“Soldier’s Home” (1925)

[2017 review here]

Another good one from Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time collection, also prefaced by an isolated paragraph with a war scene. At least it was a war scene—they don’t always feel on point. This story is not about Nick Adams but about Harold Krebs, a veteran of the Great War recently discharged and sent home. I don’t know the timeline of PTSD stories, but this certainly counts as one and may be an early one—it feels more like a Vietnam-era story in many ways. Krebs—not otherwise seen in Hemingway’s fiction as far as I know—was held over and not sent home until 1919, missing all the parades and such. Now he doesn’t want to do anything. The story feels so modern on this point that TV itself (not generally available in 1925) feels missing in action. There’s also some vibe from the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, with family and friends at home trying to help but not knowing how—arguably not even able because they weren’t there. All that is in Krebs without Hemingway having to spell it out. The title is a little double-jointed, playing off an ambiguous apostrophe, signifying a home that belongs to the soldier and also that the soldier has arrived there. The story is burdened and foredoomed with the certain sense it is true about homecomings from war, the confusing sense of being lost that the returning have. They have changed—they have aged. They don’t understand and rage dogs anyone trying to engage them. There are no real eruptions here. When Krebs’s mother presses him on his next step it is tense but ultimately uneventful. He decides to move to Kansas City, less a decision and more just a response to his mother’s pressure. In turn that’s more about the silent, absent father’s pressure. Krebs’s one point about leaving for Kansas City is he hopes he can skip a scene with his father that way. A good no-nonsense story about aimlessness and desperation and the stupid futility of war.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” (1925)

This story by Ernest Hemingway works as a kind of counterpoint to his “Indian Camp” story from the same In Our Time collection. Where Nick Adams’s father the doctor is competent and even heroic in “Indian Camp,” here he is petty and irrational, though it’s not entirely clear why. He wants some logs that have washed up on his riverfront to be cut up for firewood. The man coming to do that with a crew makes a point of saying the doctor is stealing the property of a logging company. He says it doesn’t matter to him, but he still insists on the point. This in turn enrages the doctor, who basically tells him to get the hell out of there. It’s apparent there’s something between these two men but we don’t learn in this story what it is. The doctor tells his wife one thing. It could be the source of the rancor—it wouldn’t be unreasonable—but the story seems to imply he’s just telling his wife something to keep her from asking more questions. Then he goes off into the woods looking for Nick, who is reading a book. Nick likes to tag along on his father’s calls. This is another very short story—and similarly prefaced in the collection with a “Chapter II” paragraph about war—and it is another packed full with incident. It suggests typical frictions in a community, how people who know each other so well get along or don’t get along. Whatever is between the two men is probably not that interesting. These little frictions rarely are. They are more often just litanies of slights that have grown into resentments and hostility. The doctor seems much more peevish than our view of him in “Indian Camp.” But he’s still a hero to Nick. Both stories remind me of what I liked most about Hemingway in the first place—readable, plainspoken, but full of sneaky complexity. I also (sometimes) like the artistic pretensions of the lone paragraphs or prose poems floating between stories. I recognize them as pretentious, under influence of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and such, but they work about as often as they don’t. “Indian Camp” is probably the better story, but I like the deliberate way this story interacts with that one. The constant is the father-son relationship, even as much else about the doctor seems to change. We’ll see how far this goes, but for the moment I’m relieved and happy to find stories so plainly good by Hemingway. He is finding his voice here in a very pure way, albeit a voice I came to think much less of. I’m almost ready for another visit to The Old Man and the Sea.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“Cat in the Rain” (1925)

