Steve Goddard's History Wire

Publishing Storm Headed Our Way

Measuring the World -- A Novel by David Kehlmann, Pantheon '06, $23, 259 pages, ISBN #0-375-42446-6.

Those digging out from the season's first big blizzard may want to take note of an even bigger storm -- this one in the world of publishing, where a 31-year-old German phenom has landed noisily on American shores. His debut novel, Measuring the World, was an instant best-seller in Germany, selling more than 600,000 copies and dethroning Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code in the process.

A historical novel, Kehlmann's book features Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt, known by some as the second Columbus; and Carl Friedrich Gauss, considered by some as the greatest mathematician since Isaac Newton. The novel centers on their embroilment in post-Napoleon turmoil in Germany.

Book Alert / The Artist and the Mathematician

The Artist and the Mathematician -- The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki The Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed by Amir D. Adzel, Thunder's Mouth '06, $23.95, 239 pages, ISBN #1-56025-931-0. Index, source notes, bibliography, unillustrated.

Call it the ultimate practical joke. Many consider Nicolas Bourbaki the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, a genius who crafted "new math" and created the concept of the mathematical proof. The author believes "no working mathematician in the world today is free of the influence of Nicolas Bourbaki's seminal work."

But although Bourbaki's name is attached to dozens of the foremost professional papers in his field, Bourbaki, in fact, never existed. Amir D. Aczel, a visiting scholar at Harvard, spins the tale of Bourbaki, how he and his legend came to be, how his identity was effectively shielded, and his legacy to the discipline of mathematics.

Book Alert / The Ghost at the Table -- A Novel

The Ghost at the Table -- A Novel by Suzanne Berne, Algonquin '06, $23.95, 292 pages, ISBN #1-56512-334-4.

"Misconceptions and wishful thinking are as much a part of what we know about other people as any 'truthful' details about them," says author Suzanne Berne, in explaining the impulse for writing her latest novel. It takes place on Thanksgiving weekend, as a dysfunctional family gathers to share, as families always seem to do at such times, memories of their past.

But if you've ever been part of such a scenario (and few of us have not), you'll recall that your sibling's memory of a past event is often markedly at odds with yours. Berne's narrator, for instance, finds that her father's version of her own childhood doesn't agree in many ways with her own: "That was the story he put together from all those details, a story that, like most stories people tell themselves about other people, was mostly about him."

The Ghost at the Table brings two long-separated sisters together for a snowy New England Thanksgiving, together with their estranged father. Cynthia writes historical fiction and is working on a book about Mark Twain's daughters (a project Berne once tried and abandoned). She is troubled at her sister Frances's seeming willingness to ignore her father's past and the role he might have played in their mother's death a generation earlier. Through the weekend, they struggle with warring versions of the past. As Cynthia's friend Carita declares, "blood is bloody."

Understanding the tricks minds can play is a great aid to understanding the self. But then, as Berne observes, "the minute you think you've got the last word on someone-- well, that's exactly when he gets away from you, isn't it?"

Book Alert / The Lost -- A Search for Six of Six Million

The Lost -- A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn, Harper Collins '06, $27.95, 513 pages, ISBN #0-06-054297-7, b&w images sprinkled through text.

At the end of his engrossing memoir/mystery, author Daniel Mendelsohn approaches a tree in a garden in the tiny shtetl of Bolechow in the Ukraine. There, his great-uncle Shmiel and five members of his family had met an untimely end in 1943. His arduous odyssey at an end, the author realizes he'll likely never see the village or the tree again, and it gnaws at him that no monument stands at the spot to memorialize them and their suffering. By instinct, he falls to his knees and digs from the earth beneath the tree a sizeable rock, which he then places in the crook of the tree's branches, creating his memorial to members of his own family.

Undoubtedly, there are many more such stories out there from the days of the Holocaust. But few families are fortunate enough to have such a talented chronicler with sufficient dedication to spend five years of his life, together with his photo-journalist brother Matthew, in unearthing a resistant family secret of what had happened to his grandfather's brother and his family.

