Anne Bartlett

NonfictionSocial Science

Praying to the West

Review by Anne Bartlett

The structure destined to become the Midnight Sun Mosque in Canada’s Northwest Territories had to be transported 2,800 miles from Winnipeg to Inuvik, much of it by barge. It’s now the worship house for some 100 Muslims, mostly men who were displaced from conflict zones and now drive taxis among the Inuit. They spend their spare time operating a much-needed community food bank.

On the other end of the North American continent is the Ahmadiyya mosque in Chiapas, Mexico. It’s run by a Mayan Indian, a former evangelical Christian and Zapatista leftist who got involved in Islam via a Sufi imam from an offbeat mosque in Spain founded by a Scottish hippie.

Neither fits the stereotype of a mosque that so many non-Muslim North Americans have. That’s exactly the point of Omar Mouallem’s absorbing Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas, which explores the Muslim population of the Americas in all its staggering diversity.

Mouallem, a Canadian of Lebanese descent who grew up in a Muslim family but whose personal feelings about Islam became complicated as an adult, examines his own inner turmoil as he visits 13 mosques. They’re incredibly varied but fall roughly into two groups: communities founded by Muslim immigrants, like the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, and more idiosyncratic movements begun by non-Muslims, like the Nation of Islam.

The immigrant experience described by Mouallem will sound familiar to many Americans: the desire by the first generation to assimilate, followed by a rediscovery of roots by their children, then a more eclectic approach by grandchildren. The mosques he visits reflect these different relationships to assimilation. One early Muslim community, founded by Lebanese peddlers in North Dakota, for example, is now nearly indistinguishable from its Christian neighbors. Other, newer mosques have experienced more turbulence as they’ve acclimatized to their communities, such as a Quebec mosque that was the scene of a horrific massacre by a white man in 2017 and still has to employ tight security measures to protect itself.

Mouallem seems most attracted to Unity Mosque, which is open to all traditions and welcomes gay people and female faith leaders. He suspects North America will lead the way as Islam evolves, but regardless of whether that happens, his book has made it impossible not to see this faith tradition’s rich complexity.

Praying to the West explores the Muslim population of the Americas in all its staggering diversity and makes it impossible not to see Islam’s rich complexity.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

New Women in the Old West

Review by Anne Bartlett

The campaign for women's suffrage in the United States was a tough slog over three generations, from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Frustrating defeats were the rule—except in the West. By 1914, 11 Western states already allowed women to vote. In Wyoming, they'd been doing it since 1869, well before statehood.

Winifred Gallagher’s comprehensive New Women in the Old West: From Settlers to Suffragists, an Untold American Story unearths this story through the lives of dozens of forgotten trailblazers. Suffrage is only part of it; women settlers were integral to building communities and developing the economy as the United States expanded, and the Native and Mexican women already living in the West were critical in the fight against encroachment and discrimination.

Early pioneer women were crucial full-time partners to men who were farmers and miners. Many became “town mothers,” the forces behind the establishment of schools, churches and libraries. Countless women built businesses, including Luzena Stanley Wilson, who became a successful hotel entrepreneur during the 1848 gold rush. A surprising number of women, like Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway, became prosperous as milliners, a business friendly to women at a time when everyone wore hats.

Beginning in the 1860s, the federal Homestead Acts, which granted applicants ownership rights to public lands in the West, and the Morrill Acts, which created land-grant universities, opened other paths for women. Female homesteaders, many of whom were immigrants, were relatively few in number, but they proved their claims at a higher rate than men. Coed land-grant universities also grew the teaching profession, newly open to women. 

Gallagher is candid about the less appealing elements of this story as well. Initial suffrage measures passed in part because white men hoped the votes of white women would offset those of immigrant and Black men. Additionally, Gallagher documents the ways in which white women who were missionaries and teachers demeaned people of color and backed damaging assimilationist policies.

Overall, Gallagher’s rediscoveries are inspirational. Hard conditions and sparse populations created opportunities for women in the West unavailable to them elsewhere. They fought their way into business ownership, education, professional careers—and ultimately voting booths and elective office.

The campaign for women's suffrage in the United States was a tough slog—except in the West. New Women in the Old West unearths dozens of forgotten trailblazers.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Facing the Mountain

Review by Anne Bartlett

Imagine that you and your family have been taken into custody. You’ve lost your home and small business. Fellow Americans have berated and beaten you. Now you’re all living behind a fence in a single room in a squalid barrack in some desolate nowhere. And the government comes to you and says, “We want you to join the Army and risk your life to fight for the United States.”

