January 2011

directed by Michael Mann, Twentieth Century-Fox Video

Colonial America has proved a strangely nettlesome subject for Hollywood. Full-blown features from 1776 to Revolution! have failed miserably with critics and at the box office. This one gets it right, turning the book into a thrilling, romantic adventure smart enough for grownups. As in James Fenimore Cooper’s classic novel, the action is set in 1757, during “the third year of the war between England and France for the possession of the continent,” according to the opening credits.

by Walter Karp, Franklin Square Press, 327 pages

For many years before his sudden death in 1989, Walter Karp was both a good friend and a valued contributor to this magazine. In the latter capacity he was the author of a delightful series on unusual American museums and how they reflect the personalities of their founders. But Walter always felt his true vocation was the defense of the best traditions of the American Republic, which he conducted tirelessly in innumerable articles and several books. The first of these books, Indispensable Enemies , has just been issued in paperback. In it the author calls with Jeffersonian passion for the reestablishment of liberties he sees as having been eroded by a long history of collusion between the two parties, determined to preserve the status quo. It’s controversial stuff, but few readers will be unmoved by the valor of Walter’s convictions, the powerful historical scrutiny to which he subjects them, and the clarity with which he makes his case.

by Gerhard L. Weinberg, Cambridge University Press, 1,126 pages

Four and a half years into it, the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War has found a chronicle worthy of the occasion. The diplomatic historian Gerhard L. Weinberg has compressed the endless complexities of the global struggle into a coherent—in fact, hypnotic—narrative, offered up in a single, handsome volume. The scholarship is superb and wide-ranging (the German-born author is at home in Nazi-era archives often passed over by other historians), the prose has bite and clarity, Weinberg does not shrink from making judgments, and his tale is leavened with mordant wit and underpinned with moral clarity. This is surely the finest one-volume history we have of the most important event of our century.

The stockyards are gone, and every city has skyscrapers of its own now, but the robust Chicago of the 189Os lives on in the somber mahogany splendor of the Berghoff bar. With stained glass at the street end and heavy chandeliers shedding a mellow tea-colored light and people coming in out of the raw winter weather for a restorative pint of the house’s own double dark, it is easy for the visitor to get a sense of the dynamic, working city in what Theodore Dreiser called its “furnace days.” 17 West Adams Street.

by various artists, Rhino Records 71263, four CDs

This is not music of the West of American history or of the West today; it is music of the West of pure unashamed imagination, of Gary Cooper at high noon, of “Bonanza,” and of Marlboro cigarettes. Disc One, “Cowboy Classics,” offers eighteen tunes like “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” by Patsy Montana. Most of them were written on Tin Pan Alley, of course. Disc Two, “Silver Screen Cowboys,” gives us the singing stars of the screen West, among them Tex Ritter, Slim Pickens, and Rex Alien. Disc Three zeros in on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers; Disc Four finally gets to the most iconic Western music of all, Western themes from television and movies. They’re all here: “The Magnificent Seven” (a.k.a. the Marlboro theme), “Gunsmoke,” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “Rawhide,” and more. By the time you get to Roy Rogers singing “Don’t Fence Me In” you may agree with Cole Porter’s lyric: “I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences / gaze at the moon till I lose my senses …”

Smithsonian Collection of Recordings A4-19881 (four CDs)

Rhino Records, three-CD set

In a conversation with John Clellon Holmes in 1948, Jack Kerouac said of his disaffected, angst-ridden friends, “We’re a beat generation!” He grew awfully tired over the next two decades of hearing his quip mockingly applied to every feckless college kid who grew a goatee or wore a beret. The beats inspired enormous amounts of ephemera, but they also left behind a solid corpus of genuine literary merit.

This collection contains ample amounts of both. After perhaps one too many perky jazz themes by musicians with questionable beat credentials, along comes William Burroughs to growl an excerpt from Naked Lunch and blow them all away. Jack Kerouac, his voice soft and lisping, recites with enough vigor and lilt and music to shock anyone who has struggled through his printed work.

by Paul Dickson and Paul Clancy, John Wiley & Sons, 400 pages

directed by Ric Burns, Direct Cinema, 81 mins.

It is the great cautionary tale of the westering frontier, the group of emigrants who jumped off from Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1846 and raced winter across half the continent only to have it catch up with them when they were a day’s journey away from safety. Then the worst winter ever recorded in the Cascade Range volleyed its snows down upon them, sealing them high in the Sierra Nevada for mortal months. From a grisly tale of despair and cannibalism, Ric Burns—who, with his brother Ken, produced the PBS Civil War series—has fashioned a remarkable epic of folly and courage and human resilience that is the more remarkable for the fact that despite the scarcity of archival photographs, he keeps a tense and engrossing narrative pelting along from the documentary’s beginning to its most satisfying conclusion.

by Elton E. Mackin, Presidio, 264 pages

Fifteen years ago a boxful of limp old onionskin arrived in our offices. The manuscript told the story of a young Marine private who had fought his way from Belleau Wood to the Meuse, in the process surviving some of the bitterest action the Western Front had to offer. It was terrific. We ran a full sixteen pages of it and only wished we could publish the whole thing. Now someone has, and it takes its place among the finest accounts of the soldier’s lot in the First World War. Now and then Mackin superheats his prose with youthful floridity, but there is real eloquence here, along with fierce vignettes recounted with clarity and perfectly controlled understatement. Northeast of Vierzy, for instance, Mackin’s outfit faces a German advance. The Marines spot a battery of French 75s coming their way, flag them down, and the rapid-firing guns save the day. But a German shell lands directly on four French officers standing by their guns studying a map: “Of men and map there was but a reeking hole, smoke-clogged and rancid. No other trace was left.