Books Briefly
BOOKS Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. By giving Emerson the name he privately preferred, Allen hopes to smuggle his client into the ranks of more durable binomials like Walt Whitman,...
...on John F. Kennedy...
...From films, Marilyn Monroe is here, along with Peter Lorre...
...Time and again we are told that Emerson pioneered in psychology, anticipated the spiritual concepts of such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin, shaped Nietzsche's thinking (much more space should have been given to support this claim), or grasped the Big Bang theory long before its time...
...After reading his essay, it is difficult to have patience with those that follow...
...This thick volume gives us the biographies of 572 notable Americans who died during the period of 1961 to 1965 and extends the total number in the multi-volumed D.A.B...
...The religious radical could never wholly expunge his family's Puritan heritage...
...Emerson repeatedly castigated himself for "sloth" and resolved to purify himself and produce more...
...854 pp...
...A decade in the making, The Flavor of Wisconsin extends beyond the culinary traditions (and some 400 recipes) of more than fifty ethnic groups to present a social history of Wisconsin immigrants and pioneer life, the folklore of early logging days, and the development of cheese factories, dairies, the meat packing industry, commercial fishing, and breweries...
...Joseph Blotner contributes a fine article on William Faulkner...
...Consider his early backing of Whitman, a move he knew would cost him readers among the staid, or his attempts over a decade to help the unfortunate Bronson Alcott...
...In practice Emerson was unfailingly helpful to his friends...
...On a lecture swing through the West, Emerson confessed he was appalled at the lives of Illinois settlers, who were arguably more representative of their time than the visiting New England Brahmin...
...Perhaps a biography of Emerson may be evaluated somewhat more subjectively than most books...
...There is one lovely exception: John Cole's introductory essay, "The Home Landscape," an evocative memoir of a stretch of Long Island...
...Yet Waldo Emerson shows him almost buried in work once he left the ministry for the lecture circuit...
...Emerson was a harsh judge of himself on the matter of his alleged "emotional frigidity...
...By giving Emerson the name he privately preferred, Allen hopes to smuggle his client into the ranks of more durable binomials like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson...
...He guides us through Emerson's works and days dispassionately, letting Emerson flay himself without correction...
...how we eat, and when, and with whom, reflects family and community social customs...
...Everyone has the mud up to his knees, and the coal of the country on his shirt collar...
...Emerson's generosity may have been exceeded only by his self-flagellation...
...Caught up, the reader wants to reach back through the decades and say something like, The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude...
...There is a growing number of people whose careers were in sports, films, and radio...
...Among the sports figures are Paul Waner, the great Pittsburgh Pirate outfielder, and Earl "Curly" Lambeau, football player and founder of the Green Bay Packers...
...Readers of Waldo Emerson may find themselves pulling for Emerson and wishing Allen would drop the persona of neutrality...
...The book's nostalgic flavor is enhanced by old photographs...
...How," Emerson asked, "can they have a day's leisure for anything but the work of the river...
...Unfortunately, the prose of most of Coast Alert is too stodgy, and the tone too pedantic, to keep readers interested...
...363 pp...
...The biographer does succeed in a most difficult mission: He makes the reader see Emerson as a human being, not just a foun-tainhead of apothegms...
...How can he be literary or grammatical...
...Allen points out that Emerson's "theory of friendship" made him set almost unreachable standards...
...Robert S. Maxwell writes on Philip F. LaFollette and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...Notable Americans DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY: SUPPLEMENT SEVEN, 1961-1965 edited by John A. Garraty Scribner's...
...However, Allen reveals that Emerson worried about his isolation from his fellows and lamented "the porcupine impossibility of contact with men...
...Books Briefly man beings are doing to coastal lands and waters: destruction from oil drilling, threats to pelicans and seals, futile attempts to halt beach erosion...
...Surely Emerson had strengths which make such "relevantizing" unnecessary...
...Chris Tucker (Chris Tucker teaches literature at Brookhaven College in Texas and is a frequent reviewer for the Dallas Morning News...
...He did, and you can quote him on that...
...Allen tends to overinflate Emerson's prescience...
...Joseph P. Lash writes the article on Eleanor Roosevelt...
...At Allen's hands Emerson emerges as a husband, father, and friend as well as a New England oracle...
...Nostalgia and Folklore THE FLAVOR OF WISCONSIN by Harva Hachten State Historical Society of Wisconsin...
...14.95 (available from the Society, 816 State Street, Madison, WI53706...
...Most of his contemporaries found themselves incapable of marrying the life of the mind to the world of action, but not Emerson...
...Allen's integration of Emerson the man with Emerson the philosopher may be crucial if readers are again to hang on his words as did his lyceum audiences more than a century ago...
...After two world wars, after Auschwitz and Jonestown, much of Emerson's eloquence about the self-reliant, God-directed, inconquerable human spirit seems like talk and little more...
...Allen invites the conclusion that Emerson's salvation was through work, that the constant struggle for solvency forced an otherwise retiring personality into the world...
...The result, placing Emerson's thought in the context of his life, does much to mitigate some of the harshest criticism of the man, such as criticism that he had no notion of human evil and wrote from a facile optimism or that he was emotionally aloof as a man and a thinker...
...He wrote and lectured almost constantly to free his family from debt...
...The pieces, averaging about one thousand words and written by more than 400 scholars and specialists, are uneven in quality but admirably concise...
...In radio, for example, the volume includes Norman Brokenshire, a once celebrated announcer, and sportscasters Clem McCarthy and Ted Husing...
...If Emerson pioneered in psychology, he was blind to his own inner workings on at least one important matter, the issue of work...
...What we eat," Harva Hachten contends, "tells much about our climate, soil conditions, transportation facilities, market conditions...
...Cole is a writer and editor rather than, like the rest, a scientist...
...Letters from immigrants tell of the enormous amount of time demanded for food preparation, serving, and cleaning up, particularly on the occasions of threshing and barn or church raisings, when cooking would begin before dawn...
...to 17,656...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
