Catherine Hollis

NonfictionBiography

Poetic highs and lows

Review by Catherine Hollis

Robert Lowell’s poetic imagination emerged from the extremes of New England’s weather, its frozen winters and fiery summers. Similarly, his temperament reflected the seasonal extremes of “passivity and wildness” in the depression and mania that afflicted him throughout his life. Scion of an old New England family with a history of mental illness, Lowell was able to transform his illness into art, becoming one of the 20th century’s most significant American poets. In her new book, Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, brings her medical and personal experience of bipolar disorder to bear on the entwining of Lowell’s poetry and psychology. 

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character is a compelling and intuitive account of his life and poetry against the backdrop of repeated hospitalizations for mania. Much of Lowell’s -poetry—including important poems like “For the Union Dead” and the collection Life Studies—emerged from a fertile “hypomanic” state, when an elevated mood and quickened mind helped the poems spill out onto the page. As Jamison discusses, many other artists have shared this combination of genius, creativity and illness. But Jamison, who received unprecedented access to Lowell’s medical records, doesn’t glamorize or trivialize the experience of mania or the havoc it caused Lowell’s family and friends.

The poet’s nearly annual hospitalizations were finally slowed late in the 1960s, after lithium was introduced as a treatment for bipolar disorder. The medication gave him a stability he’d never experienced before. But would the same medication have altered his poetry had it been available sooner?

Jamison has been studying the complex relationship between brain chemistry and creativity throughout her career; in Lowell, she has found her ideal subject.

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

Robert Lowell’s poetic imagination emerged from the extremes of New England’s weather, its frozen winters and fiery summers. Similarly, his temperament reflected the seasonal extremes of “passivity and wildness” in the depression and mania that afflicted him throughout his life. Scion of an old New England family with a history of mental illness, Lowell was able to transform his illness into art, becoming one of the 20th century’s most significant American poets. In her new book, Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, brings her medical and personal experience of bipolar disorder to bear on the entwining of Lowell’s poetry and psychology. 

NonfictionBiography

The life of Emma Jung

Review by Catherine Hollis

A biography of Emma Jung is by necessity also a biography of her husband, famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By placing the focus on Emma, however, Catrine Clay comes up with a fresh and compelling take on the story of Jung’s relationship with Freud and the early days of psychoanalysis.

Wealthy, educated Emma refused Carl when the penniless doctor first proposed, but with her mother’s encouragement, Carl asked and was accepted the second time around. In part, the attraction was intellectual: At the time, an educated woman was more likely to find mental satisfaction in her husband than through her own career. And Carl’s work as a resident doctor at Burghölzli, an asylum treating patients with a range of mental illnesses, was certainly fascinating. While Emma may have hoped to help Carl with his work, pregnancy and domestic cares soon preoccupied her. 

The young couple traveled to Vienna to meet Carl’s hero, the eminent Dr. Sigmund Freud, and the two men developed an intense attachment that was to shape the developing field of psychoanalysis until their infamous split a decade later. Here Emma also discovered Carl’s predisposition to infatuation with smart women. Throughout their marriage, Emma would have to grapple with the numerous frustrated, intelligent women who clustered around her husband, ultimately accepting one of them, Toni Wolff, into the household. 

Labyrinths does a fine job portraying the tightrope Emma walked to manage her husband’s health. Carl was haunted by a “second self,” an emanation from his unconscious that heard voices and saw visions. As much as Emma struggled with her husband’s flirtatiousness, she was also integral to his well-being, and they succeeded in building a long and solid marriage. Perhaps most happily, once her children were grown, Emma was able to write psychological essays, finally stepping into the limelight on her own.

 

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

A biography of Emma Jung is by necessity also a biography of her husband, famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By placing the focus on Emma, however, Catrine Clay comes up with a fresh and compelling take on the story of Jung’s relationship with Freud and the early days of psychoanalysis.
NonfictionMemoir

A marriage’s dark demise inside a cursed castle

Review by Catherine Hollis

Written with the taut urgency of a thriller, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of the disintegration of her marriage is flat-out terrifying. Author of the bestselling novels Angelology and Angelopolis, as well as an award-winning memoir about her Vietnam-vet father, Trussoni turns her unique gaze in The Fortress to the dark heart of romance. Only she could write a memoir about a failed marriage that also includes black magic, Communist Bulgaria, the Knights Templar, ghosts and Provence. 

