Coffee-table Book Research Articles

Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings ed. by Richard W. Etulain

58 Western American Literature Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings. Edited by Richard W. Etulain. (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979. 209 pages, $7.50.) Jack London wrote one classic book about tramping in America. The Road (1907) is a series of autobiographical travel episodes which are perhaps less strictly factual accounts of journeying than they are short stories in the first person. The narrative is out of sequence, but the narrator is never out of temper or out of interesting anecdotes. Traveller, storyteller, and picaresque hero, London creates a “last frontier” along the railroad track, the iron road which he himself had followed from west to east in 1894, when he had exchanged the life of a factory “work beast” in Oakland, California, for the presumably carefree existence of an easy-riding, hardliving hobo. In truth, he simply exchanged one ordeal for another. The track which Pilgrim London pursued ran through a nation of urban-industrial growth that left precious little room for latter-day pioneers to wander. London had few illusions about what he would find over the Sierras and across the Plains. The buffalo had ceased to roam, the West was a dime novel, the Indians were under house arrest on disease-ridden reservations, and the country was gripped by hard times and high unemploy­ ment in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. The wonder is that London put far more of his youthful high spirits than social criticism in The Road, but the absence of revolutionary rhetoric is only one of the curiosities of the book. Somehow, it still has the power to charm its reader. The freshness and sheer ebullience of the writing more than compensate for the scrambled narrative sequence, while the “distaste­ fulness” which offended the critics of 1907 strikes us today as mere local color (“The hobo,” editor Richard Etulain reminds us, “was not an inspiring subject for teenage girls and coffee-table books — two of the unrefutable tests for measuring acceptable fiction in the last years of the nineteenth century”). With the decline of the nation’s railroad and tramp population, the book has, of course, acquired an added nostalgic value, an evocation of a lost world as alien and exotic in its own way as London’s Klondike or Polynesia. And what of London’s other hobo writings? Do they possess the same vigor and vitality as the selections of The Road? Surprisingly, they do not. In collecting all of London’s diary, essay, and short fiction writing about tramps and tramping, Etulain has made an interesting discovery: once out of the autobiographical form, London was lost, unable to transmute his experiences into art. The only convincinglydrawn hobo London ever portrayed was himself, and that fact sets Etulain off on a number of cogent inquiries: “Why was he not able to produce writing about his road experiences that matched the high quality of his works on the Klondike? Was it that editors and readers were reluctant to accept the hobo? Did he lack sufficient artistic versatility to portray believ­ able tramp heroes?” Reviews 59 These and other questions need to be asked, and it is to Etulain’s great credit that he both offers and answers them. I personally find his conclu­ sions as impeccable as his research and editing. Certainly, he provides enough textual evidence for us to make a reasoned and informed judgment about London’s failure to create a memorable fictional tramp. Given the book’s modest price, its attractive cover (of a railroad track curving into the distance), the fact that it establishes for the first time the canon of London’s road writing, and that both its contents and editorial comments are a valuable resource, Jack London on the Road is a truly original and indispensable addition to the shelf of essential Londoniana. Etulain is to be congratulated for the fine detective work which has enabled him to solve one of the most puzzling riddles of Jack London’s writing career. HOWARD LACHTMAN University of the Pacific Jacob Hamblin: Mormon Apostle to the Indians. By Juanita Brooks. (Salt Lake City: Westwater Press, 1980.) Sixshooters and Sagebrush: Cowboy...

Reviews of Recent Books

NAVIGATIONVolume 25, Issue 1 p. 85-86 Reviews of Recent Books First published: Spring 1978 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-4296.1978.tb01318.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Inertial Navigation; INTEGRATED AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION, by James L. Farrell. Coffee Table Books; NAUTICAL CHARTS ON VELLUM IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, compiled by Walter W. Ristow and R. A. Skelton. FLIGHT THROUGH THE AGES, by C. H. Gibbs-Smith, published by Thomas Y. Crowell. For The Hobbyist; A GUIDE TO MARINE PHOTOGRAPHY, by Peter R. Smyth, published by W. W. Norton & Co. Fiction; FLAMEOUT, by Basil Jackson, published by W. W. Norton & Co. Volume25, Issue1Spring 1978Pages 85-86 RelatedInformation

Apollo Expeditions to the Moon (NASA SP–350)

Edgar M Cortwright (ed) Washington D.C.: NASA 1975 (available in UK from NTIS UK Service Centre, PO Box 3, Alton, Hants) pp xi + 313 price £13.50 (cased) (microfiche also available) This splendidly illustrated coffee-table book has only recently reached the UK (or at least the editor's desk!) but it is not so much out of date that it does not deserve a few lines in these pages. The book, produced under NASA auspices, is a record of the Apollo programme from its inception to the last flight to the moon in 1972.

