All elections are exciting at the time, but a year or two after most of them, the voters begin to wonder what the fuss was about. In 1860, though, the stakes were so high that the presidential race still retains all its drama. Peter Andrews gives a fast-paced, intimate account of how, against all the odds, we got Lincoln.
Twenty-five years ago this November, what began as a routine chore for Cecil Stoughton became the most crucial assignment of his career. As the President’s official photographer, he was in the motorcade when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and because he knew his job as well as he did, we have a moving pictorial record of that day—much of it never before published.
Good advice on how to become President from someone who made it … seeking the ghost of John Brown at Harpers Ferry “ Frank Lloyd Wright’s tableware … and, as additional cause for Thanksgiving, more.
Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, the autobiography of John D. Rockefeller, first appeared as a series of seven articles that ran monthly from October 1908 through April 1909 in The World’s Work, a magazine published by Doubleday, Page & Company. The autobiography has reappeared in book form many times since its original publication, but not until 1984, when the Sleepy Hollow Press of Tarrytown, New York and the Rockefeller Archive Center brought out a handsome new edition, could readers enjoy the approximately eighty photographs from the original magazine articles.
The photographs alone are worth the price of the book. Rockefeller lived from 1839 to 1937, and he softened as he aged—a little. If you want to see a steely gaze, take a look at him here—at age thirteen, eighteen, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-eight, or forty-five. Not once, it seems, did any photographer say, “Smile.”
Walls of rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, stupendous gemstones used as everyday objects, the rich gleam of reflected light: that is stuff dreams are made of. But when, instead of the Thousand and One Nights, the scene is turn-of-the-century New York, when those glowing jewels are made into vases, lamps, windows, and screens, then the magician responsible for it all, far from being a jar-bound spirit, can be none other than Louis Comfort Tiffany. Of all the great American designers, none have been more imitated than Tiffany. And it is no wonder: the inventiveness of his creations and the sumptuousness of his colors and textures are both endlessly satisfying and deeply original. Within the great stream of the Art Nouveau movement, Tiffany has just as important a place as Gallé, Mackintosh, or the artists of the Wiener Werkstätte.
In the early 1930s the Empire Builder was a train famous enough to have a weekly NBC radio program named after it. Each installment was a paean to industry and progress. Then the announcer came on for the close: “Hours slip away like magic for travelers in the luxurious trains of the Great Northern Railway,” he intoned. “Their pathway lies past the emerald lakes of Minnesota, through evergreen forests and fragrant valleys, along the course of ten great rivers, beside tumbling cataracts and lacy waterfalls—through a land of romance.”
These days, if we think about cross-country train travel at all, it’s probably with a pang of regret for an adventure long gone. And yet, as I learned recently, Amtrak, our national passenger service, is still very much in the game, offering a range of long-distance trips so appealing it’s hard to choose just one. Last May I took the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. The route’s broad arc across the roof of this country covers 2,206 miles and takes the better part of two days.
Amtrak’s brochure describes the various routes and berths and lists packages with hotel stays, car rentals, and air fares (1-800-USA-Rail). It’s possible to arrange to get off at any stop and continue the trip later. Glacier National Park is a good place to do this. Many of its hotels are open only in summer, but the Izaak Walton Inn, built in the 1930s by the railroad for its workers, is open all year. Across the track from the stop at Essex, it’s a magnet for rail buffs (P.O. Box 653, Essex, MT 59916/Tel: 406-888-5700).
The west-to-east trip on the Empire Builder should assure daylight at Glacier Park, no matter how late the train, since it’s scheduled to pass through in the early morning. Your fellow travelers will be of every occupation and age. Local people often use the train for short segments because air service in the region is sparse. More than one rail buff aboard told me that the most consistently scenic Amtrak trip is the stretch from Denver to San Francisco on the Zephyr.
Photographs by Serge Hambourg; Harry N. Abrams; 108 pages.
Mill buildings, it has been said, are as essential a part of the classic New England landscape as are mountains and rocky fields, and as basic to the region’s history as Pilgrims and Kennedys. Serge Hambourg, a French photographer, started taking pictures of old New England mill and factory buildings in 1982, shortly after he moved to this country. Ninety of his elegant color photographs have been collected in a volume that both documents and celebrates its subject matter.
By Leo Marx; Oxford University Press; 357 pages.
Since the first European settlers gazed across the untrammeled American landscape, writers have sought words adequate to describe it. Leo Marx, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Cultural History at MlT, ably negotiates the thickets of American letters in an attempt to more fully understand the American landscape’s influence on the lives of its inhabitants. This collection of nineteen essays written over a forty-year period examines an array of literary figures, from Melville and Emerson to Irving Howe and Susan Sontag.
By Harvey A. Leuenstein; Oxford University Press; 320 pages.
Early visitors to America were astonished at the abundance of food that regularly appeared on American tables and equally astonished at our indifference to this bounty. The national motto, one observer said, was “Gobble, gulp, and go.” This enjoyable, informative book traces the steps by which we moved from disregard of what we ate to our present intense concern with food and nutrition.
There have always been some gourmets among the gluttons. Thomas Jefferson grew to love French food during his years as American minister to France and introduced French cooking into the White House when he was President. By 1880 French chefs were firmly ensconced in the nation’s wealthiest houses and finest restaurants.