When Trussoni meets Nikolai at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the passion is intense, immediate and transformative. Soon the smoldering Bulgarian on a limited student visa is living in her apartment, eating her food and telling her that they have spent lifetimes looking for each other. He must be with her—which is why she ends up moving to Bulgaria with him when his visa expires. That, and the fact that she’s pregnant. Ignoring the persistent red flags in Nikolai’s behavior, she finds herself living in Eastern Europe for two years and giving birth in a stark Communist-era hospital. 

The relationship is good until it isn’t, but a major contributing factor is Nikolai’s volatile mental state. After selling her first novel, Trussoni moves the family to the South of France into a 13th-century fortress used by the Knights Templar. Her depiction of the psychological terrors of Nikolai’s unraveling mind set against the occult history of their remote castle is reminiscent of The Shining, down to the ghostly apparitions and nightmares they each suffer. By the time Trussoni discovers the Tibetan death threats Nikolai has carved into a doorframe, her fear is palpable and the suspense unrelenting. 

While The Fortress reads like a horror novel, its raw power comes from the hard-won emotional clarity Trussoni brings to her own role in the creation and dissolution of this marriage from hell.

 

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

Written with the taut urgency of a thriller, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of the disintegration of her marriage is flat-out terrifying.
NonfictionNature

How trees talk—and we can listen

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, September 2016

Already a runaway bestseller in the author’s native Germany, The Hidden Life of Trees now offers English-language readers a compelling look at the “secret world” of the forest. Peter Wohlleben, a forester, documents his conversion from lumber producer to tree whisperer, and in the process he reveals the highly communicative social networks of trees.

Wohlleben notes that as humans, we have been more inclined to identify with animals than plants: We recognize a kinship across species when we notice that monkeys indulge in social grooming rituals, or that elephants mourn their dead. Using the language of anthropomorphism, Wohlleben seeks to persuade us that trees too are social beings, in constant communication with one another, caring for their sick and nursing their young. He wants us to recognize our kinship with trees so we’ll be encouraged to preserve their ecosystems more readily.

Trees “speak” to one another through scent, as African acacia trees do when giraffes begin feeding off of them. The acacias being eaten send out a warning scent, which alerts other nearby acacias to produce the bitter toxin that will dissuade the giraffes from eating their leaves. Trees also communicate through a vast fungal network twined around their roots, which transmit electrical signals and chemical compounds. Through this “Wood Wide Web,” forests are truly an interconnected ecosystem—as Wohlleben demonstrates, trees in a community will send healing sugars to the roots of weak or ill trees, and some forests will keep the stumps of their elders alive long after their trunks and branches have disintegrated. 

In part, Wohlleben wants to demonstrate how centuries of forestry have harmed trees, especially the practice of thinning out trees, which keeps them from establishing healthy underground communication lines. But even more, he wants to enchant readers into taking a walk in the woods and listening to the trees themselves.

 

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

Already a runaway bestseller in the author’s native Germany, The Hidden Life of Trees now offers English-language readers a compelling look at the “secret world” of the forest. Peter Wohlleben, a forester, documents his conversion from lumber producer to tree whisperer, and in the process he reveals the highly communicative social networks of trees.
NonfictionMemoir

A mother-daughter reckoning

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, August 2016

Nadja Spiegelman’s brilliant excavation into four generations of her maternal line is nothing short of astonishing. The daughter of Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Françoise Mouly (art director of The New Yorker), Spiegelman would have a compelling coming-of-age story to tell simply on the basis of her parentage and her upbringing among artists. I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, however, is unusually sensitive to the transmission of family secrets and wounds between generations. Rather than tell the story of an individual daughter, this elegant, beautifully structured memoir tells the story of four generations of daughters locked in painful battle with their mothers. 

The focus of the narrative, at first, is the glamorous and frightening Mouly. Her sudden rages and overt favoring of her son over her daughter could—in other hands—be grounds for a revenge memoir. Her maternal cruelty, particularly concerning food and weight gain, is honestly depicted by her daughter. Despite these clearly painful experiences, Spiegelman’s drive is to understand her mother, not condemn her. Alternating chapters that focus on each woman’s adolescence show how both were targets for their mothers’ anger. In Mouly’s case, she fled from France to New York at age 18 to escape the mire of family life.

