Two recurring themes get special emphasis. One is that the rise of Israel transformed Jews physically and psychologically. Israeli soldiers, in particular, were strong, tanned, and tough — much unlike the stereotypes Cohen describes having become associated with the Jews of the European ghettos. That meant Israeli Jews could and would defend themselves. But it also brought power that could be abused. “After Lebanon,’’ notes Cohen, “there was no more pretending that Israel, because of its faith and its history, was immune, different, better. Like every other nation, it’s capable of both the best and the worst.’’

Her first album, Embers and Ashes, appeared in 1960, and Miles Davis liked it so much he insisted on having Horn open for him that year at the Village Vanguard. Other albums followed, including collaborations with Quincy Jones, but by this time, Horn had become a mother, which limited her touring.

Horn's career didn't hit full stride again until Verve Records signed her in the late ’80s. Since then, nine consecutive CDs have been nominated for Grammys, with Horn winning best jazz vocal performance in 1998 for I Remember Miles.

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McGinniss's decision to spend last year's August racing season at the famous track in Saratoga, New York, was that of a 60-year-old man returning to an old flame. The sport itself, meanwhile, had changed a great deal in the intervening three decades, and was now in danger of sputtering out. As McGinniss puts it: “By 2003, horse racing was no longer a vibrant part of America's sporting scene, but rather a faded relic of a bygone age. Far more people would go to a movie about a horse that raced more than fifty years ago than would watch a real horse race.”

That Seabiscuit summer was also the one in which Kentucky Derby winner Funny Cide was slated for a highly anticipated rematch with Empire Maker at Saratoga. So McGinniss rented a cottage for the summer and settled in to research his long-delayed Saratoga book. What he hadn't expected was meeting P. G. Johnson, the shrewd, plain-talking Hall of Fame trainer, now 78, who becomes his book's main character.

“The world does not need another compilation CD,” explains Marsalis by phone from North Carolina. “I told Blumenthal it would be cool if they just got an artist and had him re-create the songs. And Bob says, ‘Would you be interested in doing it?’ And I said, ‘No, I'm going on vacation. It's my first vacation in five years, and I'm taking it.’ And my manager, Ann Marie Wilkins, called me and said,‘‘You should do it.’ And I'm like, ‘I'm not hearing this.’”

Blumenthal and Wilkins weren't hearing Marsalis, either. Instead of telling O'Meally that his answer was “no,” they told him that Marsalis was considering the idea. O'Meally sent Marsalis a book of reproductions of the paintings being used in the exhibit, which Marsalis brought with him on a concert tour.

“As we started looking at these pictures,” he recalls, “everybody in the band was like, ‘Man, we really need to do this.’ So we did it.”

Miller introduced European grape varietals to New York, but how he came to be here is a story in itself. Miller was among the best-known magazine illustrators in the world after World War II, renowned for his drawings of handsome young couples in lust. An Oklahoma transplant, he made his mark first in New York City, then for nearly a decade in Burgundy illustrating European magazines. It was there he acquired his interest in old world varietals, but before decamping for France he had already bought the 36-acre farm he would rename Benmarl, for a few hundred dollars.

“‘What were you thinking?’ asked Graydon, too staggered by my ineptitude to work himself up into a proper rage. ‘You can’t ask Hollywood celebrities whether they’re Jewish or gay. Just assume they’re both Jewish and gay, okay?’”

Waugh's strength in travel writing was in the comic set pieces that resulted from the clash of his personality — conservative, Roman Catholic, aggressively English, snobbish, acerbic — with unfamiliar people and cultures. In Labels, for instance, he decides to put ashore in Naples one Sunday morning to view the cathedral.

Brooks warns that "if at times the book seems exaggerated, caricatured, impious, or sarcastic, my only excuse is that one of the distinctive traits of Americans is that we have often tried to tell the important truths about ourselves through humor, whether in the tall tales of Mark Twain, or the wisecracks of Will Rogers, Mr. Dooley, H. L. Mencken, or Garry Trudeau."

Well, duh. But it's impossible to imagine any of these fellows — Twain or Mencken, especially — issuing such a caveat. Neither, for that matter, would the Brooks of "Bobos," and one wonders what sort of booboisie he imagines himself to be writing for this time out.

