Edward Morris

NonfictionPolitics

A new generation of Black leaders

Review by Edward Morris

The disclosure that Gwen Ifill’s The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama was in the works—just days before the author was scheduled to moderate the one debate between vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden—drew a storm of protest from right-wing pundits. Columnist Michelle Malkin asserted that the book was proof positive that Ifill was “in the tank” for Obama and, thus, too tainted to host the event. Fox News analyst Greta Van Susteren fretted about Ifill’s “appearance of impropriety.” Their alarms were misplaced: The Breakthrough is not a valentine to Obama or a hymn to his political views; Ifill merely reports what she sees as she surveys the profusion of young black politicians now serving in elective offices from city halls to the White House.

The young pols Ifill spotlights here, apart from Obama, are Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick; Alabama congressman Artur Davis; Illinois congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.; New York governor David Paterson; former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr.; Missouri congressman William Lacy Clay Jr.; Florida congressman Kendrick Meek; the mayors of Newark, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Columbus (Ohio), Washington, D.C., and Buffalo; and various other up-and-comers. Even those who ascended to offices their parents formerly held, she says, acknowledge the need to move beyond identity politics and appeal to a wider electorate. Moreover, they all are impatient with the notion of moving up through long apprenticeships in conventional party politics. They decide on their own when they’re ready to run.

Besides interviewing these office-holders (and dutifully chronicling their known blemishes), Ifill also gathers the speculations of civil rights leaders, academics, former opponents and pollsters on what all this ferment means. The cauldron from which most of this talent bubbles up, she shows, is more likely to be Ivy League law schools than demonstrations and picket lines. Ifill also probes the race-gender issue that surfaced in the Obama-Clinton tilt, as well as the lingering question, “Is he/she black enough?”

The disclosure that Gwen Ifill’s The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama was in the works—just days before the author was scheduled to moderate the one debate between vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden—drew a storm of protest from right-wing…

History

The missiles of October

Review by Edward Morris

One had to be an adult living through that time to fully appreciate the fear kindled throughout the world by what is now called "the Cuban missile crisis" – 13 agonizing days in October 1962 when it seemed certain that the U.S. and the Soviet Union would wage an apocalyptic war over nuclear missiles Russia had attempted to install in Cuba.

In the years since, the complexities of that confrontation have been reduced to a manageable American myth in which young but resolute President Kennedy faces down wily, impulsive Premier Khrushchev. Not so, says Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs in One Minute to Midnight. In his accounting, both Kennedy and Khrushchev emerge as temperate and essentially moral leaders who succeeded in staving off warmongers within their own ranks, notably the pugnacious Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had distinguished himself in World War II by firebombing Tokyo, and Fidel Castro, who was still bristling with revolutionary fervor.

Dobbs draws on interviews with eyewitnesses, White House tape recordings, surveillance photos, contemporary news accounts and overlooked records to show the chaotic randomness of events and why so many things went wrong. American intelligence was greatly flawed, seriously underestimating the number of Russian troops and missiles in Cuba. Castro (not without reason) was certain the U.S. would invade the island at any moment. Had it done so, Dobbs reveals, Russian forces armed with tactical nuclear weapons were set to destroy the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Then there were the wild cards that could have tipped the uneasy standoff into full-fledged war. Among these were the U-2 spy plane the Russians shot down over Cuba. Most perilous of all were the primitive means of communication between the two governments that could never keep up with the rapid shifts in circumstances.

One Minute to Midnight is another persuasive argument that war is too important to be left in the hands of generals.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

 

One had to be an adult living through that time to fully appreciate the fear kindled throughout the world by what is now called "the Cuban missile crisis" - 13 agonizing days in October 1962 when it seemed certain that the U.S. and the…

NonfictionTrue Crime

Murder in an English village

Review by Edward Morris

There are four parallel stories in play in Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, each told and interwoven with admirable skill and definition. The first concerns the murder of three-year-old Saville Kent at his home in rural England in 1860 and the manner in which that crime was investigated. Since one of the first Scotland Yard detectives – Jonathan Whicher – was called in to help solve the Kent case, Summerscale relates how the figure of the dashing, seemingly omniscient detective (both police and private) developed into a cultural fixture in the mid-Victorian era. To demonstrate that point, the author then provides a running account of the growing prominence of detectives in English fiction. Finally, she describes the operation of England's surprisingly humane criminal justice system as it applied to murder cases generally and to this one specifically.