It's astounding that anyone said yes, much less thousands of people. The Japanese Americans who formed the 442nd Infantry Regiment—the most decorated unit in U.S. history for its size and service length—were American patriots, and many felt they needed to demonstrate their loyalty to their country. They certainly succeeded.

In Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II, Daniel James Brown tackles this important story with the same impressive narrative talent and research that made his 2013 book, The Boys in the Boat, an enduring bestseller. He shares the story of issei (first-generation Japanese Americans) and nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) who fought in World War II by focusing on four young men: three from Hawaii and the West Coast who joined the 442nd, and one, no less courageous, who went to prison for peacefully resisting what he believed were violations of the Constitution.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: American actor Louis Ozawa’s ability to speak both English and Japanese serves him well in narrating the audiobook of Facing the Mountain.

Brown takes us through the shock of the internment camps and the struggle for Hawaiians and mainlanders to overcome tensions and establish a cohesive fighting unit. The centerpieces of Facing the Mountain are the wrenching, on-the-ground descriptions of battles fought by the 442nd in Europe, most notably the uphill rescue of the “Lost Battalion” of Texans in France, in which the nisei suffered more than 800 casualties to rescue some 200 men.

Many readers will feel ashamed of the bigotry these men and their families faced—but every reader will admire the resilience that allowed these soldiers to create communities within the internment camps and to play such a pivotal role in the defeat of the Nazis. Most are gone now, but their stories will live on in this empathetic tribute to their courage.

Most of the Japanese American patriots who formed the 442nd Infantry Regiment are gone, but their stories live on in this empathetic tribute to their courage.
NonfictionHistory

Four Lost Cities

Review by Anne Bartlett

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, thousands of people were forced to relocate. Some returned; others never did. As the city rebuilt, it changed, through both loss and revitalization. Fifteen years later, hurricanes still threaten New Orleans, but the city certainly endures.

Keep that trajectory in mind if you ever visit a magnificent urban archaeological site such as Angkor Wat or Pompeii. As Annalee Newitz shows in the marvelous Four Lost Cities, an ancient city’s fate was determined by complex interactions of politics, the environment and human choices—all of which offer insight into the challenges of climate change and disease that we face today.

Along with Angkor in Cambodia and Pompeii in Italy, Newitz’s four cities include Çatalhöyük in Turkey, the Neolithic site of one of the world’s first cities, and Cahokia, a Native American city that was located in the St. Louis metro region. Newitz takes us along on visits to all four locations, exploring their histories and cultures through interviews with the archaeologists doing cutting-edge research at each site.

Spanning different epochs and continents, these cities were of course quite different during their respective eras. Angkor and Cahokia were essentially spiritual sites surrounded by low-­density sprawl; Pompeii and Çatalhöyük were densely packed. Pompeii was a trading town; the others were predominantly agricultural. But all faced significant environmental challenges, such as climate change, flooding, drought, earthquakes and volcanic eruption. What’s perhaps most astonishing is how long they lasted in the face of these calamities. Like New Orleans, they were rebuilt, time after time, by their creative, adaptable citizens.

Through this brightly written, lucid narrative, Newitz shows us that these cities were never “lost” and rediscovered. Even when their people ultimately moved on, they took their cultures and memories with them. As we struggle with our own difficult urban realities, Newitz argues, it’s worth considering their resilience.

As Annalee Newitz shows in the marvelous Four Lost Cities, an ancient city’s fate was determined by complex interactions of politics, the environment and human choices.
NonfictionPoliticsHistory

Operation Moonglow

Review by Anne Bartlett

In October 1957, Sputnik 1 went up, and America panicked: My gosh, the Soviets are winning the Cold War! At least that's how it seemed as the little satellite's beep-beep was heard around the world. President Eisenhower hated spending money, but even he was persuaded that an aggressive space program was crucial. The United States' prestige was at stake, and so NASA was born as an instrument of nationalist competition.

But that's not how it evolved, at least in global public perception. Teasel Muir-Harmony’s engaging Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo reveals that the 1969 Apollo moon landing mission was the single most successful U.S. diplomatic effort of the late 20th century—precisely because it consciously avoided jingoism.

Muir-Harmony, a curator at the Smithsonian, draws on a rich cache of documents from NASA and the United States Information Agency, among other sources, to bring to vivid life the ground-level public relations onslaught surrounding the Apollo project. When U.S. diplomats organized exhaustive worldwide tours and exhibits about their country's successes, they quickly learned that American boasting was a turnoff. Instead, millions of people across the earth reacted with astounding enthusiasm to a message of global unity. The space mission was "for all mankind."

