Edward Morris

NonfictionNature

The fierce devastation of a forest fire

Review by Edward Morris

Few forces of nature are as terrifying and unpredictable as forest fires, particularly those in America’s arid West and Southwest. Depending on size, such a fire can create its own shifting weather patterns, each posing a new danger, a different path of destruction. That’s what happened in Yarnell, Arizona, on June 30, 2013, when 19 of the 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting team were burned to death in a blaze sparked by lightning. 

A former firefighter himself, Kyle Dickman first focuses on the history of the Granite Mountain unit and then delves into the background and personalities of its individual members, each of whom had to undergo grueling physical training and considerable hazing to win a place on the team. Most of the men were in their 20s, often at loose ends professionally but caught up in the gung-ho spirit of their jobs. Dickman recounts in such detail their love affairs, marriages, divorces, children, aspirations and resentments that by the time they die, the reader is quite likely to feel a sense of personal loss. Dickman varies his account by quoting many of the text messages the doomed Hotshots sent to and received from their loved ones during the final hours.

The most vivid parts of his reporting, however, are his close-ups of the fire as it invades the town of Yarnell. “Bob [a 94-year-old resident fleeing with his 89-year-old wife] couldn’t see through the smoke. He kept bumping into the trees and brush on the sides of their driveway. Then he put the truck’s right wheel into a ditch. The tire exploded. Around them, dozens of propane tanks sent columns of flames shooting into the air like fires off an oil derrick.” 

Left unanswered, Dickman acknowledges, is the haunting question of why the 19 men left a zone of relative safety to descend into the cauldron that took their lives.

 

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

Few forces of nature are as terrifying and unpredictable as forest fires, particularly those in America’s arid West and Southwest. Depending on size, such a fire can create its own shifting weather patterns, each posing a new danger, a different path of destruction. That’s what happened in Yarnell, Arizona, on June 30, 2013, when 19 of the 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting team were burned to death in a blaze sparked by lightning.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

A heartbreaking look at Japanese-American internment

Review by Edward Morris

Seems like every time Americans get scared in large numbers, innocent people are killed or sent to jail—and the Constitution be damned. That was so with African Americans, native Americans, left-leaning Americans, pacifist Americans and, now, Muslim Americans. In Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II, Richard Reeves re-tells—with heart-breaking specificity—the story of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast who were incarcerated during World War II strictly because of their ancestry. More than 120,000 were stripped of their property, freedom of movement and community standing and held in “relocation centers.” Courts generally turned a deaf ear. That no such roundups were made of German Americans or Italian Americans laid bare the racist undercurrent.

After Pearl Harbor, it was open season on all “Japs.” Politicians and newspapers vilified them as an undifferentiated mass of saboteurs in waiting. When no sabotage occurred, the persecutors said it was evidence that an attack was still being planned. The most abysmal aspect of this injustice was the number of public figures—subsequently to distinguish themselves as liberals—who jumped onto the racist bandwagon. Among these were California attorney general and later governor, Earl Warren, who would go on to become chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court; American Civil Liberties Union founder Roger Baldwin; and cartoonist and writer Theodore Geisel, who, as Dr. Seuss, would teach generations of children the virtues of inclusion and tolerance. Of course, progressive President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the order allowing this to happen.

Forced to start new lives, most of the prisoners made the best of it, growing crops and establishing schools, newspapers and other social institutions. Some were eventually allowed out of the camps to attend college or find jobs in the Midwest and East. A sizable number, mostly from Hawaii, joined the army and proved their patriotism on the battlefield. Reeves follows the personal trajectories of dozens of camp inmates to illuminate both their loss and resilience.

In Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II, Richard Reeves re-tells—with heart-breaking specificity—the story of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast who were incarcerated during World War II strictly because of their ancestry.
NonfictionMemoir

A poet’s journey toward adulthood

Review by Edward Morris

It’s rare that a memoir is so emotionally engaging that a reader may wish to reach back through time and envelop the author in a warm parental hug. But that’s the impulse poet Tracy K. Smith engenders in this account of growing up as a dutiful daughter in a small town in northern California during the 1970s and ’80s. “My mother was proud of my decorum,” Smith recalls. “She liked having a little girl who instinctively wanted to obey.” Smith was much more than a compliant child, though. She was also preternaturally attuned to everything happening around her and determined to find a place for it in her rich imagination.

