Anne Bartlett

Even now, after all the mass killings of recent decades—9/11, Oklahoma City, all the rest—the Jonestown massacre is still staggering in its horror. More than 900 Americans—nearly 300 of them children—died in a Guyanese jungle in 1978 after a dangerous crackpot named Jim Jones told them to commit suicide by swallowing a poison-infused drink.

How on earth could this have happened? Couldn’t someone have done something, anything, to prevent it? If there are answers to those questions, they start with examining Jones himself, the charismatic cult leader originally from small-town Indiana who drew thousands to his Peoples Temple, then destroyed those who followed him to his remote settlement. Writer Jeff Guinn, already a biographer of Charles Manson, provides a powerful account of Jones’ life based on a comprehensive examination of the records and new interviews with temple survivors and Jones’ relatives in The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.

Jones is ultimately more interesting than Manson because he was a man of real accomplishment. Particularly in his early days, the white preacher fought effectively for civil rights for African Americans. Even as he drifted ever further into lunacy, his organization’s social service programs were always genuinely helpful. But simultaneously, Jones ran his ministry as a narcissistic cult, luring followers with phony faith healing and half-baked “socialist” rants, then exploiting his followers financially and sexually.

Was he always a monster or did something change? Initially, he resembled a number of other unorthodox evangelists. Then a pivot occurred in 1971 when Jones became addicted to drugs—his promiscuity and paranoia surged, and a tragic outcome became more likely, if not inevitable.

Guinn’s blow-by-blow account of Jonestown’s final days in the book’s last chapters is riveting. Jones betrayed hundreds of people who worshipped him; Guinn helps ensure we’ll remember their ruin.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the glory days of Al Capone—Scarface, Big Al, Public Enemy Number One—is how short they were: six years, from mid-level thug to big boss to jail. So why is he still the iconic American gangster, nearly 70 years after his death from the complications of syphilis? 

Well, he loved publicity. But because his legend was a creation of newshounds and Hollywood, much of what we think we know is wrong. Biographer Deirdre Bair tries to uncover the man behind the flamboyant image in Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. It seems a surprising project for an author who has written about Samuel Beckett and Carl Jung. Bair fell into it by happenstance when she met a man who was trying to find out if he was related to Capone. Eventually, she was able to talk extensively with Capone descendants.

They mostly turn out to be private, law-abiding folks whose reminiscences are engrossing and sometimes touching. Capone’s Irish-American wife, Mae, is at the heart of their memories—a woman who was, in their eyes, decent, loyal and loving. Syphilis, likely contracted from a prostitute, destroyed Capone’s mind, but Mae never gave up on him.

Bair carefully tries to sort out truth from baloney. No one knows how many people Capone and his minions killed. But Bair can say with confidence that the federal income tax evasion case that sent him to prison would have fallen apart if he hadn’t had incompetent lawyers and a biased judge.

Bair is particularly good at putting the Capones in the context of the Italian immigrant culture that shaped them. Capone himself wouldn’t have liked that; he always stressed that he was American-born, not an Italian. But he would have gotten a huge kick out of his enduring fame.

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

Before anyone had ever heard of Katharine Graham, there was Alicia Patterson. She built a major newspaper out of a small-town gazette, hobnobbed with presidents, wrote about hotspots around the globe and was a close adviser to Adlai Stevenson, the dominant liberal politician of the 1950s. She was also his lover, despite the fact that both were married.

Patterson, the founding publisher of Newsday, died too young in 1963, at the age of 56, and she’s little remembered today. The Huntress, a biography by her fond but clear-eyed niece Alice Arlen, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, and her husband, Michael J. Arlen, a longtime New Yorker writer, revives her story.

Patterson was to-the-manor born near Chicago, with serious wealth on both sides of the family. Her father, Joe Patterson, was a scion of the colorful Medill publishing clan that ran the Chicago Tribune. Joe himself founded the New York Daily News. But his daughter did have much to overcome—she was regarded as a family disappointment, unwilling to settle down in placid upper-class matrimony. 

Patterson was a top horsewoman, pioneering aviator and big-game hunter, but she later dismissed those avocations as “pointless.” Luckily for her, her third marriage, to rich, influential Harry Guggenheim, took. Although they constantly clashed, he bankrolled Newsday.

Then came Stevenson, unhappily married, intellectual, ambitious, endlessly dithering about his future. He and Patterson were lovers on and off for years, and she helped push him to two presidential runs. He lost, but he was the era’s liberal icon. 

The Arlens have a breezy, witty writing style that would have pleased Patterson, an intrepid woman who finally found her true calling in journalism. Alice Arlen died earlier this year at 75; she left a buoyant tribute to the aunt who encouraged her own aspirations.

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

As the popularity of the movie Midnight in Paris demonstrated, tales of the 1920s Lost Generation—Scott, Zelda and the gang—have an enduring appeal. That “lost generation” nickname was first used by Ernest Hemingway, and his early novels and posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, are among its best depictions.

A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love is a poignant postscript to A Moveable Feast, particularly to Hemingway’s bittersweet last chapter. Hotchner, now 95, was Hemingway’s younger friend and Boswell, notebook at the ready, accompanying Papa to all the iconic haunts: Venice, Paris, Pamplona, Key West. He wrote a full biography of his mentor soon after Hemingway’s suicide. In this late memoir, Hotchner wants finally to give Hemingway his say about his one true love: Hadley, his first wife, the Paris wife.

This book is Hotchner’s riposte to critics who believe the first edition of A Moveable Feast was overedited by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, in a way that was unfair to wife no. 2, Pauline. Quite the contrary, Hotchner says. In private conversation, Hemingway said that leaving Hadley for Pauline was the worst decision of his life, and had turned him in the wrong direction, as an artist and a man.

The outlines of the story are familiar, but Hotchner provides new detail, including the wrenching “100 days” that Hadley insisted on as a trial separation. During that miserable time, Hemingway lost many of his Paris friends, who to his apparent surprise hadn’t liked being turned into fictional characters. 

This is a book of elegiac charm, about a great writer’s regrets. It’s framed at beginning and end by Hotchner’s heartbreaking visit to his close friend in a psychiatric hospital, not long before he shot himself. Hotchner likes to think he’s now with Hadley.

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