Certain anthologies -- fishing stories, magazine short stories, feminist polemics, amateur poetry collections titled “Who’s Who in American Poetry” -- usually send me scampering for cover. Anthologies which do appeal, however, are like gigantic treasurehouses, fat books crammed full of gold dust, silver bars, and glittering gems.

One such book is Hiroshima: In Memoriam And Today (The Himat Group, 2000, $12). In this new collection, world leaders, writers, pacifists, and victims of the bombing give us their impression of the monumentous event of Aug. 6, 1945. The best parts of the book are the memoirs of survivors, of the chaos and death and confusion that followed the explosion.

Of equal interest is a brief debate about the reason for the attack. To question whether the United States had the moral “right” to use the bomb is not the main argument of the book. The central theme is a call for peace and for universal nuclear disarmament -- but the arguments in regard to this question are interesting. Some of the Japanese writers recognize that the wartime record of their armed forces, the atrocities in China, vicious suppression of Asiatic peoples everywhere, and murders of thousands of prisoners of war influenced both the dropping of the bomb and have also damaged their own credibility as critics. Others say unequivocally that Americans should not have used the A-bomb, arguing that the invasion of the islands would have cost no more than 40,000 American lives, that with a blockade and the continuous bombing of the Japanese homeland an invasion would not have been necessary to procure the surrender of Japan.

These latter arguments seem singularly weak. Our war with the Japanese was a bitter fight to the finish, a war in which racism figured on both sides. The leveling of German cities by British and American air forces certainly wounded the German ability to fight, but Americans still found themselves invading Germany on foot and dying on German soil. What evidence is there that Japan would not have offered a similar fierce resistance? Moreover, what American mother, given the choice between having her own son home safely or dropping two bombs on Japan, would have given her son over to possible death in an invasion? Such arguments ignore the war-weariness, savagery, and hatred of those seemingly far-off times.

Wing To Wing, Oar To Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000) will appeal neither to the weak of mind nor the faint of heart. It is a 600-page block of dense and mostly intelligent prose on courtship and marriage, and includes works by such writers as Darwin, Plato, Aquinas, Tolstoy, Austen, Frost, and Shakespeare.

The editors of this quixotic work are husband and wife, Leon and Amy Kass, and it is their brave contention that “... each of us individually can perhaps learn something from these old books useful not only for self-understanding but even for conducting his or her own courtship or for better educating our children toward the promises of marriage.”

For most young people in America, I suspect there is in fact little home counseling in regard to marriage and courtship. Most parents struggle simply to keep their children from pregnancy or the wrong crowd; there is little discussion, it seems, of what one looks for in a spouse or how “courtship” is supposed to help create a marriage. It is the hope of the editors of this massive anthology that these readings will help to lay the groundwork for just such a discussion. Theirs is a brave and noble attempt to address an issue that is altogether ignored in our society.

A third anthology which attracted my attention is The Greatest Hunting Stories Ever Told (The Lyons Press, 2000, $24.95). Authors in this collection include such luminaries as Hemingway, Tom McGuane, Robert Ruark, Theodore Roosevelt, Vance Bourjaily, and another score of men who appear equally competent both in the outdoors and behind a typewriter.

These stories range from Bourjaily’s meditation on a day’s hunting to Jim Corbett’s hunt for a man-eating tiger; the stories are not always exciting, but they are all exceedingly well-written. Reading Robert Ruark’s account of hunting deer with his grandfather made me want to trek again into his classic The Old Man And The Boy, and Gene Hill’s “Great Morning,” another story of a deer hunt but in a much colder climate, made me want to read more of him.

More than other types of books, anthologies tend to become friends. We keep them on our shelves, take them up when at odd moments, and pick our way through them again and again, pausing over a favorite essay or poem, seeking inspiration, information, or pleasure. Anthologies are like parties packed with friends who know how to talk and how to listen.

It’s good to know in this cold winter that I’ve got three more friends in this world now than I had a month ago.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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