Smith was the youngest of five high-achieving children born to a former schoolteacher and an Air Force engineer. The fact that she is black does not immediately loom large on her mental horizon, but little by little, idle remarks from white friends and overheard family conversations knit themselves into a perspective that keeps her aware and on guard. By the third grade, she is recognized as intellectually gifted and put on a scholastic path that will lead her to Harvard and beyond. In high school, she is drawn to literature: “When my teacher and I talked about a poem or story,” she writes, “I felt its words rolling toward me in great waves that crashed, receded, then gathered force and returned.” She is also drawn to her lit teacher—and he to her—even though he is married and twice her age. For months, they engage in an intense but chaste love affair that leads to her first of several heartbreaks.

At Harvard, she revels in the “small freedoms” of being on her own, one of which is having her first sexual relationship. But always at the center of her life is her overwhelming love for her mother, who dies of cancer soon after Smith graduates. It is that sad event with which Smith begins and ends her compelling story.

 

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

It’s rare that a memoir is so emotionally engaging that a reader may wish to reach back through time and envelop the author in a warm parental hug. But that’s the impulse poet Tracy K. Smith engenders in this account of growing up as a dutiful daughter in a small town in northern California during the 1970s and ’80s. “My mother was proud of my decorum,” Smith recalls. “She liked having a little girl who instinctively wanted to obey.” Smith was much more than a compliant child, though. She was also preternaturally attuned to everything happening around her and determined to find a place for it in her rich imagination.
Nonfiction

Enlightenment with a price

Review by Edward Morris

Those who find the physical world a sufficient source of intellectual and emotional enrichment are likely to be both puzzled and annoyed by A Death On Diamond Mountain. Why would the two middle class American men at the center of the story—both well-educated and neither from a particularly religious family—become so fixated on achieving “enlightenment” through Tibetan Buddhism that their quests take over virtually every aspect of their lives? And given the inward focus of their questing, why should their story matter? The real drama here arises from the charismatic woman both men loved and who ultimately set them at odds with each other.

Upon graduating from Stanford, Ian Thorson surrendered to a spiritual restlessness that took him on a nearly two-year tour of religious shrines throughout Europe and Asia. During these wanderings, he became increasingly interested in Buddhism. After his return to America, he encountered Michael Roach, a Princeton-educated seeker who, by the time they met in New York in the late 1990s, was a well-established Buddhist scholar, teacher and author. Roach’s chief aide and consort was the alluring and cunning Christine McNally. Years later, when she shifted her affections from the Roach to the younger and more vigorous Thorson, she became the apple of discord at Diamond Mountain, the retreat Roach had created for his followers in the Arizona desert. In the end, she and Thorson were cast out of this rustic Eden, a fate that led to Thorson’s slow and agonizing death.

Himself a student of Buddhism, author Scott Carney deftly traces the paths that brought these three people together and the machinations that drove them apart. The book also describes the intricacies of Buddhist history and thought and shows how Roach Americanized the religion to comfort the rich and successful.

Those who find the physical world a sufficient source of intellectual and emotional enrichment are likely to be both puzzled and annoyed by A Death On Diamond Mountain. Why would the two middle class American men at the center of the story—both well-educated and neither from a particularly religious family—become so fixated on achieving “enlightenment” through Tibetan Buddhism that their quests take over virtually every aspect of their lives? And given the inward focus of their questing, why should their story matter? The real drama here arises from the charismatic woman both men loved and who ultimately set them at odds with each other.
Social Science

What we can learn from Scandinavia

Review by Edward Morris

Annoyance can be a powerful prod to action. And so after being annoyed for years by the praise much of the world lavishes on the supposedly enlightened Scandinavians, British writer Michael Booth has bestirred himself to take a closer, more jaundiced look at the people, customs, institutions and landscapes of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and his adopted homeland of Denmark. Are these five nations the political incarnation of human happiness? Well, maybe.

