July 2009 Acquisitions

Books:
Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, 1984.
Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo, Joker, 2008.
Buenos Dias, Bebe!/ Good Morning, Baby!, 2004.
Diahann Carroll, The Legs Are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying, and Other Things I Learned the Hard Way, 2008.
Stephen L. Carter, Palace Council, 2009.
John Bassett McCleary, The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s, 2004.
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, 2002.
Christie Mellor, The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting, 2004.
Patrick Neely, Gina Neely, and Paula Disbrowe, Down Home with the Neelys: A Southern Family Cookbook, 2009.
Mary and Vincent Price, Come into the Kitchen Cook Book: A Collector's Treasury of America's Great Recipes, 1969.
Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War: A Study in the Growth of Presidential Power, 1967.
Jessica Seinfeld, Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, 2007.
Dr. Seuss, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?, 1970, 1996.
Julius Shulman, Photographing Architecture and Interiors, 1962, 2000.
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, 1986.
Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950, 2003.
Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era, 1986.
Greg Ward, The Rough Guide to Hawaii, 2007.
Alex Wright, The Imagineering Field Guide to Disneyland, 2008.

DVDs:
Extras: The Complete First Season, 2005.
Extras: The Complete Second Season, 2007.
Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks, 2007.
Made in U.S.A, 1966.
Myra Breckinridge, 1970.
Peanuts: 1960's Collection, 2009.
Schoolhouse Rock!: Special 30th Anniversary Edition, 2002.
The Sergio Leone Anthology, 2007.
2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, 1967.

That’s Amazing!

"There is something of the friendly alien about him, the man from space for whom everything--every flower, every doughnut, every doorknob--is new and miraculous. He is famous for stating the obvious, but the obvious things are exactly those things that we forget how to see."

Robert Lloyd in the Los Angeles Times praises television host Huell Howser.

Boxed Out

"And even the casual fan won't notice that he's speaking a kind of code when he says, Jeff Francoeur went four-for-four. For this we owe at least a tip of the cap to an Englishman eager to champion his new homeland's answer to cricket as printed a 150 years ago this summer."

Mike Pesca of NPR's Morning Edition reports on the sesquicentennial of the baseball box score and its innovator, Henry Chadwick.

Hecho en Venice

"Which comes back to the essential question: Why this film of all films? If fans are looking for first-rate casts falling into twisted pictures that create their own reality, why not the Coens' even weirder 'The Hudsucker Proxy' or David O. Russell's 'I (Heart) Huckabees' or Richard Kelly's 'Donnie Darko'?
"To festival co-founder Will Russell, reached on a bus between fests in Seattle and Portland, a lot of it comes down to bowling. 'I think bowling has a lot to do with tying the fest together.'"

Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times interviews the director of the new documentary The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans.

Dancing about Architecture

"If they were to disappear entirely, people would still find out about new music, after all, and criticism would doubtless live on, online and in general-interest publications. It's the more costly reporting that would be harder to find, and this shouldn't be taken lightly."

Jonah Weiner in Slate diagnoses why music magazines are in decline.

The Legend of Pat Brown

"History's judgments often need to ferment; Brown is generally acknowledged now as one of the state's greatest governors, but that appellation came with time.
"In 1966, after all, he was booted from office by Reagan in a landslide. So perhaps views of this era, too, will be revised upward.
"But it is harder to imagine that views of government, pummeled over the course of four decades, will reverse any time soon."

Cathleen Decker in the Los Angeles Times laments the loss of Pat Brown's California.

Equality of Opportunity

"There are, in short, three ways to become a U.S. citizen--to be born on U.S. soil, to U.S. citizens or foreign nationals; to be born to one or more U.S. citizen parents abroad; and to be born a foreign national, but to become a citizen of the U.S. by immigration to the U.S. and naturalization according to U.S. law.
"The Constitution excludes the third category of American citizens--naturalized immigrants--from ever being eligible to become president of the United States (or vice-president, inasmuch as the vice-president, who might inherit the office, must meet all of the qualifications of a president)."

Michael Lind in Salon calls for a constitutional amendment to let naturalized citizens serve as president.

Lincoln Logged

In The New Republic, Sean Wilentz reviews Harold Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 and The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Ronald C. White, Jr.'s A. Lincoln: A Biography, Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Donald Yacovone's Lincoln on Race & Slavery, and John Stauffer's Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. And Kaplan, Gates, and Stauffer (along with Michael Kazin) respond.

