The Browser - Off the Shelf, November-December 1996

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The Manly Ideal	Films: Down Off the Farm
Music: Jazz with Ivy League Manners	Chapter & Verse
Off the Shelf	Open Book: Friends of France

A random sampling of current books received at this magazine.

From Marie Angel's An Animated Alphabet.

Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy, by Ronald F. Thiemann, dean of Harvard Divinity School and O'Brian professor of divinity (Georgetown University Press; $55, hardcover; $17.95, paper). Thiemann wants to abandon the absolute separation of church and state and sees how doing so can be reconciled with the First Amendment. He thinks that religion should play an active part in our politics even as we maintain a fundamental commitment to pluralist, democratic values.

Love Across the Color Line: The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis, edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Ph.D. '69, and Kathy Peiss (University of Massachusetts Press, $35, cloth; $12.95, paper). Workmen discovered a black lace stocking under the floorboards of an old house in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1992. The stocking yielded a collection of letters written by a white working-class woman to her African-American lover in 1907 and 1908. Here they are, a unique primary source for historians, with scholarly commentary.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter L. Bernstein '40 (Wiley, $27.95). The author is president of an eponymous economic consulting firm and an exceedingly good writer. He tells the story of the thinkers who discovered the notion of risk-of scientifically linking the present to the future-which has led to our modern techniques of risk management, without which no bridges would span our widest rivers, no lives would be saved by coronary bypasses, space travel would be a dream, and no one would play poker.

So Fine a Prospect: Historical New England Gardens, by Alan Emmet '50 (University Press of New England, $45). In a good-looking, scholarly, and entertaining book, Emmet explores two dozen gardens and shows how they reveal the values of their times as well as the eccentricities of their creators.

An Animated Alphabet, by Marie Angel (Godine, $12.95, paper). Almost 30 years ago the late Philip Hofer '21, L.H.D. '67, founder and longtime curator of the department of printing and graphic arts in the Harvard College Library, commissioned miniaturist Marie Angel to create a new illuminated alphabet featuring animals, done in watercolor and gouache on vellum. The department had published Angel's A Bestiary in 1960, and her public wanted more. Both of these delightful little volumes were printed in black and white only. Now Godine, in a bijou of a book, gives us Angel's exquisite sequel in color.

The Quest for Longitude, edited by William J.H. Andrewes (Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, available at bookstores or from the publisher at Science Center B6, Cambridge 02138, $75 plus $7 postage). A three-day symposium on longitude occurred in Cambridge in November 1993. Dava Sobel wrote about it for this magazine ("Longitude: How the Mystery Was Crack'd," March-April 1994) and then wrote a book, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (Walker, $19), which became a genuine bestseller in the United States and England and which Penguin has issued in a paperback edition ($10.95). German and Italian editions have appeared, and translations into at least 10 other languages are forthcoming. Now the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, which organized the original symposium with the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, is publishing the proceedings of that event in a massive, handsome, profusely illustrated book edited by the collection's curator. It provides a detailed account of the history of finding longitude at sea from 1500 to 1800 and is the first book to survey this history from the perspective of several disciplines, including astronomy, cartography, economic history, history of science, horology, mathematics, and navigation. Sobel calls it "the definitive text on this subject" and "the definitive visual record" of it.

The Bookseller's Apprentice, by George Talbot Goodspeed '25 (Holmes, $35). Goodspeed's in Boston, which closed in 1995, was one of the world's preeminent rare book shops. It was founded in 1898 by the author's father, who recorded the shop's early history in his book, Yankee Bookseller. Son George spent his working life minding the store and offers here an anecdotal and engagingly digressive memoir about the books and collectors (many Harvardians) who came his way.

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