Books: Happy Adventurer

YANKEE NOMAD by David Douglas Duncan. 480 pages. Holt, Rinenart & Winston. $23.

“Every time I walk out the door,” David Douglas Duncan once said, “something blows up.” An exaggeration perhaps, but typical and probably pardonable. There have been precious few major explosions in the world during the last 30 years at which earnest, hardworking Dave Duncan has not been present. Hung up on photography ever since he was 18, when his sister gave him a 39¢ camera, Kansas City-born Duncan came along just in time to help create a new professional caste; the photojournalist. As a correspondent for the National Geographic, LIFE and, in recent years, as one of the highest paid freelancers in the business, Duncan has roamed the world, covering wars and revolutions and the people who made them and died in them.

This big, curious volume, part documentary, part art book, part personal scrapbook—500 pictures (130 in color), 100,000 words of text—is both a pictorial record of Duncan’s work and an autobiography. It shows most strikingly that Duncan the word chronicler is not as interesting as Duncan the photographer, if only because he exposes, like Halliburton, much more of his emotions and his self-concern than the reader cares to know. Characteristically, he dedicates the book to both his ex-wife and his present wife, then goes on to present dozens of documents, letters and telegrams that he collected or sent through the years. He even includes his certificate of commission as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps and a lengthy wire to Franklin Roosevelt demanding an audience for the purpose of winning a draft deferment during World War II (Duncan had unfinished work in Latin America).

The pictures, however, support the book immeasurably. Duncan’s Korean War photography is outstanding, and so are the color shots, many of them not included in his two bestselling books, The Kremlin and Picasso’s Picassos. Among other things, Yankee Nomad does a lot to tout photography as a good career. For one dazzling picture essay on Paris, shot in color through prisms, Duncan got $50,000 from McCalls—the highest price ever paid for a single picture story.