Tag Archives: books

04.24.13
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GRAND CENTRAL-THE BOOK-A DESTINATION UNTO ITSELF

It is fitting that my son who has just begun a daily commute to Grand Central gave me a copy of Sam Roberts  book Grand Central, How A Train Station Transformed America.

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During the better part of four decades , I commuted through Grand Central during periods of its greatest decay and glorious rebirth.  For me, and millions of others, the book is personal and the FOREWORD by Pete Hamill gives the work a New York City imprimatur that only Hamill could provide. Hamill: ” It was a week before Christmas in 1945.  Wait my mother said. I want to show you something. And she led me into the largest space I had ever seen. There were people moving across shiny marble floors in many directions, a gigantic clock, and a large board with numbers and the names of cities. A deep voice kept speaking from somewhere, the voice echoing off gleaming walls. We were in a place called Grand Central Station.”

The name is technically not Grand Central Station but rather Grand Central Terminal although few have ever called it anything but the former. The short-lived original named Grand Central Station, located nearby on 42nd Street,  was demolished  when the brilliant New York Central Railroad Chief Engineer William Wilgus convinced Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son, William, that the future  of railroading was electric locomotives that would allow the Park Avenue rail lines to be placed underground leading to a new two tiered Grand Central Terminal.

Roberts brings the detail of the construction of the terminal into a readable and understandable epic, with a coupling of wonderful photography.  The magic and glamour of long distance train travel abounded in Grand Central long before it became a commuter hub. Track 34, today a common departure point for the Harlem Line, was where nightly they rolled out the celebrity red carpet for the 20th Century Limited to Chicago. The train with speeds up to 123 miles per hour made the trip in 20 hours, therefore the name.  The 20th Century made its inaugural trip on June 17, 1902 and its last on December 2, 1967. By that time the once glorious Grand Central along with long-distance train travel had fallen into disrepair and neglect and the terminal was  only a  shadow of the wonder in Pete Hamill’s youthful eyes back in 1945.

Robert’s history of  Grand Central is complete,  but the excitement surrounding  the terminal’s renewal,  in  many ways, lays the foundation of the renewal of New York City itself,  and the indomitable spirit of  New Yorker’s following the city-wide declines during the 1970s. This spirit, prevalent  today, harkens back to the introduction of a popular radio program in the 1940s on NBC titled Grand Central Station. See if you don’t agree that even though the 20th Century Limited and Empire Express are distant memories,  the preamble to each radio show remains real  as you walk through Grand Central today.

As a bullet seeks its target, shining rails in every part of our great country are aimed at Grand Central Station, heart of the nations greatest city. Drawn by the magnetic force of the fantastic metropolis, day and night great trains rush toward the Hudson River, sweep down its eastern bank for 140 miles, flash briefly by the long red row of tenement houses south of 125th Street, dive with a roar into the two-and-one-haf-mile tunnel which burrows beneath the glitter and swank of Park Avenue, and then…Grand Central Station! Crossroads of a million private lives! Gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily. 

Sam Roberts has given anyone who has ever paced the marble floors of Grand Central a great gift.  Beyond rails, renovation, railroad barons , conductors, porters and engineers, this is the story of how for over 100 years a building   has played such a huge role in defining New York City.  For those of us for whom Grand Central has been part of our lives we owe Sam Roberts a special debt of gratitude. Grand Central celebrates a victory for a city we love.

Sam Roberts has covered New York City for the Daily News and the New York Times for over 40 years. He has written seven books of non-fiction including The Changing Face of America in the 21st Century.

04.10.13
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THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY/ EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN

The title of this posting  incorporates  two books, a work of non fiction and a novel. Both detail the secrets of the U.S. government’s  World War II  Oak Ridge Tennessee Laboratory from its creation in 1943 to the end of the Second World War in 1945.

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Denise Kiernan’s book The Girls of Atomic City, The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II , tells the incredible story of the overnight construction of  a  secret huge industrial complex ( Site X)  in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the sole purpose of which was to convert uranium into enriched nuclear fuel for the construction of the first atomic bomb under the stealth Manhattan Project. Within a year, Oak Ridge Tennessee grew to a community of 75,000 inhabitants and into one of the largest industrial complexes in the world!

