THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader May We Recommend . . . Three new books on the Great War. Britain's Last Tommies: Final Memories From Soldiers of the 1914-18 War In Their Own Words by Richard Van Emden (Pen &...
...In Mobility: America's Transportation Mess and How to Fix It by Joseph M. Giglio (Hudson Institute, 301 pp., $18.95) the world's least rewarding subject for light reading is transformed by a series of imaginative, sensible, and politically palatable proposals to deal with the intractable problems of financing the highway system, road improvement, bridges, mass transit, and public-private partnerships...
...Caspar David Friedrich by Werner Hofmann (Thames & Hudson, 304 pp., $75) is the first major study in a generation of Germany's greatest painter of the Romantic era...
...This ran under a headline: "Prince of Wales Bashes Boy's Brains Out With Bludgeon.'' Bull was, it is true, fired...
...There are almost equally zany tales from this book—evocative of old-time journalism (seen as a sort of adjunct to show business and far from a "profession'') and beautiful, maddening, melancholic, and crazy Paris...
...Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War by Neil Hanson (Knopf, 496 pp., $28.95...
...And finally, three miscellaneous volumes of note...
...Robert Whitcomb...
...American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia edited by Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson (ISI, 997 pp., $55...
...I ran into a few myself in the 1970s and '80s...
...These interviews are not just poignant, but astonishing, sometimes shocking: The memories of glory and horror—even humor— remain vivid...
...A few were genuinely interested in international affairs...
...And in few places was it more fun than in Paris between the world wars...
...Newspapering used to be a lot more fun than today, if a lot less healthy...
...It was the most vivid chapter in the lives of many of the newspapermen (and a few women) who lived it...
...Fried-rich's brooding landscapes and eerie light are enjoying a new vogue, and this is a landmark study with superb reproductions...
...And some even made it back at the end of the war...
...It was, and still is, a journalistic community with a delightfully high tolerance for eccentric behavior, and, er, ingenuity, which Ronald Weber (a professor emeritus at Notre Dame) details with verve...
...Not everyone will endorse the substance of every entry, and inclusions and omissions will always prompt debate...
...The prestige of Britain's victorious commander in chief, Sir Douglas Haig, quickly plummeted after his death in 1928: For two generations he has been seen as the archetypal, well-dressed general sending thousands to their death from the comfort of his chateau...
...Many of them made little effort to learn the language...
...This is a fascinating chronicle of how a fraction of the lost dead of the Great War were found: the politics of their repatriation, reburial, and, in Britain and America, the commemoration of the Unknown Soldiers...
...At that, the Prince snatched a riding crop from his equerry and beat the boy's brains out...
...That there were thousands of Americans in Paris in the twenties made it attractively self-enclosed...
...What is particularly nice about this book is that while the famed American literati of the period—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, et al.—make appearances, the real stars are the hacks: the reporters, the editors, the photographers, and the others who, fueled by oceans of alcohol and caffeine, and wreathed in tobacco smoke, put out the English-language newspapers in Paris, or sent copy by telegraph to papers back home, or fed the maw of the wire services...
...They never stopped talking about it...
...But this is a splendid, and comprehensive, gathering of the titles, ideas, people, trends, events, and organizations that comprise the history of American conservatism—no matter how you define it...
...Almost all are long forgotten now, although a few—Janet Flanner, Waver-ley Root, A.J...
...Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr...
...It is difficult to compress the life, work, and influence of Holmes into a compact volume, and White's Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (1993) is the account for serious students and interested readers...
...Beckett and Steven J. Corvi (Pen & Sword, 224 pp., $45...
...For Civil War enthusiasts, Twin Halves of One August Event: Private Pinson and Colonel Shaw by Hassell A. Simpson (Scotch Broom Press, 24 pp., $6.95) is an intriguing pamphlet that examines the mythology, and solves the mystery, surrounding the death of Col...
...Philip Terzian Books in Brief News of Paris by Ronald Weber (Ivan R. Dee 360 pp., $27.50...
...But for anyone seeking a smart, trenchant, and enjoyable introduction to one of the greatest legal minds in American history, here it is...
