January 2011

Walter Boyne’s résumé makes for unusual reading. He is the author of 42 books and one of the few people to have had bestsellers on both the fiction and the nonfiction lists of The New York Times. A career Air Force officer who won his wings in 1951, he has flown over 5,000 hours in a score of different aircraft, from a Piper Cub to a B-IB bomber, and he is a command pilot. Boyne retired as a colonel in 1974 after 23 years of service (in 1989, he returned for a brief tour of duty to fly the B-IB). He joined the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, becoming acting director in 1982 and director one year later. Upon his retirement in 1986, he took upwriting and consulting; his fourth career, in television, began five years ago.

For more on Culture Quest and its schedule of events, either call 800-234-6032 or visit www.culturequestscottsdale.com . General information on Scottsdale is available at www.experiencescottsdale.com. Hotels in the area have come a long way from tourist accommodations like the Graves Guest Ranch, described by one early visitor as “a series of cabins located around a large open field.…shaded by ash and tamarack trees [with] canvas flaps that opened to allow better cooling.” These days the luxury propertiesstrive to outdo one another in the amenities they offer. However lavish the swimming pools, man-made sandy beaches, or casitas (private apartments), some ofthese places still make a point of holding on to the past.

In 1985, the city government of Scottsdale, Arizona, quite remarkably set aside one percent of its capital improvement budget to acquire and display public art. The fund this created has also helped support the magnificent, airy Museum of Contemporary Art, itself a work of art, and its neighbor the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Both are located on the parklike Civic Center Mall in the heart of the area known as Old Scottsdale. These attractions, surrounded by shops, restaurants, and more than 125 galleries, achieve thegoal so many cities are striving for these days: keeping downtown alive.

Art and Scottsdale have been tied together since the first painters drifted into the area in the early 1900s, when Scottsdale was really no more than the outskirts of Phoenix. In 1973, around the time it became a separate municipality, Scottsdale launched what became a popular continuing tradition called Art Walk. On Thursdays year-round, dozens of galleries on two thoroughfares stay open into the evening.

It’s always a good
time to celebrate
military valor, and in
Combat Jump: The
Young Men Who
Led the Assault Into
Fortress Europe,
July 1943 (Harper-
Collins, 400 pages,
$24.95), Ed Ruggero tells the story of
the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment,
which made the Army’s first-ever
full-scale paratrooper invasion during
the Allied attack on Sicily in World
War II. If the invasion had failed, the
Army might have written off paratroopers
as a weapon. Ruggero follows their
story from induction to the end of the
Sicily campaign, with much help from
the men’s still-vivid recollections. Medal
of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the
Call of Duty , by Nick Del Calzo and Peter
Collier (Artisan, 272 pages, $40.00),
honors the 3,440 American servicemen
through the centuries whose bravery has
been outstanding enough to earn them
the nation’s highest military award.

The duel between the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack on March 9,
1862, remains a subject of animated controversy to this day. The disputes extend
even to the proper name for the Confederate ship (the Rebels called it Virginia )
and the outcome of the battle (although partisans of both sides claim victory, a recent attempt by one of our editors to call it a standoff was overruled by a superior).

Another controversial issue is the question of who designed the ironclad revamping of the Merrimack , originally a
wooden vessel that was sunk when the
Union abandoned the navy yard at Norfolk, Virginia. The plans were drawn by
John L. Porter, an experienced naval constructor, with advice from John Mercer
Brooke, a gifted scientist who also designed innovative ordnance. But what was the relative importance of the two men’s contributions?

As a young man, George Washington bought and sold slaves without scruple, but his experiences commanding black troops on Revolutionary battlefields began to reshape his thinking. In his final will he made provisions to free “all the Slaves which I hold in my own right,” the
only Founder to do so. In An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 416 pages, $30), Henry Wiencek tells the story of his moral transformation, weaving evidence from a wide range of sources into a compelling narrative.

Twenty years ago our colleague Walter Karp helped
inaugurate and refine this magazine’s coverage of historical travel.
Nobody was better than Walter
at discovering and describing
how the living essence of men
and women could cling to a
place long years after they themselves were gone. But Walter’s
true passion was politics. When
he died prematurely in 1989, the
Republic lost an eloquent and
tireless defender. That Republic,
as Walter saw it, was the country
of liberty-loving freeholders that
had long been threatened by
the insatiable corporate nationalism made possible by America’s rise to industrialprominence in the years after the Civil War.

“A lawyer is a mouthpiece or a shyster or a lip,” a Saturday Evening Post article explained in 1929. No lawyer likes to be called a mouthpiece or lip —Frank Sinatra’s lawyer Milton A. (“Mickey”) Rudin waved a libel suit at Barron’s after it ran a letter from him in 1979 under the headline SINATRA’S MOUTHPIECE —but of the three terms, shyster is by far the strongest.

Efforts have been made over the years to derive shyster from such diverse sources as the name of Shakespeare’s character Shylock; from an old slang sense of shy , meaning someone ofdisreputable or questionable character; from the Gaelic siostair , a barrator, in the sense of one who initiates quarrels or groundless lawsuits; and from thesurname Scheuster, referring to a particularly unscrupulous lawyer said to have operated in NewYork City in the 1840s.