The Northward Contrail

From the road

A quick look-in on a stormy morning in St. Paul, and a couple discovered items:

First, the Charles Van Doren piece from The New Yorker is available online.

Second, do not miss this excellent AV Club interview with the amazing Melissa Leo.  Her portrayal of Kay Howard on Homicide: Life on the Street not only opened doors for depicting lady characters in unglamorous, gritty, real-world roles with responsibility, but she also opened new doors for ladies with hair like mine.  For that, I'll always be grateful.

Thursday's discovered item

Jules Bergman lights up a model of the Apollo spacecraft's heat shield during ABC's coverage of the Apollo 11 re-entry and splashdown, July 24, 1969.

Wednesday's discovered item

Walter Cronkite helps Charlemane the Lion cowboy up on the Morning Show in 1954.  Puppeteer Bil Baird is beneath the table.

Tuesday's discovered item

A decorated torpedo warhead aboard the destroyer USS Hovey (DD-208), sometime during the 1930s.

Miles and miles and miles...!

I'm traveling just about all this week.  I'm leaving tomorrow for a multi-day extravaganza that will, I hope, include some fun as well as some learning.  In the meantime, though, I'm having to put out little fires this morning, and that's ratcheting up my travel angst a little bit.  Things can be somnolent when you're around, but leave town for a few days and that's when it all goes haywire.  (Wonder what happens when things go wrong at a haywire factory?  Never mind, don't answer that.) 

The funny thing is, I dread the days leading up to a trip.  But then I go, have fun in the process, and then get home and I'm sad the trip is over.  Yeah, I have trouble figuring that one out myself.

Since I won't be able to post while I'm away, through the miracle of TypePad's services, I'm stockpiling a few items that will post automatically while I'm otherwise engaged. What you'll get to see while I'm away are some selections from the weirdness and surrealism I've accumulated through the years -- pictures I've found, pictures I've taken, and just odd stuff I've come across and saved.  For instance, here's a preview of the kind of thing you'll see -- and it's a special anniversary edition, too:

:: I'm always one who learns about things a week too late, so it's only this morning that I found out that in last week's edition of The New Yorker, Charles Van Doren finally broke his silence about his role in the quiz-show scandal.  If you can't find it on the newsstands, go to a library and read it there, or beg to borrow a friend's copy. (The New Yorker doesn't have the article available online.)

Three books: Potluck

This week's series wheezes to a halt today with some of my favorite books that just didn't fit into any other category we covered this week. 

If you're a reader of The Onion, you probably know already about Our Dumb Century, the book produced by its staff in 1999 that presented the front pages of issues of The Onion at various points throughout history.  Not only did I laugh myself sick at the twisted retellings (and enhancements) of history, but what made the jokes even better was the attention to detail.  The phony front pages are spitting images of how newspapers looked in each era, right down to the typefaces, design elements, grammar and punctuation.  It's uncanny.  Here you can find out the real first words that were spoken on the Moon, that the Cuban Missile Crisis was merely an elaborate prank played on President Kennedy by Allen Funt for "Candid Camera," and other facts that had been lost to history.

Georgia sportswriter Lewis Grizzard became a celebrity through his humorous newspaper columns and hilarious (and sometimes bawdy) stand-up comedy routines.  He was the author of several books, and while some of them were compilations of his columns, others were original works on a single theme, some of which were really touching (exploring his troubled relationship with his father in My Daddy Was a Pistol and I'm a Son of a Gun, his checkered luck as a husband in If Love Were Oil, I'd Be About a Quart Low, and so forth).  However, I don't believe any work of his resonated as well with me as did If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground.  It's the story of his coming of age as a newspaperman: his first childhood dabblings in journalism, his training at the University of Georgia and his first newspaper jobs, his arrival as a big-city newspaperman, and his brief stint in Chicago, during which he longed to return to Georgia...which he did.  It's special to me because, as a Southern girl who had to learn to live in South Florida (which might as well be New York with palm trees), I remember spending so much time there yearning to be back where I came from...which, eventually, I was able to do.   Anyway, Grizzard doesn't abandon his wit in this book (and there are several hilarious stories he spins along the way), but it's still a thoughtful look back at his reporting youth.

