January 2011

Arthur Burdett Frost, who at the turn of the century was perhaps the best-known and most popular illustrator in America, sketched and painted his way from relatively humble beginnings to hobnobbing with the leisure class. A significant element in this ascension was his lifelong fascination with sports of field and stream: he often hunted and fished with gentlemen of affluence, and depicted their passionate pursuits on paper and canvas with such accuracy and verve that they came to consider him the sportsman-artist par excellence.

People who look on the calendar as he unfailing gauge and register of human progress might as well take note of the fact that we are only a few solar pulsebeats away from a change in centuries.

The twentieth century is coming near to a close, and in a comparatively short time we shall be living in the twentyfirst, !!logically but inevitably, there is going to be a great time of stocktaking, of pointing to the mistakes of the past and outlining the perils of the future, of wrestling with that insoluble problem of the present day: how do people whose intellectual leaders no longer believe in anything find the courage to go ahead into the unknown?

The young should be trained to love flowers and take care of the garden shrubberies. Such knowledge and taste are greatly needed in our land,” counseled Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1858. The editors of that genteel monthly went on to note with alarm: “The surface of the United States is undergoing a revolution that must change its appearance and atmosphere. The hand of Industry is everywhere displacing the decorations of Nature, the hand of Art must add new beautifyings or the country will be unsightly as well as unhealthy. Men do the work of Industry,” they reasoned, “women must assist the work of Art. So Fair Girl and Comely Matron, be prepared with your sun-bonnet or straw flat, thick gloves and stout shoes for garden work this spring and remember that you are the guardians of health as well as beauty.”

by June Namias

Beacon Press, $10.95

Over 25,000,000 immigrants have entered the United States in this century—legally. No one knows the number of illegal ones.

To find out what the new immigrant experience has been like, June Namias, with a tape recorder and a nonjudgmental sympathy, has gathered the life stories of thirty-one first-generation immigrants. This is too small a sample, as she notes in her introduction, from which to generalize, but enough to suggest the complexities and pain of immigrating.

There are basic differences between these new immigrants and their predecessors. The newcomers tend to be better educated and more highly skilled. Nowadays, they usually arrive by plane, are met by friends, and are helped by sponsoring agencies. But adapting to new customs and confronting new prejudices is still an excruciating experience, even for those who eventually make it. As a young Korean said, “I thought I was really heading to heaven. But that’s wrong. You have to try to make heaven.”

by Garry Wills

Doubleday & Co., $10.00

What the Declaration of Independence has to say, critic Carry Wills argues in his new book, was not thought at first to be of monumental importance. It was the act of declaring ourselves independent that mattered: this was a necessary step in securing foreign—particularly French—aid for our Revolutionary War effort, as foreign governments could scarcely be expected to wade into a family squabble between England and one of her colonies. But not until after the War of 1812 did Americans come to regard seriously the content of the document.

by Thomas L. Webber

W. W. Norton, $14.95

Don’t be intimidated by the rather academic trappings of this fine book. It tells us in meticulous detail made doubly moving by its unemotional tone what slave owners sought to teach, and to keep from, their slaves and what lessons those slaves actually learned. One of the first skills acquired in the slave quarter was how to spot hypocrisy. Such practices as dropping the words “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” from a slave wedding service made it obvious to slaves that even religion was being doctored to serve the white man’s purpose. What black people learned from the brutal punishments meted out to those caught with a book was how invaluable a skill reading was.

Quoting copiously from slave narratives, songs, and oral histories—sources that have often been cited before—Webber still manages to make us see slave-community life with a new and painful intimacy.

by Charles Philip Pox and F. Beverly Kelley

Dover Publications, “183 Rare and Unusual Illustrations,” $5.00

“A mile of gleam, gold, glint, and glistening glamor” beset with “sonorous metals blowing martial sounds.” Such was the circus parade, “the most alluring form of advertising ever conceived by man.” Here it all is, in a modestly priced paperback. We see the telescoping tableaux, the forty-horse hitch, the Una-fon. These are marvelous pictures of a razzle-dazzle, and now vanished, American entertainment.

A good beginning for this story is a meeting in early 1951 of three remarkable people—the greatest feminist of our age, a great philanthropist who was as notably eccentric as she was fantastically wealthy, and a biological scientist whose subsequent world fame was achieved in large part because of this meeting. Would that it could be described in circumstantial detail and invested with the drama it should have in view of what followed from it.