This cascade of peripheral information may seem like a data deluge, but in Summerscale's hands it all flows quite smoothly within the banks of the larger narrative. Many of the elements that have long since become stereotypes in detective fiction surfaced here in real life, including the territorial clash between big-city and small-town cops, the sleuth's reliance on his own hunches instead of adhering strictly to clues, and the problem of pesky newspaper reporters. "The new journalists shared much with the detectives: they were seen alternately as crusaders for truth and as sleazy voyeurs," Summersdale notes. "There were seven hundred newspaper titles published in Britain in 1855, and 1,100 by 1860. . . . There was a huge rise in crime reporting, aided by the speed with which news could be transmitted by the electric telegraph, and newspaper readers came across accounts of violent deaths every week."

The "suspicions" mentioned in the book's title allude to Whicher's stubborn, but factually shaky, belief that the victim's 16-year-old half sister, acting out of resentment at his favored place in the family, took the little boy from his bedroom and slashed his throat. The consequences of Whicher pursuing that belief drive the story.

 

There are four parallel stories in play in Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, each told and interwoven with admirable skill and definition. The first concerns the murder of three-year-old Saville Kent at…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Dan Brown delivers with ‘Lost Symbol’

Review by Edward Morris

Given the volcanic sales of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s understandable that he’s chosen to retread many of that book’s conventions and plot devices for The Lost Symbol. Once again Brown’s protagonist, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, must unlock a series of fiendishly cryptic puzzles to keep world chaos at bay, all the while confronting, within the span of a single day, a self-mutilating but endlessly resourceful villain, a powerful secret society (the Freemasons) and a well-meaning but obstructionist law-enforcement agency (the CIA). And again Langdon is accompanied in his frantic flights from danger by a woman who’s both attractive and academically worthy of him. The action takes place in and around some of Washington, D.C.’s grandest architectural treasures, among them the Capitol, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress.

When he’s not assuming other identities, the villain Langdon faces calls himself Mal’akh. He is truly a terrifying foe, rich, muscular, merciless and tattooed from head to toe. Having insinuated himself into the highest rank of Masons, his mission is to discover and expose the organization’s deepest and most socially disruptive secrets. To prevent this, Langdon has to rescue a friend who Mal’akh has kidnapped and is torturing for information. Alas, the CIA is also onto Mal’akh and is determined to keep Langdon from messing things up.  All the action proceeds from these entanglements. At times, the book reads like an episode of the TV series "24."

Building psychologically complex characters is not Brown’s strong suit, nor need it be since he’s essentially writing genre fiction. But he does create a memorable one in the diminutive person of Inoue Sato, head of the CIA’s Office of Security. A survivor of the Nisei internment camps of World War II, she is pure chain-smoking, command-snapping venom. She steals every scene she’s in. Langdon also takes a Tom Clancy turn here, equipping the CIA commandos with all manner of high-tech weapons which should make Langdon’s escapes impossible but don’t. When Langdon isn’t running for his life, he’s tossing off tutorials on myth, history and religion. Seldom has unrelieved mayhem been so instructive.

There’s not much tension-relieving humor in The Lost Symbol, but there is one spot in which Brown seems to be poking fun at himself and his delay in finishing the manuscript for this book. Langdon calls his editor to get a phone number and nimbly parries the editor’s questions about when he’s going to meet his deadline. After Langdon hangs up, the editor “stared at the receiver and shook his head. Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

Well, it was worth the wait.

Given the volcanic sales of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s understandable that he’s chosen to retread many of that book’s conventions and plot devices for The Lost Symbol. Once again Brown’s protagonist, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, must unlock a series of fiendishly…

History

The Coldest Winter

Review by Edward Morris

David Halberstam turned in the last corrections for The Coldest Winter, his study of the first eight months of the Korean War, just five days before he died in a traffic accident while en route to an interview for his next project, a book on professional football. A former New York Times reporter and one of the finest nonfiction writers of his generation, Halberstam could switch from serious issues to more light-hearted topics with apparent ease. Over the last two decades, he had alternated sports books with works on U.S. foreign policy, the civil rights movement and the firefighters of 9/11.