Kiernan details  how thousands of young women were recruited to Oak Ridge from throughout the country  with the promise of good paying  jobs that would ,” Help Win The War.”   These young recruits , mostly in their early 20s ,  boarded buses and trains without knowing exactly where they were going and  not having any idea of the position they were about to assume.  Adding to this remarkable story is that for the duration  of their stay, none of the workers at Oak Ridge  ever knew the true nature of the work.  Only after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was the nature of their work revealed to them.

The Girls of Atomic City  tells the Oak Ridge story from the standpoint of the sociological  interaction of the thousands of young men and women living together in camp-like accommodations, finding a way to establish a social life while at the same time working on a top-secret project that even talking about to friends was forbidden.  Additionally, the book translates into layman’s language  the scientific process of creating the fuel ( enriched uranium)  for  ( The  Gadget )  which was to become the atomic bomb.

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What Kiernan does not develop  is the story of the enormous health hazards that these young women  and everyone at Oak Ridge were exposed to every day.  Marianne Wiggins’  novel  Evidence of Things Unseen,  accomplishes that in a beautiful love story that winds its way from Tennessee to the  eastern shore of North Carolina and the  back to the Oak Ridge Laboratory  to uncover the horror of the impact of radiation sickness upon unknowing workers.  In an odd twist, Wiggins’ novel completes Kiernan’s  work of non-fiction.

Denise Kiernan is also the author of Signing Their Lives Away and Signing Their Rights Away, the fame and mis-fortune of the men who signed The Declaration  of Independence.   Her work has appeared in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 

04.29.12
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NO PULITZER FOR FICTION -DON’T DESPAIR-SONS AND LOVERS PREDATED THE HONOR

Surely there was great disappointment when no winner was chosen for this year’s Pulitzer for fiction. However, considered by many one of the greatest novels written in the 20th Century, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers never received one either! Published in 1913, it pre-dated the establishment of the awards in 1917 by four years! It would be interesting if the Pulitzer Board created a retroactive category.  In a sense, the Modern Library has done just that by ranking Sons and Lovers the 9th greatest novel of the 20th century. Quite right, quite right indeed!

Though technically a novel, Sons and Lovers is without doubt auto-biographical. D.H. Lawrence  is clearly writing of the struggles of growing up in a dysfunctional family in a poor mining community in England. The mother had married below her class to a husband that turned out to be not much beyond the daily retreat to the local pub with his co-workers.  In the novel, the mother is left with only her son to whom to direct all of her affection and emotion.  She would not let go of  what she perceived as all that remained important in her life.

I opened my Modern Library paperback version of Sons and Lovers and by chance the following paragraph unfolded. You will understand quickly why this great novel, once read, may erase any disappointment over their being no 2012 Pulitzer for fiction.

“Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent and watched…Paul looked into Miriam’s eyes…She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him…Lets go, he said…Something made him feel anxious and imprisoned…The two walked in silence…Till Sunday he said quietly and left her and she walked home slowly feeling her soul satisfied with the holiness of the night…Always when he went with Miriam his mother was fretting and getting angry with him…when he walked into the house his mother had been sitting thinking…She could feel Paul being drawn by this girl and she did not care for Miriam…That there was any love growing between him and Mariam, neither of them would have acknowledged…She is one of those who will want to suck a man’s soul out til he has none of his own left.”

This magnificent novel rises to new heights on each page. If you have not read Sons and Lovers I commend it to you now. At 99 years of age it is contemporary and worthy of every accolade and honor that has been bestowed upon the book and its author.  Lawrence’s other better known novels are The Rainbow, Women in Love and of course Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  His last novel was The Virgin and the Gypsy written in 1930.

A footnote. In 1920, the year that Women In Love was published no Pulitzer was given for fiction! Also published in that same year was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Sinclair Lewis’  Main Street.  Good company!