In The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, Booth brings a deliciously droll sense of humor to his mission. But he is no dilettante, no mere passer through. In striking a balance between Chamber of Commerce and chamber of horrors, he undergirds his personal observations by citing copious studies and statistics and interviewing a wide swath of sociologists, historians, politicians, journalists and common folk. Apart from a history of being tugged and battered by larger countries, the commonalties Booth finds among Scandinavians are hardiness and resourcefulness (no doubt enhanced by the unforgiving climate), social cohesiveness, devotion to economic and gender equality, respect for education (in Finland, he discovers, teachers are “national heroes”) and a secular approach to problem-solving.

And there are problems aplenty, both current and impending, Booth says. Social safety nets are expensive to maintain, particularly for aging populations, which portend even higher taxes and greater productivity. Security can and does lead to a certain level of individual indolence. Immigration, besides being socially disruptive, is giving rise to racist political parties in Denmark and Sweden, although the latter country strives mightily to welcome and integrate its newcomers. Norway’s vast oil wealth enables its citizens to maintain their smug, provincial ways. Iceland, while recovering from its recent financial disaster, still has remnants of the American-style capitalism that got it into trouble in the first place.

Even so, Booth emerges as a cautious cheerleader for the region. As societal and economic role models for the rest of the world, he declares, “The Nordic countries have the answer.”

Annoyance can be a powerful prod to action. And so after being annoyed for years by the praise much of the world lavishes on the supposedly enlightened Scandinavians, British writer Michael Booth has bestirred himself to take a closer, more jaundiced look at the people, customs, institutions and landscapes of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and his adopted homeland of Denmark. Are these five nations the political incarnation of human happiness? Well, maybe.
NonfictionTechnology

Taking control of the web

Review by Edward Morris

Although Andrew Keen has long been involved with Silicon Valley, he has a big problem with the sunny predictions made by early champions of the Internet. And here he is on solid ground. The web did not level the political playing field, provide nearly as many jobs as it destroyed, turn every citizen into an entrepreneur or allow us to share the Internet’s bounty of conveniences without sacrificing our privacy in the process.

Keen concedes that only so many sins can be laid at the Internet’s feet, but he does indict it for an array of evils, ranging from encouraging copyright piracy to concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. He describes how digital photography reduced Kodak to ruins and how the digital copying of music toppled his beloved record stores along London’s “Golden Mile of Vinyl.”

But there’s a distinction to be made—and one Keen too often ignores—between the capabilities a new technology offers and the uses to which those capabilities are put. After all, one can hardly blame the invention of the telescope for a proliferation of Peeping Toms. Nor is there anything intrinsically sinister about new technologies rendering old ones obsolete. All technologies are transitional, and at each stage of inventive evolution there are human casualties, jobs lost and communities torn asunder. This is a major reason governments exist—to help absorb the shock of such dislocation.

That’s pretty much the solution Keen ultimately arrives at. “The answer,” he says, “is to use the law and regulation to force the Internet out of its prolonged adolescence.” Technology, after all, controls process, not its own context.

 

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

Although Andrew Keen has long been involved with Silicon Valley, he has a big problem with the sunny predictions made by early champions of the Internet. And here he is on solid ground. The web did not level the political playing field, provide nearly as many jobs as it destroyed, turn every citizen into an entrepreneur or allow us to share the Internet’s bounty of conveniences without sacrificing our privacy in the process.
NonfictionLiterature

Learning to love ‘War and Peace’

Review by Edward Morris

After establishing that he’s not any of the Andy or Andrew Millers you might have heard of, this English Andy Miller introduces his ambitious vow to read 50 great books within a year—and, better still, to chronicle the struggles and discoveries involved along the way. This he does with candor and good humor

His list ranges from the predictable (Moby Dick and Don Quixote) to the surprising (The Code of the Woosters and The Communist Manifesto) to the truly head-scratching (The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1 and Krautrocksampler). His criteria for inclusion, as best one can determine, are books he has already read, loved and wants to read again, books he feels he should have read and books he’s told people he’s read but hasn’t. He doesn’t actually describe his encounter with each book, but he does linger on those he found especially endearing or hard to deal with. In the process he muses on the future of physical books and libraries in an age of electronic ones and on the ideal roles of bookstore clerks. He almost gives up on Middlemarch and Of Human Bondage but ultimately soldiers through both.