In his last completed book, Halberstam focuses on the beginnings of the Korean War, which became the confluence of a mass of political stirrings. Chief among these was America’s growing fear of communism, an apprehension deepened by the recent communist takeover of China. Fueling this fear was the mighty China Lobby, which believed that the Korean conflict might both dislodge the hated and distrusted Democrats from power (as it surely helped to do) and also serve as the vehicle for returning the defeated Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek to mainland China. For Mao Zedong, the victor over Chiang, however, the war offered an opportunity to demonstrate that communist China had a world-class army and henceforth must be treated accordingly.

At the center of these conflicting movements stood the monstrously self-aggrandizing figure of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Vain, racist and contemptuous of politicians particularly his commanders-in-chief MacArthur initially dismissed all the signs that the Korean conflict might escalate into a long and costly war. Not only did he keep honest intelligence to himself instead of sharing it with those who needed it most, he surrounded himself with toadies who tailored the intelligence they gathered to confirm his preconceptions. His one praiseworthy act during the war, says Halberstam, was planning and overseeing the successful landing of United Nation troops at Inchon. From there on, it was all downhill. He disparaged the possibility that China would send soldiers into Korea or that they could stand up to American firepower if they did come. He undercut his most effective commanders and promoted the least able ones. When his weaknesses became apparent, he blamed others. Finally and at great political risk to himself and his party President Harry Truman fired MacArthur.

As in his other historical works, Halberstam deftly sketches in the lives of all the major players. His most eloquent passages are about individual soldiers in combat. He follows the war in detail complete with battle maps from the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, through the crucial battle for Chipyongni that ended February 15, 1951. It would be two more years before the war came to a mutually unsatisfactory draw.

Halberstam points to parallels between the defective information that needlessly doomed tens of thousands in Korea and that which precipitated later wars: “[I]t showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not. In 1965, the government of Lyndon Johnson manipulated the rationale for sending combat troops to Vietnam. . . . Then in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush . . . manipulated the Congress, the media, the public, and most dangerously of all, itself, with seriously flawed and doctored intelligence, and sent troops into the heart of Iraqi cities with disastrous results.”

In his last completed book, Halberstam focuses on the beginnings of the Korean War, which became the confluence of a mass of political stirrings.
NonfictionPolitics

An American in China: Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit

Review by Edward Morris

An American in China: Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit</b> It is hard to imagine a more cynical and self-serving quartet than Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung and their eager deputies, Henry Kissinger and Chou En-Lai. Yet during the last week of February 1972, these four schemers, each trying mightily to out-finesse the other, succeeded collectively in advancing the cause of international peace and stability, as chronicled in Margaret MacMillan's Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World.

For all his amply cataloged faults, President Nixon took a significant political risk in bearing an olive branch to the People's Republic of China after having been a part of the apparatus that had vilified that country since the Communists came to power there in 1949. During this period, the official U.S. policy was that the government on the island of Taiwan represented the real China.

But geopolitical circumstances were changing. It had become increasingly clear that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic were not the Communist monolith they once seemed to be. Moreover, Nixon was bogged down in Vietnam and thought that China, which was aiding the North Vietnamese, could ease the pressure and thus contribute to a face-saving end to the war. While the American public may have viewed Nixon's change of attitude toward China as sudden, the truth was that he had been working behind the scenes to reach an accommodation for at least three years before he made his visit to Beijing. In fact, he had signaled this softening as early as the fall of 1970 when, for the first time, he openly referred to the country as the People's Republic of China rather than as the still-prevailing Red or Communist China.

MacMillan, who teaches history at the University of Toronto, has a genius for making complex events and individuals understandable. As she did in her masterful <i>Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World</i>, she embeds here a fairly concise central narrative within a carefully charted labyrinth of historical and biographical background, never allowing any one of these essential elements to detract from the other. Moreover, she has brightened the project throughout with telling and often humorous detail the ubiquitous little girl who manages to show up and present Pat Nixon flowers, no matter where the first lady visits; the president's visible frustration at having to view Chinese landmarks when he'd rather be talking policy; Kissinger's hummingbird determination to be everywhere anything important is happening; Walter Cronkite's electric socks repeatedly shocking him as he treads through the snow along the Great Wall. This is that rarest of diplomatic histories one that elicits almost as many chuckles as it does wise nods.