A lot of people have made a lot of things out of this very short story by Ernest Hemingway. Wikipedia uses it to talk about an “iceberg theory” of literature, in which a story shows the 10% that’s above the surface while also somehow suggesting the 90% of it hidden below. This story works pretty well that way, in spite of being obviously another one of Hemingway’s marriages / wives. It’s raining, and the woman, the wife of the American couple at the Italian hotel, sees a kitten outside their hotel crouched under a table and wants it for the companionship. So much depends upon it,  But it is elusive. At story’s end a maid knocks on their door with a cat in arms for her. Others see the story as related to wanting or having children. That’s fair. Another theme discussed is that she’s lonely because her husband (Hemingway) abandons her to his writing every day for hours and she doesn’t have anything to do. He is somewhat neglectful. Sadly, that sounds the most like Hemingway to me and thus the most plausible interpretation. I like it best as literally about a cat in the rain who is rescued, as we say now. A cat that has found its forever home with a woman or couple who will always take care of it. Never mind that Hemingway and this particular wife, Hadley, lost all or most of his literary work to that point when a suitcase went missing. Now a somewhat overblown legend, it does remind that literally lost writing can be debilitating. I have my own examples from the early days of word processing, when hours of work could be lost by accidentally pressing the wrong key. This story may be a little too typical of Hemingway in some ways (the stoic writer at his poetic work) but I just stubbornly like the cat story and that’s all there is to it. I won’t hear of it any other way. I suspect I may sound dismissive of Hemingway’s imagist impulses, but they do generally work and that includes this story very much. (The preface paragraph, on the other hand, is another bullfighting scene. Again, works well. Again, I'm not interested in bullfighting.) The cat scenes are better than the marriage scenes, but overall it’s another good Hemingway story by all the usual rules of judgment.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“Big Two-Hearted River” (pts. I-II, 1925)

Ernest Hemingway had a poet’s touch as well as a poet’s vanity in putting together the In Our Time collection. Many of its stories are very good—this finale to the collection is one of his best, most famous, and most defining. But it is presented as two stories in the Finca Vigia edition, which seems to be scrupulous to Hemingway’s intentions. The “two parts”—is it something about the two hearts?—are interrupted by a prose poem message from our sponsor (also before and after, also between every story in the collection). In this case it is a scene of five men being hanged and thankfully not about bullfighting. Perhaps readers in their time understood the context better than me. Is it a war scene? The writing is concrete and chiseled but what is it doing there? Last time through I tried “Big Two-Hearted River” another way, skipping the in-betweens and just reading it as a single story, where it made much more sense and isn’t that long. Hang some Roman numerals on the two parts and leave it at that, I say. None of this unbecoming monumentality. Not least because “Big Two-Hearted River” is quite a beautiful story and doesn’t need the puffery. I kept thinking of Richard Brautigan and Trout Fishing in America and all the permutations of trout fishing in America because this one (two-part) story has to be the single source of all of them. This is where trout fishing in America becomes iconic. Not, perhaps, that Brautigan necessarily belongs in a discussion of Hemingway, but he certainly spent some time living in this story. In Part I, our old friend Nick Adams is in the wilds of Michigan, returned from travels and war and painful experience, embracing the restorative forest, secure in his meditative outdoors skills. He sets up camp near the river, starts a fire, prepares a meal, makes coffee, remembers a friend, and eventually sleeps. The sense of comfort he finds in these rituals is palpable. In Part II, it’s a day of fishing, with fast water, logs, grasshoppers as bait, water thigh-high in places. A big one gets away but he ends up catching two and knows there will be good fishing for days if he wants. A city slicker such as myself may be slightly alienated by the brutality of the way he kills grasshoppers and fish, as described, but I suppose it’s all in a day’s fishing. There’s symbolism here. The town where he disembarks the train is burnt to the ground. Across the river from where he is fishing the land and water turn into an impenetrable swamp. He is cocooned between them. Maybe the highly formal two parts are supposed to suggest how broken Adams is, but I suggest reading them together and consecutively. It’s kind of mysterious how it works so well—one of those stories.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“The Battler” (1925)

