Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature Eyman takes over ten pages to set the scene, masterfully elucidating the deadly seriousness of the milieu in which Ford made his stand and the weight his deceptively simple words held for those in attendance that night. Despite its overall strength, some things about Print the Legend are at times exasperating. The book's chapters each consist of a series of anecdotes, facts, and insights strung together, some of which are only a few paragraphs long, while others go on for pages at a time. Although their cumulative resonance is potent, at times they contribute to a jerkiness in the narrative. Also, there is too much time spent going over Ford's financial history. In some instances this accounting of figures is important as it makes clear how he secured funding from one picture to the next, but often the reader just gets lost in the numbers, muddling through them simply to get to the resumption of the central tale. But these occurrences are relatively minor hindrances in what is for Ford fans an essential biography. John Ford is clearly among Hollywood's greatest directors , but behind the filmmaking giant is a man who was often unnecessarily obstinate, small-minded, inexplicably and hurtfully vindictive, wildly untruthful, and just plain mean. It's Eyman's nonpareil success in revealing the character of this very human man that makes Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford a book that even a nonbeliever like David Thompson might enjoy. Robert C. Sickels Whitman College sickelrc @ whitman.edu Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins, editors. Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age. The University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 392 pages; $29.95. For Better or Worse Back in the late 1940's, who might have envisioned that those small, nine-inch, black-and-white, Dumont television sets—that displayed test patterns up to six hours a day, offered evening news programs where commentators insipidly read from held-held scripts in front of regional maps, or broadcasted live baseball games using only three cameras—would in less than ten years transform America's economic, political, and psychological perceptions into a visual kaleidoscope where, as Marshall McLuhan aptly observed , the medium became the message? Was anyone prescient enough in those post-World War II days to realize that some sixty years later this cathode ray tube would emerge as the driving force in Western society shaping thought, action, and behavior while creating a brave new world? These are some of the tricky questions analyzed in Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, a lively, sixteen-essay study—edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins—which takes a hard look at America's love affair with its runaway technology that, for better or worse, has become the predominant educator in most homes. According to Professor Edgerton, since television is the primary way that children and adults form their understanding of the past, it also influences how people think about historical figures and events. In short, the two are entwined: history is television watching and— with all its truths and distortions, its oversimplifications and omissions —television watching becomes history. Citing the popularity of the 1952 television series Victory at Sea, Professor Rollins laments that while this program defined the Second World War for most viewers, it failed as a documentary only because it succeeded as a massive, Super Bowl spectacle, augmented with rousing martial music, appealing to Sunday-afternoon male audiences who, vicariously, fantasized they, too, were battle warriors. Here, the War was changed into a dangerous, but thrilling sports event and its winners—both real and imaginative—received a manly pat on the back for their "victory ." Even the combat veteran, Dr. Rollins reiterates, suffered from this media distortion because the "participant" easily shelved the terror and distress of his memories in favor of a more reassuring "top brass" perception that, regrettably, Victory at Sea so willfully dramatized. Other topics, likewise, examine the shaky relationship between , truth, history, and television presentation by analyzing some popular program series—including Young Indiana Jones, Dr. Quinn, Quantum Leap and Profiles in Courage—citing the influence such flimsy...