Buggy Ride

Two worthy but little-known books, after months of thumbing along untrodden ways, were last fortnight picked up by a comfortable sedan--the Pulitzer award for biography and history--and given a lift toward public attention.

Ola Elizabeth Winslow's Jonathan Edwards (Macmillan; $3.50) is what right-minded citizens expect of Pulitzer committees: a solid, sound and informative book, neither exciting nor stodgy. When Preacher Edwards preached hellfire he meant real fire. He lifted the scalps of his Northampton congregation by asking them to imagine first their little fingers dipped in the burning lake, then their hands, arms, whole bodies. He tackled the knotty complexities of doctrine with equal vigor. Biographer Winslow, who is chairman of the English department at Goucher College, pictures him as a man with a new vision unfortunately enmeshed in obsolescent theology.

Marcus Lee Hansen's The Atlantic Migration (Harvard; $3.50) is a more accomplished performance. Simply told in 306 optically pleasant pages, distilled from long research and with its tremendous documentation decently concealed at the back, it is model history.

In the century between Waterloo and Sarajevo, 35,000,000 people left the Old World for the New, half of them in three great waves-- Celtic, Teutonic and Slavic-Mediterranean. This, says Hansen, was the greatest mass movement in history, and it was unorganized. But it had roots in almost every aspect of contemporary European society, and even in the Middle Ages.

In one way, 19th-Century science pushed the emigrants, for progress in medicine, sanitation and transportation helped increase the European population in 100 years from 187 million to 400 million. One attraction of the New World magnet was its boundless forests. Wars factories and railroads had made free firewood scarce in 19th-Century Europe.

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