Alden Mudge

NonfictionHistory

A war not their own

Review by Alden Mudge

Between February 1937 and October 1938, roughly 2,800 Americans fought on the side of the elected government of the Republic of Spain against a fascist rebellion of army officers and Catholic Church leaders led by Francisco Franco. It was, notes Adam Hochschild in this vibrant, compelling and disheartening account, the only time that so many Americans went off to fight in someone else’s civil war. More than a quarter of the volunteers died in the effort.

The fascist uprising began in early 1936 shortly after an underfunded coalition of liberals, socialists, communists, workers and anarchists unexpectedly won the national election and began to transform “the Western European nation closest to feudalism.” The reforms provoked an organized military revolt. At that time wealthy landowners had “holdings sometimes larger than 75,000 acres,” while a vast number of the country’s 24 million people scratched out livings on small plots or had no land at all and worked for the big landowners. As part of the changes after the elections, anarchist-led Catalonia launched a vibrant social revolution that attracted a number of adventurous Americans, among them a 19-year-old newlywed named Lois Orr.

The liveliness of Spain in Our Hearts arises from Hochschild’s deft use of letters and memoirs from idealistic Americans (and others) like Orr. Ernest Hemingway, who reported on the war (but not on the social revolution in Spain) and later transmuted his experiences into the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, figures prominently in the story. So do numerous American journalists, including two New York Times reporters filing slanted stories from opposite sides of the conflict. There is also George Orwell, whose conflicting experiences while fighting for the Republic led him to write a landmark book on the war, Homage to Catalonia. And then there are people like Bob Merriman, a likely model for Hemingway’s fictional hero Robert Jordan. Merriman was a tall, charismatic volunteer whom a classmate, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, described as “the most popular of my generation of graduate students at Berkeley . . . and one of the bravest.” What happened to Merriman is one of the mysteries that haunts this narrative.

This story is also haunted by the complex geopolitics of a war that has been largely overshadowed by World War II. American volunteers, most of them political radicals, viewed the civil war as a first step in a global fight against fascism. Opposing them were Hitler and Mussolini, who used their vigorous support for Franco as a brutal testing ground for their weapons and military ambitions. Meanwhile, American and Western European governments clung to “neutrality,” refusing assistance to the elected government of Spain and forcing the Spanish republic to make, as Hochschild calls it, “a devil’s bargain” for support from the Soviet Union under Stalin.

It was a bargain that led to demoralizing infighting, which helped bring about Franco’s victory in Spain. Weeks before the last American volunteers marched out of Spain in defeat, Neville Chamberlain and allies allowed the emboldened Nazis to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Two weeks afterward, the Nazis attacked synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia in what is known as Kristallnacht.

The American volunteers in Spain were, as Hochschild points out, in some ways deluded by their idealism. But they were also prescient in their concern about the rise of fascism. They turned out to be some of the best and most valiant fighters for the cause. As Hochschild writes, “the Americans in Spain win a place in history not for who they were or what they wrote but for what they did.”

Between February 1937 and October 1938, roughly 2,800 Americans fought on the side of the elected government of the Republic of Spain against a fascist rebellion of army officers and Catholic Church leaders led by Francisco Franco. It was, notes Adam Hochschild in this vibrant,…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Mother-daughter memories

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, January 2016

It is impossible to explain fully the beautiful, haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. Magic? Genius? Certainly much of its power arises from the mesmerizing voice of Lucy Barton, teller of this tale. And much of it comes from the details of the story she slowly unfolds. Another piece of the explanation surely lies in the gaps in Lucy’s story that we readers must bridge with our own empathy and imagination. Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts.

The story begins with Lucy, now a published fiction writer, remembering a time, 20 or more years ago, when she was felled by an undiagnosable disease, a sort of visitation of sickness, and ended up in a New York City hospital for a prolonged stay. She was anguished to be separated from her two young daughters and her somewhat distant husband. Then, her mother, whom Lucy had not spoken to in years, came from Illinois to stay with her at the hospital. Their loving, gossipy conversations evoke conflicting emotions and vivid, if often understated, memories in Lucy about her and her siblings growing up in abject poverty, in a household rife with mental illness and abuse. The lifelong effects of that emotional and economic impoverishment, even for Lucy, the successful sibling, infuse her story in unexpected ways.