In Anna Karenina he finds “the perfect balance of art and entertainment—no, not a balance, a union of the two.” Miller and his wife are even more moved by the cosmic sweep of War and Peace. “It is as though, having found a book with all the other books within it, we looked around and asked ourselves: what do we need with all these other books?” His appendices include a list of the 100 books that have influenced him most and a roll call of 34 others he still intends to read. Then there’s his droll sidebar on the similarities between The Da Vinci Code and Moby Dick.

“Better to speak volumes,” he observes sagely, “than to read them.”

After establishing that he’s not any of the Andy or Andrew Millers you might have heard of, this English Andy Miller introduces his ambitious vow to read 50 great books within a year—and, better still, to chronicle the struggles and discoveries involved along the way. This he does with candor and good humor
Business & Finance

A case against death row

Review by Edward Morris

Bryan Stevenson was fresh out of Harvard Law School when he embraced—first in Georgia, then in Alabama—the mission of defending death row inmates and others facing undeserved or disproportionate prison sentences. An African American from a poor family in Delaware, Stevenson accepts as a starting point the maxim, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

In Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, he builds his case against the flaws of America’s judicial system by clustering his observations around the case of Walter McMillian, a black man who first drew community ire by having an affair with a married white woman. Subsequently, a drug dealer who associated with the same woman, in an attempt to lessen his own jail time, told authorities that McMillian had killed a local college girl. The dealer’s ever-changing testimony was transparently false from the outset, but eager to close the case, the authorities arrested McMillian for murder, a jury with only one black member convicted him and a judge sentenced him to death. In succeeding chapters, Stevenson describes his struggles to exonerate McMillian.

His primary adversaries are deep-seated racism, tough-on-crime politicians, ambitious prosecutors, by-the-book judges, incompetent for-hire “expert” witnesses, a Supreme Court more interested in judicial expediency than actual justice, the rise of the victims’ rights movement (which recognizes only the initial victims of crimes), the burgeoning private prison lobby and the “good Germans” among us who piously avert our eyes as we go about our daily business.

Although Stevenson writes in a calm, deliberate style, there are passages here so harrowing and outrage-provoking that sensitive readers may need to set the book aside periodically until they can clear their minds of the foul images it conjures up. Anyone animated by a modicum of fairness will recognize Just Mercy as a de facto call to arms.

 

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

Bryan Stevenson was fresh out of Harvard Law School when he embraced—first in Georgia, then in Alabama—the mission of defending death row inmates and others facing undeserved or disproportionate prison sentences. An African American from a poor family in Delaware, Stevenson accepts as a starting point the maxim, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
NonfictionMemoir

The life of an American TV legend

Review by Edward Morris

Norman Lear wants to show you his scrapbook, and—after 92 years—it’s a pretty thick one. Although he established himself as a comedy writer at the dawn of television in 1950, writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lear didn’t really become a public figure until the 1970s. During that golden decade, he revolutionized TV with such socially conscious sitcoms as “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “One Day at a Time.” Unlike the comedies that preceded them, these series explored such touchy subjects as racism, ethnic prejudices, homophobia, women’s rights, abortion, sex education and single parenthood.

In recounting how he built these cultural landmarks, Lear also provides glimpses of the actors who brought the episodes to life. Carroll O’Connor, who played the iconic bigot Archie Bunker, fought with Lear over every script but was so perfect for the role that Lear has nothing but praise for his acting skills. Jean Stapleton (Edith Bunker) and Bea Arthur (Maude) were dreams to work with, as was Rob Reiner (Archie’s “meathead” son-in-law, Mike), whom Lear had known since he was a 9-year-old next-door neighbor. Lear would later back Reiner in the classic “rockumentary,” This Is Spinal Tap.

Born into a lower-middle-class family in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear recalls being sent to live with relatives when his father served time in prison for a financial scam. Clearly, Lear has spent much of his life trying to justify his worth to his largely self-centered parents. He speaks frankly here about his three marriages and his weaknesses as a husband and father. And he explains how his political bent led him to found the liberal lobbying group, People For the American Way. Age has not diminished Lear’s gifts as a storyteller.