How You Gonna Get Respect?

"According to Terry and his ilk, what followed was a rapidly expanding, systematic program of ritual sacrifice and atonal music, designed to precipitate the apocalypse through the summoning of a Celtic death god named Samhain. Wyllie’s account is somewhat more prosaic and farcical, following the Process Church’s random global peregrinations, incoherent channeled theology (which gave equal billing to Satan, Lucifer, Christ and Jehovah) and increasingly totalitarian bureaucratic hierarchy from the point of view of an overworked acolyte, de Grimston, who believed he was being guided along a path of spiritual evolution by an incarnate goddess, or at least a secret Sufi master."

Doug Harvey in the LA Weekly reviews Timothy Wyllie and Adam Parfrey's Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

Game Theory

"But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?
"The changes in Jay-Z's approach over the years suggest that he recognizes the realist and liberal logic... but is sorely tempted by the neo-conservative impulse."

Marc Lynch of Foreign Policy compares American foreign relations with the beef between Jay-Z and the Game.

A Peculiar Historian

"'He was really a pioneer, demolishing the magnolia and mint juleps view of slavery,' said Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia. 'And the Reconstruction book was in the same revisionist mode, sweeping away myths. Among serious history scholars, nobody is going to go back before Stampp.'"

Bruce Webber in The New York Times writes an obituary for Kenneth M. Stampp.

Lady Chatterley's Verdict

"For many decades, the courts upheld racial segregation; then, suddenly, they didn’t. For many decades, the courts let the Post Office decide which books people could read; then, suddenly, they didn’t. In both cases, and many others that could be cited, the laws hadn’t changed; society did. And the courts responded accordingly."

Fred Kaplan in The New York Times notes the fiftieth anniversary of a landmark anti-censorship case.

"Well, I've Sold The Paper To The Chinese"

"Oh, and in accordance with the contractual terms of the buy-out, let me remind you all that Yu Wan Mei Fish Time is the best Fish Time, perfect eating for you and me and so delicious. That is all.鱼"

From The Onion.

The Dark Side of the Moon

"The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean—O.K. if I add 'godlike'?—quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon."

Tom Wolfe in The New York Times explains why the moon landing forty years ago was the beginning of the end rather than the end of the beginning.

In Search of the Lost Chord

"Dr. Brown deduces that another George—George Martin, the Beatles producer—also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in the literature about the song to date, which is one reason why Dr. Brown’s findings garnered international attention. He laughs that he may be the only mathematician ever to be published in Guitar Player magazine."

Ryan McNutt in a 2008 ScienceDaily article reports on efforts by a Canadian math professor to figure out the beginning to the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night."

Something Might Be Gaining on You

"One handed-down story said he would routinely order his outfielders to abandon their positions or have them sit idly in the grass while he struck out—and thoroughly humiliated—opposing batters. Another piece of folklore said his fastball was so zippy it disappeared in flight, his control so precise he could knock the ash off a teammate’s cigarette with a pitched ball. In yet another tale, Paige supposedly entered a game in relief with a spare baseball stashed in his pocket, went into his windup and, somehow, managed to pick off two base runners and strike out the man at the plate before anyone figured out what had happened. Talk about your 1-2-3 innings!"

In The New York Times, Jonathan Eig reviews Larry Tye's Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.

And That's the Way He Was

"Yet he was a reluctant star. He was genuinely perplexed when people rushed to see him rather than the politicians he was covering, and even more astonished by the repeated suggestions that he run for office himself. He saw himself as an old-fashioned newsman—his title was managing editor of the 'CBS Evening News'—and so did his audience."

Douglas Martin in The New York Times reports the death of Walter Cronkite.

Todd Gitlin in The New Republic writes an appreciation.

Strike Out

"Baseball players now tend to come in two groups. There are Latino players, scouted before they are 10, signed into baseball academies before their sweet 16 and imported along a global pipeline until they are cast aside or make the majors. Then there are white players, who largely come from suburban backgrounds and college programs. Baseball--in the US context--has gone country club. Like golf and tennis, or their hemp-addled cousins in the X Games, they are sports that require serious bank for admission. In addition, you need parents with the leisure time to be involved. These sports just don't fit the reality for today's working families, black or white."

Dave Zirin in The Nation frets about the lack of African-American players in baseball.