Here’s another good one by Ernest Hemingway from the In Our Time collection(s)—actually a late-breaking substitute for “Up in Michigan” when a publisher got squeamish. It seems to be set in Michigan, but the scene is different. Nick Adams has just been tossed from a freight train he jumped on. He’s been riding the rails. It’s too early for the Great Depression as such, but it has much of that violence—just as the 1920s had much of the same financial woes for many agricultural and other workers. It’s striking how much this feels like a Depression story now. Nick makes his way to a campfire he sees going in the woods by the railroad track. He meets a man who notices Nick’s black eye and torn clothes and seems to like the fighting spirit they suggest. He turns out to be a boxer whose name Nick knows. Now down on his luck, obviously, and we learn why later in the story. Another man shows up who is more or less the boxer’s minder. The third man is African-American, and the story is not without its problems regarding him. I hold Hemingway responsible for turning the slave Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn into “N-word Jim,” which has stuck even though Twain himself never used that term. It’s possible it would be useful to look at each use in this story of “negro” and the N-word to see if Hemingway intended any kind of useful distinction. But I suspect not. There is some unpleasant racism in his first novel as well, The Sun Also Rises (1926). My sense is more that Hemingway was a hostile racist. But that said, his portrayal of the unfortunately named Bugs is not insensitive. Bugs is interesting, complex, fully formed, and the most competent person here. It’s a little surprising to see Nick so loose in the world, riding the rails and brawling. I like the dynamics between these characters. We already know Nick but the other two are impressively vivid. The boxer is closer to cliché maybe with the mental problems that make him alarmingly violent and alarmingly quick to turn on someone. The story remains problematic because of the race issues but it’s still also very good.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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"A Warning to the Curious" (1925)

This M.R. James story was the selection of Ramsey Campbell for the My Favorite Horror Story anthology. I'm still not sure about Campbell and haven't always been sure about James either, though I think I'm coming around on him. In his introduction to the story Campbell compares it to Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar," which is a pretty good call. Once again James deploys a narrative point of view that is highly nested. There is a formal first-person narrator, who grew up in the English seaside town where the story is set. He meets a man, far from the place, who has a story to tell about the town. Within that story is a young man who is basically the main character of this story. This is typical of James, building formal distances into his stories, which can make them, as here, fuzzy and second- or thirdhand, blunting the impact in stark contrast to the vividly strange events recounted. Many things are "told of." Very little is certain. It all proceeds from a local folk legend that claims there were three crowns of East Anglia buried to protect the coast in some mystical fashion from invasion by "the Danes or the French or the Germans." I see the connection with the Le Fanu story, as something menacing begins to shadow the young man after he carefully searches for, finds, and digs up one of these crowns—the last one undiscovered according to legend. The familiar that attaches to the man is only a dark shadow, seen fleetingly, but he is accompanied by a heavy vibe. These crowns are intended to stay buried and protect the coast, see? The young man gets the point and manages to put the crown back where he found it, but it's too late. His transgression will not go unmet, and he knows it. The first time I read this it struck me as patriotic British claptrap, but then I developed a taste for James and can appreciate it more now as a potent ghost story. I like the feeling it bears of implacable antiquity and forces beyond our ken. The crown is there to protect the coastal town from Germans and such, but it will make short work of you if you get in the way even if you are British yourself. James paints his tones in blacks, whites, and grays and the story's most dramatic motions all take place under the surface, in rippling currents. It gets under your skin because that's where it takes place. The things it tells stick with you.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
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"The Festival" (1925)

Here is one of the many H.P. Lovecraft stories that did not make it into the skimpy Library of America collection edited by Peter Straub. In fairness, in most cases it's not hard to guess the reasons for exclusion—but, on the other hand, that collection had room for hundreds more pages and LOA projects devoted to an author generally bear some suggestion of completeness. A lot of stories were left out of that one. They could have been put in their own "approach with caution" section. So, right, not much happens in "The Festival." It's mostly Lovecraft laying an eldritch mood on thick. But making it a Christmas story redeems a lot of the inert qualities for me—or "the Yuletide," as our unnamed first-person narrator prefers to call it. He is obviously aware of the holiday's ancient pagan winter solstice origins. He is visiting the town of Kingsport for the holiday. He appears to have kin there who appear to know him. Or who anyway welcome him and bring him along to the festival. It's possible he is dead. The festival is held in a kind of cave next to an underground river reached by a stairway descending from a church basement. The church sits on top of a hill. There is a nice dream quality here as events unfold, an effect often sought by Lovecraft but less often achieved. This feels like a dream because it's in that realm where it almost makes sense, with careful use of details. The utter silence, for example—of the town, of the crowd of people shuffling to the festival, of the festival itself—is positively eerie and notably "off." Lovecraft had some mystical experience the first time he visited the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, the model for Kingsport. It gets mentioned a lot in relation to this story but I file it under Lovecraft's excitable temperament. ISFDB classes it as a Cthulhu story. The Necronomicon book is in it. The narrator's relative, "the old man," is a good character—he wears a subtle mask which is hard to notice at first and makes his facial features immobile. So lots of good stuff here but no real story—various horrors and grotesqueries of the scene at the festival proper, then over and out. That's not necessarily a bad thing when I think of the contrived getaway capers that mar some of his best stories, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or At the Mountains of Madness. Still, a dreamy march to a mysterious subterranean chamber and some grotesqueries don't feel like quite enough either, hence perhaps the reason it was left out of the LOA (S.T. Joshi did include it in his Penguin collection of Lovecraft). I like "The Festival" because it's a Christmas story after all, and I believe it is Lovecraft's only one. He always was a great one for respecting tradition.

