The History of the Snowman Review

The book is broken into two parts:  The Modern Snowman, which starts at the present and moves back to the early 1800s in the United States, and The Renaissance Snowman, which traces, mainly through Europe, the snowman back into medieval times.  Each of the 18 chapters is fairly short, covering a specific theme and/or snowman-related historical incident.

The first section consists of eight chapters:  The Age of Expansion:  The Twenty-first Century, The White Trash Years:  1975-2000, The Hollywood Years:  There's No Business Like Snow Business, The Golden Age of Advertising Since the Early Twentieth Century:  Snow Sells, The Dean Martin Years:  Drunken Debauchery and Other Misgivings, Snowman Deconstructionism:  Literary Circles, The Birth of a Media Star:  1870s-1910s, and Snowman Photography since the mid-Nineteenth Century:  Mr. Sound Bite.  Each chapter offers a brief description of the use and presence of snowmen during their respective time period.  In particular, the chapter covering the years from 1975-2000 mainly discusses the use of snowmen as evil persona, creatures and/or serial killers in films and other media.  Eckstein also discusses the presence of the snowman as art kitsch during these years.  The Hollywood Years looks at the appearance of snowmen in films, TV, books and songs.  Of special interest here is the creation of Frosty the Snowman.  The chapter on advertising offers plentiful examples of how snowmen were used to hawk all types of commercial products from tobacco to dental hygiene products to laxatives to sardines.  The Dean Martin Years focuses on the use of snowmen to specially advertise alcohol in terms of drinking, smoking and womanizing.  And so each chapter moves farther back into our own history and how we view our times through the frozen lumps of coal that are the snowman's eyes.

Following a funny interlude of Eckstein's favorite snowman cartoons, including a Peanuts cartoon and a couple by macabre cartoonist, Charles Addams, the second part of the book tries to run the first snowman to ground.  These chapters are entitled:  The Revolution of 1870:  The Snowman's French Roll, Made in America:  The Snow-Angel of 1856, Eighteenth-Century Snow and Ice Sculpture:  From Russia with Love Handles, Early American Snowmen in the Seventeen Century:  New World, Fresh Snow, Snowman Exploration in the Late Sixteenth Century, Belgian Expressionism:  The Miracle of 1511, Early Classism in Snow Sculpture:  Politically Incorrect Fun, Italian Snowballs from the Fifteenth Century:  The Two-Ball Theory, The First Snowman, and The Ice Age:  Who Came First, the Caveman or the Snowman? 

Of particular interest are the chapters on 1870, 1856, and 1511.  On December 8, 1870 snow began falling in Paris.  A soldier, Alexandre Falguiere, in the space of two to three hours created a nude snow woman sculpture named Le Resistance.  This snow figure became famous.  There are several illustrations of Le Resistance in the book.  On New Year's Eve in 1856, Larson G. Mead, Jr., later a world-renown architect who constructed many American monuments and memorials, along with two friends, made The Snow Angel in Brattleboro VT.  For years afterward, he was requested to recreate this masterpiece.  Again, Eckstein has several drawing and photographs of what The Snow Angel looked like.  Finally, in 1511, the entire town of Brussels constructed a town of snowmen.  There were at least 50 elaborate scenes with 110 snowmen from all classes of society and participating in all manner of activities including politically charged and sexually obscene ones.

Eckstein concludes his book with a brief account of what he has found in the Far East.  Clearly, this is an area he will be doing further research.  Following some stories and miscellanea about his research, there is a nice bibliography.  All in all, I found this to be an entertaining, fascinating and easy read.  My one complaint is that the editing could have been better.  I was annoyed at several grammatical mistakes and word misusage early in the book.  I didn't notice it as much later in the book, but that could be because I stopped looking for the mistakes.  But even with that short-coming, this is fun reading.  There are a lot of photos and pictures illustrating his points.  There are two sections of color photographs also.  If one is interested in our holiday traditions, snow, or just looking for some easy, light reading, this book will soothe one's appetite.