The astronauts assigned to the mission proved to be natural goodwill ambassadors, indefatigable in their unpretentious friendliness. Muir-Harmony brings us along for their post-flight tours—as Frank Borman wades into Paris crowds to press the flesh and as Neil Armstrong says just the right thing to charm the prickly wife of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito. The positive feeling generated by Apollo arguably helped Nixon jump-start his secret Vietnam War peace talks.

It feels like such a remote era now: Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were all instinctive internationalists, despite their political differences. They believed the United States would prevail through U.S.-led alliances and openness, in contrast to Soviet secrecy and bullying. Muir-Harmony notes that, even with the achievement of the moon landing, NASA couldn’t overshadow global disgust with the Vietnam War or the nation's racial turmoil in any lasting way. Still, Operation Moonglow is a winning remembrance of a time when America thought big and optimistically about its role in the world.

In 1957, Sputnik went up, and America panicked: My gosh, the Soviets are winning the Cold War! At least that's how it seemed as the little satellite's beep-beep was heard around the world. President Eisenhower hated spending money, but even he was persuaded that an aggressive space program was crucial.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

A Demon-Haunted Land

Review by Anne Bartlett

When the western part of the former Third Reich transformed itself with lightning speed into a stable democratic republic and economic powerhouse, it was the ultimate post-World War II success story. The story is true enough, but it wasn't quite that simple. In fact, the defeated German people were shattered after the war. Countless thousands were refugees, prisoners of war and rape victims, collectively blamed for the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, these conditions caused widespread tension, illness, emotional breakdown and deep denial.

They also caused a now-forgotten witch panic. Historian Monica Black surfaces this deeply buried episode in her riveting A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghost of the Past in Post-WWII Germany, which explores the connection between Germany’s trauma and an upsurge in superstitious hysteria. Included in this wave were Germans who accused their neighbors of being witches, a charismatic faith healer named Bruno Gröning who attracted thousands of followers and others who reported sightings of the Virgin Mary.

From 1947 to 1956, there were 77 “witchcraft” trials in Germany. To be clear, these were not trials of witches; they were cases brought by people accused of witchcraft against their accusers. (The word “witch” was seldom used; the accusers called them “evil people.”) The most notorious trial involved Waldemar Eberling, a lay healer and exorcist who told clients they had been bewitched by neighbors. He was called Hexenbanner, "witch banisher," and both he and his nemesis, a retired teacher who crusaded for the accused, had been anti-Nazis.

Black focuses much of the book on Gröning, a former Nazi believed by his legion of followers to possess magic healing powers against illnesses caused by evil. He eventually went to trial in a tragic case involving a teenage girl with tuberculosis who stopped medical treatment because of her faith in him.

All these cases were studied by doctors at the time they occurred, but Black perceptively points out that none of them ever publicly faced up to the heart of the matter. The terrible societal conditions that led to this outbreak, the experts said, was the fault of the Allied occupation. Guilt and shame over Nazi crimes were never mentioned. Only Eberling’s teacher-enemy pointed out—privately—that a hunt for “witches” was not unlike blaming the Jews.

Historian Monica Black’s riveting A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghost of the Past in Post-WWII Germany explores the connection between Germany’s trauma and an upsurge in superstitious hysteria.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Royal Witches

Review by Anne Bartlett

Princess Diana and Meghan Markle have both struggled with the downsides of marrying into the British royal family, but at least no one ever arrested them on accusations of treasonous witchcraft. Astoundingly, that really happened to four royal women in a 70-year period some six centuries ago, in a burst of bizarre prosecutions.

The Wars of the Roses, the dramatic 15th-century struggle over the English crown, have attracted writers from Shakespeare on. More recently they’ve inspired both "Game of Thrones" and the White Queen saga. Now author Gemma Hollman provides a new lens on this period in Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England.

The four women—Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Elizabeth Woodville—were far from the witchy stereotype of solitary village women. They were all intelligent and cultivated, the wives or widows of powerful men: two kings and two kings' brothers. It was too dangerous for these men's enemies to attack them directly, so their adversaries undermined them by targeting the women.

Hollman expertly re-creates their courtly world—the lavish clothes, jewels and palaces that inspired so much envy. Their personalities necessarily remain elusive, but all four chose unusual paths to marriage, so their sense of agency is clear.

