'Vacuum' historian scoops up facts

Dave Wood's Book Report

David Halberstam is one of America's preeminent popular historians. He's a veritable vacuum cleaner when it comes to gathering up the facts and putting them in readable prose.

He's written many, many books, including two of my favorites, "The Fifties," of which I am a child and about which I thought I knew it all until I read Halberstam, and "The Reckoning," in which he took apart both the American and the Japanese auto industries, then reassembled them in a perceptive book, not only about cars but about culture.

One of the typically telling anecdotes that Halberstam is a master of in the latter book comes during his profile of Henry Ford II, a fellow known for boozing, chasing women and being the scion of a family that never got along well with its labor unions. Halberstam reports that rank-and-file assembly line workers loved the tubby capitalist, cheered him on in his various drunken driving and extramarital escapades and referred to him affectionately as "Hank the Deuce."

A sports fan, he has also written many books about athletics. Now he's out with "Playing for Keeps" (Random House, $24.95), the life story of Michael Jordan. In this hefty book about the world's greatest hoopster, Halberstam's detailing is impeccable.

Case in point: Halberstam paints a great opening to his book when he tells of Jordan and the Chicago Bulls traveling to Paris to play in a European tournament sponsored by one of Jordan's chief "clients," McDonald's. Paris is his favorite haunt (remember the beret?), and the Parisians return the compliment, mobbing him wherever he goes. At one point during this working visit, Jordan confuses The Louvre, one of the world's great art museums with The Luge, one of the world's most boring sports events. Such was France's adulation of Jordan, Halberstam reports, that the fussy French journalists didn't report the gaffe.

And so goes the entire book, which begins with his early life, an upper middle class life which is interesting in itself, then goes on to his college career, his break into the pros, his flirtation with baseball and on up to the present, including the NBA strike.

It's all fascinating stuff. If I had a complaint it would be that Halberstam brings new meaning to the word "apotheosis," the entire book being an exercise in gee-whiz-this-guy's-perfect. I mentioned my reservation to a friend who is a great sports fan and his reply was "Why not? Gee whiz, he IS perfect." I guess that just goes to show that book reviewers need to watch more ESPN and not so many episodes of "Booknotes."

'Round here

Just when my upper Midwest cupboard was bare, when I thought our region had completely stopped producing books, two wonderful volumes arrived in the mail, one from Minnesota, the other from Wisconsin.

Lanesboro, Minn., author Mary T. Bell has published a book that will warm the hearts of people like me. I grew up in town full of Scandinavians, a town full of old men who had their first American jobs in the logging camps of the upper Midwest. Those grizzled fellows are gone now. But Bell brings them back to life in, wonder of wonders, a scholarly coffee table book, "Cutting Across Time: Logging, Rafting and Milling the Forests of Lake Superior" (The Schroeder Area Historical Society, c/o Sandra Bennett, Hwy. 61, Schroeder, Minn., 55613, $24.95).

This handsome hardcover is chock full of photos and illustrations supported by an excellent text held together with the life of lumber baron John Schroeder. It's a class act all the way and I can't recommend it highly enough.

And in a photo finish with "Cutting" is a book that will stay for a long time on my nightstand. It's "Wisconsin Folklore," (University of Wisconsin Press, $12.95), compiled and annotated by James P. Leary, director of the Folklore Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Leary covers everything from Woodland Indian Place Names to Norwegian Fiddling to Faith Healers to Church Dinners to, you guessed it, Tavern Amusements. What really impresses is not the general list of topics, but the intense homework Leary must have done to sift and winnow so meticulously.

Typically, such stuff is very parochial. You'd expect a Madison folklorist to concentrate on southern Wisconsin and all those famous places like Mukawanago and Milwaukee. Not Leary. He covers the entire Badger State, including long-dead Norwegian fiddlers like Oscar Nyen, from my birthplace in Preston township and legendary Polish strongman Albert Gamroth of Independence, a town about as far away from Madison as you're going to get and still be in Wisconsin. I grew up hearing about Nyen and Gamroth, but I never dreamed a scholar way down south would spend the time to find out. This book is one to browse in endlessly.

Leary missed one good legend from home. Hans Jacob Olson, who lived near Fiddler Oscar Nyen's place, so I'll tell it here. Legend has it that Olson was so mean that the neighbors ganged up on him in 1876 and hanged him from a tree in his own front yard, whereupon a delighted Mrs. Olson cooked coffee and served cookies to the hangmen.