 

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

Norman Lear wants to show you his scrapbook, and—after 92 years—it’s a pretty thick one. Although he established himself as a comedy writer at the dawn of television in 1950, writing for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lear didn’t really become a public figure until the 1970s. During that golden decade, he revolutionized TV with such socially conscious sitcoms as “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons” and “One Day at a Time.” Unlike the comedies that preceded them, these series explored such touchy subjects as racism, ethnic prejudices, homophobia, women’s rights, abortion, sex education and single parenthood.
NonfictionBusiness & Finance

Spend now, think later

Review by Edward Morris

Global and ravenous, modern capitalism has turned American citizens into mere consumers, people who are focused principally on their own gratification and essentially indifferent to the needs of the larger society. This, in a nutshell, is Paul Roberts’ thesis in The Impulse Society.

He contends that when capitalism in the U.S. was driven by manufacturing, and most buying and selling of goods took place within national borders, economic growth benefited everyone. Not so these days, he argues, when manufacturing has fled, borders are porous to both labor and capital and the financial sector dictates the rules of the game. That game, it turns out, is finding ways to maximize profits for the few by squeezing and manipulating the many.

At first it appears that Roberts is blaming the victims for their social insularity—for turning away from community and immersing themselves in technological gadgetry, for overextending themselves financially and for shirking political engagement. But he goes on to show that these are all the inevitable consequences of a system that values profit above all else. If we act on impulse instead of reflection, it’s because there is more profit to be made from impulse. The system lures, nudges or bludgeons us into buying things we don’t need and often can’t afford. And via its extension of easy, pay-later credit, the system allows us to find immediate delight in our own economic enslavement.

A political realist, Roberts doesn’t go so far as to counsel a revolt against capitalism. He does suggest a series of palliative measures—moderation of political rhetoric, re-imposition of banking regulations, acts of individual community-building—but they sound more like wistful wishes than practical plans. Ultimately, he fails to confront the paramount question of how national actions can hope to stem—much less turn back—the rapacious global phenomenon he has so skillfully anatomized.

 

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

Global and ravenous, modern capitalism has turned American citizens into mere consumers, people who are focused principally on their own gratification and essentially indifferent to the needs of the larger society. This, in a nutshell, is Paul Roberts’ thesis in The Impulse Society.
NonfictionBiography

Don’t cross a double-crosser

Review by Edward Morris

Real life spy Kim Philby had a level of charm that fictional spy James Bond could only aspire to. To meet Philby, it seemed, was to fall under his convivial sway. Thus, when it was disclosed in 1963 that this very proper, well-placed and Cambridge-educated Englishman had been spying for the Soviet Union since 1934, two people were particularly shaken by the revelation: Nicholas Elliott, his longtime drinking buddy and colleague at MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and James Angleton, the zealous spymaster at America’s Central Intelligence Agency. Both men had regarded Philby as the supreme exemplar of their shadowy trade. Of course, he was.

The focus of A Spy Among Friends is the fragility of trust in the spy business. Apart from the pain of losing his best friend when Philby was outed and subsequently fled to Russia, Elliott also suffered the embarrassment of having brought Philby back into MI6 after he had been nearly exposed as a spy a few years earlier. Angleton never recovered from Philby’s betrayal, which made him paranoid and suspicious of everyone he worked with.

Both Elliott and Angleton tried to rewrite history to show that Philby hadn’t fooled them as completely as the records show he did. From Philby’s perspective, though, his story was of unwavering allegiance to the noble cause of worldwide communism, a goal that trumped nationalism and friendship. That dozens, maybe hundreds, of undercover agents were killed as a direct result of his dissembling never appeared to bother him.

British author and historian Ben Macintyre (Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat) does a masterful job of bringing these intriguing personalities to life and of recreating the World War II and Cold War milieus that forged their passions and alliances.

Spy novelist John le Carré, who served under Elliott in MI6, provides a poignant afterword concerning his former superior’s attempts to purge himself of Philby’s ghost.

 

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

Real life spy Kim Philby had a level of charm that fictional spy James Bond could only aspire to. To meet Philby, it seemed, was to fall under his convivial sway. Thus, when it was disclosed in 1963 that this very proper, well-placed and Cambridge-educated Englishman had been spying for the Soviet Union since 1934, two people were particularly shaken by the revelation: Nicholas Elliott, his longtime drinking buddy and colleague at MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and James Angleton, the zealous spymaster at America’s Central Intelligence Agency. Both men had regarded Philby as the supreme exemplar of their shadowy trade. Of course, he was.
NonfictionMemoir

Two sides of a cultural coin

Review by Edward Morris

Although he speaks repeatedly of his “two Italies”—a phrase he borrows from the poet Shelley—Joseph Luzzi is neither fully at home among the coarse elements of Calabrian culture his immigrant parents brought with them to America nor within the borders of Italy itself, what with its infuriating mix of high art and low purpose. But it is this unresolved quality of Luzzi’s musings—the back and forth tugging of a splendid mind—that makes this book so alive and such a pleasure to read.