Spiegelman’s desire to learn the truth about her mother’s childhood takes her to Paris and her grandmother Josée, yet another strong-willed and sharp-tongued woman. As she pursues Josée’s childhood story, as well as her mother Mina’s story, she learns that certain patterns and connections have haunted each of these pairs of mothers and daughters, even when they recall events differently.

A meditation on memory and the nature of truth as much as a family history, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This introduces a stunning new voice in the field of memoir.

 

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

Nadja Spiegelman’s brilliant excavation into four generations of her maternal line is nothing short of astonishing. The daughter of Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Françoise Mouly (art director of The New Yorker), Spiegelman would have a compelling coming-of-age story to tell simply on the basis of her parentage and her upbringing among artists. I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, however, is unusually sensitive to the transmission of family secrets and wounds between generations. Rather than tell the story of an individual daughter, this elegant, beautifully structured memoir tells the story of four generations of daughters locked in painful battle with their mothers.
NonfictionMemoir

Branches of a glamorous family tree

Review by Catherine Hollis

With seven generations of family secrets, two notable English country houses and multiple writers, England’s Sackville-West and Nicolson families have served as material for multiple memoirs. In A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations, Juliet Nicolson—daughter of Nigel Nicolson and granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West—takes her turn at the family trade. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as cabinets of old letters and diaries, Nicolson casts a gimlet eye on family stories extending back to her great-great-grandmother Pepita, the legendary Spanish dancer who entranced a young British diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West, into a passionate, illicit affair.

The patterns Nicolson observes in her family—ardent love affairs, maternal abandonment and the destructive effects of alcoholism—are fascinating in their repetition, showing how families do tend to repeat mistakes across generations. Nicolson’s familial dysfunctions are, however, particularly glamorous, as they involve naughty Victorians, runaway wives and aristocratic privilege.

Her great-grandmother’s life makes for particularly compelling reading, as the young Victoria travels to Washington, D.C. to set up a diplomat’s house for her grieving widower father (Lionel never married Pepita, but their children were legitimized by the family). Victoria’s flirtatiousness was legendary, resulting in a proposal from President Chester Arthur himself. After 14 proposals (at least), she was swept off her feet by a first cousin, named—like her father—Lionel Sackville-West. Her introduction to the “arts of love” is quite spicy, and the story gains much from Nicolson’s access to her own family’s papers.

The author’s elegant and balanced assessment of the women in her family focuses on marriage and domestic life, and a strain of unhappiness that tends to result in middle-aged alcoholic isolation after the fading of the glamour and beauty of their youth. Nicolson’s candor and realism make this legendary family accessible and sympathetic, and her book a compelling work of memoir.

With seven generations of family secrets, two notable English country houses and multiple writers, England’s Sackville-West and Nicolson families have served as material for multiple memoirs. In A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations, Juliet Nicolson—daughter of Nigel Nicolson and granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West—takes her turn at the family trade.
NonfictionMemoir

Recalling shaky memories of a lost father

Review by Catherine Hollis

Chris Forhan’s aching, lyrical memoir excavates both a lost father and a lost era in American history. The middle child in an Irish family of eight, Forhan came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. He recalls spirograph toys and the Beatles, Jell-O and tuna casserole, JFK and the moon landing. These details are important because they help Forhan cinematically recreate the family from which his father absented himself, ultimately by suicide in 1973.

Who was Ed Forhan? This is the central, animating question driving My Father Before Me, a mystery that continues to haunt his adult children. Their family life was riddled with silences: Where did Ed go when he didn’t come home at night? Was his apparent mental illness a result of unchecked diabetes, childhood trauma, bipolar disorder or all (or none) of those factors? His son Chris interviews his mother and siblings, and looks through family photos and newspaper clippings to find answers. 

An award-winning poet, Forhan writes with grace and intelligence about the very process of constructing a memoir. How can he trust his memories of his father, these flashes that may reflect desire more than fact? By bringing in the voices of his siblings and mother, he fleshes out this portrait of a haunted and wounded man, adding heft and color to the fragments of memory. Forhan learns more about Ed’s tragic and lonely childhood, one of the many things the family never spoke of directly.

