Starting with a set of rare first...

Starting with a set of rare first editions of the memorable American Guide Series from the Argosy Bookstore, American historian Bernard A. Weisberger immersed himself in the 48-state guides and three of the principal city guides created by a corps of unemployed New Deal-era writers whose publisher was the Works Progress Administration and whose subject was a nation staggering under the weight of the Depression. One result of their labors--and of Weisberger’s inspiration--is a fascinating one-volume anthology, The WPA Guide to America: The Best of 1930s America as Seen by the Federal Writers Project (Pantheon: $14.95). Included in the Federal Writers Project was the early and anonymous work of Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Oren Eisley and John Cheever, as well as some 6,000 other writers, editors and researchers who profiled America on the eve of World War II.

“While their uncanny knack of mirroring all aspects of American popular culture in the thirties . . . accounts for what is worst in the guides, it also accounts for much of what is best,” Weisberger writes. “What leaps from the guides is their fondness for the basic stuff of America. They are a people’s monument because it is so evident that they were compiled not just with care, but with love.”

The same can be said of Weisberger, who has stitched these little snippets of prose into a crazy quilt that is something greater than the sum of its parts--”The WPA Guide to America” preserves the prose of the original state and city guides, but also constitutes an original work with a new perspective on the nation as a whole. We ramble from the Vermont countryside (“We are helpless before our tradition of not pretending to know more than we do, of not being other than what we are,” observes Dorothy Canfield Fisher) to the Deep South (“Old Negro women will tell you that when a Louisianian dies and goes to Heaven and finds there is no gumbo, he comes right back”) to the Old West (“After decades of glory, as placer mines gave out and placer miners wandered away, the gold region lost its fine flush of feverish enthusiasm”). Along the way, we are witness to history, folklore and a sense of both local color and national spectacle, all of it rendered rather poignant by the passage of time and the loss of American innocence.

Yes, We Sang! Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps by Shoshana Kalisch with Barbara Meister (Harper & Row/Perennial Library: $12.95; also available in hardcover, $22.95) is a remarkable testament to the strength and courage of the men, women and children who sustained their essential dignity in the face of the Holocaust. Kalisch, a survivor of Auschwitz, has collected the words (in both English and transliterated Yiddish) and music of 25 songs whose very existence is proof that the Nazis may have murdered Jews, but failed to obliterate the Jewish spirit. “They were the only means of expressing our sadness and grief, defiance and hope,” Kalisch recalls. “When our spirits sank, the songs took over; they helped us keep our faith that life held some meaning.”

The sentiments of these haunting songs range from tenderness (“Quiet, quiet/Let’s be silent/Graves are growing here . . . Quiet, little one,/don’t cry, treasure/What use are your tears?”) to black humor (“Yidl with the fiddle/Moyshe with the bass,/Let me sing my last song/The gas chamber I face”) to stirring defiance (“It burns, brothers dear, it burns!/If we don’t help ourselves, our fate is dire./If you love your poor little town,/Please don’t let them burn it all down./Put out the flames with your own blood--/Only you can squelch the fire”). Indeed, the songs are the poetry of a heroic people, simple and sturdy, witness to the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of utter evil.

The Biosphere Catalogue, edited by Tango Parrish Snyder (Synergetic, 312 Houston St., Fort Worth, Tex. 76102: $12.95) purports to be a work of science, but it is an odd and eccentric one. This ambitious anthology teaches that the earth is a unitary biological entity of which human intelligence is (or, more accurately, should be) the brain; its contributors include scientists, technicians and environmentalists but also a sleight-of-hand magician, the founder of a Berlin drug rehabilitation center and a self-described “flaneur” (idler). The essays collected here ponder the various aspects of the biosphere--everything from microbes to global pollution--and urge a sense of personal responsibility for the fate of our planet. Above all, “The Biosphere Catalogue” expresses a kind of spirituality in science, a metaphysical belief in the biosphere as an entity which has been dubbed “Gaia,” as if to acknowledge its divine qualities. “Gaia is synonymous with the biosphere, a sort of proper noun (derived from the Greek goddesses of the Earth) we can use to address this provident entity of which our human wisdom is only a small (and perhaps ultimately insignificant) part,” write Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. “If we are truly in possession of biological wisdom, these ideas are not simple academic word games but turning points in evolution for the future history of life.”

Titles reviewed in “Paperback Originals” have been published in softcover only or in simultaneous softcover and clothbound editions.