It was the hushed tones with which his relatives spoke during his boyhood of Shmiel's clan that motivated him early on to seek answers, once and for all. That and a collection of desperate letters from Shmiel to Mendelsohn's grandfather in 1939. In his quest, the author was able to find aged villagers who still remembered atrocities and could help him piece together the fragments of "a terrible betrayal." His book is a wonderfully-written family tribute.

George Washington With His Pants Down? Can You Believe It's At Yale??

Yale Daily News:

"Curious about what George Washington looks like with his pants down? Interested in seeing photographs of Germans who choose to dress up as Native Americans? Ever wonder what Saddam Hussein's head would look like on the $20 bill?

"These are just a few of the subjects chosen by artists now on display at Artspace's current exhibit, 'Don't Know Much About History.' The exhibit, which opened Nov. 18 and will run through Jan. 20, promises to be 'an exhibition exploring the recontextualization of history by contemporary artists.' Denise Markonish, the curator of Artspace, said she got her inspiration for the theme of the exhibit after seeing many contemporary pieces depicting historical moments.

"'I started looking at some contemporary artists and noticed that they were dealing with history in a very contemporary way,' she said. 'I then worked on synthesizing their ideas into a common theme.' The title, she said, was taken from the first lines of Sam Cooke's famous song, 'What a Wonderful World,' written in 1960.

'Pieces of the exhibition are spread out across newly painted, gray-colored walls of the gallery, making Artspace look much more conservative than it has in the past. 'Some people have said that when they walk by, it looks like a more traditional gallery,' Markonish said. 'It's not until they look closer at the exhibition that they realize it's not so traditional.'

Middle-Class Midwesterners Uprooted Themselves And Headed To LA

Los Angeles Times:

Louis Adamic called it 'the enormous village.' Carey McWilliams said it was 'the most priggish community in America.' Both were describing Los Angeles at the beginning of the 20th century, a municipality of vast potential and vast contradictions that had staked itself out as a quintessentially American promised land. Barely 50 years beyond its pueblo roots, L.A. was a city on the hustle, overrun with boosters selling every aspect of the place. The 1872 rail spur linking Southern California to the transcontinental railroad may have made Los Angeles a compelling tourist destination, but in the early 1900s, the place was equally focused on density and migration - an elaborate state of perpetual growth.

"This migration boom was not the first, nor would it be the last. By 1911, L.A. had already experienced one population explosion, due to the 1880s real estate boom, and many of its civic institutions - The Times, the California Club, the DWP - were in place. Yet if, as McWilliams writes, '[t]he first wave of migration brought wealth, enterprise, and culture to Southern California,' this second influx delivered a more Midwestern sensibility, domestic and traditional. What set it apart from other, similar movements in American history was that members of the middle-class uprooted themselves by choice, moving west to a more pleasing landscape that seemed to offer endless space and light.

"Beneath this optimism, of course, there dwelt a nativist impulse; when Times city editor Charles Fletcher Lummis called Los Angeles the 'new Eden of the Saxon home-seeker,' he was speaking to every so-called homegrown American frightened by the immigrants who had transformed cities such as Chicago and New York. Such a sensibility represents the underside of the Southern California mythos, and it would become part of the bedrock on which the region developed, helping fuel its essential conservatism while setting the stage for its most bitter legacies, from racial housing covenants to the John Birch Society, the Watts Riots to Rodney King."

Who Was Sir William Johnson? Find Out on DVD

Newsday:

"Now that he's going digital, maybe Sir William Johnson will finally emerge from the dusty pages of American history. The William Johnson Papers will be digitized for a DVD, giving students, scholars and history buffs easier access to the 15,000 pages of documents generated by the wealthy and powerful British official who was a towering figure in 18th-century America but is largely forgotten today. During a news conference Wednesday in Lake George, the site of one of Johnson's battlefield victories, officials from New York historical organizations said the yearlong Johnson Papers 'legacy project' will involve scanning the material onto a searchable DVD scheduled for release in October 2007.

"'It's an extraordinary treasure trove of material,' said Nicholas Westbrook, director of Fort Ticonderoga and vice chairman of the New York State French and Indian War 250th Anniversary Commemoration Commission.