Ultimately this memoir documents four generations of fathers and sons and tracks the patterns of damaging emotional behavior passed down through the family. Now that Forhan is himself a father to young sons, it is essential to recollect his father, if only to free himself from the burden of his influence. Fortunately for the reader, his journey is beautifully and resonantly captured here.

 

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

Chris Forhan’s aching, lyrical memoir excavates both a lost father and a lost era in American history. The middle child in an Irish family of eight, Forhan came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. He recalls spirograph toys and the Beatles, Jell-O and tuna casserole, JFK and the moon landing. These details are important because they help Forhan cinematically recreate the family from which his father absented himself, ultimately by suicide in 1973.
NonfictionHistory

Turn the page

Review by Catherine Hollis

Material historian Mark Kurlansky tells the history of the world through things. In his bestselling books Cod and Salt, he focuses on a particular commodity and explores how it has shaped our global society. Readers will find his latest offering, Paper: Paging Through History, an engaging and informative journey through the history of paper, printing and writing.

Kurlansky focuses on an idea he calls “the technological fallacy.” This is the commonly held belief that new technologies change the world. For example, hasn’t our world changed impressively since the birth of the Internet? But Kurlansky asks us to think differently: It is not so much that new technologies change society, he argues, but that social evolution drives technological innovation. Technologies develop to support social change.

This was as true for ancient Sumeria, Kurlansky proposes, as it is for us. Writing, as we know it, developed in Sumeria as characters called cuneiform that were pressed into clay tablets that denoted trade in commodities. As trade grew, society developed a need to record it. But clay tablets were heavy, and not easily portable, so from that need emerged the invention of papyrus, a lightweight writing material made using the reeds that grew by the river Nile. 

Following the trail of his subject throughout history, Kurlansky begins with Han China, when paper as we know it was most likely invented. After six centuries, during which paper was exclusively an Asian phenomenon, Islamic cultures switched from papyrus to parchment to support developments in mathematics. European paper-making lagged far behind until the Italian Renaissance in the 1500s. Following his topic across time and cultures, Kurlansky leads us into the 21st century and current debates about the end of printing.

Capacious and elegant, Kurlansky’s Paper is an essential history of the stuff books are made from.

 

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

Material historian Mark Kurlansky tells the history of the world through things. In his bestselling books Cod and Salt, he focuses on a particular commodity and explores how it has shaped our global society. Readers will find his latest offering, Paper: Paging Through History, an engaging and informative journey through the history of paper, printing and writing.
NonfictionBiography

A publishing titan finally gets her due

Review by Catherine Hollis

The remarkable life story of Blanche Knopf, who co-founded Alfred A. Knopf publishers in 1915, encompasses the history of 20th-century literature. Many of Knopf’s most distinguished authors—including Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir—were brought into the firm by Blanche’s wide-ranging literary interests. Inevitably, however, this is also a story about gender in the workplace: Although Blanche was an equal partner in shaping the company, she owned less of it than did her husband and his father. 

Blanche’s marriage to Alfred Knopf lies at the heart of Laura Claridge’s capacious and engaging biography. Although the Knopfs shared a passionate commitment to literature, they were not well-matched intimately and quickly settled into a “open” marriage. Blanche mainly lived in an apartment in Manhattan, while Alfred preferred to settle in the nearby suburbs. Despite the distance between them, they had two children: their son, Pat, and the publishing company, which is still thriving today.

One especially timely and tragic theme in Blanche’s life concerns her lifelong drive to be thin. Beginning in the 1920s, when fashionable women pursued a skinny flapper’s body, Blanche spent an inordinate amount of time and energy dieting. Living on a menu of cocktails and olives, supplemented by a popular diet pill that damaged her eyes, Blanche seems to have channeled the stresses of the workplace into a lifelong eating disorder. 

Despite her rocky personal life, Blanche’s true passion was finding and signing new authors. She was personally responsible for bringing to Knopf popular hard-boiled detective novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and her immersion in the Harlem Renaissance led her to authors Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen. 

In The Lady with the Borzoi, Claridge triumphantly restores Blanche Knopf’s central place in 20th-century publishing history.

