January 2011

by Mary Sayre Haverstock

Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 198 illustrations, including 73 plates in full color, 248 pages, $35.00

There are no anthropomorphic morals in this bestiary. It is simply a book of American animal paintings, often giving us glimpses of the artists’ most relaxed, intimate work. Ranging from the peaceable-kingdom to the howling wilderness views of the animal world, the images are as gentle as a kitten painted as a thank-you note or as ominous as circling buzzards. The paintings are splendidly reproduced in this enticing book.

by Stephanie Kraft

Rand McNally & Company 90 photographs, 239 pages, $9.95

“The places I loved or hated between the ages of three and thirteen compose an inexhaustible landscape of memory,” Ellen Glasgow once wrote. This landscape of memory is what Stephanie Kraft explores for us in her compact, unusual book about the homes and hometowns of thirty American authors.

In well-chosen pictures and neat, graceful essays she shows how and where the writers lived, and how deeply rooted they were in their home territories. For instance, William Faulkner, working in Hollywood and furiously homesick for Oxford, Mississippi (his Yoknapatawpha County) once wrote that he yearned to be in his own kitchen “with my family around me and my hands full of Old Maid cards.” Sherwood Anderson, talking of the countryside around Clyde, Ohio, where he grew up, recalled his boyhood sense of “awe before the facts of life in meadows.”

Those who had the pleasure, a few years ago, of reading Frances FitzGerald’s award-winning work Fire in the Lake should know that her strength is in what might be called cultural anatomy—the careful dissection of the webs of habit and belief that hold a people together. In that book she appeared to be talking about American warriors in Vietnam. But in reality she dealt with deep and subtle differences between the Vietnamese and American views of power and history, and how Washington’s policies foundered in that gulf of misunderstanding.

A strange word suddenly appeared in the American vernacular after the Civil War. The word was “sportsman.” It served to define a certain kind of gentleman who took his leisure with rod and gun. And that was the curiosity of it, for the pursuit of fish and game on this continent had seldom before been associated with leisure. One hunted or fished in order to eat. The rod and the gun rested next to the ploughshare. Men who went afield for amusement were regarded as scalawags undoubtedly cursed with addiction to liquor, cards, and cockfights as well. But the war, and the onrushing force of the industrial revolution, had somehow rolled part of the Puritan ethic aside. Now, rod and gun could be perceived not only as tools of subsistence but as accouterments of a new aristocracy. Now, more often than not, the fellow with burrs on his cuffs would be hailed as a pillar of the community.

“They call me the Master Birdman,” he said once, “but they pay to see me die.” He hated his audience. He loved his audience. He was bitter, contradictory, expansive, and fatalistic. Foremost in the first generation of daredevil pilots, he flew in a natty pin-striped suit with a two-carat diamond stickpin keeping his necktie in place. His fellow pilot Beck-with Havens, one of his very few close friends, described him as “a strange, strange man.” He was also, according to Orville Wright, who knew something about it, “the most wonderful flyer I ever saw and the greatest aviator of all.” He claimed to have flown for twenty million people—and he flew wide enough and far enough for that to be possible.

The history of politics is a history of words. “Boss” is as American as “Santa Claus,” both words being Dutch in origin. “Boss,” wrote the English captain Thomas Hamilton, was a peculiar Americanism, a substitute for “master.” Hamilton’s book, Men and Manners in America , was published in 1831, roughly coincident with the rise of machine politics in the United States. It was during the 1830’s, too, that “big” became a favorite Americanism, an adjective suggesting quality as well as quantity; power and prestige, not merely size. Yet it was not until after the Civil War, when the era of the big bosses was opening, that “boss” and “bossism” acquired a political significance. Most bosses ruled the swelling cities; a few perfected their machinery in order to run an entire state. Most were Democrats; a few were Republicans. Many exercised a politically disputable, yet practically unchallengeable power over their local legislatures; a few were able to extend their power over their party in the United States Senate. Most had risen from the lower middle class; a few descended into politics from the upper classes.

A friend of mine still laments the deprivation he suffered after the first fight between Joe Louis and former heavyweight champion Max Schmeling of Germany in 1936. “I attended a dreary boarding school back then,” he recalls. “Its only claim to excellence was the cinnamon rolls served for Sunday breakfast. Well, we were all boxing fans there, and those of us with sense knew that Joe Louis was unbeatable. When the odds were announced eight to one in Joe’s favor, there was as much betting in that dreadful institution as the scarcity of Schmeling backers would permit. Imagine my delight when I chanced upon a fool willing to venture his two weekly cinnamon rolls against my pledge of sixteen. We were all distraught when the German knocked Joe out; but for me—at an age when eight weeks without rolls was an eternity—the future was a boundless Sahara, and it is well that no means of painless suicide was readily at hand.”

In the summer of 1867, after more than a year of relative peace between Indians and whites, the southern Plains were in a shambles. It was an old story of blood and blunder by then. Consider this brief scenario: at dawn on November 29,1864, Colonel John Chivington, 1st Colorado Cavalry, had led his men in a surprise attack on a sleeping camp of some seven hundred Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado. At least one hundred and fifty Indians were killed that morning—and, according to a congressional report, killed with a feral intensity: “Fleeing women holding up their hands and praying for mercy were brutally shot down; infants were killed and scalped in derision; men were tortured and mutilated.…” Indian reprisals had followed in the spring and summer of 1865, and the military, depleted after the Civil War, could not control the situation.