Read Beat (...and repeat)

If you believe western civilization is the result of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times, historian Naoise (pronounced Knee-sha) Mac Sweeney suggests you think again.
That concept is a powerful figment of our collective imagination, she says, delivering some of her evidence in the form of a new book, "The West: A New History in 14 lives."
How did she arrive at the 14 individuals she wrote about? "I just wanted to capture a range of personalities--not just kings and queens or great generals--but I wanted to get more of everyday people," Sweeney told Steve Tarter.
That's if people like Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq as-Sabbah al-Kindi, a Muslim philosopher, mathematician, physician and music theorist who lived in 9th-century Baghdad, could be called an everyday person.
Al-Kindi stirred Sweeney's interest, she said, the more she researched his work--hundreds of treatises from astrology to zoology. He touched on subjects as varied as the astronomy, jewelry and the tides, even writing about how to remove stains from clothing, said Sweeney.
Other figures in "The West" include Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century B.C., Phillis Wheatley, an 18th century African American poet, and Carrie Lam, "until very recently the chief executive of Hong Kong," she said. 
The 14 characters cited by Sweeney span the millennia and the continents, representing different religions, varying levels of wealth and education, diverse traditions and nationalities. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed—and why we’ve misunderstood it for too long.
 

The bicycle has had anything but a smooth ride in the United States. As Robert Turpin tells it in “The First Taste of Freedom,” a history of how the bicycle has been marketed over the years in this country, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s. Bicycling was a phenomenon with adults riding both individually and in clubs. Women found cycling brought new freedom. Production boomed with some 300 manufacturers across the country producing bikes.

Production peaked in 1898 and 1899 with a million bikes produced annually, said Turpin. But just a few years later, the biking craze cooled. U.S. production of bicycles dipped to 200,000 a year by 1905, he said.

The arrival of the automobile at this time obviously played a big part in displacing the bicycle as a transportation wonder, said Turpin.  

The U.S. military purchased a lot of bicycles in World War I but couldn’t really find an application for them other than to equip messengers with fresh wheels. 

Bicycles enjoyed something of a upturn in the 1930s, Turpin told Steve Tarter, but the emphasis was more on nostalgia—a desire to recreate the golden days of the 1890s--rather than charting an exciting future.

After World War II, manufacturers finally gave up on convincing adults to ride bicycles, said Turpin. Instead the focus was on the youth market. “The bicycle became more of a toy. Replicas were popular,” he said, noting that one of the popular models in the 1950s was a Hopalong Cassidy bike complete with six-shooters mounted right behind the handlebars.

Turpin said a second bike boom came in the 60s and early 70s generated by the popularity of Schwinn’s Sting-Ray, the first bike with a “banana” seat and high-rise handlebars. With the arrival of the oil crisis in 1973, adults finally outpaced children as bike riders, he said.

Interest in exercise helped get bikes moving again in the later years of the 20th century with mountain bikes taking off after their early adoption in California, said Turpin. More recently, biking spiked during the pandemic when bikes became as hard to find as toilet paper.

Only now have biking stocks resumed to a normal level, said Turpin, a longtime bike rider, himself. 

Today’s trends? The number of kids who once drove the bicycle market are in decline while electric bikes are on the upswing, he said.    

"A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed."
That's the way David Sax's "The Revenge of Analog" starts off but that was 2016--light years ago since the intervening pandemic seemed to stretch time, itself. Sax's most recent effort, "The Future is Analog" was published in 2022.
"This book came out of the experience with the pandemic when everything in our lives --work, school or family reunion--went online," Sax told Steve Tarter.
"This was the future, the new normal" was the feeling at the time, he suggested, adding that folks later found out they wanted to do real things again--like going out to movies, concerts or restaurants.
Sax, who lives in Toronto, said business in the city still hadn't returned to what it was before the pandemic. "I was in a big office last week and it seemed pretty bustling but they said that at one time only 50 to 60 percent of the workforce was in the building," he said.
"I don't think any place is back to 100 percent. Everybody's experimenting now (with hybrid models balancing remote and in-office work). Unfortunately, you physically can't be in both places," said Sax.
"How do we strike the right balance between analog and digital?" That's the real message that Sax brings.

