Unique profiles

Occasionally in my reading, I stumble across a unique character profile that I wish to share with you, dear reader. It might be about an individual whom I’ve never even heard of (such is the case this time), but the nature of the person’s life strikes me in some way that I wouldn’t feel right if I were to keep such newfound knowledge to myself. In sharing these profiles with you, I may occasionally “show my age” by making some categorical statement that could easily be refuted by someone who’s been around long enough to actually know what I’m talking about (seeing as I might not). But I’ll share just the same.

The first such profile is this piece from a recent Wall Street Journal about Jacques Barzun, a cultural historian, professor and longtime feature at Columbia University. If you want to find out more, read it. If you don’t, that’s fine. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it…

And to give you another taste of what this series of profiles will be like, here’s an item from a February edition of the New York Times Sunday Book Review about the part-time literary career of E. Howard Hunt, one of those responsible for organizing the infamous Watergate break-in.

New Ken Burns film a must-see

This week, I’ve been watching “The War”, the new Ken Burns documentary airing on PBS this week that takes a closer look at World War II. I’m a big fan of Burns’ previous documentaries, including his epics on the Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, as well as his shorter, two-part film on Mark Twain.

“The War” seems to differ from those films in that it reflects on this monumental event primarily from the vantage point of the men and women who physically waged the war on the battlefields abroad or in the factories, shipyards, and salvage drives back in the states. Burns’ previous works tended to give at least equal attention to the leading figures of the events or cultural entities they examined, whether it was Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, Lou Gehrig and Willie Mays, or Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker.

However, anyone who’s ever flipped on the History Channel or Turner Classic Movies knows that the Second World War has received it’s ample share of screen time. Just about every angle of the war has been covered extensively, perhaps even more so than most of the subjects in Burns’ earlier films. So Burns may be correct to assume that we don’t need another exhaustive on-screen look at the key strategies of the Normandy Invasion, the Yalta conference and its aftermath, or full profiles of FDR, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Ike, Tojo, Mussolini, MacArthur, Patton, and the rest of the major characters. That’s all been done.

Instead, Burns builds his narrative around four towns: Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Cal., Waterbury, Conn., and Luverne, Minn. He allows the members of those communities who lived the war first-hand to tell their stories of what it was like as individuals doing their part to pull the country through that trying time. In this way, Burns allows his subjects to describe the collective experience of the nation as U.S. troops fought line-to-line with German and Japanese forces, as factories at home brought in thousands of workers to fill the demands for ships and planes, as citizens gathered scrap metal and bacon fat to help produce armaments and munitions, as black Americans still served in all-colored units almost 80 years after the Civil War, and as Americans of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps here at home.

But despite the stark realities Burns displays, he also uses the film to portray American hope and optimism. Despite their treatment, many Japanese Americans still signed up to defend their country in the military. Families made sacrifices at home, knowing that “the boys” overseas faced much worse conditions on the front lines. And despite tactical blunders by second- and third-tier generals, American troops still pushed on to win a war that, at least at the outset, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, they were not well-equipped to fight.

The seven-part series continues tomorrow evening I can’t wait. If you don’t see it, then, to borrow a phrase from a noted philosophical treatise, I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.