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January 2011
During a bloody spate of Indian uprisings against the British in the Great Lakes region, Gen. Jeffery Amherst proposed a novel means of curbing the violence. In July, Amherst suggested to Col. Henry Bouquet that he provide Indians with blankets contaminated with smallpox. The idea intrigued Bouquet, but in the end he relied on more conventional weapons such as musketry and bayonets.
This is the question posed by Paul Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers , and it’s enough on people’s minds to put Kennedy’s long, careful study on the best-seller lists. In an incisive interview, the economist Robert Heilbroner examines Kennedy’s views on what lessons the decline of imperial Spain and Britain may have for the United States.
Football’s greatest crisis: back in 1905, people were dying from the game. It took repeated intervention by the President of the United States and two sweeping rules changes to create the much safer sport we watch today…works by the portraitist Irving Wiles, a natural successor to Sargent who was born just a little too late and today is virtually forgotten…Robert Louis Stevenson’s journey to California in pursuit of the woman he loved…the great American dinner party, and how you should have behaved…and, to help you make the transition to autumn, more.
Joseph McCarthy’s fall from favor after the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings was precipitous enough to satisfy all but his most unforgiving victims. Censured by his colleagues in the Senate, snubbed by the White House, ignored even by the newsmen who had once fought to be first to carry his press releases, he grew convinced that he was being hounded by triumphant Communists who had taken over the telephone company, and, when the tumblers of brandy and vodka he drank in relentless, suicidal succession began to produce delirium tremens, he screamed in fear of the writhing serpents he was sure surrounded him. “No matter where I go,” he sobbed to a friend toward the end, “they look on me with contempt. I can’t take it anymore…They’re murdering me.”
On July 24, 1832, a 60-year-old businessman in Albany, New York drew up an explosive will. The businessman was named William James, but historians call him William of Albany to distinguish him from the elder of his two famous grandsons.
Historians have not paid much attention to William of Albany. After all, he was only a businessman. Nevertheless, his story is fascinating, and his success in business set the stage for the dazzling successes that followed his family. I learned about him in a book about his namesake, Becoming William James, written by Howard M. Feinstein, a psychiatrist and an adjunct professor of psychology at Cornell.
By David Plowden; W. W. Norton & Company; 160 pages. It’s a fair bet that David Plowden is the only major American photographer ever to have left Yale for a job as assistant to the trainmaster on the Great Northern Railroad in Willmar, Minnesota. But Plowden has always loved trains. His first memory is of seeing a locomotive from the lower berth of a Pullman; the first picture he ever took, at the age of eleven, was of a steam locomotive. One of his teachers, the photographer Minor White, told him that unless he took pictures of his “damned engines and trains” and got them out of his system, he would never photograph anything else. In time Plowden went on to photograph other things; but he never did get trains out of his system, and this magnificent book is his elegy to the vanished era when the railroad was the emblem of our civilization.
By Gertrude Himmelfarb; Harvard University Press; 209 pages. “Mickey Mouse may in fact be more important to our understanding of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt.” With this pronouncement a devotee of the “new history” recently let fly another rhetorical attack in a long and bitter academic war between the practitioners of the old history and the new. In this collection of essays Gertrude Himmelfarb enters the fray to mount her own counterattack against the new historians.
By Malcolm Forbes with Jeff Bloch; Simon and Schuster; 336 pages. At first glance Glenn Miller, Thomas Jefferson, Buddy Holly, Sigmund Freud, Aeschylus, and Sid Vicious might not seem to have a great deal in common. But they all are fellow members in the vast fraternity of death. This book tells how they joined.