Samir Husni has the distinction of being known as "Mr. Magazine," a title bestowed on him by a grateful student in 1986. Having made magazines his focus as a professor at the University of Mississippi for 37 years before retiring last year, Husni is now the founder and director of the Magazine Media Center.
Husni told Steve Tarter that he picked up his love for magazines in his native Lebanon as a child, developing a love for publications involving ink and paper that has never wavered.
Husni recently donated his extensive collection of magazines--two truckloads worth--to his alma mater, the University of Missouri where they will be stored and maintained to serve students and those with an interest in media, he said.
Magazines, like newspapers, have gone through numerous changes in the digital age, said Husni. Consolidation of the companies that publish magazines has resulted in fewer titles coming to press, he noted.
While 535 new magazines hit the market in 1996, only 74 new titles appeared in 2022, noted Husni, pointing out that newsstands are also disappearing from the American scene.
Husni wrote the obit for the old-fashioned newsstand in 2014. That was the place that usually sold tobacco products along with magazines and newspapers. At that time he pointed to the new newsstands springing up in groceries and bookstores.
Now those outlets are shrinking while the average price of an individual magazine (now at $11) continues to climb, he said.
While the pandemic wiped out reading material in waiting rooms and airline magazines, subscription sales for a number of periodicals went up during that time, he said. 
One of the trends in magazine publishing today is the bookazine, said Husni. "This is a book made to look like a magazine," he said. Subjects are chosen to grab public interest. It might be the Titanic or a rock group like Journey, anything  that people might be willing to spend $14.99 on, Husni added.

When Bonnie Siegler found the movie film that her grandfather Jules Schulback, a successful Manhattan furrier and amateur filmmaker, had taken of Marilyn Monroe while in New York doing the famous blown skirt scene from "The Seven Year Itch," she knew she had something.
It turned out to be more than just a fascinating piece of cinema history (the only surviving footage of that legendary night in 1954) but a book, "The American Way," that Siegler co-authored with Helene Stapinski.
Her pursuit of details about her grandfather led to a remarkable piece of forgotten history bridging old Hollywood, the birth of the comic book, and the Holocaust.
Schulback escaped from Nazi Germany but as Stapinski and Siegler state, getting out of Germany was difficult and dangerous enough but getting his family into America posed another challenge.
Jewish people needed a financial sponsor to be admitted to the United States at that time. Stepping up to assist Jules and his family was a character by the name of Harry Donenfeld, a publisher of “girlie” magazines who really struck gold when he started publishing comics.
That led to yet another icon in "The American Way": Superman. While Donenfeld cashed in as publisher,  the creators of the cartoon, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who signed over all rights to the "Man of Steel," were left frustrated in their efforts to take advantage of the comic's incredible success.
Other luminaries that are also part of "The American Way" include Billy Wilder, the director who made "The Seven Year Itch" along with classics like "Double Indemnity," "Sunset Boulevard" and "Some Like It Hot." Like Schulback, Wilder, who came to the U.S. with fellow countryman and actor Peter Lorre, also left a family in Nazi Germany.
While Siegler's grandfather was able to get his family out of Germany, Wilder never knew what happened to his mother until Siegler's own research pinpointed where she had been murdered by the Nazis.
The book, while focusing on a number of celebrities, has a serious side, following how Jewish citizens in Germany lost their freedom, then their businesses and finally their lives through the 1930s. Siegler points to parallels with rights that have been steadily eroded in the United States in recent years.

Sometimes it's hard knowing just how wild the Wild West was in this country. Cutting through the mythology that surround western heroes like Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill Cody is something that Steve Wiegand endeavors to do with "1876: Year of the Gun."
A longtime journalist for three California papers, Wiegand has devoted himself to writing books since 2010. With "1876," he's sifted through western history to provide an account for readers to better understand the situation.
"Sometimes the legends and the fact are inextricably intertwined. Sometimes what squeezes out is the truth," he said.
Wiegand debunks some of the stories surrounding Bat Masterson, George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James along with Earp and Cody but makes the point that the figures we know so well weren't phonies. "They did live dangerous lives. Hickok was shot and killed while playing poker at the age of 39. In the case of Bat Masterson, he had a dual life. On one hand he was a buffalo hunter, involved in shootouts and served for a time as sheriff of Ford County (where Dodge City is located). For the last 20 years of his life he moved to New York where he served as a newspaper editor and sports columnist and an expert on boxing," Wiegand told Steve Tarter.
Wiegand's research turned up the legends that might have been along with the celebrated characters that have become household words thanks to television and movie stardom. 
"Bill Tilghman was a U.S. marshall and revenue agent who racked up 50 years in law enforcement, getting involved in more shootouts that Hickok, Earp and Cody combined, but you don't hear about him," he said.

Journalist Gloria Dickie, based in London where she serves as an environmental correspondent for Reuters, offers a superb study of the eight surviving species of bears with "Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future." 
Recounting her travels in search of spectacled bears in Ecuador and Peru, sloth bears in rural India, pandas in China, sun and moon bears in South Vietnam, black and grizzly bears in the western U.S., and polar bears in the Canadian arctic, Dickie details the threats faced by each and profiles the conservationists who protect them. 
Along with describes the horrific conditions under which caged sun and moon bears have their bile harvested for use in traditional Vietnamese medicine, she notes how sloth bears, the most dangerous of all bears, are facing habitat challenges in heavily populated India.
While the eight species live in different environments there's one thing they have in common: they're all in trouble. The panda is protected in captivity but is increasingly rare in the wild, she pointed out. The polar bear, meanwhile, is literally on thin ice when it comes to its future.
Dickie relates how bears have been mistreated over history despite occupying a special place in the culture. It's hard to come up with a bad bear literary figure with  heroes such as Rupert, Paddington and Winnie the Pooh on the scene.
Baloo in Kipling's "Jungle Book" is described as a brown bear but rightfully should have been a sloth bear, states Dickie. "No other bear species inhabits the forests of Madhya Pradesh. He would likely have eaten termites and mahua (flowers), not nuts and roots. And Baloo would have been more inclined to disembowel Mowgli than to teach him the ways of the jungle."
Steve Tarter recalled a statement from Dickie's book that sums up the predicament bears face with a habitat that continues to shrink: "Without wilderness the grizzly would cease to exist. And without the grizzly, wilderness is tamed, deprived of its monarch." 