 

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

The remarkable life story of Blanche Knopf, who co-founded Alfred A. Knopf publishers in 1915, encompasses the history of 20th-century literature. Many of Knopf’s most distinguished authors—including Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir—were brought into the firm by Blanche’s wide-ranging literary interests. Inevitably, however, this is also a story about gender in the workplace: Although Blanche was an equal partner in shaping the company, she owned less of it than did her husband and his father.
NonfictionArts & CultureArt

Portrait of the lonely artist

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, March 2016

Olivia Laing’s soulful blend of biography and autobiography makes her one of the most compelling nonfiction writers around. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking made numerous “best of” lists in 2014 with its gimlet-eyed portrayal of the ravages of alcohol on the careers of otherwise distinguished writers. Laing continues to pursue her unique blend of experiential research in her new book, deepening her personal investment in the material.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone begins with a brokenhearted Laing (who’s British) adrift in a series of New York City sublets. She finds, as so many do, that loneliness has a particularly urban flavor, and that modern cities are very easy to get lost in, particularly if they are not yours. Partly to assuage her loneliness, she starts pursuing the life stories of American visual artists who made the experience of isolation part of their art. 

She begins with Edward Hopper’s famous painting “Nighthawks,” with its indelible portrait of a late-night diner, and explores the bitter dynamics of his marriage to a fellow artist. Other subjects include Andy Warhol’s use of technology to create a safe barrier to intimacy, and—heartbreakingly—downtown artist David Wojnarowicz’s depiction of the tragic isolation of gay men in the era of AIDS. A chapter on outsider artist Henry Darger—the creator of the weird and epic Vivian Girls—argues for his deliberate transmutation of childhood trauma into art.

Laing’s own wrestling with loneliness, and her readings in psychology and philosophy, weave in and out of these portraits, creating a complex and multilayered narrative. Her experiences of “insufficient intimacy” and the social awkwardness of the lonely offer a humane and sensitive lens through which to view the life and art of her subjects. This is a stunning book on the nearly universal experience of feeling alone.

 

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

Olivia Laing’s soulful blend of biography and autobiography makes her one of the most compelling nonfiction writers around. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking made numerous “best of” lists in 2014 with its gimlet-eyed portrayal of the ravages of alcohol on the careers of otherwise distinguished writers. Laing continues to pursue her unique blend of experiential research in her new book, deepening her personal investment in the material.
NonfictionMemoir

A father’s unsettling legacy

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, February 2016

Chris Offutt has made a remarkable career for himself as an award-winning author and screenwriter (“True Blood,” “Weeds”). In his stunning new memoir, he turns to the complex legacy of his father, Andrew Offutt, a prolific writer of pulp science fiction and pornography. And by “prolific,” we’re talking more than 400 paperbacks of series fiction, with titles like Blunder Broads and The Girl in the Iron Mask. (The complete bibliography in the back of the book is worth a perusal for its less family-friendly titles.)

After Andrew Offutt discovered his talent for churning out pulp fiction, he became a stay-at-home professional writer in the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky. While his wife catered to his every need, Chris—the oldest son—became the de facto caretaker of his three younger siblings. They all knew not to go into their father’s study, or walk too loudly or slam the door: The entire household revolved around the “great” writer’s sensitivities. Small wonder each child escaped by age 17, but as a writer himself, Offutt felt the burden of his father’s influence. 

The questions Offutt asks himself in this thoughtful, elegant memoir emerge from the emotionally wrenching process of organizing and cataloging his father’s work (more than 1,800 pounds of it) after his death. Did Offutt become a writer despite, or because of, his father? How does one mourn a difficult parent? How are we shaped by our childhoods, and can we truly move on from them? These are questions we all might ask upon the death of parent, and they will open up this particular story to many different readers. 

While the beating heart of the book is its depiction of a complicated father-son relationship, it also provides a fascinating glimpse of the literary culture of 1970s science-fiction conventions and the last days of paperback porn before the advent of video and digital pornography. My Father, the Pornographer preserves a slice of forgotten literary life within its keenly felt, lyrical portrayal of a son wrestling with his father’s inheritance.

RELATED CONTENT:  Read a Q&A with author Chris Offutt.