...Bull, drunk and/or just desperate for a story, brought this tale out of a news release about the Prince of Wales reviewing a troop of British Boy Scouts of Paris: Stopping before one manly youth the Prince inquired: "What is your name, my lad...
...And for the genuine military buff, there is Haig's Generals edited by Ian F.W...
...Using the mystery of this founding portrait as a starting point, the NPG put on an exhibition this year about the elusive Will, featuring art, manuscripts, books, even Elizabethan clothing, for which this is the catalogue...
...Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's most distinguished biographer, Prof...
...In sexual matters, they were more universalist...
...Here may be found the shiploads of documents, scattered across war-torn Europe, that Herbert Hoover carefully collected and sent home after 1918, as well as Czar Nicholas II's abdication letter, Joseph Goeb-bels's diary, posters from China's Cultural Revolution, and the first draft of Milton Friedman's Nobel Prize lecture...
...Two volumes for the reference shelf...
...It is worth remembering that, at the end of four years of war, some three million combatants remained unaccounted for...
...Many came with the idea of doing literature, a mission usually quickly eroded by the need to make a living and by the numerous sensual distractions of Paris...
...They came to Paris seeking freedom (from, among other things, Prohibition), the luxuries provided by a wonderful (if you were American) exchange rate, and a purportedly energizing environment in which to create Art...
...Liebling, and Elliot Paul come to mind—are still read a bit...
...Most of them stayed only a few years and then went back to America to take up banal "adult lives,'' though a few stayed, up to when the Germans marched into the city in 1940...
...Searching for Shakespeare by Tarnya Cooper (Yale, 239 pp., $60...
...On the coffee table, three new titles deserve some space...
...In 1856, the new National Portrait Gallery in London was presented with its first bequest: A study of William Shakespeare, known as the 'Chandos portrait,' which has never been authenticated...
...Now just about all of them are dead, and so I am very happy that Weber has brought a bunch of them back to life for us...
...Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary edited by Joseph M. Flora, Amber Vogel, and Bryan Giemza (LSU, 496 pp., $55) takes an expansive view of the subject (Edward O. Wilson was born in Alabama, and Jimmy Carter in Georgia, but they are not what most people would consider 'southern writers') and is generous to marginal figures (Carl Hiaasen, Barbara Kingsolver, Rick Bragg), but it's a handy treat to have them all between two covers in a collection of impressive breadth and quality...
...Hassel A. Simpson, a retired professor of English at Hampden-Sydney, writes with understated elegance...
...by G. Edward White (Oxford, 144 pp., $17.95...
...Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune...
...Now, the wheel turns again, and this intriguing series of essays restores the reputation of Haig and nine of his army commanders...
...Robert Shaw, killed at the head of the 54th Massachusetts regiment in its assault on Fort Wagner, an event immortalized in Saint-Gaudens's famous bronze relief on Boston Common and in the 1989 film Glory...
...Britain's Last Tommies: Final Memories From Soldiers of the 1914-18 War In Their Own Words by Richard Van Emden (Pen & Sword, 256 pp., $36.97...
...G. Edward White of the University of Virginia Law School, has written a shorter version of Holmes's life for the Oxford Lives and Legacies series...
...Consider Spencer Bull, employed by the Paris Tribune, owned by the sometimes-lunatic Col...
...They were in Paris to serve an American audience and to drink with Americans...
...Years later, when I worked at the International Herald Tribune in Paris in the 1980s, the managing editor there, the sainted Walter Wells, noted, "You can go through a whole year in Paris and only speak French to your plumber.'' The American journalists who flooded Paris entertained an expatriate community that often seemed a separate nation within France...
...None of your goddamned business, sir," the youngster replied...
...It has been 88 years since Armistice Day, and so veterans of the trenches and No Man's Land are all centenarians, and down to a handful in Britain...
...A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations From the Hoover Institution Archives edited by Bertrand M. Patenaude (Stanford, 303 pp., 49.95) celebrates one of the great repositories of contemporary history, the Hoover Institution at Stanford...
Vol. 11 • July 2006 • No. 40