<i>Edward Morris writes from Nashville.</i>

An American in China: Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit</b> It is hard to imagine a more cynical and self-serving quartet than Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung and their eager deputies, Henry Kissinger and Chou En-Lai. Yet during the last week of February 1972, these four…

Memoir

A birthday he won’t soon forget

Review by Edward Morris

On the cold January eve of Stanley Alpert's 38th birthday, three young and impressively armed thugs whisked him off a Greenwich Village street and into a menacing black Lexus. After stopping at an ATM to sample his bank account, the hoodlums drove the frightened U.S. attorney to a Brooklyn apartment, intending to relax there until the next day, when they planned to steal Alpert's stash of several thousand more dollars. If he didn't cooperate, they warned him, they would kill his father.

By this time, Alpert had been blindfolded and was alternating between feelings of terror and outrage. Even so, he managed to play it cool. He decided early on that he would remember every possible clue that might help him identify his abductors if he survived. Regularly, though, he assumed he wouldn't. Soon after their arrival at the apartment, the kidnappers Lucky, Sen and Ren were joined by their string of juvenile streetwalkers Mystic, Mercedes and Honey. Thus did the initially grim gathering take a decidedly festive turn. As the good times rolled, Alpert's captors became absolutely chummy, even offering him sexual favors when they discovered it was his birthday. It will not undercut the narrative of The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival to reveal that the author's imprisonment was, for all its horror, relatively brief or that he emerged from it reasonably intact. But the manner by which he and his captors separated has to be one of the strangest incidents in criminal history. Alpert divides the book into two parts: Mouse and Cat. His mutation from timid rodent to all-claws feline is marvelous to witness. He has hardly inhaled his first breath of freedom before he's flat-out on the chase to run down the villains and put them away.

In recounting his ordeal, Alpert deftly weaves in family history, reflections on close friends, concerns both professional and romantic, and the colors, smells and textures of New York City in 1998, when the event occurred. His wonderfully re-created dialogue reads like lines from a David Mamet play. While there is nothing here to make the reader feel the stomach-wrenching fear the author experienced, the accumulative richness of character fosters an identification that is far more moving and profound.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

On the cold January eve of Stanley Alpert's 38th birthday, three young and impressively armed thugs whisked him off a Greenwich Village street and into a menacing black Lexus. After stopping at an ATM to sample his bank account, the hoodlums drove the frightened U.S.…

History

Where country has always been cool

Review by Edward Morris

Visitors new to Nashville are invariably surprised at how small, compact and unassuming the area known as Music Row is. Roughly three streets wide and eight blocks long, it still looks more like a residential neighborhood than a multibillion-dollar entertainment capital. Housed within this deceptive geography are major record companies, music publishers, talent managers, booking agencies, entertainment lawyers, recording studios, trade organizations and kindred enterprises.

In How Nashville Became Music City, U.S.A., Michael Kosser, a veteran Nashville journalist and songwriter, set out to tell Music Row's story while there were still people around who remembered how it all got started. Although Nashville had been a country music stronghold since the launching of the Grand Ole Opry radio show there in 1925, it wasn't until the early 1940s that a cohesive music industry began to form. By the end of World War II, things started buzzing in Nashville. Then, in 1955, as Kosser relates, brothers Owen and Harold Bradley, both established musicians, built a tiny recording studio on 16th Avenue South. This was the seed from which Music Row grew. Owen went on to produce such enduring acts as Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn and K.D. Lang. Harold became one of the most recorded session guitarists of all time.

Instead of giving readers a dry linear history of The Row, Kosser provides a textured, anecdotal one, woven from his easygoing interviews of more than 60 seminal figures. (To keep them all clear in the reader's mind, he lists and identifies them at the start of his chronicle.) Among the people who recalled for him the old days are Harold Bradley, now the head of the local musician's union (Owen died in 1998); Buddy Killen, who toured with the great Hank Williams before becoming a publishing mogul; and Bob Doyle, who quit a good job to take his chances at managing a kid named Garth Brooks. A master storyteller himself, Kosser knows the power of a good yarn to bring history alive. As informal as it is, this book is a historical landmark. The accompanying CD includes 12 classic songs recorded on Music Row.

