Richard Reeves, who is best known as a presidential biographer having written reliable and useful monographs on John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan (though my favorite of his oeuvre is his 1982 retracing of Alexis de Tocqueville’s American visit, American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville, an undertaking French celebrity intellectual Bernard Henri Lévy recently refreshed) has published an account of what is frequently called the first shot in the Cold War: Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift—June 1948-May 1949.

Explaining on how he came to write this book, Reeves writes:

I spent the better part of the last 20 years researching and writing a trilogy on the American presidency, doing books on John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. I knew I had said what I had to say on all that. I had to find some new subjects. At the same time, I continued writing a syndicated column for newspapers around the country, an exercise that kept me up on the politics and people of the day and of the 21st century. I was not happy many of those days. My country was becoming, or being—seen as, arrogant, self-righteous, and brutal—a monster using its very substantial power to try to enforce a new order, a kind of neo-imperialism. Of course, we meant well; Americans usually do. After all, didn’t these people want to be like us?

The Berlin Airlift is a piece of national history that at the least is a splendid example of enlightened self-interest. In June 1948, Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the Red Army to blockade the city, a stranglehold that intended to drive Allied occupational troops out of Berlin, which through some bizarre accident of history was deep inside the Soviet zone. Despite a National Security staff and Joint Chiefs who were nearly unanimously opposed, President Truman opted to stay and additionally ordered the airlift, which was an intricate logistical operation—planes taking off and landing every 90 seconds delivering food, fuel, and medical supplies to a demolished Berlin’s two million inhabitants.

By combing service records and conducting hundreds of interviews, Reeves was able to assemble a truly feel-good adventure from the selfless efforts of the 20,000 veteran civilian airmen who flew the 300 beat-up old planes in an improbably altruistic adventure that was also a strategic victory for what came to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Daring Young Men is an uplifting, multi-level story—a good story about doing good. Yet, in ruminating about it, two thoughts grab me: what does it say about the United States that Richard Reeves has to go back 70 years for an example of the decent America he grew up in, and, wouldn’t it have been great if there had been some residue of national decency to spur the Bush government to help New Orleans?

But so it goes. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 9, 2010

With nearly 30 books of novellas, novels, stories, essays, poetry, and food and travel writing under his ample belt, one might expect Jim Harrison’s name to have to have wider currency, at least among smart folks that read books. Yet, despite being translated into more than 20 languages and selling well, I rarely meet other readers of Mr. Harrison’s. Living in New England could explain that—Harrison once told me he had a reading here, attended by a smattering of people—the next night in Jackson, Miss., there was an audience of a few hundred appreciative souls. For his large and largely invisible audience I am pleased to note Harrison’s new novel, The English Major (which is not about a British soldier), which has 60-year-old Michigan farmer Cliff, recently divorced from real estate broker wife Viv, still grieving over the passing of his 13-year-old Labrador mix Lola, embarking upon a road trip around America, using a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. as a template as the itinerary for his voyage—at one point vowing to rename the states and their state birds as a gesture against some unidentified banality.

One of the pleasures of reading Harrison is that his character’s first-person ruminations are honest and sage and frequently amble to the funny side. For example, sex—which is still (I hope) a vital part of the human experience—is given its proper, deep-breathing due. In this case, even for a 60-year-old geezer. Throughout, Harrison scribes a lively balance between the way English major/mentor Cliff observes and comments on both his outer and inner peregrinations.

By the way, here are some of the renamed states: New York/Iroquois, Georgia/Creek, Oklahoma/Cherokee, Florida/Seminole, South Dakota/Lakota, Wyoming/Cheyenne.

You get it, right?

Speaking of road trips and road books—the quintessential American activity since de Tocqueville, whose 1830s trip has since been reiterated by Richard Reeves (American Journey) in the 1980s and recently by Bernard-Henri Lévy (American Vertigo) in the 21st century, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, claiming inspiration from the New Deal’s WPA’s state guides, corralled 50 writers to write about the 50 states for State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America—including a wonderful bonus of a conversation with Edward P. Jones on Washington, D.C.

I leave it to you to ponder the odd couplings, but my vote goes to Dagoberto Gilb writing on Iowa. It should not go unnoted that in 1922 The Nation launched a series of articles on each state, written by a diverse and contentious gaggle of writers—Edmund Wilson (New Jersey), Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), H.L. Mencken (Maryland), W.E.B. DuBois (Georgia), Willa Cather (Nebraska), and Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota)—which was anthologized in two volumes in 1923 and 1924 as These United States. In 2003 The Nation repeated that project, edited by John Leonard, with the likes of Frank Conroy, James Lee Burke, Luc Sante, Mike Davis, Ana Castillo, Jim Grimsley, Rosario Ferré, Larry Watson, Elizabeth Benedict, and Donald Hall.

All this leaves me wondering when someone will get the bright idea for the Last American Road Trip… —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 27, 2008