A lively history of the early republic, its branches coming together to form a sturdy whole.
Beguiling study of American intellectual and cultural life two centuries ago at the places where forests and civilization met.
“Reading books, filling in the blanks with my imagination, I sought to restore the stories of the figures in the original I had not seen, which itself was a record of what the chronicler-carver perhaps only dreamed when he invented the life of his times.” So writes Stanford humanities professor Nemerov of a mysterious carved box that, long ago, poked its way out of a streambank. It’s not the only mystery in the pages of this luminous book. Another is the odd vision of a figure painted in the crook of a tree high above a Virginia forest floor, both startling and delighting its discoverer, who took the opportunity to “ponder the fact that his imagination gave rise to such phantoms.” Nemerov is a collector of such forest-born visions. Some are exalted, as when, early in this episodic, anecdotal narrative, Nathaniel Hawthorne finds in the New England woods a metaphor for his work. “For him,” writes Nemerov, “trees were brains, arbors of thought, much like his own.” Some are economic: Groves of hemlock are felled in order to cure livestock hides, with a noxious load of acids and blood dumped into a pristine Hudson River. Some are ominous: Nat Turner retreats to “a self-secluded place in the woods” to plan his uprising of enslaved people. Nemerov delights in turning up surprises that inform his pointed tales. His discovery of the story of David Douglas, who lent the Douglas fir his name and whose life ended tragically in a trap meant to protect gardens from rampaging cattle, is a feat of scholarly detection. So is his restoration to history of an Irish immigrant who, sadly, fell from an elm he was trimming, a narrative frame within which the author discusses anti-immigrant sentiment.
A lively history of the early republic, its branches coming together to form a sturdy whole.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-691-24428-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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