January 2011

North of New York City on New York’s Route 9 the driver will be rewarded with an astonishing array of historic houses open to the public. Presidents’ homes, palaces of the Gilded Age, and artists’ studios are thick on scenic outlooks along the Hudson River. In May, just as spring reaches its glory on the river, two new house museums will open their doors, gilding—if that’s even possible—the lily. Owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and managed by Historic Hudson Valley, caretaker of many of the great Hudson River properties, Nelson A. Rockefeller’s eighty-seven-acre estate and forty-room turn-of-the-century stone mansion in North Tarrytown is ready for visitors, the first time any Rockefeller home has allowed the public in.

Elektra Nonesuch 9 79287-2 (one CD), $15.98. CODE: AHB-26

The Mind’s Eye (four cassettes), 5½ hours, $19.95. CODE: MER-1

Smithsonian, two CDs $32.97 , CODE: SMP-1 ; two cassettes $29.97 , CODE: SMP-2

The songs in this marvelous collection, writes the music historian Robert Bamberger in the excellent explanatory pamphlet that accompanies it, “cannot be mistaken, or burdened, to tell all we want and need to know about that time. But there is still much that these songs do tell, and what they obscure may not be as important as what they illuminate. Though not shared memory itself, the love songs of World War II are a window into its heart, against the day that is coming, when remembrance is second-hand.”

RWM Associates (one cassette), 80 mins., $9.95. CODE: RWM-2

It’s been thirty-five years since the appearance of Cornelius Ryan’s classic account of the D-day invasion, The Longest Day (Touchstone, 338 pages, $11.00 soft cover, CODE: SAS-7 ), which is still among the best. This year’s fiftieth anniversary of the battle for Normandy has produced a clutch of commemorative books, starting with Stephen Ambrose’s comprehensive and readable D-day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (Simon & Schuster, 704 pages, $30.00, CODE: SAS-8 ). “The destruction of the enemy’s landing attempt,” Adolf Hitler warned in March of 1944, “is the sole decisive factor in the whole conduct of the war and hence in its final result.” Ambrose, whose Eisenhower Center in New Orleans has been collecting D-day recollections since 1983, shows how right the F’fchrer was; he draws on hundreds of fresh interviews to document the events of those crucial hours.

by Sharon Peregrine Johnson and Byron A. Johnson, Thomas Publications, 200 pages, S14.9S spiral bound. CODE: TMS-1

by John Strausbaugh, Elast Books, 184 pages, $16.95 soft cover. CODE: BIT-1

Who’d make the better President: someone with intelligence, humility, character, a vision for the country, and a grasp of current issues, or someone who can look dignified and presidential even when the BeeGees have their arms around him? In Alone with the President John Strausbaugh presents the argument for the latter.

by Robert Friedel, W. W. Norton & Company, 256 pages, $23.00. CODE: NRT-1

In the November issue Alan Hall wrote that a recent article on the Delta Queen had “solved a minor mystery that has plagued me since 1946”—namely, what was that drab-gray sternwheeler doing surrounded by Navy vessels in San Francisco Bay? But I’m afraid Mr. Hall’s mystery is not as neatly solved as he thinks.

The vessel in the photograph is not the Delta Queen . The Delta Queen had a wide stairway leading up to the hurricane deck, where the steam calliope is today, and she never moored in the old railroad-car float slip shown in the photograph. Only the Delta King moored there. Delta Queen , when at Treasure Island, moored at a pier not visible in the photo. I was a crew member of the Delta Queen during all of 1945 and 1946, up to the time the vessel was sold to a contractor, taken to Alaska, and converted into a barracks for construction workers. I was probably on board when your picture was taken.