Toward the end of the book, as Lucy begins to write about the visit from her mother and her childhood memories, a writing teacher tells her: “People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. Such a stupid word, ‘abuse,’ such a conventional, stupid word. . . . This is a story about love.”

My Name Is Lucy Barton is indeed about love, or really, the complexity of misshapen familial love. It is also a story of lasting emotional damage and resilience, and a writer’s commitment to the truth. The novel is also full of keen observations about how childhood travels forward into adulthood. Strout, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, has written a profound novel about the human experience that will stay with a reader for a long, long time.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It is impossible to explain fully the beautiful, haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. Magic? Genius? Certainly much of its power arises from the mesmerizing voice of Lucy Barton, teller of this tale. And much of it comes from the details of the story she slowly unfolds.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Jane Smiley wraps up her sweeping trilogy on the American family

Review by Alden Mudge

Golden Age, the third and final volume of Jane Smiley’s splendid The Last Hundred Years trilogy, opens during a 1987 family reunion at the Langdon family farm in Iowa. Gathered are the surviving children and a number of grandchildren of Walter and Rosanna Langdon, the progenitors and subject of the trilogy’s first volume, Some Luck, which began in 1923. By this point, readers know intimately many of these characters and are familiar with the affections and antagonisms that bind and separate parents and children, aunts and uncles, husband and wives, brothers, sisters and cousins. These ups and downs only proliferate as the story unfolds, until this final episode concludes in 2019. A long-alienated husband and wife find a surprising, loving accommodation late in their marriage, for example, and the love-hate relationship of twin brothers Michael, a high-flying venture capitalist, and Richie, a well-intentioned congressman, goes completely off the rails.

These problematic familial relationships are explored with biting intelligence, great narrative skill, good humor and generosity of spirit. In fact, her humanely realized characters are what make these novels so addictive. But the Langdons never live outside of American history. They are increasingly urban, urbane and politically and socially sophisticated. The family farm is constantly under threat from a trend toward agriculturally destructive but economically advantageous factory farms, and climate change puts arable land in play for international investors. But for Smiley the demise of rural life, of small-town community relationships, has environmental and political consequences. In her final chapters, Smiley offers a warning about America’s future.

As with the previous volumes in the trilogy, Smiley devotes a chapter to each year. With an increasing number of grandchildren and great grandchildren, this requires an astonishing facility for stage management. Smiley makes compelling narrative choices, and Golden Age reverberates with shocks and surprises. So in the end, Smiley’s title for this final volume feels ironic. Looking back over 100 years of Langdon family struggles and recognizing our nostalgia for an imagined American past, a reader may wonder: Has America seen the last of its Golden Age?

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Golden Age, the third and final volume of Jane Smiley’s splendid The Last Hundred Years trilogy, opens during a 1987 family reunion at the Langdon family farm in Iowa. Gathered are the surviving children and a number of grandchildren of Walter and Rosanna Langdon, the progenitors and subject of the trilogy’s first volume, Some Luck, which began in 1923.
NonfictionHistory

Challenging the conventional wisdom on Germany’s war machine

Review by Alden Mudge

How much more can possibly be written about World War II? A whole lot, as American historian Rick Atkinson said in a 2013 BookPage interview. (“There will be more to write about this [war] forever,” Atkinson told us.) James Holland’s The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941, the first of a planned three-volume series called The War in the West, is a great example of how a re-examination of historical accounts leads to new insights that urge us to reconsider the common wisdom about one of the most well-documented wars in history.

Holland, a best-selling British Gen-X military historian and novelist, and his publisher have promoted this book as a revisionist history of the war because it challenges the widely held view that at the outbreak of the war, Germany held all the cards in terms of the best trained and equipped military. Britain and its allies wandered about in a tactical desert, out-trained, out-armed, out-foxed and out-maneuvered until the slumbering British war machine and then the Americans awoke and mobilized, so the old story goes.

