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Editor’s Choice

March 2023
1min read


Peter Andrews, whose history of American newspapering anchors this month’s issue, recommends an entertaining study by Stephen Bates, who wrote the accompanying piece on the Hutchins Commission: If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes of American Journalism (Henry Holt, 318 pages, $12.95 soft cover, CODE: HHC-3 ).

Edward Sorel, who illustrated the newspaper story, has for years collaborated with his wife, Nancy Caldwell Sorel, to create a highly popular series in The Atlantic Monthly called “First Encounters.” Now it has become a very handsome, wholly engaging book chronicling sixty-five actual first meetings: an anxious Scott Fitzgerald shows off for Edith Wharton; the young Fats Waller goes at gunpoint to Al Capone’s birthday party; Sarah Bernhardt collapses in Thomas Edison’s arms; William Randolph Hearst gives Orson Welles the cold shoulder . . . ( First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings , Knopf, 144 pages, $24.00, CODE: RAN-23 ).

In his column “The Life and Times” Geoffrey C. Ward reviews No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Homefront in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 768 pages, $30.00, CODE: SAS-9 ), which follows the years from 1940 to 1945.

As Ward explains in another article in this issue, his newest collaboration with the filmmaker Ken Burns has produced both an epic-length PBS film on the history of baseball and a richly illustrated companion volume, Baseball: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, 468 pages, $60.00, CODE: RAN-24 ). The game’s stars and rogues—from King Kelly to Babe Ruth to Roger Clemens—make the contentions of baseball’s modern era seem tame by comparison.

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Stories published from "October 1994"

Authored by: The Editors

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Authored by: The Editors

A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields

Authored by: The Editors

The Evolution of the Ballpark

Authored by: The Editors

Clash of Wings
World War II in the Air

Authored by: The Editors

American Flight Jackets, Airmen & Aircraft: A History of U.S. Flyers’ Jackets from World War I to Desert Storm

Authored by: The Editors

Shot in the Heart

Authored by: The Editors

Bettmann Portable Archive

Authored by: The Editors

Pictures of the Pain
Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy

Authored by: The Editors

Music by Elliott Carter, Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage

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