Roger Bishop

NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

The Many Lives of Anne Frank

Review by Roger Bishop

Anne Frank’s account of the 761 days she and her family and others spent in hiding during World War II is one of the bestselling nonfiction works ever and the best-known work of Holocaust literature. In her richly rewarding and meticulously researched The Many Lives of Anne Frank, Ruth Franklin thoughtfully probes not only the life and writings of the young author but also details the complex history of publication and dramatization of Frank’s seminal work, The Diary of a Young Girl, and its global influence (it’s available in 70 languages). “Anne Frank,” writes Franklin, “has become not just a person . . . but a symbol: a secret door that opens into a kaleidoscope of meanings, most of which her legions of fans understand incompletely, if at all.”

The author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction and a biography of Shirley Jackson, for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award, Franklin is well suited to excavate Frank’s life and legacy. “The most important misconception about Anne, with the longest lasting repercussions, has to do with the diary itself,” writes Franklin. It was not discovered after Frank’s death. In fact, it existed in three versions: The first is Anne’s rough draft; the second, the draft she hoped to publish (in response to a request from the Netherlands government); and the third, the first published version that is now taught in schools across the world. Franklin examines in detail how the three differ from one another. Anne’s father, the only one of the family who survived the concentration camps, edited that third draft after Frank’s miserable death from typhus at Bergen-Belsen. He insisted that any editing he did was what Anne would have wanted.

Some critics claim that The Diary of a Young Girl—and its adaptations to stage (in 1955) and screen (in 1959, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture)—does not emphasize Anne’s Jewishness enough, and instead creates a more humanist portrait, thus negating the unique and catastrophic experiences of Jews during the Holocaust. Still others attempt to ban the book from school and public libraries, deny the legitimacy of the diary and question whether the Holocaust happened altogether. Novelist Cynthia Ozick has written that Anne’s story has been “Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized” and “falsified.” Some blame Otto Frank’s editing for softening the text and failing to confront the “brutal reality” of the Holocaust. For his part, Franklin writes, Otto “believed in the Diary as a beacon to promote international tolerance and peace.”

“It is precisely this chameleon-like quality that has made Anne’s story uniquely enduring,” writes Franklin. Indeed, The Many Lives of Anne Frank explores how Frank has been “understood and misunderstood, both as a person and as an idea.” This assiduously researched yet accessible text is an excellent companion to the work of Anne Frank that illuminates the young girl and her undeniable impact on the world’s understanding of this tragic time in history.

Ruth Franklin’s thoughtfully probing The Many Lives of Anne Frank illuminates the “kaleidoscope of meanings” ascribed to the titular author and her foundational work.
NonfictionHistoryBiographyAmerican History

A Man on Fire

Review by Roger Bishop

In 1881, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his diary that in the unlikely event someone would write his biography, “the key to my life is easily to be found in this, that what I longed for from childhood was not to be eminent in this or that way, but to lead a whole life, develop all my powers, and do well in whatever came in my way to do.” As Douglas R. Egerton shows in his magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the colonel, abolitionist, minister, legislator and writer did just that.

Egerton writes that “Higginson’s lifelong refusal to tether himself to a single issue has today kept him from fame by association with one. Scholars, whether of antislavery or literary or gender studies, tend to tell only part of Higginson’s story.” A noted Civil War historian, Egerton guides us expertly through the issues and personalities in Higginson’s various causes. He raised funds for evangelist-abolitionist John Brown’s fateful raid on the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As a Civil War army colonel, he led the first Black Union regiment and wrote about that experience in his classic Army Life in a Black Regiment. A prominent man of letters, Higginson corresponded with Emily Dickinson about her poetry, and his own essays and poems appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. A noted public speaker, Higginson supported women’s suffrage and advocated for women’s participation in governance.

Egerton also sensitively captures the private life of this very public man, highlighting Higginson’s relationships with his mother; his first wife, Mary, who died in 1877; and his second wife, Minnie, and their daughters. Higginson had a basic optimism that drove his extraordinary activism. Despite the struggles for the reforms he fought for, he said in 1871 “that this is a remarkably good world, and there are remarkably good people in it.” This bright outlook rings through A Man on Fire, especially in Higginson’s writings, which Egerton cites throughout. In his memoirs, Higginson wrote, “It has been my privilege to live in the best society all my life—namely that of abolitionists and fugitives.”

When Higginson’s 1898 memoir, Cheerful Yesterdays, was published, his friend Samuel Clemens observed, “He was always doing the fine and beautiful and brave disagreeable things that others shrank from and were afraid of—and his was a happy life.”

 

Douglas R. Egerton’s magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire charts the extraordinary life of multitalented abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
NonfictionBiography

Ira Gershwin

Review by Roger Bishop

Ira Gershwin has long been regarded as one of the major lyricists of the Great American Songbook. Many of his contributions to Broadway shows, movies and recordings from the 1920s to the 1950s remain popular today. Three of his songs were nominated for Academy Awards but did not win. Today, those songs “The Man that Got Away,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and “Long Ago (and Far Away),” are standards. Among the artists who have released all-Gershwin recordings in recent years are Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, Diana Krall, Brian Wilson and Michael Feinstein.