One-Shot Shulman

"Shulman had 'a profound effect on the writing and teaching of architectural history and understanding architecture, especially Southern California modernism,' said Thomas Hines, UCLA professor emeritus of architecture and urban design. And Newsweek magazine's Cathleen McGuigan wrote that some of Shulman's photographs of modern glass houses in Palm Springs and Los Angeles 'are so redolent of the era in which they were built you can practically hear the Sinatra tunes wafting in the air and the ice clinking in the cocktail glasses.'"

Claudia Luther in the Los Angeles Times writes an obit for Julius Shulman, real-estate photographer.

"He's 20 and He Hates"

"It was this cosmic love-in that nearly got Antonioni charged under the Mann Act, which prohibits the transport of people across state lines for prostitution and 'immoral purposes.' In fact, the entire production, as the critic J. Hoberman recounted in The Dream Life, his epic cultural history of the '60s, was the target of much federal snooping, with rumors swirling that Antonioni was planning a flag-burning scene and intended to shoot on the site of Robert Kennedy's assassination. (Neither proved true, though a rippling American flag atop the Mobil Oil building in downtown Los Angeles does feature prominently in one startling shot.)"

Dennis Lim in Slate revisits Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 movie, Zabriskie Point.

Status Display Anxiety

"In the same car is another, older woman—do men not read anymore? (Seinfeld’s Jerry, defensively: “I read.” Elaine: “Books, Jerry”)—holding up a Kindle at an angle to catch the light. Unless you were an elf camped on her shoulder, what she was reading was hoarded from view, an anonymous block of pixels on a screen, making it impossible to identify its content and to surmise the state of her inner being, erotic proclivities, and intellectual caliber. She might be reading Alice Munro, patron saint of short-story writers, or some James Patterson sack of chicken feed—how dare she disguise her download from our prying eyes! And reading an e-book on an iPhone, that’s truly unsporting. It goes the other way as well. How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?"

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair wonders how in the digital age we will show off our our "cultural snobbery or keen connoisseurship (take your pick, depending on the degree of pretentious wankery you attribute to others)."

Shooting the Moon

"On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin overshot their planned landing point and nearly ran out of fuel as they dodged boulders and false alarms from their computerized dashboard, looking for a place to come down. They made it with 17 seconds to spare. That night the Soviets’ unmanned Luna 15 spacecraft, which they hoped would scoop up rock samples and beat Apollo 11 home, crash-landed into another part of the moon, while the two Americans, having completed their walk around Tranquility Base, slept in the lunar module."

As the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing approaches, Thomas Mallon reviews Craig Nelson's Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon and Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl's Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences in The New York Times.

Can This Marriage Thing Be Saved?

"The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it—given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized—simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it? If so, we might as well hold the wake now: there probably aren't many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness."

Caitlin Flanagan in Time ponders the current state of marriage.

Katha Pollitt responds in The Nation.

Thrill or Trick?

"Yet most of my habits haven't changed. I've bought disposable plastic organizers from a big-box store and partaken of the overpriced Whole Foods salad bar. I've chosen the cheapest brand of eggs and cereal at the grocery store. And while I've tried on lovely, pricy alternatives to H&M for my summer wardrobe, I've stopped just before purchasing out of sheer short-term economic preservation. When it's convenient, I've reverted to cheap. If you can't even get the converted to testify, where does that put your movement?"

In The American Prospect, Noreen Malone wrestles with the message of Ellen Ruppel Shell's Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.

Stupendous Man

"Having made the basic analogy between Puritan New England and ancient Israel, some extended the comparison even further, to speculate about the perhaps decisive place of the American colonies in sacred history. In Calvinist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, Israel was usually portrayed as a nation chosen by God to preserve his law until His Son arrived to purify and promulgate it throughout the world. Israel was thus a divine crucible and a providential conduit for the gospels. And so, it seemed, was America--a nation chosen by God to proclaim the repristinized Christianity of the Protestant Reformation to all peoples."

On the eve of John Calvin's five hundredth birthday, Damon Linker in The New Republic traces the theologian's impact on American ideology.

God Wants You to Be Rich?