I'm a big fan of trivia, factoids, hidden information, obscurities and so on -- stuff you're not supposed to know.  So when I discovered William Poundstone's Big Secrets on the bookmobile in my later pre-teen years, I couldn't get enough of it.  Big Secrets spawned two additional volumes  (Bigger Secrets and Biggest Secrets), and all of them have the ability to make you sit for hours and read away.  Yeah, in the age of the Interwebs, when rumors and such can be made and debunked at the speed of light, the need for these kinds of books may not be what it once was (and, granted, some of the information in the Big Secrets volumes is awful dated by now), but for those of us whose brains are of a previous generation, it's compelling.  From the mysteries of what makes Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coca-Cola taste the way they do, reverse-engineering the recipe for Mrs. Fields' cookies, backwards-masking messages that were allegedly hidden in rock songs, myths and facts about porno films that allegedly feature famous movie stars...to just about anything else (the myth that if you stare at Ritz crackers that are arranged a certain way,you'll see the word "Sex" spelled out in the little holes in the crackers; the mystery behind the Dr. Bronner's soap label, and so on), Poundstone's three books are a great way to spend hours you didn't even know you had.

Honorable mentions: Dave Barry Slept Here by Dave Barry (a fractured history of the United States that will never let you look at Oct. 8 the same way again); Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones (the Warner Bros. animator's merry memoir); Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz (a look at why the Civil War still grips the Southern imagination to the present day); Supercarrier by George Wilson (the Washington Post defense correspondent goes on deployment to tell about life aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy); Down with the Old Canoe by Steven Biel (examines how the Titanic disaster has gripped the public imagination since; alas, it was written before the James Cameron mega-film came to pass).

Three books: Media

Today I'll discuss three books about the media -- and you'll notice that most of them deal with the subject in a historical perspective.  (What did you expect from a historian, anyway?  Yeah, I teach communications, but my first love is history.)

Jeff Kisseloff's The Box is an oral history of television from 1920 through 1961 -- essentially from its earliest stirrings through television's emergence as America's medium of choice (and Newton Minow's pronouncement that television had become a "vast wasteland").  Through years of effort, Kisseloff tracked down engineers, inventors, technicians, announcers, directors, performers and anyone else he could find who played a role in the birth of American television.  Some of it's bawdy, some of it's contentious, but all of it is interesting.  It's all here, from the early technicians who used to launch paper airplanes while working on the antennas atop New York's skyscrapers, through the birth of commercial television in 1941 and the war effort, the short but inventive life of the "Chicago School" of programming, through live drama and the quiz show scandals.  A wonderful book for a rainy afternoon, full of little stories that bear repeating.

Out Of Thin Air is the professional memoir of NBC News impresario Reuven Frank, and in it he describes the evolution of televised news from the 1948 political conventions through the 1980s, and his role in it.  In the process, you essentially get a history of NBC's television news division, and what it was like from the inside -- how the big events were covered, the internal struggles and pressures, how they kept both the executives satisfied and the reporters (who, in the new medium, were becoming celebrities themselves) happy, the editorial decisions (one case in point is Frank's recollection of how they decided to handle the famous film of the point-blank execution in Saigon -- whether to show it, how much of it to show, and so forth).  What sets Out Of Thin Air apart from works by his contemporaries, like Don Hewitt and Fred Friendly, is that Frank's tone is more understated; he was a more understated person.  He is no less upset than Friendly by what eventually became of the division he loved, and what the networks did to television news, but his tone is more of sadness and lament rather than Friendly's more vocal dissent. 

For what seems like forever, Edward R. Murrow has been regarded as the patron saint of broadcast news, to the point of a "cult of Murrow."  The 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck added to the shine in recounting Murrow's battle against Senator Joe McCarthy.  But while Murrow was indeed a titan, he was also a human being.  The 1980s brought us two excellent biographies of Murrow: the scholarly, densely-detailed Murrow: His Life and Times by Ann Sperber and Edward R. Murrow: An American Original by Joseph Persico.  They are both excellent, but I give my personal nod to Persico's volume because, to me at least, it succeeds a little more in bringing its subject back to life.  That's no slight to Sperber, who paints a broad, context-filled canvas against which she tells Murrow's story.  But Persico succeeds a little better in telling Murrow's life through "the little picture."  You can't go wrong with either book, and they beautifully complement each other, but my personal nod is to Joe Persico's little book.