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

Chris Offutt has made a remarkable career for himself as an award-winning author and screenwriter (“True Blood,” “Weeds”). In his stunning new memoir, he turns to the complex legacy of his father, Andrew Offutt, a prolific writer of pulp science fiction and pornography. And by “prolific,” we’re talking more than 400 paperbacks of series fiction, with titles like Blunder Broads and The Girl in the Iron Mask. (The complete bibliography in the back of the book is worth a perusal for its less family-friendly titles.)
NonfictionBiography

A couple’s history and heroism during WWII

Review by Catherine Hollis

Esteemed historian Ian Buruma turns his attention to a happy marriage in his elegant new book, Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War. While his grandparents might seem a more limited subject than his recent Year Zero: A History of 1945, this family love story is deeply intertwined with history. Using their correspondence during both the First and Second World Wars as his primary source, Buruma crafts a finely observed portrait of an assimilated Jewish family in England between the wars.

In Buruma’s telling, Winifred and Bernard Schlesinger were “more English than the English.” Of German-Jewish origin, they came from distinguished, upper-middle-class families who prized education and classical music. Although they were not officially engaged until 1922, their mutual affection is clear from letters written as early as 1915. Buruma humorously depicts the strain of the long engagement on their powers of patience; once they were finally married in 1925, they joked of having to consult Roman frescoes for advice on sex.

Despite their warm domestic life and five children (including film director John Schlesinger), the family’s encounters with anti-Semitism darken the peace and milieu in which they live. Bernard, a doctor, found himself blackballed from certain medical institutions; his frustration at this routine discrimination led to the most heroic act of the Schlesingers’ marriage. In 1938, the family helped 12 child refugees leave Nazi Germany and kept them safe in England. One of the most moving moments in the book occurs when Buruma names “the Twelve,” many of whom are still living today.

 

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

Esteemed historian Ian Buruma turns his attention to a happy marriage in his elegant new book, Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War. While his grandparents might seem a more limited subject than his recent Year Zero: A History of 1945, this family love story is deeply intertwined with history. Using their correspondence during both the First and Second World Wars as his primary source, Buruma crafts a finely observed portrait of an assimilated Jewish family in England between the wars.
History

The spirit world is calling

Review by Catherine Hollis

Tightly paced and furiously entertaining, The Witch of Lime Street tells the fascinating story of the rise of spiritualism in the years after World War One. With an entire generation lost to the trenches and the Spanish flu, charlatans and hucksters emerged in force to put grieving families in touch with their beloved dead. This was the era of séances, table rapping, ectoplasm and “spirit photography”—done with a camera that supposedly captured an image of you posing with your dearly departed’s ghost.

Many people, including prominent figures like Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, wanted to believe that it was possible to establish communication with the dead. Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, mourned the loss of his son, while Houdini grieved the loss of his mother. But while Doyle became a true believer and embarked on lecture tours to support the new “religion” of spiritualism, Houdini became a psychic detective, seeking proof of the fraud and fakery behind it. Houdini would know: His entire career as an escape artist was based on creating illusions using the tricks of magic. But where magicians used sleight of hand to entertain, mediums—Houdini felt—used it to deceive.

When Scientific American offered a $2,500 prize to any medium who could prove decisively the truth of their messages from beyond, Houdini was appointed to the examining committee. And thus began an epic showdown between the magician and the medium, Mina Crandon, the so-called “Witch of Lime Street.” David Jaher, a screenwriter and professional astrologer, takes this battle as the story’s centerpiece, while offering a finely drawn portrait of an era when people’s will to believe in miracles trumped the pursuit of truth.

The Witch of Lime Street is a well-researched history of the links between vaudeville, magic and mediumship told with verve and humor. Fans of Glen David Gold’s novel Carter Beats the Devil will find much to enjoy here. 

Tightly paced and furiously entertaining, The Witch of Lime Street tells the fascinating story of the rise of spiritualism in the years after World War One. With an entire generation lost to the trenches and the Spanish flu, charlatans and hucksters emerged in force to put grieving families in touch with their beloved dead. This was the era of séances, table rapping, ectoplasm and “spirit photography”—done with a camera that supposedly captured an image of you posing with your dearly departed’s ghost.

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