December 1956
In This Issue
Explore the December 1956 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
High Hurdles and White Gloves
The first modern Olympic games took place in Athens sixty years ago in a stadium holding seventy-five thousand. The American hurdler Thomas P. Curtis won the Gold Medal in his event; he also found time to make notes of what happened.
New Books for Children
Widow of the author and critic Joseph Henry Jackson, CHARLOTTE JACKSON does a monthly round-up of children’s books for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Accent on Living
The Weimaraner
KEN W. PURDY,formerly editor of Argosy, True,and Parade,is now free-lancing. His book Kings of the Road was published by Atlantic̶ Little, Brown in 1952.
Better for the Birds
RICHARD CHURCHILL prefers to be identified as “a middle-aged writer,” and is at present living in the Southwest. He is using a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing the pilot friend in the harrowing story that follows.
The Eyes Have It
MILDRED CLINGERMAN is a Tucson, Arizona, housewife, who has written extensively in the field of science, fiction.
Clothes Tree
The Higher Fi
JOHN M. CONLYis a former New York and Washington newspaperman, now editor of High Fidelity Magazine. “ They Shall Have Music” is a quarterly feature in the Atlantic.
Science and Industry
British West Africa
What's New in Aluminum?
It has been said that today most of us are seldom more than a few feet from something made of aluminum. In the following interview, Nathanael V. Davis, president of Aluminium Limited, the independent Canadian producer which supplies an important amount of the aluminum ingot we use, answers some key questions which have been raised about this versatile metal.
Schweitzer Day by Day
A graduate of Hamilton College who entered our foreign service in 1929, ROBERT G. MCGREGOR served during the past three years as our Consul General at Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo, and while there had two extended visits with Dr. Schweitzer at Lambarene. He saw the good doctor without pomp or circumstance, and these are the impressions he brings to us of his visit of last July. Mr. McGregor is now Deputy Director of the Office of Dependent Area Affairs in our State Department.
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
The Space-Child's Mother Goose
Our Mistakes in the Middle East
Could we have halted the sudden decline in our political fortunes in the Middle East and perhaps have avoided our present predicament altogether? This is the question which J. C. HUREWITZ endeavors to answer in his examination of our policy since the end of the Second World War. Mr. Hurewitz is Associate Professor of International Relations at Columbia and the author of three books on the Middle East, including a major work recently published in two volumes under the title, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, 1535-1956. He spent three years in the Middle East before the war; made a return visit there in 1954; and served as Political Advisor to the United States Cabinet Committee on Palestine in 1946.
The End of the Record
SEAN O’FAOLAIN,unlike many of the leading Irish writers of this century (including George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce), has elected to remain in Ireland. He is a Dubliner who is generally regarded as one of the very best short-story writers of our time and is a sympathetic yet realistic interpreter of contemporary Irish life. This is one of the thirty stories which Mr. O’Faolain has selected as his best and which will be published in book form next spring by Atlantic—Little, Brown. The mood and experience which contributed to the writing of these stories, Mr. O’Faolain describes elsewhere in this issue.
Christmas Poem
The Barricade of Secrecy
Ever since the thick veil of censorship first descended on radar and atomic bomb developments, government offices of all sorts have tended toward increasing concealment of their operations. Neither press, public, nor Congress can break “the paper curtain" surrounding at times even the most commonplace information. HAROLD L. CROSS, author of The People’s Right to Know, has been serving as guide and counsel to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and to the Moss Subcommittee of the House of Representatives in their efforts to restore public access to the nation’s news.
The Lion and the Throne: The Trial of Sir Walter Ralegh
Mr. Justice Holmes, John Adams, and Sir Edward Coke — to the study of these three giants in law CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN has devoted no less than fifteen years. The sequence is important, for each of the three built upon the edifice of his predecessor; and for this reason perhaps Sir Edward Coke, who suppressed the conspiracies against Queen Elizabeth and fought for the Commons against James I and Charles I—perhaps he is the mightiest of the trio in that he laid the foundations of our Bill of Rights. The following excerpt is the second of three, powerful and charged with character, which the Atlantic is drawing from Mrs. Bowen’s forthcoming book, The Lion and the Throne. They are highlights in a volume which in its entirety runs to 200,000 words.
Looking Back at Writing
A Dubliner who is generally regarded as one of the best short-story writers of our time, SEAN O’FAOLAIN is a sympathetic yet realistic interpreter of contemporary Irish life. He has made a selection of his thirty best stories, which are to be published in book form next spring, and in looking back over them Mr. O’Faolain has this to say about the development of a creative writer.
Books That Talk to the Blind
Biographer and editor whose roots go back to Bristol, Rhode Island, MARK ANTONY DEWOLFE HOWE is the oldest and dearest of Atlantic contributors, having made his first appearance in our columns sixty-three years ago last spring. Mr. Howe published his autobiography, A Venture in Remembrance, at the age of seventy-seven. Then as the light began to fail he was more and more confined to his apartment on Louisburg Square; here he has continued to write his poems and his essays, and, when blindness made reading impossible, he has enjoyed the companionship of Talking Books.
Winter Evening After the Theater
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
Reader's Choice