Edward Morris is a former country music editor of Billboard.

 

Visitors new to Nashville are invariably surprised at how small, compact and unassuming the area known as Music Row is. Roughly three streets wide and eight blocks long, it still looks more like a residential neighborhood than a multibillion-dollar entertainment capital. Housed within this…

NonfictionHistoryBiography

American Prometheus

Review by Edward Morris

It is fitting that an excellent study of Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” would emerge at a time when American politicians are butting heads with scientists over such subjects as global warming, stem-cell research and that golden oldie of discord, evolution. Although government officials were alarmed by Oppenheimer’s left-leaning politics even as he assembled the team that would produce the dreadful bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, they still treated him with deference, knowing that, to a considerable degree, America’s war efforts were in his hands.

When the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought Japan to its knees, Oppenheimer became a national hero. But he had moral qualms about the bombs—how they should be used as instruments of foreign policy and whether even more destructive ones should be built. These reservations, occurring as they did during a time when Russia was developing its own A-bombs, led to clashes between Oppenheimer and the more hawkish members of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and their allies in Congress. In the spring of 1954, Oppenheimer was called before a board of inquiry and grilled for weeks about his real and suspected contacts with Communists before, during and after the war.

Ultimately, the board voted two to one not to renew his security clearance, even though it concluded that he was a loyal U.S. citizen. Publicly, he was in disgrace, but the verdict also made him a cause célebré among academics, the larger liberal community and fellow scientists around the world. As humiliating as his ordeal was, Oppenheimer suffered far less than many others who were trampled in the red scare. He was never imprisoned, never lost his job, never forbidden to travel abroad. By the time he died of throat cancer in 1967, much of his immediate postwar luster had been restored.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s richly documented American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer focuses on his across-the-board brilliance, his magnetic (but often caustic) personality and the shifting political milieus that led to his elevation and downfall.

Oppenheimer, the film adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's richly documented American Prometheus, opens this week and focuses on Oppenheimer's across-the-board brilliance, his magnetic (but often caustic) personality and the shifting political milieus that led to his elevation and downfall. Read our review of the book!
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Patterson’s newest villainess loves ’em and loots ’em

Review by Edward Morris

Forget the title. There's no honeymoon chronicled in the latest fast-paced thriller from James Patterson. But there are plenty of lovemaking scenes of honeymoon intensity. At the center of each one is the gorgeous Nora Sinclair, who uses her body with the precision and deadliness of a sniper's rifle. Her day-to-day job is interior decoration, but her real profession is wooing and dispatching rich, handsome men and pillaging their estates. In so doing, she is constantly shuttling back and forth among her fashionable digs in Boston, Westchester and Manhattan. It's a good life, albeit one that bounces along on a trampoline of intricately woven lies and deceptions.

The qualities that humanize Nora are her circle of "Sex in the City"-like girlfriends and her devotion to her mother, who is stored away in an asylum and nursing her own dark secrets. Nora doesn't so much revel in evil as accept it as the cost of doing business.

Determined to call Nora to account for her misdeeds is FBI agent John O'Hara. (The authors have a bit of fun with literary allusions like this. One character gives another books by such crime-story competitors of Patterson as John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell and yet another passes the time reading Nelson DeMille.) Trouble is, O'Hara, who operates via a variety of guises and ruses, is as susceptible to Sinclair's charms as her earlier victims were. He also has old wounds to deal with, including a failed marriage and the reputation of being an organizational maverick. And he's working on another case as he's pursuing Nora, one that nearly gets him killed.

Unlike Patterson's more densely textured Alex Cross novels, Honeymoon has the quick-cut pacing and visual snap of a screenplay. The chapters really scenes seldom exceed four pages and generally end with a portentous declaration or a cliffhanger incident. The text twinkles with the brand names of tony consumer items, not surprising when dealing with a conspicuous high roller like Nora.

