Norman Rockwell: The Faith of the Soviet Image
The Faith of America, pictured by Norman Rockwell, text by Fred Bauer (Carmel, NY: Guideposts, 1980)
The Soviet Image: A Hundred Years of Photographs from Inside the TASS Archives, by Peter Radetsky with Sam Radetsky, foreword by Philip Longworth (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007)
Russia in Revolution, 1900-1930 by Harrison E. Salisbury, designed by Jean-Claude Suares (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978)
The Great Purges, written by Isaac Deutscher, edited by Tamara Deutscher, designed by David King, photographs from the David King Collection (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984)
Seven Days that Shook the World: The Collapse of Soviet Communism by Stuart H. Loory and Ann Imse, introduction by Hedrick Smith (Atlanta, Georgia: Turner Publishing (CNN Reports), 1991)
History of the Modern World: The Forties and Fifties by Nathaniel Harris (London: Macdonald Educational, 1977)
The Jews in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History by Martin Gilbert (NY:Schocken Books, 2001)
Witness to Our Time, photographs of Alfred Eisenstaedt, foreword by Henry R. Luce (NY: Viking Press, )
Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photographs of Sergei Mikhailovitch Prokudia-Gorskii, commissioned by Tsar Nickolas II, edited by Robert H. Allshouse (NY: Dial Press, 1980)
"Rockwell . . . gave us light--light to see ourselves more clearly and those about us more dearly." (157)
"The pendulum has swung back after some wild gyrations, and we are able to look objectively at ourselves once again." (129)
A large volume of photographs from the TASS archives made it clear to me that this summer would be spent cutting up the Soviet Union. Then I found a book on "the purge" and more on the verge that crossed my youth—“missile" was a word I learned in second grade.
All I needed was a place to lie my parings.
I spent an afternoon in a Ventura book barn looking for a repository.
At last I selected an especially unctuous book on Norman Rockwell, put together by Guideposts, subtitled Faith in America.
I remember there was always a stack of Guideposts magazine in my grandparents's w.c., something to pass the . . .
time. And my grandfather once published a little article in its pages.
They specialized in miracles.
Limbs repaired.
Souls in revolution.
Ideology redeemed.
Faith.
But there was more than a touch of Stalin behind the apple cheeks of Rockwell's America.