Book of the Week (July 18, 2011)

On the New Book Shelf in the Library Lobby

The Greater Journey:  Americans in Paris
By David McCullough

Call Number:  DC 718 .A44 M39 2011

Publisher's Description: The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.

After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of Light. Most had never left home, never experienced a different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough writes, “Not all pioneers went west.”

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about everything. There he saw black students with the same ambition he had, and when he returned home, he would become the most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate, almost at the cost of his life.

Two staunch friends, James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Cooper writing and Morse painting what would be his masterpiece. From something he saw in France, Morse would also bring home his momentous idea for the telegraph. 

Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans launched his spectacular career performing in Paris at age fifteen. George P.A. Healy, who had almost no money and little education, took the gamble of a lifetime and with no prospects whatsoever in Paris became one of the most celebrated portrait painters of the day. His subjects included Abraham Lincoln.

Medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote home of his toil and the exhilaration in “being at the center of things” in what was then the medical capital of the world. From all they learned in Paris, Holmes and his fellow “medicals” were to exert lasting influence on the profession of medicine in the United States.

Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James were all “discovering” Paris, marveling at the treasures in the Louvre, or out with the Sunday throngs strolling the city’s boulevards and gardens. “At last I have come into a dreamland,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom’s Cabin had brought her.

The genius of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the son of an immigrant shoemaker, and of painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, three of the greatest American artists ever, would flourish in Paris, inspired by the examples of brilliant French masters, and by Paris itself.

Nearly all of these Americans, whatever their troubles learning French, their spells of homesickness, and their suffering in the raw cold winters by the Seine, spent many of the happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris. McCullough tells this sweeping, fascinating story with power and intimacy, bringing us into the lives of remarkable men and women who, in Saint-Gaudens’ phrase, longed “to soar into the blue.”


Review from the LA Times
More from the publisher

Book of the Week (July 11, 2011)

Beyond the Trees: Stories of Wisconsin Forests
By Candice Gaukel Andrews

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS)

Call Number:  SD 428 .A2 W627 2011

Wisconsin Historical Society's description:  The diversity of landscapes evoked in Beyond the Trees is matched only by the characters who inhabit them. Traverse the footsteps of Ojibwe hunters and early explorers in the remote woods of Brule River State Forest. Trek past the remains of bygone logging and CCC camps in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. Glimpse into the world of Great Lakes shipping in Point Beach State Forest. Walk on trails named after John Muir and Increase Lapham in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, and experience urban green space at Milwaukee's Havenwoods State Forest. From orchids to oak savannah, beaver to brook trout, and white-tailed deer to timber wolves, discover Wisconsin's flora and fauna.

Richly illustrated with color photographs by the author's husband, John T. Andrews, and other professional photographers, Beyond the Trees is also an intimate visual portrait of these stunning landscapes. Archival images, informative sidebars, locator maps, and contact information for Wisconsin state and national forests round out this unique book.

Nature writer Candice Gaukel Andrews weaves together contemporary observations and historical reminiscences in Beyond the Trees: Stories of Wisconsin Forests. Readers will journey to some of the most pristine and notable places in the Upper Midwest: Wisconsin's state and national forests.

Additional Information from the WHS

Book of the Week (July 4, 2011)

Smoking Typewriters:  The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America
By John McMillian

You can find it on the New Book shelf in the Library's lobby
Call Number:  PN 4888.U5 M35 2011

How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people-many of them affluent and college educated-to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled?


In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian shows that one answer to these questions can be found in the emergence of a dynamic underground press in the 1960s. Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young people across the country launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New, cheaper printing technologies democratized the publishing process and by the decade's end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many of those who produced and sold them-on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses-became targets of harassment from local and federal authorities. With writers who actively participated in the events they described, underground newspapers captured the zeitgeist of the '60s, speaking directly to their readers, and reflecting and magnifying the spirit of cultural and political protest. McMillian pays special attention to the ways underground newspapers fostered a sense of community and played a vital role in shaping the New Left's highly democratic "movement culture."
Deeply researched and eloquently written, Smoking Typewriters captures all the youthful idealism and vibrant tumult of the 1960s as it delivers a brilliant reappraisal of the origins and development of the New Left rebellion.