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"The Bishop of Hell" (1925)

Speaking of the conte cruel, Marjorie Bowen was one who trafficked regularly in the supernatural, when she wrote horror, but the stories I've seen always make the human comedy hurt a little too. I wrote previously about her Christmas story, "The Crown Derby Plate," which is practically a cozy, a ghost story to tell the kids in December, but even that has sharp edges. Bowen had a miserable childhood before winning success as a prolific writer of romances, mysteries, historical nonfiction, and more. I love the way the first-person narrator in "The Bishop of Hell" is so unnerved by his own story. "England, 1790," the story opens. "This is the most awful story that I know; I feel constrained to write down the facts as they ever abide with me, praying, as I do so, a merciful God to pardon my small share therein. God have mercy on us all!" Later in the story he mentions he was a lifelong nonbeliever until the events he narrates, but boy is he a believer now. He's inclined to beseech God at the virtual drop of a hat. Bowen tears into her classic horror tales ("Kecksies" and "Scoured Silk" are nearly as good) with acid details. The bishop of hell is one Hector Greatrix, louche, hedonist, and libertine, who lives only for his own pleasures. He enjoys things like borrowing money on the strength of his family name, gambling it all away, and never paying it back. I love that he is actually an ordained clergyman, as the younger son of a younger son. Mostly he is just a despicable villain. He steals the wife of a man who has helped him. They flee from London to the Continent and he keeps her only because she has an income. When that's not enough he turns her out to Italian dandies. She stays with him at first because she loves him and then only in the hope that he will do right by her. God have mercy on us all! He will never marry her because she slept with all those Italians. This cad comes to a wonderfully satisfying bad end (this is how it's done, Jane Rice!)—I mean he comes to a bad end on this plane because obviously, after taking his own life and all the assorted sins, he's going to Hell. Capitalized, a proper noun. God have mercy on us all! The spook show happens only in the very ending, as if to confirm the existence of Hell and Greatrix's consignment to it, but it's as ghastly and effective as the details we learn in the rest of the story. It's cunning of Bowen to make it all come out right morally because it is also license for her to go to town on the depravity, which she pursues almost with ferocious glee. She leaves our first-person narrator, and readers as well, wringing hands and calling to God. Grant us mercy!

Read story online.

"Soldier's Home" (1925)

Read story by Ernest Hemingway online.