The Monthly’s low-paid editors have a habit of going on to much bigger things. Some of the brighter stars among the alumni include Michael Kinsley, editor of the New Republic; James Fallows, who served as chief speechwriter for President Carter before becoming Washington editor of the Atlantic and writing the books National Defense and More Like Us; and Taylor Branch, a contributing editor for Esquire and author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, which shared the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for history with James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. But the Monthly’s biggest achievement could be its emergence as a leading voice of “neoliberalism.”

Well, the actions of a number of the prosecutors involved in the Hernandez and Rolando Cruz prosecutions didn't merely surprise me—they appalled me. I really didn't think some of the things they did could be done to Americans. I didn't think people would knowingly try to convict a man with prints from a woman's shoe. I just didn't think things like that happened in our courtrooms. But they did.

“It must be very difficult for Tony Williams to know what to do next. With Miles Davis at 17, taking the drumming world as well as the musical world by storm at 19 — and there you are, you've got to make your living from that level up. You know what I mean? It's very difficult. His Lifetime band was great. I saw them.”

Whatever discomfort his family background caused, Hearst nonetheless took a job at the Examiner after graduation. He started out driving a truck and selling ads, switched to general-assignment reporting and eventually became assistant city editor. In 1976, Hearst decided to test his mettle outside the Hearst Corp. Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, which was then based in San Francisco, persuaded Hearst to help him launch an outdoor magazine aimed at baby-boomer backpackers and devotees of adventure travel. Hearst and Wenner are said to have chosen the magazine’s name, Outside, while strolling the grounds of the Hearst castle at San Simeon.

Hearst was signed on as managing editor of Outside partly because of his name (as was “assistant to the publisher” Jack Ford, son of President Gerald Ford) and partly because of his experience as an adventurer (Hearst was a motorcyclist, a pilot, a horseman, a cross-country skier and a rock climber). His next-in-command, Senior Editor Terry McDonell, helped offset Hearst’s lack of magazine-editing experience. The two remain friends and business associates: Hearst is a contributing editor of Smart, a sort of thinking-man’s magazine that McDonell launched a year ago (it takes its name from the H.L. Mencken aphorism “One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads”); McDonell has been brought to San Francisco a couple of times by Hearst as a consultant to the Examiner.

Callout to TK

Its freewheeling language and design, too, set Augie and Bellow off from Gatsby and Fitzgerald. Gatsby, steeped in modernist pessimism, is an exquisitely compact tale of the American dream gone sour; Augie March is a sprawling, defiantly optimistic picaresque. Yet Bellow, with his strange new mix of erudition and big-city colloquialism, was no less a stylist than Fitzgerald or Hemingway.

“Chicago, if I were to explain it to an outsider, in contrast to other cities like New York or New Orleans or San Francisco — they’re called the storied cities, these three cities, and they’re supposed to have social graces. Chicago never had that. Chicago is what I call a horny-handed city, a city of hands. A city of building and construction, heavy industry, the stockyards at the time. At the time. There’s no stockyards today, but at the time Chicago was known — ‘hog butcher of the world.’ And so they came — that is, ‘they’ meaning from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as blacks from the South — to work in the yards. They came to work in the steel mills; they came to work in the farm-equipment plants, railroads, heavy industry. It was a city of hands.”

Harrison’s poetry abounds with images from northern Michigan. Not so his fiction, most of which is set in places he has traveled to rather than the place he lives. Harrison is a place-oriented writer who can and does write accurately about many places. He disdains regionalism. “A writer’s just a writer,” he says, bumping along a gravel road in his Landcruiser, “and anytime a writer gets buried in regionalism or ethnic background he’s making a mistake. He has to stay free of all entanglements like that.”

Take a real time and place, and a real type of people, let the imagination go to work on them, and create your own complex, enduring myths. Myths not just of Albany, but America itself in microcosm. It’s an approach that demands a gut-thorough understanding of the history of one’s place, and Kennedy is fortunate to have had his seep in like it did.

“Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint,” Algren wrote in City on the Make, “you have to love it a little while.” Liebling clearly thought otherwise. From the get-go, his look at Chicago was down his nose. 

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