Examining the operational minutia of the war—the economies of scale in the production of uniforms and weaponry, for example—Holland complicates that earlier notion in fascinating ways. It’s obvious but has been largely unremarked, he notes, that to have a mechanized army (one of the supposed advantages of the German army) you also need to have the truck and tank mechanics and the supply chain to keep the machines running. To a surprising degree at the outbreak of the war, Germany still relied on the horse, and did not have the necessary infrastructure to sustain its supposed mechanical advantage.

Holland also argues that earlier views of the progress of the war follow Hitler’s own strategic biases in seeing World War II as a land-based operation in which the huge German army dwarfed the small British army. But this ignores the fact that in a global war the advantage lies with those who can protect their sources of raw materials, as the dominant British Navy could and did.

This, in very reduced form, is the provocative thesis of this book. Fortunately, Holland supports this thesis with riveting detail and a novelist’s narrative skill. Like Atkinson, he draws vividly on personal and official accounts, ranging easily between front-line experiences and high-level strategy to tell the gripping story of the war in Europe up until the German invasion of the U.S.S.R., a period when the U.S. had not yet entered the war. It’s a compelling account, one that readers with an abiding interest in World War II will want to add to their libraries.

James Holland’s The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941, the first of a planned three-volume series called The War in the West, is a great example of how a re-examination of historical accounts leads to new insights that urge us to reconsider the common wisdom about one of the most well-documented wars in history.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Franzen chronicles a woman’s coming-of-age

Review by Alden Mudge

Jonathan Franzen is a writer who swings for the fences, an ambition that attracts terabytes of online derision. Hold the derision. Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, is quite simply his best, most textured, most plot-driven and, oddly enough, most optimistic novel to date. 

The book’s epigraph is a line from Goethe’s Faust, uttered by Mephistopheles, the devil to whom Faust sells his soul. One of the questions Franzen, ever the unsettling, ironic, literary provocateur, wants his readers to consider is the complicated masquerade of good and evil: how the most seemingly well-intended actions sometimes arrive at evil results, how seemingly bad actors occasionally engender good, and how sometimes we don’t know the difference.

Purity also raises questions about feminism and male privilege, and—as in Franzen’s previous bestsellers, The Corrections and Freedom—about the emotionally complicated nature of family life. 

A reader is free to avoid thinking about any of these questions, however. There are plenty of sharply drawn characters, fast-moving, seemingly coincidental events, beautifully rendered—often funny and satirical—observations, and excellent sentences to sustain unflagging interest. The narrative moves with astonishing confidence through time and geography, from contemporary Oakland, California, to East Germany before, during and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to Texas and Denver and points in between. There is a murder. There is a missing nuclear warhead. There are conflicts between believers in a freewheeling, no-secrets-allowed Internet and traditional journalists bent on sourcing a story. There are fraught, intimate family dramas and heartrending betrayals. And that’s just for starters. 

As the novel opens, its title character, Purity Tyler, known as Pip, squats in a foreclosed house in West Oakland and works as a telemarketer trying to pay down $130,000 in college debt. Her mother, an aging hippie living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, snatched her away from her father, moved to California and changed their identities when Pip was an infant. Pip, one of those young, worldly innocents, is unbearably close to her mother, walks around with a “ready-to-combust anger” and wants nothing more than to learn who her father is. 

A visiting German anarchist puts Pip in touch with Andreas Wolf, media sensation and founder of an outlawed idealist organization headquartered in a remote paradisaical valley in Bolivia, trying to bring the worst government secrets to light around the world. Wolf offers her an internship to help with the loan and promises computing power to help locate her father. After a flirty email exchange with the charismatic, beguiling Wolf, Pip heads for Bolivia. The plot thickens. And Purity becomes a novel that is impossible to put down—and impossible to stop thinking about once you have put it down.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Jonathan Franzen is a writer who swings for the fences, an ambition that attracts terabytes of online derision. Hold the derision. Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, is quite simply his best, most textured, most plot-driven and, oddly enough, most optimistic novel to date.
NonfictionBiography

Rich beyond your wildest dreams

Review by Alden Mudge

Never heard of Jacob Fugger? That’s probably because he was born in Augsburg in 1459, the grandson of a Swabian peasant. But by the time he died in 1525, Fugger had become, according to author Greg Steinmetz (who compared the net worth of wealthy people with the size of the economy in which they operated), the richest man who ever lived.