In the 15th century, belief in magic blended easily with nascent science; even serious scholars pursued alchemy. These women may indeed have turned to “love potions” or fortunetellers—but was it treasonous conspiracy against the king? The likes of Cardinal Beaufort and Richard III did their best to make that case.

The accused women were smart and lucky enough to escape the axe. But this was not a game: Eleanor’s supposed accomplices were tortured and executed. Eleanor herself, the beloved wife of popular Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, was forced to walk unhooded across London on three separate days in “penance,” her humiliating fall visible to all.

Even readers familiar with the basic history of the Wars of the Roses will see aristocratic skulduggery in a strikingly fresh way in Royal Witches, as we continue to grapple with the treatment of women who rise to important positions even in our own time.

Princess Diana and Meghan Markle have both struggled with the downsides of marrying into the British royal family, but at least no one ever arrested them on accusations of treasonous witchcraft. Astoundingly, that really happened to four royal women in a 70-year period some six centuries…

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Vapors

Review by Anne Bartlett

Those of us who are fans of gangster stories have been saturated (oversaturated, perhaps?) in the Lucky-Bugsy-Meyer saga, rooted in New York but with memorable offshoots in Havana, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Well, here’s a fresh cast and venue: the casino crowd of Hot Springs, Arkansas, arguably America’s gambling capital until it all came crashing down in the mid-1960s.

Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky do make cameos in The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice, David Hill’s true crime narrative of the spa resort town from the ’30s through the ’60s. But the big players are the less-remembered mobster Owney Madden, casino boss Dane Harris and a raft of crooked homegrown pols, judges and cops—with a fleeting appearance by Hot Springs resident Virginia Clinton and her promising son Bill.

It’s still astonishing how open Hot Springs’ vice industry was, with city leaders acting as an integral part of the criminal establishment. Madden was the mob’s guy in town, but he quickly assimilated to the local landscape. Harris, the son of a bootlegger, had aspirations of respectability; he’s the Michael Corleone of the story. He wanted the clubs, led by his gang of Vapors, to be glossy entertainment palaces. Harris did his best with payoffs and vote-buying, but internecine fighting that featured bomb explosions and pressure from Bobby Kennedy’s Department of Justice ended his dream.

The history is fascinating, but what makes The Vapors a compelling—and ultimately heartwrenching—book is the author’s account of his own family, who lived in Hot Springs during the casino heyday. His grandmother Hazel Hill landed there as a teen, drifted into casino work after leaving her violent, alcoholic husband and neglected her sons as she fell into her own sad addictions. Hill tells the hard truth of her life with compassion and context.

Amid all this mayhem, one person in the book emerges as a beacon of decency: Jimmy Hill, Hazel’s youngest son and the author’s father. Intelligence, hard work, athletic talent and loyal friends led him to a better life. Dane Harris should have been so lucky.

Those of us who are fans of gangster stories have been saturated (oversaturated, perhaps?) in the Lucky-Bugsy-Meyer saga, rooted in New York but with memorable offshoots in Havana, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Well, here’s a fresh cast and venue: the casino crowd of Hot…

NonfictionBlack History

Wandering in Strange Lands

Review by Anne Bartlett

When Morgan Jerkins traveled the United States in search of her roots, she didn’t just look up the official records, useful as they sometimes were. She talked to relatives and knowledgeable strangers to explore what she calls the “whisper” stories: the ones African Americans and Native Americans quietly pass on through generations, because they are afraid to speak them too loudly.

In the sensitive, insightful Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, Jerkins, an African American in her 20s raised mostly in New Jersey, recounts her journey to uncover the meaning of those stories for her own relatives, as well as for the millions of others who moved north during the Great Migration. Seemingly unimportant traditions like eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day and half-serious references to “roots” hexes turn out to be important clues to the culture of kidnapped Africans in Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana.

Jerkins finds the hard truths of racism in her research: a great-grandfather who fled a lynching threat; Gullah landowners forced off their property by whites; relatives who “passed” as white and cut family ties. But she also struggles emotionally with the discovery that her background is more diverse than she had understood. Among her ancestors are whites, free Creole people of color who owned slaves, and, possibly, Native Americans.

After her illuminating visits to Louisiana, Oklahoma and the Georgia-South Carolina low country, Jerkins ends in Los Angeles, where she spent part of her childhood. California, she says, was the last Promised Land for black people, but it turned out to be as disappointing as everywhere else. Now many African Americans are leaving in a reverse migration to the South. 