The celebrated and much beloved George Gershwin, best known for his “Rhapsody in Blue” and the “folk opera” Porgy and Bess, was Ira’s younger brother and frequent collaborator. George developed a brain tumor and died at age 38. This devastating turn of events not only was a profound personal loss for Ira but also made him the custodian of George’s estate. While continuing to pursue his own career with other composers, he had to contend with long-disputed legal and financial aspects of this inheritance.

In Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words, the first full-length biography of its subject, Michael Owen beautifully captures the life and times of the Gershwin brothers as they crafted musicals for Broadway, including Of Thee I Sing, for which Ira received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama 1932 for his lyrical contribution; George missed out on the award, for there was not a prize for music at this point. Owen writes that Ira “was honored to be recognized but was equally perturbed by the ignorance of the committee that discounted the inventiveness of the music, which allowed his words to come to life.”

So too does Owen’s engaging and insightful portrait illuminate Ira’s life. Ira Gershwin is meticulously researched, thoughtfully drawing from a wide range of sources to take us behind the scenes of the highs and lows of writing for stage and screen. Through Ira’s musings, personal letters, production notes and business correspondence, as well as interviews with those who knew him, we see how this low-key, erudite and keen observer of life and language became not only an outstanding wordsmith, but also the chief archivist of his and George’s musical achievements.

There are numerous theatrical and academic projects inspired by and named for the Gershwins. The best known is the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for American Popular Song. The award, established in 2007, recognizes the important place popular song has in our country. Among the recipients are Paul Simon, Carole King, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and Garth Brooks. And, of course, the Gershwin songs continue to be heard and enjoyed.

Michael Owen’s thoughtful, engaging biography illuminates the life and work of Ira Gershwin.
NonfictionBiography

Ingenious

Review by Roger Bishop

Benjamin Franklin was among the most influential of the Founding Fathers. He signed all four major founding documents, and his diplomacy brought about our fledgling nation’s alliance with France and the peace treaty with Britain that ended the Revolutionary War. A true Renaissance man, Franklin was also a publisher, printer, businessman, community leader, inventor, widely read author and much more. And although his scientific work is sometimes described by historians as a hobby, Franklin was in fact a visionary scientist. Richard Munson’s splendid Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist convincingly argues that Franklin may not have been as effectual as a politician “if not for his fame as a leading scientist, which opened doors for him in the worlds of diplomacy and nation-building,” Munson writes. “Science, rather than being a sideline, is the through line that integrates Franklin’s diverse interests.”

Franklin’s “core and consistent attribute,” according to Munson, was curiosity. While only upper class men in Europe had the financial resources, equipment and time to pursue scientific projects, in the Colonies, inquisitive amateurs like Franklin approached the same concerns. As Franklin became a man of means, he purchased sophisticated instruments and assembled a team to work with him. Skilled in communications, he shared his experimentation with a network of fellow scientists around the world.

Franklin is best known for his experiments with electricity, and Munson covers the subject in considerable detail. Robert Millikan, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, said that Franklin’s research was “probably the most fundamental thing ever done in the field of electricity.” But the broad range of Franklin’s interests included the interaction of oil and water, weather patterns, demographic studies, circulation of blood, ant behavior, smallpox, salt mines, whirlwinds and waterspouts, the absorption of heat by different colors, the threat of lead poisoning, purification of air by vegetation and the management of silkworms. Franklin’s well-written accounts of his experiments were accessible to readers of all kinds. He received many honors in Europe and the U.S. for his scientific work. As a founder of the American Philosophical Society, he supported the scholarly pursuit of what he called “useful knowledge.”

Munson’s absorbing narrative biography guides us expertly through Franklin’s extraordinary life. Page after page, Ingenious shows how one person with little formal education made an impact that still has relevance today. For readers of history, biography and science (or simply those in search of an outstanding book about Franklin that is not too long), Ingenious is an excellent choice.

Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

The Forbidden Garden

Review by Roger Bishop

In March 1921, the world-famous botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was named director of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, which was located in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) and devoted to the study of plant life. He initiated an ambitious plan to develop the world’s first seed bank, which he promised would be “a treasury of all known crops and plants” that would produce super crops that could alleviate global famine.

Award-winning author Simon Parkin vividly relates the tragic yet inspiring story of Vavilov and his team’s dedication to the project in The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice. By 1934, Vavilov’s pioneering effort had opened over 400 research facilities around the Soviet Union. The seeds, “stored in packets and filed for safekeeping in the wooden drawers that lined the seed bank’s dozens of rooms,” were irreplaceable; in some cases, they had been harvested from crops now extinct due to human activity. Vavilov recruited and trained a staff that understood their worth and felt a “keen sense of responsibility.”

