January 2011

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.

Supreme City The most important election Tragedy in Dallas Plus …

“New York,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” He was speaking of the city in the 1920s, of course—that delirious decade that began early with the victorious troops home from World War I marching up Fifth Avenue and ended early with the crash of 1929. In between, the town celebrated its new preeminence among cities of the earth, and now you can join in that celebration with a special three-part section on New York in the twenties. Gerald Carson, one of the tens of thousands of country boys drawn to America’s grandest junction, recalls the splendid tribulations of getting a home, a wife, and a job in the city of Jimmy Walker, Al Jolson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay; a guide tells you everything you need to know to find your way around the town—restaurants, shows, dives, hotels, apartments (if you want a big place on Park, you’d better be prepared to spend more than three hundred dollars a month); and a photographic portfolio takes you through buildings—both grand and humble— that stand today as the most tangible monuments to an uncommon decade.

Block Island is a small, sandy interruption of Long Island Sound. Despite its apparent accessibility—it lies within two hundred miles of more than twenty million people—Block Island is as stubborn an interruption of the twentieth century as it is of the sea.

Islanders often reassure first-time visitors that their initial impressions won’t fade: with its rolling hills and stone walls spotted with lichen, Block Island is reminiscent of southern England or Ireland. It is European, too, in its sense of the past. On Block Island, history accumulates like a kind of local natural resource.

The Indians called Block Island Manisses, “island of the little god.” Only three miles wide and seven long, it was aptly named. In 1614, however, Adrian Block of Amsterdam changed the name to his own when he circumnavigated the island and drew a map on which he labeled it “Adrian’s Eyland.”

A book-length study of Block Island’s historic architecture, with black-and-white photographs by Judith Watts, will be published sometime next year and will be available from the Block Island Historical Society.

Flights of Passage Feud Border Fury Mills and Factories of New England The Pilot and the Passenger Revolution at the Table

By Samuel Hynes; Frederic C. Beil & Naval Institute Press; 270 pages.

“Every generation,” writes Samuel Hynes in the preface to his new book, “is a secret society.” The secret his generation shared was the experience of coming of age in the Second World War. Hynes was eighteen when he entered Navy Flight School, and not yet twenty-one when the war ended. In the meantime, he’d learned to fly in combat effectively enough to earn an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross in the Pacific. Afterward he went back to the normal business of living, became Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton, and wrote books on the Edwardians and on W. H. Auden. But still he carried the secret. It “made us different from those who were older or younger than ourselves, or who were not in the war. I can’t formulate the differences in terms that seem adequate to the experience, but perhaps I can recover something of the experience itself.”

By Altina L Waller; University of North Carolina Press; 313 pages.

Of historic family fights, brawls, and feuds, the long-running struggle between two Appalachian clans, the Hatfields and the McCoys, occupies the most prominent place in the American popular imagination. In comic strips, songs, movies, and television, the unruly and ignorant hill folk have succeeded in becoming such a part of America’s mythic past that many readers will no doubt be surprised to discover that the combatants were real people.