January 2011

directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, First Run Features, 88 minutes

In a way, nothing makes the point that the Cold War is over like watching old nuclear-defense films. When The Atomic Cafe first played in theaters a few years ago, the arms race was still on, and the effect of seeing it was one of bitter irony. Viewing it out from under the Cold War is a different experience. This survey of early films about the bomb makes a fascinating introductory history of the surreality of the war that ended in 1989.

by Carlos A. Schwantes, University of Washington Press, 360 pages

by Henry Kisor, Times Books, 384 pages

Both authors are roughly of an age, and they both fell in love with trains as children in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Schwantes listened to his grandfather’s tales of a youth spent on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, and Kisor would wait on a late afternoon at the depot of a small New Jersey town for an “almighty rumble: a big black Ten-Wheeler bringing my father home from Manhattan on the Erie railroad.” These memories might as well have been tattooed; such experiences are hard to dig out of the skin, as the awe of the child becomes the passion of the man.

by Alan Hess, Chronicle Books, 127 pages

Many of us hold Las Vegas at disapproving arm’s length, thinking it’s the last place we’d ever want to go. Just wait until you read Alan Hess’s admiring history of the city that began as a wagontrail stop across the Western desert and became a modern synonym for tastelessness, flash, and illusion writ on an ever-grander scale. Hess’s enthusiasm is infectious; he simply loves the twohundred-foot neon signs, the theme architecture in which paddle-wheel steamers bloom in the desert next to Roman amphitheaters that promise orgies of getting and spending. Hess speaks kindly of “Italian marble floors and pink-andwhite leather sofas, lilac carpeting in the casino, and violet and magenta walls.” He tells of chandeliers that “took the form of flying saucers and spinning planets.” And he also brings to his chronicle of hotels and signs and behind-the-scenes money the cooler, analytic sensibility of an architectural historian who sees in Las Vegas a “potent urban model” of today’s car-oriented commercial strip.

by John Hersey, Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages

by James Vance and Dan Burr, Kitchen Sink Press, 192 pages

The ragged pair at the heart of this big comic-book novel of hobo life are a thirteenyear-old boy named Freddie, who is searching for the father who deserted him, and his older companion, known as the King of Spain, Freddie’s protector and guide to the freight trains and flophouses and hobo jungles that form the backdrop for a classic coming-of-age tale. Anyone Freddie’s age will enjoy this story as it steeps the young reader in gritty Depression detail. The author, James Vance, has been scrupulous about thirties hobo slang—“jocker,” “yard bull”—and the artist, Dan Burr, gets the period cars, haircuts, magazines, and slouchy hobo clothes dead right. Along his road to early manhood, Freddie rides the rods, learns to read hobo code on houses, sings the “International” with a group of strikers and is tear-gassed with them, and even befriends a convincing old Jesse James impersonator. This is an entertaining primer of hard times.

by John Maxtone-Graham, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 311 pages

Library of America, two volumes: “ Great Britain and America ,” 846 pages; “The Continent,” 845 pages

by Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith, and Doug Kirby, Fireside, 287 pages

by John Margolies, Bulfinch, 128 pages

by Michael Karl Witzel, Motorbooks International, 160 pages

Two very handsome and engaging books give us a look at a fading world. Gas stations will exist as long as internal combustion propels us through our lives, but the morning time of Georgian or Deco buildings glossy with tile, of free road maps and guys in visored caps checking your oil—that’s gone forever. Both these books retrieve it admirably, and although Witzel’s offers more gasstation history, it is the illustrations that allow us to share the authors’ passion for their subject: the cap badges and giveaway toys, matchbooks and postcards and attendants’ uniforms, and the advertisements showing families in their DeSotos on the road to radiant tomorrows and clean rest rooms.