On Sunday, September 9, 1906, a freshly painted sign greeted visitors to the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoological Gardens:
The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.” Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight 103 pounds, Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.
A scandal tour of Washington, D.C. . . . Polaroid’s great instant gratification machine . . . and, adding our own bounty to this bounteous month, more.
No business magnate ever threw himself into presidential politics with the fervor of the newspaper king William Randolph Hearst. He spent his life building the most impressive propaganda machine the country had ever seen, yet managed to end up hated by nearly everyone.
An extraordinary special section introduces four very different but equally gifted photographers—all of them discovered through persistent recent detective work. Here are crystalline scenes of New Yorkers getting on with their lives in the prosperous 1920s and the straitened 1930s; a bleak stereo view showing the bone-strewn ground of the Little Bighorn, which led to the identifying of a major Western cameraman; placid, sunny views of the gentry at play that conceal a tragedy that would kill thousands; and West Coast Civil War images that the government did everything in its power to keep you from seeing.
In one of the great engineering epics of all time, NASA met the challenge posed by Sputnik ’s derisive chirp by putting a man on the moon in a little more than a decade. And then, somehow, we lost our way. T. A. Heppenheimer tells how one of the most popular government agencies of all time followed a false star.
I fear this will be the most unoriginal choice conceivable: War and Peace.
—Clifton Fadimoan, writer, editor, TV commentator
In my un-American way I pass over Gone with the Wind for Tolstoy and War and Peace. Sorry about that.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, Powell M. Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus, Harvard University
Conrad Richter's Trilogy The Trees, The Fields, and The Town.
—Richard Lingeman, managing editor, The Nation
Frederick Manfred's Lord Grizzly and Riders of Judgment.
—Larry McMurtry, author, Lonesome Dove
My favorite historical novel is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1975. It is a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant, using a half-dozen principal characters (only one of them entirely fictional) to get at the various meanings of the war. I assign this book in my undergraduate course on the Civil War and Reconstruction at Princeton; it is perennially the students’ favorite reading in the course.
—James M. McPherson, George Henry Davis Professor of American History, Princeton University, and author, Battle Cry of Freedom
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For any young person “growing up southern” in the thirties, Gone with the Wind, the massive novel itself, had an impact far beyond its literary merits. It climaxed a decade of Southern historical novels, beginning with Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and going on with Stark Young’s So Red the Rose, Clifford Dowdy’s Bugles Blow No More, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Allen Tate’s The Fathers, and so on.
My classmates at the then small women’s college of the University of North Carolina read it and talked to grandmothers and great-grandmothers who had lived through “Mr. Sherman’s visits” and as youngsters saw his “calling cards,” the blackened chimneys still standing along the six hundred miles of Sherman’s track.