Biographer Thomas B. Buell, author of The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War (Crown, 1997), will present a talk at the Library at noon on Feb. 27, in the Mumford Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Memorial Building.
Sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, the program is free and open to the public. His presentation is part of the center's "Books & Beyond" series, which features authors of books that have a particular relevance to the Library's programs or collections.
"This is the first book we've featured that has drawn on the Library's remarkable resources for the study of the Civil War," said Center for the Book Director John Y. Cole.
"Mr. Buell examines the nature of military leadership by studying six generals -- three pairs from North and South who met in battle -- to assess their abilities as generals."
Thomas B. Buell is writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina and the author of biographies of Admirals Ernest King and Raymond Spruance. A former navy commander, he has taught military history at the Naval War College and at West Point.
Mrs. Patterson as a "Murrow Boy"
Mrs. Patterson and Sam Brylawski of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, discuss her career as a journalist.
At their Dec. 2 "Books & Beyond" presentation on The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), authors Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson paid a special tribute to Mrs. Jefferson Patterson, a member of the audience who was an important figure in their book.
Mrs. Patterson is a member of the Library's Madison Council and a generous donor to the Library of Congress and many other cultural institutions.
As related in The Murrow Boys, in 1939 Mrs. Patterson, whose maiden name was Mary Marvin Breckinridge, was a 33-year-old photographer who happened to be in Europe when Hitler invaded Poland.
Her friend, CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, hired her, along with several other correspondents, to broadcast the news of the rise of Nazism. Based in Amsterdam, she worked for CBS for six months, resigning to marry American diplomat Jefferson Patterson on June 20, 1940.
Her broadcasts were successful and affecting. In The Murrow Boys, the authors quote, for example, from one of her broadcasts that poignantly describes the plight of refugees in France.
They also point out that Ms. Breckenridge was the only woman who "cracked" the fraternity of the "Murrow Boys," which included familiar names such as Eric Sevareid, Charles Collinwood and Howard K. Smith.
According to Mr. Cloud and Ms. Olson, Mrs. Patterson's role as "Murrow Boy" will be one of the focal points of a film now being made of the book.
During the discussion following the talk, Mr. Cole pointed out that Mary Marvin Breckinridge also is one of eight women featured in the Library of Congress traveling exhibition "Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters During World War II."
'Read More About It!' Messages on CBS-TV Holiday Specials
Doug Davidson
Since 1979 the Center for the Book has provided CBS Television with 30-second reading messages that send viewers to their local bookstores and libraries for suggested books. On Dec. 19 millions of viewers saw the center's "Read More About It" message following "Mickey's Christmas Carol," an animated version of Charles Dickens's tale in which Mickey Mouse played Bob Cratchit and Scrooge McDuck was Ebenezer Scrooge. The books mentioned on the air were Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Other Stories, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham (Children's Classics Edition, Crown, 1987) and Christmas Stories: Tales of the Season, ed. by John Miller (Chronicle Books, 1993).
On New Year's Day, an estimated 20 million viewers saw the center's "Read More About It" message, which was presented twice (prior to the Tournament of Roses Parade and during the parade) by Doug Davidson, the star of CBS's popular soap opera "The Young and the Restless." The books mentioned on the air by Mr. Davidson were All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life, by Jack Santino (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and America Celebrates! A Patchwork of Weird and Wonderful Holiday Lore, by Henning Cohen and Tristram Potter Coffin (Gale, 1991).
Cultural Map of Wisconsin Published
The Wisconsin Center for the Book, located at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in Madison, is an institutional sponsor of the "Cultural Map of Wisconsin: A Cartographic Portrait of the State," recently published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
The colorful 40-by-45-inch map locates more than 1,200 sites of interest (e.g., the Little House on the Prairie, the Great Peshtigo Fire, the World's Largest Fish Fry and John Muir's boyhood farm) and includes hundreds of descriptive notes about the state's history, culture, land and people.
The front of the map shows the entire state. The back provides many more sites of interest on smaller cultural maps of 16 cities, as well as thematic maps that emphasize the strong connections between regional landscapes and cultures. The map includes a 24-page booklet that indexes the sites by county and provides a key to the numbered symbols on the map -- which represent 25 lighthouses, 40 hiking trails, 50 writers, 41 festivals, 54 colleges and universities, 243 museums and tours, 587 historic sites, 56 rustic roads, 42 historic communities and 136 parks and forests.
The project was supported in part by the Wisconsin Humanities Council with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The other institutional sponsors were the U.S. Geological Survey-Water Resources Division and the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where the Department of Geography and Cartographic Laboratory played major roles in the map's planning and production. "Cultural Map of Wisconsin: A Cartographic Portrait of the State" is available for $9.95 from the University of Wisconsin Press, telephone: (800) 829-9559; fax: (800) 473-8310.
Another Wisconsin Center for the Book project was "Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision," a symposium on May 3-5, 1996; the papers from the meeting will be published by Island Press in 1997. The center's "Wisconsin Authors Speak" project enabled 10 nonprofit organizations to present local authors to their communities in the fall of 1996.
With the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Studies, its School of Education and the Cooperative Children's Book Center, the Wisconsin center is sponsoring "Radical Change: Book Open to the 21st Century," a conference focusing on children's and young adult literature, on April 4-5 in Madison. For information contact the Cooperative Children's Book Center, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706; telephone (608) 263-3720; fax (608) 262-4933.