Honeymoon is the sixth novel Patterson has written with a co-author but his first one with Howard Roughan, whose solo works of fiction include the lavishly praised The Promise of a Lie and The Up and Comer. Because the focus is more on the observable scenery and action than on nuanced character development, the two authors' writing styles mesh quite well. The only dissonant factor is an occasional and unaccountable shift in point-of-view. Sometimes O'Hara's character is presented in third person, sometimes in first.

Speaking to BookPage in 2003, just before the release of his historical novel, The Jester (written with Andrew Gross), Patterson joked that he picked his co-authors out of the phone book. Then, on a more serious note, he continued, "I'm looking for somebody who, I think, can bring good things to the party, somebody I can get along with." To date, he has written three novels with Gross and several with other co-writers. "I don't really get into the process [of how I co-write]," he said, "because every time I sort of lay out what I do, the next thing you know, somebody else is doing the same thing." More significant than his method of writing, Patterson asserted, is the variety and appeal of his novels. "I think one of the most interesting things is the diversity of these books and the fact that on a pure readership level, a pure, spellbinding, can't-put-it-down level, that they're pretty successful. Forget about sales. They just move along real well."

Honeymoon does indeed move along "real well," accelerated by a handful of strong supporting characters. Among these are O'Hara's sympathetic and no-nonsense boss, Susan (whose relationship with him turns out to be a bit more complex than manager-employee); Nora's deceptively cunning mother; and a mysterious blonde woman who shadows Nora right through to the novel's unexpected conclusion. Maybe it's a bit early to talk about "beach reading," but Honeymoon should be perfect for the sands of summer if not the sands of time.

Forget the title. There's no honeymoon chronicled in the latest fast-paced thriller from James Patterson. But there are plenty of lovemaking scenes of honeymoon intensity. At the center of each one is the gorgeous Nora Sinclair, who uses her body with the precision and…

History

A riveting account of war at sea

Review by Edward Morris

The land battles of the First World War with their miles of muddy trenches and coils of flesh-shredding barbed wire were such horrific scenes of slaughter that it's easy to forget that there was a huge and complex naval component of the war as well. Robert K. Massie's massive and meticulously detailed Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea should correct this imbalance of attention. A sequel of sorts to his 1991 classic Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War, Massie's latest book displays his usual talent for bringing history to life in a narrative that is both exhaustively researched and completely engrossing.

Beginning with the buildup of the German fleet during the early days of the 20th century, a time when Germany and Great Britain were still linked by military friendships and monarchial blood, the author portrays the main players on each side and then proceeds methodically to chronicle all the major (and most minor) clashes at sea. He ends with the defeated German forces scuttling dozens of their battleships while corralled at the British stronghold of Scapa Flow.

The towering figures in Massie's narrative are Winston Churchill, in his pivotal role as First Lord of the Admiralty; John Jellicoe, the First Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief; the calculating and duplicitous David Beatty, who would succeed Jellicoe near the end of the war; and the resourceful German admirals Alfred von Tirpitz, Maximilian von Spee, Reinhard Scheer and Franz Hipper. Although the focus always stays on the encounters out at sea and along the coasts, Massie does take time to explain the increasing importance of airplanes and dirigibles in combat. And he gives a thorough assessment of that new and cunning instrument of destruction, the submarine, and shows how the surface vessels quickly came to terms with it.

No detail is too small to escape Massie's discerning eye, whether it is a failure of ship design that denies it a victory or Beatty's amusing extramarital peccadilloes (he even treats the reader to a sample of the commander's erotic doggerel). With America's entry into the war in April 1917, another great naval force was brought to bear against Germany. This one, as Massie demonstrates, was less important for its firepower than its ability to deliver into battle enormous numbers of troops and volumes of supplies. While the British fleet maintained a strangling blockade of its foe, "[t]he U. S. Navy played a major role in transporting over 2 million American soldiers to Europe. By June 1918, American troops were pouring into France at the rate of 300,000 a month." Part a study in strategies and part pure adventure story, Castles of Steel illuminates an important transitional period in military history just before land and sea forces gave way to the supremacy of air power.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

The land battles of the First World War with their miles of muddy trenches and coils of flesh-shredding barbed wire were such horrific scenes of slaughter that it's easy to forget that there was a huge and complex naval component of the war as well.…

Memoir

A child’s-eye view of polygamy

Review by Edward Morris

The 28th child of a Mormon father who married 16 wives and sired 48 offspring, author Dorothy Allred Solomon shares the story of her fundamentalist upbringing in her compelling new memoir. Although it contains moments of lightness, Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk has none of the whimsy the title suggests. Because the practice of plural marriage was both illegal and officially outlawed by the Mormon church long before her birth in 1949, Solomon lived her early years in the shadows and on the run. And because fiercely held but unpopular beliefs are innately volatile, this one ultimately cost her father his life.