As Jerkins finishes her moving chronicle, she says she is “exhausted” by the constant racial violence she finds, most recently in the massacres in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, where a high proportion of the victims were people of color. One way forward, she writes, is for black people to “regain their narrative and contextualize the shame.” The answer, Jerkins says, is not flight but true community informed by deep knowledge of the past.

When Morgan Jerkins traveled the United States in search of her roots, she didn’t just look up the official records, useful as they sometimes were. She talked to relatives and knowledgeable strangers to explore what she calls the “whisper” stories: the ones African Americans and…

NonfictionTrue Crime

American Sherlock

Review by Anne Bartlett

We live in an era that feels awash in crime case forensic evidence. Every day, news comes of DNA tests that have exonerated long-imprisoned innocents or nabbed villains in cold cases. An entire generation has grown up watching the CSI franchise on television, and jurors tend to expect some Gil Grissom-like savant to testify, even when that’s not realistic.

That was hardly the case a century ago. Police relied on third-degree interrogations, and science just wasn’t in the picture. But slowly, a handful of forensic pioneers changed the criminal justice landscape. One of the most prominent was Edward Oscar Heinrich, a largely forgotten figure whose riveting story is revived in Kate Winkler Dawson’s American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI.

After finishing her well-regarded Death in the Air, Dawson was looking for a follow-up project when she stumbled on the voluminous Heinrich papers at the University of California at Berkeley. She literally had to persuade the university to catalog the neglected collection so she could do her research. It produced archival gold.

Heinrich was a headline name in the 1920s and ’30s as a key criminologist in high-profile murder cases. Dawson structures her book around his most mysterious and sensational cases—among them, a bloody train robbery that netted almost no money, the killing of a priest solved in part through handwriting analysis and the multiple trials of a Stanford University employee who may or may not have bludgeoned his wife in her bathtub.

Heinrich forged the way in blood pattern analysis, ballistics, forensic photography, polygraphs and criminal profiling. Yet he was often frustrated by juries who were baffled by his work, and importantly, he wasn’t always right. He trusted forensic science too much; as Dawson reminds us, we now know that handwriting, blood and gun evidence is far from flawless. Like Heinrich himself, she argues, we need to continue pushing forward in the never-ending quest for true justice.

We live in an era that feels awash in crime case forensic evidence. Every day, news comes of DNA tests that have exonerated long-imprisoned innocents or nabbed villains in cold cases. An entire generation has grown up watching the CSI franchise on television, and jurors…

NonfictionLatin American History

Fifth Sun

Review by Anne Bartlett

For generations, historians have gleaned their understanding of the conquest of Mexico from Spanish accounts—whether from the conquistadors, who stressed Aztec human sacrifice, or Catholic missionaries, who were sometimes more sympathetic to the indigenous Nahua people. If you’d asked why the approach was so one-sided, the scholars would have said: Because nothing else is available. 

That’s simply not true. The people Americans call Aztecs, who called themselves Mexica, had a strong tradition of historical annals that didn’t stop with the conquest. For years afterward, the descendants of Nahua nobles, both Mexica and others, continued to write Nahuatl-language chronicles.

Happily, the long neglect of those documents has now ended. Historian Camilla Townsend continues her groundbreaking work in the field in the marvelous Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, a dramatic and accessible narrative that tells the story as the Nahuas saw it.

Yes, the Mexica sacrificed humans and were unpopular enough that some of the regions they had conquered allied with the Spanish. But they were also pragmatic, funny, clever, artistic and enmeshed in a civilization as sophisticated as Spain, if not as technologically advanced. Fifth Sun helps explode denigrating myths: Moctezuma was not a coward, just a realist. He did not think Hernán Cortés was a “god.” The translator known to posterity as Malinche (really Malintzin) was not a “traitor.”

Townsend, a first-rate writer, explores each era through the lives of real Nahuas who lived through or wrote about it. Among them are a captive daughter of Moctezuma, who bore one of Cortés’ many illegitimate children; a local ruler who learned to work in a Spanish-governed world and sponsored an important chronicle; and an indigenous Catholic priest, proud of both his ancestry and his Christian faith. 

The Mexica were smart and effective, but they couldn’t overcome Spanish horses, steel and guns. Even so, they didn’t give up. As is often true after a conquest, the defeated generation’s children rebelled a few decades later, and the grandchildren pushed to preserve their history. Fifth Sun continues that crucial task. 

