After the end of World War II, Japan's Emperor Hirohito was not called
to the Tokyo war crimes trial. Instead, countless of his associates
in government and the military (sometimes coached by lawyers for the
Allied Powers) produced testimony that deflected any blame from the
Showa Tenno and onto the military. Hirohito remained a figurehead
until his death in 1989, and he went to the grave generally seen as
the victim of a rapacious military. Since then, however, documents have
come to light indicating his direct involvement in Japan's conduct in
Asia and the Pacific. Drawing on these sources—often revealing
startling facts—Bix describes how a tentative young emperor took
greater control of an expanding war with the goal of capturing all of
East Asia. The military first pulled Hirohito into the war effort by
fabricating an attack by Chinese forces in Manchuria. Though at first
reluctant to act and angry at his failure to control the military, Hirohito
quickly saw that to stay in power he would have to work with the generals.
Hirohito's shy, passive public image was not entirely inaccurate, Bix
argues, but that persona covered up his fierce will for self-preservation
and his political cunning. In the end, the book makes a compelling argument
that postwar Japan might have fared better had the man who held "divine
responsibility" for the fate of the nation owned up—at any time
during the next forty years of his reign—to his role in the war.
—Landon Thorpe
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
David W. Blight
Belknap Press at Harvard University
Press, $29.95 (cloth)
In this book, David Blight tries to understand the past and also how
we remember it; more importantly, he realizes that our memories grow
into our history. In Race and Reunion, Blight demonstrates this
phenomenon by examining how Americans treated their own recent history
during the first fifty years following the Civil War. The sheer bloodiness
of the war and its myriad intimate losses demanded, for the living,
some kind of greater meaning. Blight shows how the task of remembering
came down to two competing desires: sectional healing and racial justice.
Many Americans found meaning in a vision of reconciliation, a happy
ending in the form of renewed national unity and strength. But for others,
especially former slaves struggling to make a new place for themselves,
the Civil War had not settled enduring debates about equality; emancipation,
with its new human geography, created its own set of difficulties and
questions for the nation. Those questions were not answered, at least
in the short term, as the sentiment of reunion promised greener, or
perhaps just easier, pastures. And so America began to turn its back
on race. We know, from our own memories, the result: America's geographical
fragments grew together while its races grew apart. —Susan McWilliams
Banvard's Folly
Paul Collins
Picador USA, $25 (cloth)
For this book, Paul Collins set up camp in library basements to excavate
the lost quirks and quacks of history. The forgotten souls he unearthed
are intriguing as much for their once-dazzling fame as for their current
anonymity. Banvard's Folly is a collection of mini-biographies
of bona fide artists and brilliant charlatans, linked by the thread
of ephemeral notoriety. Whether proven failures or proven irrelevant,
these men—and one woman—were stubborn in the pursuit of
invention, money, respect, and renown. Among them: Alfred E. Beach,
who proposed building a pneumatic subway line in nineteenth-century
New York; Jean Francois Sudre, who developed a language using musical
notes as a means of universal communication; and John Banvard, who built
a "Three Mile Painting" of the Mississippi shoreline. In picking apart
the often comical ebb and flow of these characters' renown, Collins
renders their outlandishness—though by compressing centuries of
fact into bubbly narration, he teeters precariously toward historical
fiction. Collins calls himself a "collector of obscurity," but in truth
his research scrutinizes what he calls "the only real sin in America
… failure." "Vivas to those who hav fail'd!" cried Walt Whitman.
Banvard's Folly shows how we can chase history's spotlight, even
when its shine proves elusive. —Mercer Hall
The Other Boston Busing Story: What's Won and Lost across the Boundary
Line
Susan Eaton
Yale University Press, $26.95
(cloth)
The title of The Other Boston Busing Story is misleading in that
the book tells not one, but a multitude of stories about the participants
of METCO, a voluntary school desegregation program in the Boston metropolitan
area. Via METCO, African-American students have been commuting to suburban
schools, sometimes riding buses for two hours each way, for the past
34 years. In the book, 65 former participants recount their past and
present conceptions of race, education, socioeconomic status, and—although
they don't label it as such—social and cultural capital. Their
experiences show that, overall, METCO has had a positive effect in the
long run on students in the program, even when it did not appear to
help at the time. In particular, METCO participants learned to be fluid
"cultural translators" of both white-dominated and black-populated worlds
much earlier than those who were not bussed. The sheer volume of participant
testimony and author commentaries in this book errs on the side of exhaustiveness,
as some material begins to lose poignancy when it is repeatedly drilled
into the reader. Nevertheless, this book clarifies key issues involved
in forming a multicultural society via school desegregation and should
facilitate constructive debate on education policy. —Celina Su
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books
H. J. Jackson
Yale University Press, $27.95
(cloth)
The scribbles, symbols, notes, and questions that all of us, at one
time or another, have written in our books are here explored in careful
and scholarly detail. Marginalia examines these annotations as
conversations between readers and authors, readers and themselves, and
among readers of the same book, conversations that are significant both
historically and psychologically. In explaining why readers mark up
books, Jackson avoids the romantic notion that marginalia reveal a reader's
spontaneous, innermost thoughts; the writer of marginalia, she argues,
often seeks the approval of the next reader of the annotated book, "the
silent audience that will sooner or later witness the performance."
Jackson takes us through several case studies of marginalia—from
Coleridge's many annotations to anonymous comments in library copies.
Rather than trying to impose characteristics that unite all of them,
she wisely lets each case study stand in its own uniqueness. Underneath
its scholarly precision, Jackson's prose has a proselytizing edge; she
urges us to think about the marginalia that we come across and hopes
our libraries will preserve annotated books. But perhaps her most passionate
plea is for us to ignore our prudish desire to keep our books pure and
clean in their margins, to "throw off the mind-forged manacles and take
a pencil to [our] books." —Tara Neelakantappa
A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Houghton Mifflin, $28.95 (cloth)
The subtitle of this book ought to be "Privileged Beginnings of a Precocious
Scholar." By 21, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been to Exeter, taken a
'round-the-world tour, graduated from Harvard College, spent a year
at Cambridge University, and published an important political biography.
By thirty, he had been in the Harvard Society of Fellows, published
The Age of Jackson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, served
in the wartime OSS, and won a faculty appointment alongside his father
in the Harvard history department. And still, his most important achievements
were before him, and won't be recounted until the second volume of this
autobiography. Junior, as he was known, is the most influential American
historian of the twentieth century, with the reading public if not with
his guild. In this volume, he writes about his intellectual and political
formation in the 1930s and '40s while providing high quality gossip
about his many friends and acquaintances in and out of Cambridge and
Washington. He singles out Perry Miller, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard
Devoto, John Kenneth Galbraith, Archibald MacLeish, Samuel Eliot Morison,
Reinhold Niebuhr, Joseph Alsop, and Isaiah Berlin, and explains the
history of the martini and the importance of the bow tie to a gentleman's
wardrobe. Though not an intimate memoir, his book does two things very
well. Schlesinger explains how his own times shaped his writing about
politics and ideas in nineteenth-century America. And he vividly demonstrates
what it meant to be a political liberal in America in the early years
of the Cold War. No matter how committed to achieving an egalitarian
society he and other liberals were, that goal was subordinate to the
goal of defeating the Soviet Union and discrediting its supporters on
the American left. Junior has remained a liberal throughout his 84 years;
how he managed to do so should be the focus of his sequel. —Philip
S. Khoury
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