A well-conceived and well-illustrated pleasure to read, combining narrative history and keepsake volume.
An overstuffed exploration of American history as related through material artifacts, from Meriwether Lewis’ compass to relics of the Space Age.
The “history of X in Y objects” trope, launched by Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects a few years ago, is already in danger of becoming a cliché. Indisputably, though, if you wanted to learn about American history through material holdings, the Smithsonian would be the place to start and end, just as the British Museum served as the trove of first and last resort for MacGregor. Smithsonian Undersecretary Kurin’s (Madcap May: Mistress of Myth, Men, and Hope, 2012, etc.) tales are abundant, so much so that it seems almost a shame to stop at a mere 101 items, fat though this book is. For instance, who knew that the original Stars and Stripes, the flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, was packed off to shelter in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during World War II because Franklin Roosevelt “feared Germany might bomb the National Mall”? Beginning 500 million years ago, Kurin celebrates the Burgess Shale fossils, which gave Stephen Jay Gould material evidence for his evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium; then writes of the bald eagle, “adopted as a national symbol…for its connotations of indomitable force”; and then turns to Clovis points, the tools that early Indian hunters used to bring down mammoths, bison and perhaps even an eagle or two. Rocketing through hundreds of years by way of a Colt revolver, the lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land” and Sitting Bull’s sketchbook (again, who knew?), Kurin closes with some of the tools of our time, from Chuck Berry’s guitar to the first Apple computer and on to galaxies far beyond our own.
A well-conceived and well-illustrated pleasure to read, combining narrative history and keepsake volume.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59420-529-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Working with records he discovered himself, Willis (English/College of William and Mary) constructs a comprehensive and methodical history of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press and of its literary and intellectual significance. From its founding with a recreational handpress in 1917 to Virginia's suicide in 1941, the Hogarth Press produced—in pamphlets, series, or in volumes with artistic illustrations and unusual bindings—474 titles constituting a history of modern letters, including poetry, fiction, history, social and political commentary, and a library of psychoanalytic writing. Though demanding, ``the dear old Press,'' as Virginia called it, was for her ``life on tap''—a source of energy, therapy, and creative freedom, a freedom she extended by publishing works by her friends in the Bloomsbury group and by their friends: Vita Sackville-West, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, Laura Riding, and John Crowe Ransom, to name a few. Between the wars, the Woolfs helped to disseminate European culture with translations, some by Virginia herself, of Rilke, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gorki, Dostoyevsky, and, of course—in the International Psychoanalytic Library—Freud and his followers. Politically, the publishers gave voice to women and to such liberal political writers as H.G. Wells and John Maynard Keynes. In an age when major commercial publishers complained of a decline in readership and increase in costs of production, the Woolfs, through their personal supervision, devoted assistants, cautious selection (they rejected Ulysses), and good business sense, produced bestsellers while their own creative lives flourished. Always a part of their domestic lives, the press survived the Blitz, economic depression, Virginia's mental collapses, political unrest, and the various demands of temperamental authors. Lucid, unbiased, tactful, Willis offers fresh perspective on English cultural life between the wars—and insight into the perennial lure of the printing press for creative writers.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8139-1361-6
Page Count: 469
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
Far more worthy than the celebrity-driven narratives of recent seasons, this is an exceptionally valuable addition to the...
An extraordinary tale of bravery under fire and the will to endure.
When the Philippines fell to Japan in 1942, hundreds of the Allied troops who survived the Bataan death march were imprisoned in the jungle camp of Cabanatuan. Some would be tortured, others executed without cause; all suffered starvation and illnesses such as “dengue fever, amoebic dysentery, bacillary dysentery, tertian malaria, cerebral malaria, typhus, typhoid.” For three years, the “ghost soldiers” of Cabanatuan lived in an earthly hell, and they would have remained there longer had an elite group of Rangers fighting with Douglas MacArthur’s invading army not planned and executed a rescue operation of tremendous emotional but doubtful strategic value—and one that could easily have ended in a costly disaster. Led by a young colonel named Henry Mucci (called “Little MacArthur” not only because he smoked a pipe incessantly but also because “he had, like the Supreme Commander, a firm grasp of the theatrics of warfare”), the Rangers penetrated deep within Japanese-controlled territory, mounted an attack on the Japanese troops and tanks surrounding the camp, and led hundreds of Allied prisoners to safety—with thousands of enemy soldiers in hot and vengeful pursuit. Amazingly, the operation cost only a handful of casualties. Justly celebrated in its time (“Every child of coming generations will know of the 6th Rangers, for a prouder story has not been written,” declared one combat correspondent of the rescue), the Cabanatuan rescue has since been all but forgotten. Sides (Stomping Grounds, 1992) restores the episode to history in a thoroughly researched and reported narrative that is careful in its attention to detail and never short of thrilling.
Far more worthy than the celebrity-driven narratives of recent seasons, this is an exceptionally valuable addition to the popular literature surrounding WWII.Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49564-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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