Wonderful article on JFK in the September issue ("The Lines of Control Have Been Cut"). But it’s worth pointing out that, although one of the founders of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn did dabble in politics (Bruce Barton, U.S. House of Representatives, 1937-40), the esteemed Mr. Bowles was the founder of a competing shop that formerly bore his name. Michael L. lanzito Vice President, BBDO New York, N.Y.
Correction: On page 88 of “A Nation of Immigrants” in the February/March issue the paragraph beginning “What of the other 85 to 90 percent?” contained several errors. It should read: “What of the other 80 to 90 percent? Of the 4,493,000 arrivals in the 1970s, 1,588,000 came from Asia (somewhat over one-third), 1,983,000 from North and South America, and 80,779 from Africa. The five major contributing nations were, in order, Mexico (640,300), the Philippines (355,000), Korea (268,000), Cuba (265,000), and China, both mainland and Taiwan (237,80O).”
by Edward T. Hall, Doubleday, 182 pages
In a most agreeable memoir Edward Hall, an anthropologist now entering his eighties, looks back to his days as a very young man employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs on a New Deal project in Arizona’s Navaho and Hopi lands. “I lived in a country within a country,” Hall recalls, “a place where the trappings of modernity were barely visible.” Hall’s job was to oversee crews of Indians as they blasted rock and laid roads and generally worked to improve government lands; he was providing employment in “the least known, least visited, and least understood part of the United States.” Sixty years later he sets down his memories as freshly as if he were just venturing forth on that journey. Of the Navahos he writes, “I know truly, though inadvertently, that they sang me into being.”
by Mary Lou Widmer, Pelican Publishing, 207pages
Mary Lou Widmer has already written entertaining histories of the Crescent City in the 1930s, —40s, and —50s. In those she mixed stories from her own life in New Orleans with details of the city’s coming of age; a photograph of her high school prom might appear near a picture of a 1940s Mardi Gras. Having now used up much of her own experience, she fills out New Orleans in the Twenties with earlier family lore. It is an amble through a town in which some streets were still paved with ballast blocks from European ships and the average per capita income was $131. Top-hatted chimney sweeps roamed the city, shouting, “ Ramoner la cheminée! , ” while King Oliver and Louis Armstrong invented a new kind of music. The town was awash in geniuses, charlatans, and bathtub gin. Widmer profiles the great saloons that became “restaurants” during Prohibition, including Tom Anderson’s and Lamothe’s. The Anheuser-Busch Brewery got through by converting to ice-cream production.
by Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely, Jr., Orion Books, 336 pages
What happens when you take hundreds of artists, from the most mediocre to Winslow Homer, train them in a tradition of military art that prizes the grand and the heroic, and then send them out to paint an often harrowingly ugly, brutal war between brothers? That, in effect, is the question asked by this collaboration by two leading Lincoln scholars, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner. They have amassed and reproduced in color some 280 paintings of the war; they write in their introduction that “we considered them as part of a great effort to comprehend the Civil War, and the opportunity for comparison offered by this approach revealed meanings in the works about which we had never before read.”
by John H. White, Jr., Johns Hopkins University Press, 644 pages
This extraordinarily comprehensive tome is for anyone who lived through the glory days of rail freight or simply wants to know more about it. For instance, White delves into the bizarre world of freight classification, where different goods were assessed different fees for the most arbitrary of reasons. This system eventually got so complicated that there were listings for such arcana as slippery elm bark and yak fat. After minutely describing the business aspects of a freight line and the life of its workers, the book goes even deeper into detail about particular types of specialized cars: eight-wheel gondolas and hoppers, refrigerators, livestock cars, as well as the familiar caboose. The technology of the cars receives similarly exhaustive treatment: thirty-seven pages on couplers and draft gears, for example.