Alexis McCrossen is a professor of history at Sothern Methodist University who cannot only tell you what time it is but tell you something about time, itself.
Her book, "Marking Modern Time" is a history of clocks, watches and other timekeepers in American life.
She notes that the public clock era flourished in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s. That was a period, she told Steve Tarter where, after the Civil War, cities across the country sought to build the biggest and best public clocks possible.
"The public clocks were a symbol of order, of legitimacy. Showing the wrong time might have suggested there were other problems about the enterprise displaying that clock," she said.
Clocks entered American homes as decorative pieces that had the ability to tell time.
"Connecticut clockmakers that used brass and other materials became very wealthy. Clocks became wildly popular after the Civil War," said McCrossen.
Watches came on during World War I but didn't really sweep the market until after World War II, she said.

Edith Wilson may have wielded more power than any first lady in U.S. history for a period during the second term of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency but, if she did, she never admitted it.

That’s part of the story that Rebecca Roberts tells in her new book called “Untold Power.”

Edith Wilson first met the president during Wilson’s first term. “She inherited a jewelry store when her first husband died in 1908. She was a wealthy woman of status. She was the first woman in Washington to get a driver’s license. She’d tool around D.C. in her little electric car.

While Woodrow, himself a widower, was taken with Edith right away, she took a little longer to accept his proposal. “She initially told him that she’d marry him if he lost (the 1916 election) but came around and said she’d marry him regardless of the vote,” Roberts told Steve Tarter.

While she never gave any interviews, Edith Wilson blazed trails in a lot of ways, said Roberts, who described the first lady as fascinated by politics.

When Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in October 1919, the president became bedridden. That’s when Edith stepped up as acting president although no formal acknowledgement was ever made. The physical problems that Woodrow Wilson suffered were kept from the public, the press and the president, himself, said Roberts. During this period of his incapacity, if you needed to see the president, you dealt with Edith, she said.

After Wilson left the White House in 1921, Edith covered her tracks and downplayed her role, emphasizing she was only the dutiful wife, said Roberts.

After his presidency, the Wilsons remained in Washington. Woodrow Wilson died in 1924 but Edith outlived him by 37 years, dying in 1961. Following her husband’s death, she returned to her role as wealthy widow, said Roberts, noting that her one focus throughout her life was to burnish her husband’s legacy whenever she could.

It’s easy to take the phenomenon of the Sunday paper for granted. Until just recently, the idea of a metro Sunday newspaper complete with color comics, special supplements and inserts landing on your porch with a resounding thud was the way of the world.

While the devastating decline in the nation’s newspaper industry has suddenly made us conscious that the world may not always have newspapers to sort through on a Sunday (or on any other day for that matter), Paul Moore and Sandra Gabriele have written “The Sunday Paper: A Media History” to provide a vivid account on how one of the most successful media stories—from both an artistic and business viewpoint—came to be.

Transcending the constraints of newsprint while facing competition from other media, Sunday editions borrowed forms from and eventually partnered with magazines, film and radio, inviting people to not only read but watch and listen.

“When we started in 2007, we would never have guessed how newspapers would be a thing of the past by the time we finished (“The Sunday Paper” was published last year by the University of Illinois Press), including the great American Sunday paper. But we already knew the art, fiction and fun of Sunday papers had always been precarious and ephemeral,” Moore and Gabriele wrote.

In their interview with Steve Tarter, the authors relate how syndication efforts that started late in the 19th century played a part in making the Sunday paper special. It wasn’t just about news, the very lifeblood of the newspaper, that made the Sunday effort outstanding, “the Sunday paper structured a different relationship between its world and public,” Moore and Gabriele noted.

“From the society and fashion pages to sporting and business reports, theater reviews, and listings, and feature stories about contemporary culture, Sunday supplements took advantage of a day of leisure to reflect upon pastimes and amusements,” the authors stated.

The death of newsprint is also part of the story here as newspapers, displaced first by “breaking news” broadcasts on radio and TV and then by Twitter and other social media, no longer own the public stage. Can a Sunday paper succeed in a digital world? Moore suggests that it would be an effort in nostalgia to try and reinstate a printed journal  since our whole concept of a day of leisure has changed along with our media choices.