Yet, in spite of all the troubles she chronicles, Solomon's recollections of her father the naturopathic physician Rulon C. Allred are suffused with warmth and affection. Her descriptions of the natural beauty of Utah rise to the level of poetry. Solomon has an extraordinary memory for childhood incidents and feelings. When coupled with material gleaned from family journals, it enables her to recreate not simply her own growing-up but also an incredibly rich and convoluted social order that has seldom been depicted from the inside. In Solomon's eyes, her father was not the insatiable master of an ever-expanding harem, as outsiders may have viewed him, but rather the conscientious, hard-working and besieged CEO of a generally harmonious community. There were many sources of disharmony beyond the community, however. While it had once enshrined polygamy as a divine commandment, the Mormon church now viewed it as an embarrassment and a political liability. Those who, like Allred, broke away from the church often fought viciously among themselves. To shield their parents, the children were taught to evade and dissemble.

Throughout her turbulent youth which included a rape, her father's murder and an early marriage Solomon was able to maintain a stabilizing sense of detachment. Without condemning it outright, she concluded early on that plural marriage was not for her and, in so doing, began her slow and uneasy assimilation into the outside world.

The 28th child of a Mormon father who married 16 wives and sired 48 offspring, author Dorothy Allred Solomon shares the story of her fundamentalist upbringing in her compelling new memoir. Although it contains moments of lightness, Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk has none of…

Clive Cussler’s real-life undersea adventures

Review by Edward Morris

When does Clive Cussler find time to write? In The Sea Hunters II, a collection of true stories about his searches for lost ships, aircraft and, in one case, cannons, the prolific adventure novelist seems always to be flying to this site or that to oversee yet another against-the-odds quest that he's underwritten with his book royalties. Often, the pursuit yields nothing except the excitement of the hunt and the companionship of fellow enthusiasts. But there are clearly enough successes and near misses to keep the author's blood up.

To spearhead his searches, Cussler founded NUMA (National Underwater & Marine Agency), a real-life echo of the world-girdling NUMA he created for his Dirk Pitt novels. Cussler is quick to point out, however, that his NUMA has only bare-bones financing compared to that of its free-spending fictional counterpart.

In this book, the details of each actual exploration are preceded by a narrative in which the authors reconstruct from historical documents and their own rich imaginations the events leading up to the loss of the object they are looking for. By this device, they are able to "explain" precisely what happened to the crew of the fabled "ghost ship," Mary Celeste, which was found drifting and abandoned in 1872. Discovering what he is convinced are remnants of this ship is one of Cussler's headiest triumphs.

As passionate as he is about this aspect of his work, Cussler never romanticizes it. While Dirk Pitt may command first-class accommodations in exotic locales, his creator is far more likely to find himself in a seedy motel along the Mississippi or the New Jersey coast. Pitt has state-of-the-art equipment; Cussler makes do with state-of-the-moment tools.

The oldest remains Cussler and company look for are those of the French ship L'Amiable, lost in 1685 off the coast of what is now Texas. His most vivid and probably most accurate story involves the sinking of Lieutenant John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 1943. There is also a diverting account in which the explorers cruise a lake in Vermont to look for Aunt Sally, an experimental boat that may or may not have gone down there in the late 1820s. For pure drama, nothing else matches the authors' description of the steamboat New Orleans as it is tossed and pelted on the Mississippi River by the New Madrid earthquake of 1811.

The best part of these engaging tales is that they all have modestly happy endings. Even when the searchers come up empty- handed, they console themselves with the prospect of trying again another day. And often they do.

When does Clive Cussler find time to write? In The Sea Hunters II, a collection of true stories about his searches for lost ships, aircraft and, in one case, cannons, the prolific adventure novelist seems always to be flying to this site or that to…

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features