How Fugger rose to such riches is the tale Steinmetz spins so adroitly in his new book. By the time he was born, Fugger’s family had already gained some prominence as textile traders. The family sent young Jacob to Venice, then a great trading center, where he learned banking and was an early adopter of newly invented accounting practices that would give him a leg up on his competitors throughout his life. From there, Fugger went on to finance commercial enterprises, the Vatican, wars and even the election of the Holy Roman emperor. He battled the Roman Catholic Church’s usury laws, and his victory, says Steinmetz “ was a breakthrough for capitalism. Debt financing accelerated. The modern economy was underway.” According to Steinmetz, by facilitating the sale of papal indulgences, Fugger also lit the fuse for the Reformation.

Steinmetz, a former journalist who now works as a securities analyst, writes about Fugger in thoroughly modern terms. He attributes much of Fugger’s success, for example, to “his willingness to bet big, defy odds, and go anywhere for a deal.” This makes the book a swift and compelling read. But despite the corruption he witnessed and fostered in the church of his day, Fugger also believed the church was the route to his eternal salvation. Fugger is, writes Steinmetz, “a recognizable figure to modern observers.” Yes he is. But he is also very much a product—perhaps an advanced product—of his own extraordinarily interesting times.

Never heard of Jacob Fugger? That’s probably because he was born in Augsburg in 1459, the grandson of a Swabian peasant. But by the time he died in 1525, Fugger had become, according to author Greg Steinmetz (who compared the net worth of wealthy people with the size of the economy in which they operated), the richest man who ever lived.
NonfictionTrue Crime

A crime writer’s guide to the grisly

Review by Alden Mudge

In this fascinating explanation of the techniques of forensic science, Val McDermid takes readers on an “evidential journey” that begins at the crime scene and ends in the courtroom. McDermid, a Scottish crime fiction writer and former newspaper crime reporter, turns out to be a remarkably intelligent and witty guide for a tour of such gruesome subjects as blood spatter, DNA analysis, toxicology exams and forensic entomology, a discipline that McDermid writes, mordantly, is “based on one grisly fact: a corpse makes a good lunch.”

In each chapter of Forensics, McDermid’s approach is to narrate a short history of the discipline in question, weave in the views of contemporary investigators, then offer a procedural step-by-step on how a fire scene investigator, for example, would gather evidence to determine the cause of a fire. None of this is ever formulaic, because, as McDermid writes, “it takes a sensational case to establish a new forensic technique in the public consciousness.” And McDermid is particularly good at illustrating Forensics with quirky, sometimes spine-chilling cases that were solved because of a particular technique of forensic investigation.

Did I say solved? Another enticing aspect of Forensics is the skepticism McDermid brings to these investigative sciences. It’s a skepticism shared by the best current practitioners, who now couch their interpretations of data in language not meant to dazzle juries so much as contribute to the search for the truth. But, as McDermid’s final chapter about expert forensic testimony in the courtroom points out, our adversarial justice system is sometimes more about winning than arriving at the truth.

This is a sobering end to a riveting book that armchair sleuths and anyone interested in the inner workings of crime detection will want to read.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this fascinating explanation of the techniques of forensic science, Val McDermid takes readers on an “evidential journey” that begins at the crime scene and ends in the courtroom. McDermid, a Scottish crime fiction writer and former newspaper crime reporter, turns out to be a remarkably intelligent and witty guide for a tour of such gruesome subjects as blood spatter, DNA analysis, toxicology exams and forensic entomology, a discipline that McDermid writes, mordantly, is “based on one grisly fact: a corpse makes a good lunch.”
NonfictionMemoir

A blunt and brutal memoir of fleeing North Korea

Review by Alden Mudge

Many of us think of North Korea as a nation of automatons, blindly following Dear Leader over the cliff. If nothing else, Joseph Kim’s memoir of his harrowing childhood during the famine that devastated North Korea in the 1990s will complicate that view.

