January 2011

One year (six issues)

A welcome newcomer to the small firmament of popular magazines devoted to history, this trim, goodlooking bimonthly published in Chicago compresses a great deal of interesting material into a thirtytwo-page compass. Among the offerings in the first issue is a review of Patrick O’Brian’s superb—and superbly accurate—novels of British sea life in Nelson’s day by John Lehman, who, as a former Secretary of the Navy, knows something about maritime concerns. The second issue looks at subjects as diverse as the Islamic revolution, American shortcomings at the Yalta Conference, and Ted Turner’s epic movie about the Battle of Gettysburg. This last, by the way, draws pretty high marks from so knowledgeable an observer as Shelby Foote, who was impressed by Martin Sheen’s portrayal of Lee (“It was a very daring performance. … Sheen managed to communicate that he was somewhat off-balance, nervous, that he was caught in the fly-paper”) and Tom Berenger as Longstreet (although “I wish I could have given him fifty dollars and told him to go buy himself a better beard”).

It really is as good as its sixty-year-old reputation. It is the apotheosis of barbecue. An American Heritage editor, a raw Easterner, found himself in Kansas City a couple of months ago, stopped in at Bryant’s, and loved it so much he drove around town for three hours just to rebuild his appetite and then went back for more. It’s been in the same nondescript storefront in a nondescript neighborhood since it opened in the early thirties. You simply go to a window in the back and say what kind of meat you want (beef, chicken, pork, ribs—the standard order is beef and fries), and out comes a succulent blending of rich, subtle, smoky flavors unlike anything you’ve ever tasted. 1727 Brooklyn Avenue.

Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 430 330-2 (one CD)

Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 436 121-2 (one CD)

Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 436 925-2 (one CD)

four CDs , four cassettes

This is a satisfying survey of classic blues, that immense body of American music grown on the skeleton of a simple, repeating twelve-bar harmonic scheme. Listen to it straight through, and you’ll hear the acoustic picking of Blind Lemon Jefferson give way to Walter (“Furry”) Lewis’s bottleneck effects, then the addition of trumpets, banjos, harmonica, and stride piano, until, toward the end, Muddy Waters’s early electric plays over a ticky-tacky drumbeat on “Louisiana Blues” in 1950. Some major artists (Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson) may seem underrepresented, but breadth is the thing here, and their recordings are very widely available. Here you will find, for instance, Sara Martin singing “Death Sting Me Blues”—”an example of the second-rate singer who occasionally produces a masterpiece,” according to the thorough and respectful notes that accompany the recording—and Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 “Dark Was the Night,” a wordless chant that sounds like a spiritual hummed over a sitar.

Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, Dorian Discovery #DIS80107 (one CD)

by Loren R. Graham, Harvard University Press, 128 pages

As an art lover and docent with Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut, I found the cover of the December issue of American Heritage startlingly familiar. When I looked up Return of the Hunters , by Pieter Brueghel the Llder, the similarities diminished some, but they are there nonetheless: the same diagonal line of the hillside, the dark trees against the snow, and the groups of people in the distance. I thought you might be interested in the comparison, if you had not already thought of it; surely Glackens knew the painting Brueghel did more than three hundred years earlier.

by Eric DeLony, Little Brown, 152 pages

This book is both a visual delight, with photographs of some ninety great American bridges, many of them in color, and a trove of economically presented information, and it can serve equally well as a coffee-table picture book and as a serious desktop reference. The author, Eric DeLony, is the chief of the Historic American Engineering Record, an organization founded in 1969 to document America’s industrial and engineering heritage, and he is one of the nation’s leading experts on bridge history. He has arranged his selection chronologically, beginning with a 1764 stone bridge in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and finishing with the VerrazanoNarrows bridge in New York. The spans described and shown in between, and the short introductions and timelines for the five chapters they fall into, combine to tell the whole story of the development of bridges in America, from wood and stone through iron to steel and concrete. If you find bridges beautiful or historically fascinating or both, this book is a pleasure.

by Neal McCabe and Constance McCabe, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Charles M. Conlon worked most of his life as a newspaper proofreader, but he spent his summers from 1904 to 1942 as the pre-eminent photographer of baseball. His portraits of players appeared year after year in The Spalding Base Ball Guide, Sporting News , and elsewhere, and several of his pictures, such as one of Ty Cobb making a vicious, dirt-spattering slide into third base, are familiar but anonymous masterpieces. Conlon’s finest art lay in his still portraits of players standing around the field, looking like dirty farm boys. There is so much waiting in baseball, and he exploited this for beautiful studies of Honus Wagner’s strong, grimy hands gripping a bat and of the umpire Silk O’Loughlin solemnly demonstrating his (now universal) “safe” call. His portrait of a pouty Babe Ruth seems a commentary on the game’s pressures until you realize he’s just waiting to get back to the gum wad stuck on his cap.

directed by Bruce Beresford, Samuel Goldwyn Company, Vidmark Video, 105 mins.

In this grimly beautiful 1991 film about a Jesuit priest’s ordeal in the seventeenth-century Canadian wilderness, the Canadian actor Lothaire Bluteau plays Father LaForgue, who leaves France in 1634 to convert Indian souls. LaForgue, whose closeset dark eyes show back his stony faith to anything that surprises him, hires Algonquins to guide him upriver; they see him as a spooky figure- a “black robe,” after his Jesuit frock —and he feels only pity for them. LaForgue’s party is ambushed, and several are taken prisoner by the Algonquins’ enemies, the Hurons.

The Australian director Bruce Beresford, who also made Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant , employs a harsh realism. From the first scenes in the New World you see mud everywhere. When the group travels, the water is tin-colored and the sky a winter-gray, and the woods are as menacing as they are unspoiled. When LaForgue finally reaches the Huron colony, his faith has been tortured but is intact.