January 2011

by Esmond Wright; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 404 pages; $25.00.

For most of his political life, Benjamin Franklin strove mightily to preserve the bonds between Great Britain and her American colonies, to keep that “fine and noble China vase, the British Empire” from cracking. When he saw that he must fail in the effort, he strove even more to make sure the revolution succeeded, even if it meant wheeling and dealing with every selfish interest in France, Spain, and Holland. For Esmond Wright in his acute biography, Franklin is the American as heroic fixer—zestful, humorous, open to any man’s ideas but always testing them against his own sense of the reasonable and humane, sometimes overly relishing his own craftiness but, in the end, knowing that nothing could be accomplished without consultation and consent. Wright is especially good in showing us how well Franklin knew men’s psychology; no one understood better the pride and arrogance and bad faith of the British bureaucrats and how this distorted and finally dissipated all their efforts.

by Hal Morgan; Viking; 239 pages; $35.00.

This is a browser’s book, a coffee-table book for trivial pursuitists, a delight. Hal Morgan has collected more than one thousand pictures of American trademarks, divided them by theme, product, history, and design, and served them up with an intelligent text. They show our prejudices (exterminators in the 1890s were symbolized by Chinese eating rats); they illustrate changes in custom (“Heroin” was a trademark for an 1898 proprietary drug); and they point up our infatuations (the noble Indian, after he was conquered, became a symbol for practically anything). The 1870 devil emblem for Underwood Deviled Ham is the oldest registered food trademark still in use in the United States, and it is shown in all its design versions.

by Laura Shapiro; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 280 pages; $16.95.

About a hundred years ago there erupted in America the same passion for food and its preparation that exists here today. It was then called the domestic science movement, and its aims couldn’t have been more different from those of today’s eager gourmets. The idea was to standardize food, to make it pure, scientific—and tasteless. Fannie Farmer (“the mother of level measurements”) and the Boston Cooking School led the way in “disdaining the proof of the palate.” In this witty and delightful book, Laura Shapiro explores the reform forces that, in the name of science and progress for women, introduced such items as gelatin-marshmallow salads into our national cuisine.

by Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, with Bernard S. Finn; Rutgers University Press; 263 pages; $35.00.

Thomas Edison’s light changed the world so quickly and dramatically that it is not surprising that its origins are the stuff of myth. But the true story is much more human and only a little less glorious than the legends. Two historians of technology reconstruct the stages of the invention, beginning when Edison first announced that he would shortly produce a light bulb and ending four long years later when a commercial incandescent lighting system finally began operation, in New York in 1882. An initial period of wild overconfidence was followed by months of groping, frustration, hype, intense hard work, breakthroughs, and a growing understanding of the basic science of electricity. Even after the bulb’s traditional birthday, everything from fixtures to generators had to be invented, built, and strung together before the invention had any practical significance. When all that was done, the world would never be the same again.

by Barry Lopez; Charles Scribner’s Sons; 464 pages; $22.95.

The far, far north is another world on earth, a place where night and day and nature and distance and human life as we know them are obliterated and replaced by something different and wonderful. Barry Lopez, author of the prizewinning study Of Wolves and Men, spent four years traveling across the upper reaches of North America and beyond. When he returned, he wrote a masterful volume that combines natural and human history to explore not only the land of the Arctic but the strange fascination it has held for subarctic man over the centuries. In doing so he throws light as well on modern man’s troubled relationship with our dazzling planet.

by Cleanth Brooks; University of Georgia Press; 58 pages; $9.95.

American speech arrived with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English settlers who emigrated to the New World, Cleanth Brooks argues in three wise and charming essays gathered into this small book. Since then the mother tongue has evolved much more than the daughter tongue. This is most noticeable in the American South, where people at every education level cling tenaciously to their local pronunciations and rhythms of speech. Perhaps most astonishing is Brooks’s conviction that black Southern speech also, or even especially, is derived from early English locutions rather than from African ones. Citing examples from writings as various as Uncle Remus and the work of Flannery O’Connor, Brooks demonstrates the vitality and particularity of this old British-based Southern language. These essays were originally delivered as lectures at Mercer University in Georgia.

I enjoyed Professor Elting E. Morison’s article “Inventing a Modern Navy” (June/July issue), but a training manual on repelling boarders should not be used as an example of an idea that was outmoded by the late nineteenth century. During World War II the destroyer escort USS Buckley was boarded by the crewmen of a U-boat she had just rammed. Most of the Germans were driven back by small-arms fire, improvised missiles, and even bare fists before their sub sank. Likewise, the crew of the USS Pueblo might have benefited from the study of the art of repelling boarders.

When Alain Enthoven and the other “Whiz Kids” first hit the Pentagon with their economists’ approach to cost efficiency, they had a majority of the military staff in favor of both their goals and their methods. It appeared we had some young tigers who, with the power of the Office of the Secretary of Defense behind them, might finally achieve some meaningful savings by eliminating duplication of facilities, matèriel, and people among the services. But after about a year they found the fight to win these goals from Congress too tough and chose instead to usurp the roles of generals and admirals.

George Hadfield was one of the most distinguished architects ever to practice in this country, yet he is so little known that no book has been written about him and very little has been published in architectural journals. Born in Florence in 1763, the son of an English innkeeper, he arrived in America in 1795 and made Washington his home for the remaining thirty-one years of his life. Among other buildings he designed is Arlington House, now a museum overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. He also contributed substantially to one of the finest complexes of buildings ever erected in the capital: the first offices of the Departments of State, Treasury, Navy, and War, four separate edifices connected with the White House so that they seemed wings of the presidential mansion. Like so many of Hadfield’s Washington buildings, they have disappeared. But his most important achievement still remains: the old City Hall, which inspired its much larger neighbor, the original National Gallery of Art, dedicated in 1941.