The Great Famine killed as much as 10 percent of the country’s population. Undoubtedly the central government owns responsibility for this. But instead of “an oppressive, invasive government,” Kim, a young boy living in a small city far from Pyongyang, experienced “something more frightening to a child: a complete absence of authority of any kind.” 

In this far-flung, slow-moving chaos, Kim sees his immediate family split asunder and his extended family collapse. “Kinship melted away in the face of hunger,” he writes. And from the fields bordering their home, Kim observes that first the frogs, then the grasshoppers and finally the grass itself begins to disappear. This is a devastating chronicle of the grinding progress of starvation.

But what makes Under the Same Sky so poignant is that the family’s decline is not a straight slide to hell. At one point Kim’s father rallies, finds work, and the family gets a television, which gives them social power.

Of course, this upturn in fortune does not last. The family falls further into poverty and disarray. Essentially orphaned and now a feral child, Kim survives by joining a gang and developing a talent for thievery, while at the same time struggling to maintain some element of his humanity.

Finally at 15, Kim makes the desperate decision to cross a frozen river into China. It is an act of madness that somehow works. Now in his mid-20s living in New York City, Kim is building a new life. It’s the life of a survivor, filled with determination and deep regret.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Many of us think of North Korea as a nation of automatons, blindly following Dear Leader over the cliff. If nothing else, Joseph Kim’s memoir of his harrowing childhood during the famine that devastated North Korea in the 1990s will complicate that view.
NonfictionMemoir

Full speed through life

Review by Alden Mudge

The frequent surprises in Oliver Sacks’ guardedly self-revelatory autobiography begin with the book’s cover photo. There we see a buff, leather-jacketed Sacks astride his new BMW motorcycle in Greenwich Village in 1961. Who knew that the genial, gray-bearded, best-selling writer-neurologist once portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie Awakenings (1990) was such a hunk in his late 20s? Or a state-champion lifter on Southern California’s Muscle Beach? Or a physician addicted for a while to amphetamines? Or a closeted gay man who had sex during the week of his 40th birthday and then not again until he fell in love at 75?

Revelations like these will keep a reader turning the pages of On the Move. But Sacks’ book, self-effacingly subtitled “A Life,” actually has much more to say than these headline grabbers would indicate. The book is a kind of reckoning, a summing up, of Sacks’ growth as an intellectual and a writer. Born in England to a prominent Jewish family, Sacks was from an early age a ceaseless letter writer and journal keeper; he draws liberally on those writings to give readers a sense of who he was as a younger man. Many of this autobiography’s 12 chapters offer the backstories to Sacks’ books, known for illuminating the curious workings of the human brain. Sacks also writes with feeling about his immediate family, almost all of them doctors, as well as his lasting friendships with the likes of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick and the poet Thom Gunn.

In fact it is an early Gunn poem that provides the title for this book. And what an appropriate title it is! In these pages, Sacks is always on the move, leaping adroitly from one topic to the next. We are swept along by the velocity of his account of a long and eventful life.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The frequent surprises in Oliver Sacks’ guardedly self-revelatory autobiography begin with the book’s cover photo. There we see a buff, leather-jacketed Sacks astride his new BMW motorcycle in Greenwich Village in 1961. Who knew that the genial, gray-bearded, best-selling writer-neurologist once portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie Awakenings (1990) was such a hunk in his late 20s? Or a state-champion lifter on Southern California’s Muscle Beach? Or a physician addicted for a while to amphetamines? Or a closeted gay man who had sex during the week of his 40th birthday and then not again until he fell in love at 75?
NonfictionHistory

The fateful voyage of the ‘Lusitania’

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, March 2015

In an interview some years ago, Erik Larson, author of such bestsellers as The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, called himself “an animator of history” rather than a historian. Indeed, he has always shown a brilliant ability to unearth the telling details of a story and has the narrative chops to bring a historical moment vividly alive. But in his new book, Larson simply outdoes himself.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania tells in riveting fashion the story of the final voyage of the top-of-the-line British passenger ship, which sailed from New York City on May 1, 1915, and was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland six days later. The magnificent ship went down in only 18 minutes. Of its 1,959 passengers and crew, only 764 survived. Among the dead were 123 Americans, and the sinking of the Lusitania is often cited as the reason President Wilson dropped his vow of neutrality and led America into World War I.