For generations, historians have gleaned their understanding of the conquest of Mexico from Spanish accounts—whether from the conquistadors, who stressed Aztec human sacrifice, or Catholic missionaries, who were sometimes more sympathetic to the indigenous Nahua people. If you’d asked why the approach was so one-sided,…

NonfictionBiography

Poisoner in Chief

Review by Anne Bartlett

Sidney Gottlieb was an odd fit for the CIA in 1951. Among the Company’s aristocratic Ivy Leaguers, he was a left-wing scientist and the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants. But he and CIA chief Allen Dulles had at least one thing in common: Each had been born with deformed feet, though Dulles’ condition was less serious. Did that shared remembrance of early physical struggle form a bond? Whatever the reason, Dulles hired Gottlieb, and so began his astonishing career of killing, torture and lies.

The outlines of Gottlieb’s CIA tenure, as head of the MK-ULTRA mind-control research project and director of the spy-tools department, are well known. But renowned journalist Stephen Kinzer’s new biography of Gottlieb, Poisoner in Chief, is still shocking in its vivid detail.

Throughout the 1950s, under Gottlieb’s imaginative leadership, MK-ULTRA experimented with LSD and other dangerous drugs on unwitting or coerced subjects—mental patients, prisoners and just plain old everyday folks. Many were left mentally disabled for life; some were even killed. One fellow CIA scientist was likely thrown out of a window when he was deemed unreliable. And it was all done in a completely fruitless search for the ability to “brainwash” human minds. Nothing worked—ever.

In this masterful book, Kinzer demonstrates that the “research” done by Gottlieb’s team was as horrifically unethical as anything done by Nazi doctors later tried for war crimes. And yet, as Kinzer carefully documents, Gottlieb was a “nice guy” who loved his family and lived a proto-hippie lifestyle in rural Virginia. He spent his post-CIA years quietly, as a speech therapist who treated children—when he wasn’t destroying documents or stonewalling congressional committees.

During the years of investigations and lawsuits that began in the 1970s, Gottlieb never publicly repented; indeed, he believed himself to be a true patriot who had fought a justified war against communism. Kinzer’s chilling book reveals what can happen when morality is jettisoned in the name of national security—then and now.

Sidney Gottlieb was an odd fit for the CIA in 1951. Among the Company’s aristocratic Ivy Leaguers, he was a left-wing scientist and the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants. But he and CIA chief Allen Dulles had at least one thing in common: Each had…

Nonfiction

Alexander the Great

Review by Anne Bartlett

Greece. Bulgaria. Turkey. Syria. Lebanon. Israel. Egypt. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Pakistan.

In only a dozen years, Alexander the Great created an empire that encompassed large parts of what are now these 11 countries. It still seems a staggering feat—even more so now, when the United States has been fighting a war in just one of those countries for 18 years and counting.

Every age since the young Macedonian king’s death at age 33 in 323 B.C.E. has come with its own interpretation of his exploits. As author Anthony Everitt notes, to one respected historian in the 20th century, Alexander was the perfect English gentleman; to another, he was the prototype of a totalitarian dictator. Of course, he was neither: He was a man of his own time and place. In Alexander the Great: His Life and His Mysterious Death, Everitt, an expert storyteller, has written a riveting narrative that restores Alexander to his own context—and takes a whack at solving the remaining mysteries.

Did he kill his father? Was he straight or gay? Visionary or winging it? Genius or lucky? Big-hearted or a violent drunk? And the ultimate question: What—or who—killed him? Everitt marshals the facts and makes his case. Along the way, he takes us on a spirited passage through the ancient world, from the Balkans to South Asia, with effective explanations of battles and sieges and a useful description of the ordinary Greek soldier’s experience. 

One conclusion is incontrovertible: Alexander was a military strategist of rare talent, defeating larger armies by brilliantly analyzing their deployments and seizing the initiative with aggression and deceptive tactics. He was helped enormously by the disciplined army that his late father (and victim?), Philip, left him. Everitt is particularly perceptive about the impact of Alexander’s charismatic parents, as well as the snake-pit royal court where he was raised.

Alexander left no dynasty, but he did change the Middle East for centuries. And we still remember him more than 2,000 years later. That would have pleased him.

Greece. Bulgaria. Turkey. Syria. Lebanon. Israel. Egypt. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Pakistan.

In only a dozen years, Alexander the Great created an empire that encompassed large parts of what are now these 11 countries. It still seems a staggering feat—even more so now, when the United…

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