"Milmon Harrison, author of Righteous Riches, calls this a 'prosperity narrative' and says it's as American as apple pie. Shaping these narratives, he says, is the entitlement mentality—from Winthrop's 'city upon a hill' sermon and John O'Sullivan's manifest destiny to the secular but similarly strong faith in Wall Street as 'too big to fail.' A laughable example was New Thought mystic Charles Fillmore's rendition of Psalm 23. It began: 'The Lord is my banker; my credit is good.' This talk of holy sinecure as a birthright is Osteen-ism at its most sophomoric. (He and his wife would not be held down by the foundation-cracked hovel of their more naive years! They got the full asking price for their townhouse!)"

Clint Rainey in Slate wonders how the recession will affect proponents of "the Prosperity Gospel."

And in the December issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin argues that these beliefs helped cause the recession itself.

Walk This Way

"Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is 'shuffle', where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down 'rewind' and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured."

Scott Campbell, a thirteen-year-old British boy, reviews a thirty-year-old Sony Walkman for the BBC.

A Simple Desultory Philippic

"McNamara was the archetype of a new wave of management specialists on the rise in Washington during the 1960s. He surrounded himself with a bevy of analysts who became known as his 'whiz kids,' and they played a prominent role in drafting the classified 'Pentagon Papers,' an exhaustive history of the U.S. entry into Vietnam that McNamara secretly commissioned in 1967.
"Brimming with self-confidence, McNamara transformed the Defense Department into the giant military and civilian fiefdom it remains today. Among his creations were the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense Supply Agency, the predecessor of the massive Defense Logistics Agency.
"But it was Vietnam that defined him, from his assertive oversight of the first contingents of Green Beret advisors sent by the Kennedy administration to South Vietnam in 1961 to his backstage qualms that led Lyndon Johnson to replace him as Defense secretary."

In the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Braun writes an obituary for Robert S. McNamara.

"We Found That Rather Attractive"

"In 1965, Mr. Klein was hired by the Rolling Stones’ young manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, to handle the band’s business affairs. With his working-class New Jersey accent and aggressive, direct negotiating style, Mr. Klein convinced the Stones, as he would many other musicians, that he would be a powerful advocate."

Ben Sisario writes an obit for Allen Klein in The New York Times.

I'd Lurk in the Baddest Part of Town

"In fact, there is generally too much killing here. Dillinger's gang is responsible for the deaths of a dozen people, but the film makes it seem like many multiples of that number. During the entire yearlong spree between the summer of 1933 and summer 1934, Dillinger himself probably murdered just one man, but in Public Enemies, he is a killing machine."

Elliott J. Gorn in Slate checks the accuracy of Public Enemies.

When That New Party Army Came Marching Right Up the Stairs

"President Obama, speaking at Cairo University last month, described his 'unyielding' belief that various rights espoused by the founders, including free speech, representative government, and respect for property, deserve global support because they are 'not just American ideas.' In fact, they never were."

Adam Freedman in The New York Times connects the Declaration of Independence to English legal traditions.

Don't Leave Home without Him

"As Malden recalled in 1991 in The Times, Corridan 'was a Jesuit priest who taught law to the longshoremen. . . . The scene in the hold of the ship, he wrote at least 80% of that speech. A man came to him and said, "Father John, I can't get a chit to go to work. Now I haven't gotten a chit in two months." He says, "You go in there and demand a chit even if you take it out of his hands. . . ." And the man did, and two days later he was found in the East River,' nearly dead.
"The man survived, but the next morning Corridan stood on a box on the dock and delivered the sermon that inspired Budd Schulberg's screenplay.
"'Some people think the crucifixion only took place on Calvary. They better wise up,' Malden's priest says in the film. 'Every time the mob puts the crusher on a good man, tries to stop him from doing his duty as a citizen, it's a crucifixion.'"

Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times writes an obit for Karl Malden.

Throwing Stones

"In The Philip Johnson Tapes, Johnson recounts that in the mid-1950s, he invited Mies, with whom he was collaborating on the Seagram Building, for an overnight visit. At 10:30 in the evening, Mies emerged from the nearby guesthouse and told his host that he wanted to leave. Johnson thought he was joking. 'I don't think you understood,' responded Mies. 'I'm not staying in this house another minute, and you've got to find me a place to stay.' What had upset the German architect? 'I just think he felt that my bad copy of his work was extremely unpleasant,' Johnson later speculated."

In honor of the building's sixtieth anniversary Witold Rybczynski in Slate visits Philip Johnson's Glass House.

Oh Canada

"In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution—from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States."

To commemorate Canada Day in The New York Times, eleven expatriates write about what they long for.