Twice in the last century, downtown Baltimore was rebuilt: out of the embers of 1904, and out of the demolition of 1954-1999. Which was the bigger event? The fire covered 140 acres, Marion E. Warren and Michael P. McCarthy point out in The Living City: Baltimore's Charles Center and Inner Harbor Development (Maryland Historical Society, 110 pages, $35 oversize), but the latter exceeded 150. And the first time, our rebuilders mostly copied what used to be, while CC-IH is one different kettle of (National Aquarium?) fish.
Old vs. new is also the pictorial theme of The Living City, much of which honors the career -- five decades so far -- of Marion E. Warren of Annapolis, photographer. Again and again, Warren got there before Buzz Berg (the wreckage remover).
Amid vast economic and social change, Charles Center, followed by Inner Harbor, was a while in the making. McCarthy, an urban historian, lauds the many heroes (D'Alesandro, Boucher, McVoy, Wallace, Miller, Potts, Sondheim, McKeldin, Millspaugh, Rogers, Moss, Steiner, Durden, Feinblatt, Embry, Kostritsky, Cooper, Van der Rohe, Schaefer, Bonnell, Rouse, Thompson, Copp), while recalling the occasional rough moment (rejected bond loan, neglected skywalks, Cross-Harbor Expressway threat). Mildly, McCarthy wonders whether, with more selectivity in the original 33-acre wipeout, downtown might not now embody more of this city's charm.
But what The Living City shows and tells is a success story. Let copies of this book go forth to awe cities of the mountains and the plains, and any that still have a lackluster waterfront.
Nice to look at, Baltimore's waterfront; great for drinks and fun. But let us also hold in mind some port scenes before the Civil War: the sailing ships moored there, taking on cargoes of men, women and children -- slaves bound for the New Orleans market.
As tobacco gave way to grain in much of Maryland, and cotton boomed in the Gulf states, profits awaited the Southern dealer in field hands; horror awaited the slave families as Southern auctioneers split them up.
Ship manifests from those years still exist, in the National Archives. Ralph Clayton, a scholar and Pratt Library staff member, prints them whole (some 12,000 names) in his book, Cash for Blood: The Baltimore to New Orleans Domestic Slave Trade (Heritage, 681 pages, $48.50). Among these slave surnames: Calvert, Carroll, Paca, Goldsborough, Dulany, Key -- and Freeman.
In a lengthy preface, Clayton gives data on the principal Baltimore slave traders: Austin Woolfolk, Hope H. Slatter, Joseph H. Donovan, James F. Purvis, John N. Denning, Bernard and Lewis Campbell, with excerpts from their newspaper advertising.
Baltimore harbor had its moments. One day in 1826, on the street, Woolfolk attacked Benjamin Lundy, the abolitionist, almost killing him. Later, convicted of assault, Woolfolk was fined $1. But one day in 1863, shortly after Gettysburg, Union troops led by Col. William Birney entered Pratt Street's one remaining slave pen, and its 56 captives were free at last.
Wayne Karlin, from his professorial longhouse in Southern Maryland, has achieved national standing as a fiction and nonfiction authority on war in Vietnam. Now, shedding oceans and centuries, he comes home, to the colonists of Calvert and St. Mary's, and the Native Americans forced to cope with them. His new novel, The Wished-For Country (Curbstone, 340 pages, $16.95 softbound), is the first successful attempt to reconstruct the middle 1600s, down there by the Potomac, with a modern psychological sensibility.
Karlin borrows liberally from historians then and since; he sprinkles his narrative with Leonard Calvert, Margaret Brent, Jacob Lombroso, Henry Fleet, William Claiborne, Andrew White, S.J. (a quotation from whose book provides this one's title). The lead figures, now one speaking, now another, are an indentured English carpenter-trader, his artist slave, several Indian women, a Piscataway boy kidnapped by the English, the Jesuit priest.
The Wished-For Country slits just as many jugulars as does the standard Hollywood model for old Scotland or old Ireland. But say this for Karlin: He is attuned to the terrain, with its mud, vines, insects, summer heat, saltwater, wildlife and original beauty.
A first big-time championship team rates a book; so does a change in that team's home base. Put them together, at the University of Maryland, College Park, as Paul McMullen of The Sun has happily done, and you have Maryland Basketball: Tales From Cole Field House (Johns Hopkins University Press, 250 pages, $29.95).
McMullen's story (done in part from interviews with old-timers) starts with Ritchie Coliseum (1931) and ends with Comcast Center (2002), but the emphasis is on the huge sports center in between, opened in 1955 and named for a chairman of the university's Board of Regents. In the first game there and in the last, what a satisfaction, decking the University of Virginia. As culmination, last April's national basketball championship (won on a distant court) remains a thriller. McMullen relives it with press-row immediacy.
What meanings were there in the marble figures now gone from the four friezes of the Parthenon? Generations of scholars have suggested answers. For the eastern sculptures in particular, the only mention remaining from antiquity is a single sentence in Pausanius, the Roman travel writer: "All the figures relate to the birth of Athena." Some of them, battered, are now in the British Museum.
In Athena and Eden (Solving Light, 160 pages, $14.95 softbound), Robert Bowie Johnson Jr. of Annapolis proposes a solution. Or put it this way: in his lucid, even daunting, book, today's standard theologies take on awkward postures.
The frieze's centerpiece shows Hephaistos (Roman Vulcan) whacking Zeus (Jupiter) on the head with an axe. Up from the fissure springs Athena (Minerva), among other things the patron of ancient Athens. Hera (Juno) sits there, upstaged. Other gods attend.
Johnson then posits a parallelism between Greco-Roman and Hebrew cosmologies. Deified, Adam becomes Zeus; Eve turns into Athena. And -- Johnson points to the nonhostile snakes often present in ancient vase paintings and sculptures -- Eden's serpent turns out to have done us a favor, that famous garden day when humanity attained a measure of self-dependence.
The role of Cain (founder of the first city) turns upside down.
Readers committed to tradition in scripture should know that when Johnson claims mistranslations, he is schooled in the original languages and texts.
James H. Bready writes a monthly column on regional books. Previously he worked as a reporter, editorial writer and book editor for The Evening Sun.