January 2011

A stifling spring or early summer afternoon draws on toward evening. To the west and south, a sullen cloudbank, swollen with moisture, pulsing with electrical display, rides up on the push of hot Gulf air.

Back-lighted by late sun, the advancing storm front can be seen to churn and shift and tumble in mighty collisions. But now, on the ground, the last memory of a breeze has subsided into a wrapping, oppressive stillness. A breath, it seems, scarcely can be drawn.

Farmers later may remember, or seem to remember, in these suspended moments an unaccountable agitation among the livestock, and city folk recall a strange unease.

The quality of light changes. The trees, each leaf frozen perfectly in place, the houses, the arrested figures of the people standing with faces upturned southwestward—all are bathed in a greenish glow, as if viewed through a discolored glass.

Most deadly tornado:

The tri-state tornado that raked Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana on March 18,1925, killing 689 persons and injuring over 2,000 along a path of more than 200 miles.

Largest number of tornadoes to occur simultaneously:

The so-called Super Outbreak of 1974, in which 148 tornadoes were reported in 13 states and Canada between noon, April 3, and seven o’clock the following morning. The death toll reached 315, and damage was estimated at more than $600,000,000.

Length of track:

Commonly less than 10 miles, although a single tornado in 1947 careered 221 miles from Texas through northwest Oklahoma into Kansas.

Width on the ground:

From a few yards to more than 2 miles; average less than one-quarter mile.

Wind speed:

We owe a considerable debt to the British army for our visual perception of the eighteenth-century American scene. Among the officers London posted to North America were a number skilled with sketch pad and paintbrush who spent off-duty hours recording the landscape around them and the campaigns in which they fought. None of these soldier-artists was more observant than Thomas Davies, Royal Artillery.

by Ronald Sanders
Little, Brown, $15.00

Occasionally a new work of history appears that is so adventurous and elegant that the reader is awed. This is such a book. Ronald Sanders’ subject is how the Europeans who settled the New World had acquired the prejudices against Indians, blacks, and Jews that they brought here with them. In searching out the roots of American racism, he ranges back hundreds of years and among many peoples with a confidence and immediacy that seem to lay the past open before us. One intriguing speculation that is explored here is that Columbus’ family may have been conversas —Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity.

Not light reading, this one, but richly rewarding.

by John Hammond Moore
Random House, $8.95

When you dig a secret escape tunnel, what do you do with the dirt? One group of German POWs held at Papago Park, Arizona, during World War II solved the problem by building a faustball (a form of volleyball) court inside their compound. Their guards were delighted; it was the first cooperative gesture these particular die-hard Nazis had made. On the twenty-third of December, 1944, three months after work started on the athletic field, twenty-five German naval officers and seamen wriggled through the 178-foot tunnel to freedom.

Their freedom turned out to be brief, but this intriguing account, drawn from newly declassified military records, reminds us of how little we know about the half-million POWs held in the U.S. from 1942 to 1946. The peculiar cat-and-mouse game between captive and captor—all conducted within the confines of the Geneva Convention—is revealing and entertaining.

Published by W. W. Norton and the American Association for State and Local History. Each volume has a 16-page photographic insert., maps, and a bibliography. Just published: Arkansas by Harry S. Ashmore; Illinois, by Richard J. Jensen. $8.95 each

Bicentennial boredom set in for most of us long before the end of 1976, but there are some Bicentennial projects still in the works that are too good to dismiss. This series of state histories is one. Forty-three of these small, attractive books have appeared so far. The authors are natives or devotees of their states, and have written lively and warm interpretive essays rather than formal histories. By the end of 1978, the series will be complete—fifty-one matching volumes. (Washington, B.C., is the extra one.)

Edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams. Co-published by Smithsonian Institution Press and Harry N. Abrams. Over 750 plates, including 90 pages in color. Hardcover, $27.50; paperback, $12.50

Newspaper comics—typically irreverent and blunt—were beloved by the American public long before they were recognized as a serious native art form. One of the problems, according to the useful text that accompanies this great feast of comics, is that the early strips tended to appear in newspapers that bettereducated Americans didn’t read, such as the Hearst papers. Art critic John Canaday, who writes the foreword to this book, says that he followed his favorite comics as a boy in Texas by pawing through his neighbor’s trash, because his father wouldn’t allow a Hearst paper in the house.

We like to say that this is a skeptical age. The landscape is all littered with the sad fragments of things we no longer believe in, and we wear the resulting pessimism proudly, as a fashionable garment. We are too smart to be kidded.

So we say. Actually, our age takes more things on faith than any previous age in history. It has to, because it believes (as our fathers understood the word) in nothing at all.

West Point owes its distinctive character mainly to one man. He was Sylvanus Thayer, who transformed the country’s new military academy from a marginal and shaky enterprise into a school whose supremacy in the fields of science and engineering was unchallenged in America for some forty years. Thayer was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1785, and was educated at Dartmouth and, later, at West Point, where he spent a postgraduate year before joining the Corps of Engineers as a second lieutenant. A close student of Napoleon’s campaigns, and an admirer of Napoleon’s efforts to put the military arts on a scientific footing, Thayer was picked by the Army, in 1815, to go to France, with orders to buy badly needed books, maps, and equipment for West Point, and to see what Americans could learn from Prance’s famous military schools. Two years later President Monroe decided to remove West Point’s superintendent, a touchy martinet named Alden Partridge, and Thayer was a logical choice to succeed him.