave shanties and street corners to cabarets,” through minstrel shows, early movies, radio, television, and all the way to Richard Pryor. At that time, before his near-fatal fiery accident with a cocaine pipe, Pryor was the apotheosis of the black American comic tradition—a street observer and gifted mimic and “a master of lyrical obscenity,” in the words of the critic Pauline Kael. Watkins takes Pryor’s jittery ascendance as his point of departure and examines the three hundred years of black history that made that comedian possible.

by Gerard R. Wolfe (Id edition), McGraw-Hill, Inc., 559 pages, $19.95 soft cover. CODE: MGH-1

John Steele Gordon’s otherwise fine sketch of “executive” contributions to the success of Sears, Roebuck & Co. (September) implies that Julius Rosenwald’s philanthropic works didn’t require much more than the ability to write checks. But it was there that his “executive” abilities were at their finest. After all, in setting up the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in 1917, Rosenwald employed some of the most able foundation talent, and the Fund’s stimulus packages were modeled after Rosenwald’s own uncanny way of “giving away” money. The idea was to stir local tax initiatives rather than to make people permanently dependent on charity.

In “A Tent on the Porch” (July/August) Wilfred M. McClay wonders if the myth of the West is vital and nourishing to the American mind or really nothing more than self-deception. While this and other questions raised by Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay are still debated, it is interesting to see how a “frontier consciousness” has informed some of our greatest literary minds. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, through his narrator Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby : “…for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Carraway, like Fitzgerald and Turner, is from the Midwest (“the ragged edge of the universe”) and is drawn to the East by “civilization.” But he retreats to the West in the end, disillusioned by the excesses of the Jazz Age. Turner stuck it out in the East, occasionally taking refuge in the tent on his porch.

I object to your use of the name “Dallas” on the cover of the November issue as a synonym for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The city is much more than the place where JFK died; after thirty years we should stop equating its name with a tragic event. When was the last time anyone referred to Robert Kennedy’s assassination as “Los Angeles” or to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination as “Memphis”?

You might be interested to know that the Delta King is operating as a hotel and restaurant in Sacramento, California, where she sits at the foot of K Street right where side-wheel river steamers awaited San Francisco-bound passengers on the first transcontinental railroad, which ended at Sacramento.

Stan Garvey, a Menlo Park writer working on a book about the Delta King and Delta Queen , learned that these two steamers apparently were the first passenger vessels to have air-cooled staterooms from the time they began operating between San Francisco and Sacramento in June 1927. True, it wasn’t refrigeration cooling, and it wouldn’t work in a swampy climate, but it did fine in California.

Belle Grove Publishing Co., 55 mins., $29.95. CODE: BGV-1.