Honorable mentions: This Just In by Bob Schieffer (a whimsical memoir by the CBS newsman); The Murrow Boys by Lynne Cloud and Stanley Olson (the story of Murrow's wartime CBS reporting team, and their varied fortunes); Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control by Fred Friendly (the aforementioned volume by Ed Murrow's collaborator, partly a history and partly a scathing critique of what business pressures did to news departments); On Her Trail by John Dickerson (the life story of one of the first women to be a network television correspondent, told by one of her sons -- a complex, wonderful book); JFK: Breaking the News by Hugh Aynesworth (the account of a Dallas newspaper reporter who covered the Kennedy assassination from the moment it happened on, and his encounters with various figures in the investigation and subsequent proceedings; a good book that shows the process through which a reporter digs through a big story); Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis (a history of broadcasting's birth, focusing on three of its principals and their varied fortunes); I'll Sleep When I'm Dead by Crystal Zevon (an unvarnished oral history of musician Warren Zevon, told by those who knew him best).

For tomorrow, a potluck version of "Three Books," on books that didn't fit neatly into any of these categories.

Three books: Sports

Today's installment of "Three Books" deals with the human drama of athletic competition (sorry, channeling Jim McKay for a moment...well, actually, I'm never sorry to channel the great Mr. McKay, come to think of it).  As before, this list is limited by the books I've actually read, and limited by my preferences.  Still, if you pick up any of these books, I think you won't be disappointed.

Seasons in Hell by Mike Shropshire was the first sports book that had me rolling on the floor laughing until I cried.  Shropshire had the dubious fortune of covering the Texas Rangers for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and in Seasons in Hell he covers the first few seasons after the Rangers (formerly the expansion Washington Senators) arrived in Texas.  The Rangers were struggling, full of colorful and sometimes strange characters, and Shropshire's weary, jaundiced style captures every bit of the absurdity of covering a team full of strange characters as it wallows in the American League's basement.  Shropshire's been likened to the great Dr. Thompson in the way he writes, and I'll agree there's more than a little gonzo in Seasons in Hell. 

While Shropshire's book captures the absurd, at the other end of the spectrum is A Life At Full Throttle by Janet Guthrie.  We don't think twice about women in high-profile motorsports in this age of Danica Patrick, but without Janet Guthrie there probably wouldn't have been a Danica Patrick or a Sarah Fisher.  When Janet Guthrie raced at the 1977 Indy 500, it was truly a big thing, and it came not without a lot of struggle.  Some viewed her as an unwanted meddler, a "lady driver" who wasn't competent to race, and chanted obscenities at her.  Others, though, viewed her alongside her friend Billie Jean King as someone who was opening new possibilities for women, showing that a woman could do what the boys could, and do it competently.  (That wasn't all; Janet Guthrie was also a skilled pilot and engineer who had hoped to become an astronaut...that hope was dashed, though, for the obvious reason considering the times.)

A Life At Full Throttle is more than a sports book, though; it easily stands on its own as literature, and it has a class and dignity matching that of its author.  Guthrie writes sensitively and eloquently about not only what she did, but the emotion behind it, as she describes working her way up through different classes of motorsport competition up to Indy cars and a few NASCAR seasons (remember the Kelly Girl Laguna?).  It's truly a beautiful book.

While A Life At Full Throttle is poetic at times, Cheating by Tom Jensen takes the covers off what NASCAR teams will do in the name of gaining a competitive edge.  Starting with the original "Strictly Stock" premise, Jensen describes how the technology of stock car racing changed...and how, as the technology changed, mechanics, crew chiefs and owners endlessly tried to find an edge on the other guy and not get caught.  The often-told tales of people like Smokey Yunick (he of "It Didn't Say You Couldn't" philosophy) are in here, along with folks like Junior Johnson and his "banana car," Gary Nelson, and so forth on up through today's owners and crew chiefs like Ray Evernham (with particular emphasis on the "T-Rex" Monte Carlo that Evernham oversaw for Jeff Gordon).  The book also examines how NASCAR's inspection system, and its connected penalty system, has changed over the years.  Though it's now a bit outdated in these days of the "Car of Tomorrow," Cheating is still an illuminative look inside a topic that not many people in the know are willing to talk openly about.

Honorable mentions: October 1964 by David Halberstam (the events leading up to the 1964 World Series, contrasting its two teams and how they evolved after the sport's integration); The Best Damn Garage in Town by Smokey Yunick (Smokey's life and adventures, told in a manner as unvarnished as the man himself, and endlessly entertaining); Cannonball! by Brock Yates (the real story behind the famous "Cannonball Run" that was immortalized in the underwhelming Burt Reynolds/Hal Needham movie); Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy (the story of the Dodgers legend); The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney (a look at the New York Yankees of the 1990s and the championship run that ended in 2001); Winning Is Not Enough by Sir Jackie Stewart (an elegant, sensitive memoir by the legendary Formula One racer).