But the U.S. entry into the war was more complicated. Larson gets at this complexity by presenting a portrait of Wilson in emotional tumult after the sudden death of his first wife and the dawn of a romance with the woman who would become his second wife. Also contributing to the complexity of international relations were the ruthless actions of the Germans and the machinations of the British Admiralty, headed by Winston Churchill, which in a top-secret effort had cracked German codes and was tracking the U-boat that ultimately sank the Lusitania, but inexplicably did nothing to prevent it.

These are the realpolitik aspects of the story Larson weaves in alternating chapters. But what is most compelling about Dead Wake is that, through astonishing research, Larson gives us a strong sense of the individuals—passengers and crew—aboard the Lusitania, heightening our sense of anxiety as we realize that some of the people we have come to know will go down with the ship.

A story full of ironies and “what-ifs,” Dead Wake is a tour de force of narrative history.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Larson about Dead Wake.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

 

In an interview some years ago, Erik Larson, author of such bestsellers as The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, called himself “an animator of history” rather than a historian. Indeed, he has always shown a brilliant ability to unearth the telling details of a story and has the narrative chops to bring a historical moment vividly alive. But in his new book, Larson simply outdoes himself.
NonfictionMedicine

Taking the pulse of medical history

Review by Alden Mudge

What makes Rob Dunn’s narrative history of advances in heart research so fascinating is on vivid display in the opening chapter of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Here Dunn tells the story of a Chicago surgeon who performed the first-known repair to the pericardium, the protective sac around the heart. The year was 1893, and Chicago was abuzz over the World’s Fair. The patient, a railroad worker, had been stabbed in a knife fight at a local bar. The surgeon, a talented, ambitious African-American man, had been forced by racial prejudice to found his own poorly funded hospital, serving Chicago’s lower class. At a time when a knife to the heart was almost always fatal, the revolutionary procedure was delicate and complex because there was no technology to sustain the heart while a surgeon worked on it. To everyone’s amazement, the procedure succeeded.

There, in a nutshell, is the enticing weave of biography, social history and heart-related scientific drama that will entice and satisfy readers throughout the book.

From this opening, Dunn relates many fascinating stories, ranging from Leonardo DaVinci’s contributions to our understanding of the heart to the complexities of developing the heart-lung machine. The book takes its title from an experiment by Werner Forssmann, an ambitious surgeon wonderfully described as “more forearm than frontal lobe,” who, in a dangerous stunt, inserted a catheter in his arm, running it all the way to his heart, an exploit that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize.

Dunn, a biology professor and widely published popular writer on science, says we are far more ignorant about the workings of the heart than we think, and there is much more to learn. That is undoubtedly true, but for a general reader, Dunn’s book is a great contribution to our understanding of the lifelong work of our beating hearts.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What makes Rob Dunn’s narrative history of advances in heart research so fascinating is on vivid display in the opening chapter of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Here Dunn tells the story of a Chicago surgeon who performed the first-known repair to the pericardium, the protective sac around the heart. The year was 1893, and Chicago was abuzz over the World’s Fair. The patient, a railroad worker, had been stabbed in a knife fight at a local bar. The surgeon, a talented, ambitious African-American man, had been forced by racial prejudice to found his own poorly funded hospital, serving Chicago’s lower class. At a time when a knife to the heart was almost always fatal, the revolutionary procedure was delicate and complex because there was no technology to sustain the heart while a surgeon worked on it. To everyone’s amazement, the procedure succeeded.
NonfictionMemoir