Now director of Italian studies at Bard College, Luzzi was the first of five siblings born in the U.S. His harsh, demanding father, Pasquale, worked in an airplane-parts factory and cultivated a small farm in Westerly, Rhode Island. He never fully assimilated, nor did he seek to. “For my father,” Luzzi observes, “life abroad meant never being able to express himself in the language of the people in charge.”

Luzzi first went to Italy in 1987, when he was a 20-year-old junior at Tufts. He thought he might study art or, at least, try to reconcile the mythic Italy with its pop culture manifestations in America. Over the next 20 years, he visited Italy regularly and found the glories of Dante and Michelangelo juxtaposed with the stifling bureaucracy of Italy’s civil service. Back home, he pondered the larger meanings of The Godfather and “Jersey Shore.”

In 2007, Luzzi’s wife, Katherine, died in a car accident, leaving him with a newborn daughter to raise. He returned to Rhode Island, where his mother, brother and four sisters instantly “turned their lives upside down to help.” His grief kept him away from Italy for the next three years, but in 2012, he took his 4-year-old daughter to Florence, realizing that her concept of Italy will always be a world distant from his. He stresses that he has never viewed himself as “Italian-American.” Rather, he says, “I was Italian and American—a little of each, yet not fully either. . . . It is left to my daughter’s generation to inhabit the hyphen.”

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

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Joseph Luzzi for this book.

Although he speaks repeatedly of his “two Italies”—a phrase he borrows from the poet Shelley—Joseph Luzzi is neither fully at home among the coarse elements of Calabrian culture his immigrant parents brought with them to America nor within the borders of Italy itself, what with its infuriating mix of high art and low purpose. But it is this unresolved quality of Luzzi’s musings—the back and forth tugging of a splendid mind—that makes this book so alive and such a pleasure to read.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Old maps in the hands of a master criminal

Review by Edward Morris

In his heyday, E. Forbes Smiley III was larger than life, a man who excelled at virtually everything he set his hand to. Although his name smacked of sitcom pretentiousness, he was never the rich buffoon. Raised in a middle-class, well-educated family in New Hampshire, Smiley became a superb college student, an engaging conversationalist, a gifted woodworker and a generous and loyal friend.

After college, he turned his considerable talents to the rare maps trade, and within a few years was an expert at it. His taste for the good life, however, and zeal for creating his own idealized surroundings eventually outstripped his legitimate income. So he began stealing and selling maps from university and public libraries in an increasingly feverish effort to stay ahead of his bills. He was caught in 2005 and served three years in prison before returning to his family in Martha’s Vineyard, where he has since scratched out a living as a landscaper, laborer and web designer.

The Map Thief, Michael Blanding’s captivating account of Smiley’s career, also provides first-rate summaries of the histories of map-making and collecting, as well as vivid profiles of the principal players who aided Smiley and helped bring him down. Appropriately for such a story, the book is rich with historically important maps and maps that show the territories Smiley occupied during crucial periods of his life. One of the latter is a map of Sebec, Maine, a small town Smiley attempted to transform into his vision of an ideal New England village. This project alone is estimated to have set him back almost a million dollars.

Initially, Smiley agreed to cooperate with the author in writing this book, but after giving two interviews, he withdrew, leaving Blanding to piece together the rest of the narrative through interviews with his friends, business associates and a growing throng of adversaries.

Although this is a sad story brilliantly told, it hardly amounts to a tragedy. Though Smiley’s hubris led to his downfall, he emerges as such a versatile and resilient figure that one expects we will hear from him again.

 

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

In his heyday, E. Forbes Smiley III was larger than life, a man who excelled at virtually everything he set his hand to. Although his name smacked of sitcom pretentiousness, he was never the rich buffoon. Raised in a middle-class, well-educated family in New Hampshire, Smiley became a superb college student, an engaging conversationalist, a gifted woodworker and a generous and loyal friend.

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