Tomorrow, my picks in books about the media.

Three books: History

Today, I'm continuing the series on "three books" with my top picks in the field of history.  Again, the ground rules: These are books I picked from those I've read (or with which I have sufficient familiarity) among those in my collection.  As a result, they're limited by my areas of interest.  For instance, you'll notice that today's list is heavily biased towards relatively modern American history.  Well, that's where my interests lie, and always have.  I haven't read enough outside that field to talk with confidence about books from other areas.

Anyhow, enough talk, eh?  Get to game.

Perhaps my favorite book in the historical field -- and it sounds strange to use the word "favorite" when the subject is so morbid, but it's one of the most well-crafted books I've ever read -- is one that was written not long after the event it covered.  William Manchester's The Death of a President was published in 1967 after protracted controversy between Manchester and the Kennedy family.  Manchester, who had known John F. Kennedy and had written a very flattering book about him (Portrait of a President) had been commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy to write "the" book about her husband's assassination, and that book would be the one with the family's blessing.  I'll leave it to others to tell the story of the dispute that broke out (Manchester himself wrote about it in a book called Controversy and Other Essays, and in an article that tailed the Look magazine serialization; there was also a book called The Manchester Affair by John Corry that explored the controversy).

Why does this book compel me?  I have never read another book that so completely immersed me in an event in such detail, almost like a time machine in book form.  You literally feel like you're sitting there, in the moment, and though I was born a decade after the event, it's like I can see the detail, gauge the emotion, and feel the moment as if I were there.  It's not an absolutely complete account, of course, and there are some detail errors.  Manchester never veils his admiration of the Kennedys, and there's an amount of heavy-handedness in his portrayal of Lyndon Johnson and his circle.  (And those who disagree with the Warren Commission's findings will be disappointed; this isn't a book that sees a conspiracy.)  Still, the rich detail of the book, the breadth of Manchester's interviews and sources, and the way Manchester weaves it all together keeps me coming back.  Some folks think it's way overwritten, some folks believe it's fiction, but by sheer amount of detail, this is my kind of book.  (Highly recommended is the 1988 reissue, which features an introductory essay by Manchester in which he reflects on the controversy.)

What William Manchester did for the Kennedy assassination, James Swanson did for Lincoln's assassination with Manhunt, turning a familiar story into a historical work that reads like literature.  Any schoolkid knows what's going to happen and how the story ends, but Swanson (whose interest in Lincoln's assassination dates from his own schoolboy days) tells it anew with rich detail and moment-by-moment reconstruction.  Some passages in the book are downright haunting; there were nights when I treated Manhunt as bedtime reading, and wished I hadn't once the lights were out.  It's as good as any novel I've read, and all the more remarkable considering it's a story that's been told countless times. 

How can you take a topic as broad (or, to some, as dull) as the postwar United States Navy, capture its technological, cultural and political evolution, and make it interesting?  Michael Isenberg did it in Shield of the Republic, which tells the story of the Navy from the end of World War II through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and everything in between: the escalating tensions with the Soviet Union, the battle between the Navy and the Air Force over strategic air power, the war in Korea and the ongoing crises in the Far East, successive political administrations and how the Navy's top brass reacted to successive administrations' policies, the struggles to adopt and adapt new technologies (many of which often failed to work as advertised, but some of which -- like the nuclear-powered submarine and the Polaris missile -- changed the face of warfare). 

Isenberg doesn't pay attention only to the broad picture that you see in too many other books about the armed services.  Throughout the book, he tells the stories of how the Navy was changing at the personal and social level -- about the feelings in the enlisted ranks, about racial integration in the Navy, about the slow evolution of the role of women, and looks at the Navy as a society in itself.   He does all this with wit, and some parts of Shield of the Republic are a particular delight to read.   This book may be a little difficult to find, but it's worth it.  (I seem to recall that Shield of the Republic was the first volume of a planned multi-volume history of the modern United States Navy; I haven't heard anything about a sequel, but I hope that it will happen yet.)

Honorable mentions: Mayday and The Crisis Years by Michael Beschloss (examines Khrushchev's relationships with Eisenhower and Kennedy, respectively); Divided Highways by Tom Lewis (a history of the Interstate Highway system); The Fifties by David Halberstam (a history of the decade in America, told through stories of some of its most famous personalities, events and innovations); Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger (want to know how the airlines got the way they did?  Read this).

