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What made industrialist Henry Ford hate the Jews so much? Neil Baldwin, a distinguished biographer and executive director of the National Book Foundation, spent four and a half years studying that question, as he researched "Henry Ford and the Jews." For two decades, says Baldwin, Ford waged a rabid anti-Semitic media campaign, spending millions of dollars publishing "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," "The International Jew," and the Dearborn Independent. By 1922, a large portrait of Ford hung in Adolph Hitler's private office in Munich. But, says Baldwin, "as far as I can tell, Henry Ford really did not grow up with any first-hand experience of Jews. He didn't really know any Jews until he was a grown person." As an adult, Ford's views were "shaped by received opinions and by people who worked in his inner circle that were very, very biased and prejudiced people."
Baldwin believes that there were three main reasons for Ford's venomous views. "Ford had several reservoirs of anger, and he didn't know what to do with them," says Baldwin. The first was World War I, and its disruption on the industry he was trying to create. Second, "he was an extremely conservative Christian, with a highly developed Puritanical streak. I think he thought Jews represented the antithesis of what Protestant America should be and what pure uncorrupted America should be." Third, says Baldwin, "I think by nature his mind was very Manichean. He believed in good versus evil, and he needed a repository for that evil." Does Baldwin, as a Jew, feel that he can be fair to Ford? Yes, he says firmly. "I'm a very rigorous historian-biographer, and I've had a lot of practice writing stories that very much resist objectivity." His meticulously researched book will be an eye-opener to anyone who only has a textbook knowledge of "The Flivver King."
By curious coincidence, Mark Dunn, the author of "Ella Minnow Pea," was thinking about the Taliban when he wrote his engaging first novel over two years ago. "It's kind of spooky," he says. "One of the reasons that I wrote this was to make as strong a statement as I can against the
way that religious extremism can really ruin people's lives." The playful yet cautionary book is set on the fictional island nation of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop is named after its native son Nevin
Nollop, the inventor of the pangram "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog," known to a generation of aspiring typists. (A pangram is a sentence that includes all of the letters of the alphabet.) A crisis arises and island authorities begin to ban the use of various letters in the alphabet. Eventually the only letters remaining are LMNOP. (Ella Minnow Pea — get it?) The efforts of certain freedom- loving islanders is reminiscent of the doings in Fahrenheit 451. Dunn's epistolary novel (made up of letters) is sui generis, a delight for people who love language.
Dunn isn't merely an author and a playwright with 25 plays under his belt. He's also a guy who grew up one block from Graceland, and once hung out for a night with Elvis. "He was a really neat guy," says Dunn with a slight southern accent. "He was very laid back, very friendly. He went out of his way to make people feel that he was just a happy-go-lucky local guy. Very unassuming." Dunn now lives in New York City's Greenwich Village, where he knows about the events of September 11 from first-hand experience. "When the World Trade Center came down, I watched it from my roof," says Dunn. "It was an incredibly surreal experience. Those of us who were in the building at the time just went upstairs and watched history unfold in front of our eyes. Total shock. I didn't start processing it until several days later. That's when the depression set in." Was the 35-year-old author frightened? "Oh, yes," says Dunn. "My first instinct was to get to the grocery store to buy water and food. I figured that all of Manhattan was under attack, and we were going to be in bunkers for quite some time."