"The project is being launched by the commission, the New York State Library, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, SUNY Press and Johnson historic sites in the Mohawk Valley. Its goal is to distribute the Johnson Papers DVD to every school and public library in New York state. Digitizing the information will likely raise the profile of a major player in pre-Revolution America, Westbrook said."

Book Alert / Walt Disney -- The Triumph of the American Imagination

Walt Disney -- The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler, Knopf '06, $35, 851 pages, ISBN #0-679-43822-X. Index, bibliography, source notes, two groupings of b&w glossy images.

Psychologists use the term parcosm to describe an invented universe, one which a patient's mind may construct as a defense mechanism in times of stress but which may also become pathological, to the extent it signals a permanent break with reality. Walt Disney was all about parcosms. He suffered a childhood of deprivation (or at least his myth says so -- separating myth from reality with Disney is half the battle) and his creation of parcosms to survive sensitized him to a similar need in his fellow Americans, especially during the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II.

Disney's parcosms were exactly that, invented universes, not merely diversions. Early amusement parks dealt in sideshows and rides designed to take one's mind off of one's troubles for a brief period, only to return one to reality at the end of the experience. Disney, however, created Disneyland, then Disneyworld -- self-contained worlds in which one could, for whole days at a time, lose touch with reality.

His power lay in the ability to not only visualize parallel reality but to create it. As Gabler tells us, he reinvented animation from a visual trick into new worlds in which the imagination could take flight and accomplish noble ends as well. Through Bambi, he triggered a national debate over hunting. Through Fantasia, he joined high and low culture, allowing Mickey Mouse to climb a symphony podium to shake hands with conductor Leopold Stokowski.

And there's Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the rest. Disney's impact on culture was so great that it led to a backlash against his influence on the culture, an influence that some said pandered to small town Americans' banalities and exalted the saccharine over gritty reality. By the time of his death in 1966, Disney had morphed into a cartoon, a phenomenon he well realized, as he told one associate, "I'm not Walt Disney anymore. Walt Disney is a thing. It's grown to become a whole different meaning than just one man."

The long knives came unsheathed after Disney's death, leading to eviscerating profiles of Disney the man, notably Richard Schickel's 1968 book, The Disney Version. The value of Gabler's book is that now, four decades out, a more balanced analysis of Disney's influence on American life is possible. Gabler has written a serious book for those who wish to understand 20th century culture.

Book Alert / The Girl With The Gallery

The Girl With The Gallery -- Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market by Lindsay Pollock, PublicAffairs '06, $30, 483 pages, ISBN #1-58648-302-1. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text, grouping of full-color glossy images.

When six-year-old Edith Gregor arrived in Manhattan in 1906 from Odessa, what degree of chutzpah could have convinced her that if she made it here, she could have made it anywhere? But within two decades, she had opened one of Greenwich Village's first art galleries, which she would operate for 44 years.

Now arts journalist Lindsay Pollack brings a long-neglected New York arts figure to center stage. "Halpert cultivated the most illustrious art collectors of the day, invented the market for American folk art, and pushed the first group of American artists working in a modern vernacular into the history books, including Stuart Davis, Jacob  Lawrence, Georgia O'Keefe, Charles Sheeler, and Ben Shahn." If you've missed her up to now, revel in her story.

Book Alert / The Private Lives of the Impressionists

The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe, HarperCollins '06, $29.95, 356 pages, ISBN #0-06-054558-5. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text, two groupings of full-color images.

Oh yes, how idyllic it was for such young vital artists as Monet, Cezanne, Manet, Renoir, Degas and Cassatt to meet as soulmates in Montmartre. Well, only to a degree, recognizing that these days were the 1870s and 1880s, the wake of the Austro-Prussian War, the precursor of domestic tension for the next generation.

Not that the founders of the burgeoning impressionist movement were daunted by domestic concerns, so in thrall were they to "their innovative abilities the capture the moment in both the fleeting lights of a landscape and scenes in daily life." Difficult as it may seem today, "the Impressionist painters were once ridiculed and ignored by their contemporaries," according to author Sue Roe, British writer and teacher.