Exile from the Motherland

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, January 2015

If Elena Gorokhova’s splendid second memoir merely conveyed to readers a vivid, almost visceral understanding of the sometimes paralyzing sense of dislocation she experienced arriving in the United States in 1980 from the Soviet Union, that alone would be reason enough to read it. On her first day in the U.S., for instance, she visits the air-conditioned Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum with the American husband she barely knows, and wonders, “Why are there no smells? Russia assaults you in your nostrils: milk always on the verge of turning sour, the wet wool of winter coats we wear everyday for five months, rubber phone booth tiles buckled with urine. . . .”

In the first third of Russian Tattoo, which describes her first year in the U.S. and the full extent of her unhappy first marriage, nearly every page sings with sharp, intelligent, often witty observations about her new, confusing life in America.

But in a way, this section of the memoir is merely the brilliant surface of a more profound exploration of her split identity, of what leaving her Motherland and making a life in her new homeland has meant for Gorokhova: What does she carry? What does she leave behind?

Gorokhova accomplishes this through a moving exposition of her difficult relationships with her mother and her American-born daughter, Sasha. Readers of Gorokhova’s wonderful first memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs, know that Elena herself was a lively, rebellious daughter. Here she writes that her mother was “a mirror image of my Motherland—overbearing, protective, controlling, and nurturing.”

When Gorokhova’s own daughter is born, her mother arrives from the Soviet Union to live with them in New Jersey permanently. It’s a complicated set of relationships, but as the years pass, Gorokhova sees that her daughter has become “just as ruthless and honest as I used to be.” And she herself has seemingly become more like her mother. With these sorts of divides there are never clean resolutions, but as the illuminating final section of the memoir indicates, there are soulful accommodations. Some of us actually do get wiser as we get older.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If Elena Gorokhova’s splendid second memoir merely conveyed to readers a vivid, almost visceral understanding of the sometimes paralyzing sense of dislocation she experienced arriving in the United States in 1980 from the Soviet Union, that alone would be reason enough to read it. On her first day in the U.S., for instance, she visits the air-conditioned Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum with the American husband she barely knows, and wonders, “Why are there no smells? Russia assaults you in your nostrils: milk always on the verge of turning sour, the wet wool of winter coats we wear everyday for five months, rubber phone booth tiles buckled with urine. . . .”
NonfictionPop CultureHistory

America’s feminist superhero

Review by Alden Mudge

A harried reader could get the gist of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by opening it just past dead center and reading through the 16-page comic-book version of the story.

There you would learn, in brief, that William Moulton Marston, inventor of the lie detector test, came up with the idea for Wonder Woman in 1941. Also, that the Wonder Woman character drew on the feminism of Marston’s wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and of Olive Byrne, who joined the Marston household as a “housekeeper” and just happened to be the daughter of Ethel Byrne and niece of Margaret Sanger, two early, firebrand birth control activists. That under Marston, Wonder Woman enjoyed astonishing popular success, surpassed only by Superman and Batman. And that after his death, with the end of World War II and the dawn of the 1950s, Wonder Woman lost her superpowers and, like so many women who had worked in the war effort, was returned to domestic life.

But this barely scratches the surface of the personal and social history that Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and staff writer at the New Yorker, relates so well and so playfully. Her fascinating, often brilliant new book is profusely illustrated with photographs and cartoon panels. Marston turns out to be a brilliant, bombastic self-promoter, a terrible businessman but a wonderful father to the children he has with both Elizabeth and Olive (though their true parentage remains a secret to Olive’s children until later in their lives). Marston is a complicated personality whose marital relationships would seem to make him a very unlikely feminist. And yet he was—in ways that will lead readers to ponder political orthodoxies.

Through assiduous research (the endnotes comprise almost a third of the book and are often very interesting reading), Lepore unravels a hidden history, and in so doing links her subjects’ lives to some of the most important social movements of the era. It’s a remarkable, thought-provoking achievement.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A harried reader could get the gist of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by opening it just past dead center and reading through the 16-page comic-book version of the story.

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