January 2011

Perhaps I overlooked something in your historical-fiction issue. How else to explain the slighting of novels with World War I settings in this otherwise interesting issue? Not a single novelist, journalist, or historian asked to name their favorite historical novel, not even those who had written about the Great War, named a Great War novel. It can’t be that the war was so uninteresting that such novels as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front , Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms , Faulkner’s A Fable, Gather’s One of Ours (the last two of which won Pulitzer Prizes) can be ignored.

May 15, 1885. The architect Henry Hobson Richardson peered out of a carriage window at the corner lot on Chicago’s Prairie Avenue and then turned to his client and asked, “Have you the courage to build the house without windows on the street front?”

The young John Jacob Glessner promptly responded, “Yes.” In this way, the design for one of Richardson’s most criticized and most influential buildings was commissioned for one of the newest of Chicago’s new rich. Glessner’s courage, however, was not unalloyed; he realized he could still reject the final plans. Ultimately, the industrialist’s new house was the result of many compromises, some courageous, some less so.

How could that distinguished group of contributors have failed to mention the greatest and most hilarious series of historical novels of all time, the Flashman Papers by George McDonald Fraser? Historically accurate, right down to their footnotes, maps, and appendices, these books tell the tale of Sir Harry Flashman, an engaging anti-hero who manages to be everywhere (from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Battle of Gettysburg) and meet everyone (from the Duke of Wellington to Kit Carson) in the nineteenth century. Among other highlights in the series, the third volume of the Flashman Papers captures the rustic eloquence of Abraham Lincoln better than anything else I have ever read, fiction or fact.

The United States Army has always been secretive about its defense installations. In the summer of 1864, a breach of security took place on the tiny island fortress of Alcatraz that reverberated all the way back to the War Department in Washington.

Alcatraz Island, squatting in the middle of San Francisco Bay, is the 22-acre cork in the mouth of the Golden Gate.

Beginning in 1853, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers transformed the humpbacked islet into one of the country’s most heavily defended pieces of real estate. The fort continued to grow throughout the early Civil War years, until, by the end of 1863, it mounted more than a hundred pieces of heavy artillery.

I read with joy and instant recognition Bernard A. Weisberger’s superb article on the history of political parties in America (“The Lives of the Parties,” September). I say recognition because I had heard it all before—on an Amtrak Metroliner streaking from Washington, D.C., to New York City five or six years ago. I was producing a film on the history of Congress, and Bernie was one of the writers. We were returning from a series of meetings when an innocent question of mine about the two-party system sparked a magnificent soliloquy from him. For nearly three hours, the fastest and most pleasant train trip I’ve ever taken, he took me campaign by campaign through American history right up to the present. He knew everything: the third parties, the fourth parties, the percentage of the vote each got. He knew their campaign slogans and even sang to me their theme songs. By the time we reached Penn Station, I was higher than a kite, elated by the tour this eloquent, generous freelance historian had given me.

Your article “The Greatest Athlete in the World” in the July/August issue is superb! All associated with the Olympic movement appreciate this reflection on one of the most important figures in Olympic history. We just returned from Barcelona, and the name Jim Thorpe is still on the lips of those around the world.

We used to have rubber-band fights sometimes. A Saturday-afternoon visit to his office was one of my favorite treats. Irving Browning’s office was like no one else’s. He was the founder and owner of Camera Mart, a motion-picture-equipment rental and supply company But there was little in his office about cinematography unless it was the row of antique movie cameras that lined a high shelf running around the walls. No, Irving’s office was, rather, an eclectic museum. Prominent on the wall to the left as you entered was an original Mutoscope, Charlie Chaplin flickering forever in its interior darkness. Stacked against it was an ever-changing assortment of antique weaponry from almost any historical epoch you could name, but especially from the American past. Remington bronzes loomed out of the semidarkness (there never seemed to be lights on; the office was always lit by natural daylight). Hanging on the wall behind his desk among a number of prints was a framed arrow labeled, “The Arrow That Killed Custer.” Even then I don’t think I believed it.

Thorpe Tribute Parties Live Great War Legacy Great War Legacy Great War Legacy Lakeside

May 13,1992: The first two failures looked weirdly dopey: spacesuits evoke swaddling clothes, making the astronauts resemble giant infants, and the painfully slow, seemingly awkward movements of men in zero-g conveyed the sense of graceless clowns. A man touching a gigantic weightless mass with a hair too much force and setting it spinning hopelessly had the cruelly farcical logic of slapstick: Abbott and Costello go to the moon. After the seven-million-dollar “capture bar” screwed up—it looked like a giant Rube Goldberg tire iron—the dreary certainty settled in that the shuttle crew would fail for the third and final time to recapture the satellite; another hundred million bucks down the rathole.