Even halfway into this very short story I was pretty sure I would be coming away from it complaining again about Ernest Hemingway's mechanized stoicism and all that implicit machismo. To be sure, those elements are here, and they are as annoying as ever. But there's also something distinctly modern about this, like the stories we hear about soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and before that from Vietnam. But not from Korea, or, before this, from either of the world wars. The stoicism of our hero Krebs, the returning warrior, is palpable, yes, but somehow suffused with dignity and a certain intimidating demeanor. It's not pitiable at all, on a certain level, nor arrogant, except as emotional defense. I don't recall seeing anything like this in Hemingway before. It's one of his early stories, which tended to be his best work. The language is what we've come to expect: a minimum of adjectives, and monolithic paragraphs filled with verbs, nouns, and conjunctions. It's stripped down and clean, but note that the compound clauses can really pile up sometimes. There's machismo, but less in the authorial voice than in the character Krebs, and there it seems for the most part bluster. Yet he's not unsympathetic. More than anything he is opaque, though obviously wounded psychically. It's just that no one knows what to do about it—not Krebs himself, nor anyone around him, nor even the author either evidently. Nowadays we would prescribe time, rest, and psychotherapy, but nowadays we also collectively refuse to follow through on that, leaving our wounded warriors wounded, but thanking them in train stations for their service. I'll give Hemingway the benefit of the doubt that he (sort of) knew the problem, though not what to do about it. That what he did was take the sense of something wrong as his motivation to write, and all the puzzling surface details he saw but could make no sense of as his subject. Hemingway was a journalist first, remember, and in many ways a story like this is just a kind of reporting. Never mind that many sentences here would never get past a copy editor without some judicious attempts for a little more clarity. It's almost better without it. The sense of someone utterly stunned by life is the essence of this story. The soldier has returned to the soldier's home, but the soldier isn't home. Since the war, there's no home for him anywhere.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

An American Tragedy (1925)

Theodore Dreiser's "first novel since 1915" is genuinely a great American novel of the 1920s and inevitably invites comparison with The Great Gatsby, published the same year. At something like five times the size, Dreiser's novel is certainly the most imposing. In a comparison of language, perhaps, is where Dreiser's nagging reputation as a poor writer may find some origins. Not only is Fitzgerald's lustrous language one of the fine points about Gatsby, but also An American Tragedy does have some remarkably deplorable passages—I had always wondered why Dreiser had the reputation, and now I think I know. Most of the last third seems to refrain from direct verbs altogether, preferring to use the gerund form, which begins to feel like moving through pitch—the judge deciding, the lawyer presuming, the gallery gasping, the defendant worrying, the investigator scheming. I think it might be the worst I've ever seen, at least within the bounds of formal literature. Still, it does not diminish the blunt force with which Dreiser imagines and moves his characters about. Clyde Griffiths, at the precipice of a career that could have shot to the skies like Jay Gatsby's, is instead felled, by his circumstances—the inferiority of his upbringing in the naturalist fashion, at which Dreiser has never been better—and equally by his choices. Together they sketch Clyde's character, unique yet of an unmistakably 20th-century American stamp, indeed archetype. An American Tragedy is a big fat tome, with clunky writing, but it is a pulpy, breezy, gripping read, as all the forces of the narrative are brought to bear. All of Clyde's decisions, good and bad, are arrived at transparently. The predicament in which he finds himself is aching and relentless. At some point, likely, readers depart from Clyde's choices and begin to disapprove—strongly. But the route to that place is so lullingly banal that it's really hard to say that moment is going to be the same for everyone. The second of the book's three sweeping movements was most interesting to me, a novel of manners that studies American class distinctions closely. The crime and courtroom drama are fine, but increasingly wordy. Still, obviously, this is one not to miss if you care anything about Dreiser and/or 20th-century American lit.

In case it's not at the library.

The Gold Rush (1925)

USA, 81 minutes (72 minutes, 1942 re-release)
Director/writer/editor: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Roland Totheroh
Music: Charles Chaplin (1942)
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Georgia Hale, Henry Bergman, Malcolm Waite

The Gold Rush offers another example of a classic movie that exists in multiple, somewhat controversial versions, although in this case, sadly enough, it's the auteur himself who is arguably the villain in the drama. Chaplin, in 1942—likely emboldened by his ability to survive in the "talkie" era, as evidenced by his three previous, laudable efforts, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator, all of which managed to maintain the aesthetics he had established in the silent era even as they took shrewd advantage of the developing technologies—set himself to recutting The Gold Rush, which many consider his greatest picture. He trimmed away some 10 minutes, scored it, and then made the colossal error of removing the intertitles in favor of adding his own voiceover narration.