Tomorrow, my picks in books about sports.
 

This week: three books

With a new week comes something I haven't tried before: a theme for the week's posts.  And given that intellectual-property theft is the sincerest form of productivity, I'm ripping this week's theme off from a series featured on All Things Considered.  In this series, a prominent literary figure is asked to list three books on a given theme that he or she thinks are really good.  It's a neat idea, and since I know a good idea when I see it, I'm going to spend this week in a five-part ripoff of NPR's neat idea.  Isn't it neat having your own blog?  Of course it is.

Before we begin, the ground rules: These books are selected by me, and represent my own favorites.  I've deliberately chosen only books with which I have firsthand experience, and that I've read all the way through (or read the majority of, enough of to have made a good assessment).  My selections, and my themes, are limited by my interests, the books in my library, and my personal predilections, preferences and prejudices.  It's an entirely subjective list, and I make no claims that it's unbiased or objective or the bottom line on anything except books that have served me well and that I'd recommend to friends as good reads.  So there.

(One more note: I've deliberately avoided installing hyperlinks to these books at any of the online bookstores.  My reason?  I'd rather you buy them at the bookstore, online or brick-and-mortar, of your own preference.  I know I could set up an affiliate account with any of the online bookstores, but it's a bit more of a hassle than I'd like to engage in right now.  Anyhow, you should be able to buy most, if not all, of these books from any of the usual suspects, or through searches for used/out-of-print books.)

And now to the first day's list.  Given that we're currently observing the 39th anniversary of a particular historic event, I thought I'd launch (tee hee!) this series with three particularly good books about the history of human spaceflight -- in particular, the race to the moon. 

Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon caused quite a stir when it came out in 1994 because it was an accessible, thorough, and fun-to-read account of the lunar voyages of Apollo.  Chaikin interviewed all the Apollo astronauts he could, including some who were a bit reclusive, and manages to capture not only the great technological advances but also the humanity of the voyagers and those who supported them.  If you've seen the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, you've seen a series that was based on Chaikin's book.  It's a fun read, well-researched, and it's stood for over a decade as perhaps the best first stop for anyone interested in the subject.  (If you can find it, there's also a large-format, three-volume edition with hundreds of color photographs, and it makes a good thing even better.)

While Chaikin's book retells the side of Apollo known by most, Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox tells the story of the engineering and technical side of Apollo.  The astronauts and their voyages are really in the background, for Murray and Cox tell the story of how the machines were designed, how the software was written, how Mission Control came into being, how the flight rules were developed, and so on -- the whole story of the enterprise that made it happen.  Lest you think this would make for a dry volume filled with jargon, Murray and Cox write in an engaging style that's filled with illustration and anecdote, making technical concepts accessible to the lay reader.  Read Chaikin for the story of the voyages, and read Murray and Cox for the even more amazing backstory.  These books complement each other very well.

Finally, Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins is, for my money, the best book ever written by a space explorer -- and given that some of the astronauts' memoirs are very good, that's saying a lot.  What's even more remarkable is that Collins' memoir was first published in 1973, and even with the passage of time it's still considered one of the best.  The Apollo 11 crew wasn't known for being particularly effervescent or dynamic, but Michael Collins possessed a poet's eye and a sly wit, and he put those to work in recounting his Air Force career and his NASA days in this book.  Collins tells the tales of his spacefaring days with amusement, bemusement and an underlying sense of wonder about it all, and the book reads like a neighbor telling you about some of the incredible things he's experienced.  He flew to the moon, yes, but you also find that Collins is a man who loved tending his roses and genuinely doesn't understand why people want autographs.  ("What do they do with them?" he's been known to ask.)

Honorable mentions: The All-American Boys by Walt Cunningham (an astronaut memoir that told the stories behind the "all-American" image); First Man by James Hansen (an excellent, authorized biography of Neil Armstrong); ...the Heavens and the Earth by James MacDougall (a sweeping history of the Space Age's political backstory); This New Ocean by William E. Burrows (an accessible general overview of human space exploration, providing some great context); Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane (does for the Shuttle program what The All-American Boys did for the previous generation's astronauts); Moon Dust by Andrew Smith (tells the human stories of the Apollo astronauts three decades later); and, of course, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (need I say more?).

Tomorrow, my picks in books about history.