January 2011

by Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany (with Amy Hill Hearth), Kodansha America, 210 pages.

Some of Sarah and Bessie Delany’s recollections of their Southern girlhoods and seventy-five independent years in New York City first appeared in our October issue. The full volume contains more adventures from throughout their lives, including a near run-in with the Ku Klux Klan on Long Island, and offers their views on current politics. Bessie predicts “there will be a white woman President before there is a Negro President. And if a Negro is elected President? That person will be a Negro woman.”

by Shirley Streshinsky, Villard Books, 432 pages.

edited by Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Villard Books, 384 pages.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the fauna of the American interior were as novel and exciting a scientific frontier as the human genome is today. John James Audubon made a lifelong project of becoming the artist-ornithologist who would reveal the birds of America to the world. The obsession took up most of his years, and when he wasn’t studying birds and shooting them and painting them, he was journeying through Scotland, England, and France trying to sell subscriptions to his monumental work, dressed in the garb of a frontiersman as he called on personages from Louis Bonaparte to Sir Walter Scott. His story, absorbingly told by the novelist Shirley Streshinsky, is one of a man who made one aspect of the vanishing wilderness his life.

by David Zinman (with a new afterword), University Press of Mississippi, 361 pages.

On the centenary of Huey Long’s birth this classic 1963 work of reporting has been reissued with a new afterword in which the author sifts through recently discovered evidence from the killing. At the time of the 1991 exhumation of Carl Weiss- the young doctor thought to have shot Long in the State Capitol corridor in 1935—the assailant’s .32-caliber revolver finally turned up in a bank security box with a mysterious spent bullet and some pictures of the Kingfish’s shot-up linen suit. They had all passed into the possession of the original investigator’s daughter.

Drive out to Henry Ford Museum for the holiday banquet served at the Eagle Tavern in Greenfield Village, the immense, fascinating township the Motor King assembled. The Eagle began life in 1832; until New Year’s it re-creates 185Os hospitality: You sit down at communal tables to be regaled with beef tea, veal pie, chicken, roast beef, and spirits from the taproom. The food is excellent, but even more satisfying is the powerful illusion of stepping out into the warm, shadowy, agreeable bustle of a prosperous hostelry a century and a half ago.

by Wendell Garrett, edited by David Larkin, principal photography by Paul Rocheleau, Rizzoli, 300 pages.

A generation ago the Victorian Age was derided and dismissed. Its garish eclecticism and overt materialism offended modern sensibilities. Today it is enjoying a revival that verges on full redemption. Victorian America shows why. A worthy sequel by the same team that created Classic America , this survey is divided into three regional essays that take us from the antebellum South through the industrializing North and onto the West Coast and the dawn of our own century. The text accurately conveys what the photographs of the houses and buildings vividly confirm: the Victorian Age was marked by dynamic change, confidence, and burgeoning wealth.

by Richard Reeves, Simon & Schuster, 798 pages.

Reeves, a political reporter in the 1960s, looks at the man and the dynamics of his Presidency at length and in depth. He finds Kennedy keen but careless, with a “love for chaos, the kind that kept other men off-balance.” The author’s fascination with his subject is contagious as he limns the President’s handling of the daily crises that are so much part of the job. Reeves writes that “what I searched for was what he knew or heard, said or read.” And as the incidents of courage and cruelty mount up, he refuses to explain away Kennedy’s contradictions. By the end, after keeping his guard up against the famous Kennedy charm for nearly eight hundred pages, Reeves arrives at a true liking for the thirty-fifth President, a well-rounded appreciation for him that only this much vivid detail could support.

A gathering of recent books, videos, recordings, and other items of special interest to the readers of American Heritage , selected and recommended by the editors.

morris museum of art, augusta, ga.1993_8_94-95

I can t Sleep by John McCrady is dated 1948, but the Mississippi-born painter began to sketch the idea fifteen years earlier, when he lived in New Orleans in a ramshackle house in the French Quarter that was home to plenty of raucous parties. In this bravura scene, lit and split in half like a stage set, McCrady is the distressed fellow sitting up in bed on the ground floor, trying to shut out the blare of the music and thumping of the dancers directly above him.

When Robert Henri spent some months in La Jolla, California, in 1914, he found Sylvester, a local newsboy, so engaging a character that he painted him again and again, although only two of these portraits seem to have survived. In this one, which Henri titled The Failure of Sylvester , the artist pictures his subject dozing; the “failure” referred to is Sylvester’s inability to stay awake, because apparently he was so at ease at his sittings.

A hooked rug, a medium that might seem more appropriate for depicting a sulky race, celebrates the 1950 Indianapolis 500. As the rug attests, Johnnie Parsons pushed his car—No. 1, the first Kurtis-Kraft to win at Indy—to victory at an average speed of 124.002 miles per hour. The day started inauspiciously when Parsons’s mechanics discovered a crack in his engine block. But the sturdy four-cylinder Offenhauser held up through the whole race—and, in fact, went on to take second place the next year.