I was first exposed to the original version in a film class some 30 years ago—where, again, I wish I would have paid a little more attention (or at least kept my notes from the class), because I have to think the instructor, Rob Silberman, must have discussed these versions, and deliberately chose to show us the original. But I was blissfully unaware a year or two ago when I finally got around to seeing it again, and found, lo and behold, the simpering, unctuous voice of Chaplin carrying on as if he is reading bedtime stories to children. It seemed to me unbearable.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Bronenosets Potyomkin, USSR, 75 minutes, silent
Director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
Writers: Nina Agadzhanova, Nikolai Aseyev, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Sergei Tretyakov
Photography: Eduard Tisse, Vladimir Popov
Editors: Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei M. Eisenstein
Cast: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov, Ivan Bobrov, Mikhail Gomorov, Aleksandr Levshin, N. Poltavseva, Konstantin Feldman, Prokopenko, A. Glauberman, Beatrice Vitoldi

Critical consensus over the long decades has secured the position of Battleship Potemkin even still as not only the greatest Russian (or Soviet Union) film ever made, but the greatest silent picture as well. Thus, it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which this could well turn out to be the most disappointing movie you have ever seen.

Even as recently as last month, Andrew O'Hehir at Salon could be found raving about a painstaking new restoration that includes a re-recording of the original score by Edmund Meisel (full disclosure: I am writing based on an older print obtained via Netflix with an incidental Shostakovich score). "For better or worse," he writes, taking a calculated position that flies in the face of the movie's daunting academic credentials, "this film's true revolutionary legacy is not art cinema but Hollywood; it's got a lot more in common with Tony Scott's Unstoppable than it does with Andrei Tarkovsky."

Whoa up, Bucky. The point might be arguable in terms of film history, but its suggestion is fairly misleading. Let's not forget that perhaps no other film, until Citizen Kane came into its own, has been so over-praised, over-celebrated, and, ultimately, overrated. I'm here to tell you that it's still fans of Tarkovsky who have the better chance of extracting pleasure from Battleship Potemkin than fans of Unstoppable. And I'd be willing to bet the house on that.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

I don't think it's possible to overstate the value and pleasure of this slender novel. Set quite deliberately in 1922, written mostly in 1923, and published in 1925, it was as contemporary to its times, the so-called "Roaring '20s," as it could be. It so completely occupied them, in fact, that it came to practically overwhelm them. It packs in everything: the psychic fallout from World War I, the shallow mania for wealth, the widespread ongoing exodus from country to city, Prohibition and the gangsters it spawned, the rise of the automobile, and all of the hysteria and desperation and foolishness and exhilaration. The main points may now be found in an image on a U.S. postage stamp from 1998, but the emotional realities are detailed expertly in this novel. As a work of literature, it is at once so subtle and so complex that it has proved almost entirely resistant to conversion to film—Baz Luhrmann is reportedly the latest to give it the old college try, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan along for the ride. Good luck with that. They are the right names, I will say, or right enough, and if the picture is almost certainly doomed to failure I'm looking forward at least to a resurgence of interest in the book that it may engender, as I recall the failed attempt in 1974 of Jack Clayton and Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston accomplishing too. That's when the book first came to my attention anyway, and how I came to encounter this strange story of a man so quotidian, so mundane, and yet so extraordinarily obsessed with an incident in his past that he enters into the times with the sole intent of amassing a fortune he can use to enable him to attempt to recapture it. And the times happened to be right for him to do exactly that. Fitzgerald was a writer who plied his trade almost entirely by instinct, using the expedient tool of English language dedicated to varieties of fantastic and ineffable throughlines. His work is unified in the way it is all mad with romance, drunk on it, rich with extravagant notions and presumptuous images. It could be awful, lugubrious and indulgent and tin-eared and grossly misunderstanding of the terms of life for many. But when he caught the thrum of something vital, and nowhere did he do that better than he does here, he was capable of an almost monstrous beauty. In its language, its structure, its deceptively modest goals and its approach to the problems of the novel, it is almost perfect, with an uncanny ability to transform a lovely story, almost as if by accident—except that, by everything we know about the ambitions of Fitzgerald, it was anything but an accident—into one of the most profound observations of America that exists yet even today.

In case it's not at the library.