A corpus of ‘Mughal’ glass

In the history of Indian art some areas are in very much better order than others. For those whose interests are concentrated in the Mughal period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), the study of the history of painting has been vastly advanced in the last 20 or 30 years. Every year increases the great number of paintings known to exist in public or private collections, or passing through the sale-rooms and the stocks of dealers in three continents, and almost every year there are significant discoveries and publications. In the field of Mughal architecture, perhaps, the same rapid progress is not visible. Some attractive coffee-table books figuring it have recently been published but there is a disappointing lack of analytical examination.

Books and literature

This falls — heavily — into the category of coffee table book; lavish in size, including thickness, and in the number of illustrations. It is divided into two sections.

History of the Film: Coffee-Table Books

Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer The Movies (Simon and Schuster, $19.95) Larry Carr's Four Fabulous Faces (Arlington House, $40.00, available from Nostalgia Book Club at $19.95) David Shipman's The Groat Movie Stars: The Golden Years (Crown, $10.00 which with 450 pictures covers the history of Hollywood stars from the 1920s to 1945— just before the system began to come apart Alan G. Barbour's Days of Thrills and Adventure (Macmillan, $6.95, also available in Collier paperback, $3.95) Richard Gertner of Films In America: 1929-1969 (Golden Press, $12.95, but $9.95 before January 1st) Raymond Lee's Not so Dumb: Animals in the Movies (A.S. Barnes, $8.50) Charles Higham's Tho Films of Orson Welles (University of California Press, $10.95)

After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (review)

92CIVIL WARHISTORY modek did, however, win adoption by military, naval, and police forces on both sides of the Adantic. Some saw considerable action. At San Juan Hill, in 1898, the United States Army made its first use of Gatlings in close support of an infantry attack. But this was the last important employment of the weapon. The development of effective automatic machineguns rendered the Gatling obsolete and little more was heard of it for half a century. It survived only as the source of the slang word "gat," meaning a pistol or revolver. Only in 1945, as a result of the growing need for a reliable, extremely high-rate-of-fire machinegun, unlikely to overheat or burn out, was the Gatling principle revived. Today it is the basis of major airborne weapon systems. Firearms experts Paul Wahl and Donald R. Toppel have compiled a useful and interesting semi-technical history of the development and employment of the Gatling Gun and of the life and career of its colorful inventor. Profusely illustrated, although lacking color plates, the book includes a fascinating array of sketches, photographs, model drawings, document reproductions, and other pictures guaranteed to please the taste of the "coffee table book" collector as well as the more serious scholar. The text contains both historical narrative and detailed weapons specifications, in addition to colorful eyewitness accounts of military and naval actions in which the Gatling saw service. The authors have drawn their material from "nearly a decade of research" in archival sources, including the records of the Gatling Gun Company itself, and published works, as well as from their own long years of experience as gun collectors and military students. Unfortunately for the scholarly reader, their product is undocumented and their short bibliography restricted to only a few published references. But their work appears to be careful and generally accurate. It will probably remain the last word on the Gatling Gun. Stanley L. Falk Industrial College of the Armed Forces After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877. By Joel Williamson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965. Pp. ix, 442. $7.50.) This volume is an important and able work of revision. It destroys many stereotypes of Reconstruction history, with the result of placing the Negro in a much more favorable light than older accounts have done. In the process, the author challenges a number of previously accepted views. For example, he maintains that when the opportunity presented itself during the war, it was the trusted house servants and skilled mechanics who fled the plantations, and not the field hands. He also disputes the idea that the large plantations were broken into small units; in this same vein, the tradition of a wide migration by Negroes from the plantations is exaggerated . Professor Williamson states that contrary to northern misrepresentation , the Black Codes were not designed to reinslave the Negro, but for BOOKREVIEWS93 bis protection. The reason why many Negroes refused to sign labor contracts was not unwillingness to work, but the hope of land division. Contrary to recent interpretations, segregation was strongly developed during Reconstruction and was advanced in part by the Negroes themselves and by northern whites residing within the state. One of the more valuable chapters of this study is the description of the Negro politician, a very different portrayal than that given by James S. Pike in the Prostrate State. Williamson states that few of the Negroes in politics were straight from the cotton rows. Indeed, many were men of real ability, and vivid portraits are drawn of some, such as Francis Cardozo and Robert Smalls. One of the more prominent leaders, W. J. Whipper, advocated giving the vote to women. Williamson ako gives a more favorable account of the scalawags than is traditional. Still, he does not minimize the susceptibility of both Negro politicians and scalawags to corruption. The author represents the new breed of southern historians, who have emancipated themselves from old assumptions and stereotypes, who dig deeply in the sources, maintain a very liberal oudook, and write with sophistication and charm. Clement Eaton University of Kentucky Labor Revolt in Alabama: The Great Strike of 1894. By Robert D. Ward and...