In August 1940, Vavilov vanished. And in June 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Leningrad’s industrial factories gave the city strategic importance, and as the birthplace of revolutionary Communism, it “symbolized all that Nazi ideology opposed.” Hitler decided to “starve it into submission.” Without support from Stalin’s government and unable to move the seeds, the Plant Institute staff and others in the city lived and died through 872 days of siege.

The remaining staff now faced a moral question. “Eat or abstain?” Parkin writes. “Is any sacrifice justifiable in the name of scientific progress, or to protect one’s research? What responsibility did the botanists hold to the survival of future generations? . . . There is no doubt that the quarter of a million seeds, nuts and vegetables in the building . . . could have prolonged the lives of the botanists and, beyond that, the public.” A new director encouraged them to eat the collection, but, committed to their mission, they refused. Using the diaries and letters of the botanists, as well as later-recorded oral histories, Parkin paints a suspense-filled record of this harrowing time in history.

The Forbidden Garden uncovers the tragic, inspiring story of Russian botanists who sacrificed everything to preserve a quarter million seeds during World War II.
NonfictionHistory

The Stalin Affair

Review by Roger Bishop

In the summer of 1941, Germany broke its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and invaded the Soviet frontier. Joseph Stalin was stunned and unprepared, and his army suffered many casualties. Hitler’s about-face was good news for Great Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. Now, Germany’s forces would be split, and Great Britain and the Soviet Union had a common enemy. 

Only four months prior, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed to aid Great Britain and appointed millionaire businessman Averell Harriman to be his personal liaison to Churchill. As bestselling historian Giles Milton describes in his vivid portrayal of high-stakes diplomacy and personal relations during World War II, The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War, this invitation “would lay the foundations of a remarkable, if bizarre, three-power wartime alliance.”

Soon after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviet ambassador presented a formal request to the U.S. government for $2 billion in guns, ammunition and aircraft. Once the decision was made to help the tyrannical government, with whom the U.S. strongly disagreed on almost everything, Harriman soon found his mission expanded. He worked closely with Churchill and Stalin, coordinating the ordering and shipping of military supplies. He was also FDR’s eyes and ears, reporting back the goings-on of political leaders. Harriman’s astute judgment of Stalin, as a leader suspicious of everyone and focused on dominating all the territories “liberated” by his army, would prove critical. Milton writes that “Averell had helped to manage a complex relationship between three leaders with widely different backgrounds, approaches, and goals,” often assuaging Stalin’s fears of betrayal to keep the alliance on course. 

In addition to relying on a vast archive of official records of events, Milton also uses accounts written by some of the less prominent observers of this political alliance, which brings a sense of immersion and immediacy to The Stalin Affair. Among the previously unpublished sources are letters from Harriman’s daughter, Kathy, who accompanied her father and worked as a news service reporter. Her many letters to family and friends give us a special window into events. 

Milton’s outstanding writing and research make The Stalin Affair an authoritative and lively account that shows how despite tensions, strong egos and different approaches to leadership, these unlikely partners worked together to end the war. 

The Stalin Affair is an authoritative and lively account of the unlikely World War II alliance among the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryAmerican History

The Bluestockings

Review by Roger Bishop

In 18th-century England, women and men had no setting where it was acceptable to converse as equals on intellectual subjects like literature, fine art, foreign affairs, history, philosophy and science. That is, until women began hosting lively gatherings that defied sexist gender norms.

When Elizabeth Montagu began hosting her salons in her house in London, she started a trend that historian Susannah Gibson calls “the centerpiece of the first women’s liberation movement.” Gibson’s meticulously researched and beautifully written The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement tells how this groundbreaking development changed the lives of women who achieved prestige as novelists, poets, translators and advocates of education.

Gibson spotlights salon hosts Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Thrale alongside prominent intellectual figures of the period: novelists Frances Burney and Sarah Scott, poets Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, author and advocate Mary Wollstonecraft and historian Catharine Macaulay. “Whatever magic Montagu weaved within the walls of her salon,” writes Gibson, “the old spell was broken and the learned lady—so despised elsewhere—suddenly became a desirable person to know . . . even an aspirational figure.” Macaulay is of particular interest because her experience is emblematic of the existent societal tension. Her multivolume history of England was widely praised, yet she dealt with “an enormous amount of male prejudice.”

The term “bluestocking” “caught on as a way of valuing intellectual endeavors above fashion.”  While Gibson acknowledges the diversity of opinions among the Bluestockings, she writes that, on the whole, they “were advocating for the most fundamental woman’s right: the right to be acknowledged as an independent individual of inherent worth.” Laying the groundwork of a whole new worldview, the movement influenced the suffragists of the next century. Consistently enlightening and insightful, The Bluestockings should be widely read by both women and men.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Bluestockings recounts the lives of 18th-century women who forged a path for feminist movements to come.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Presidents and the People

Review by Roger Bishop

Since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, Americans have spent much time interpreting its meaning. As Corey Brettschneider, a professor at Brown University who teaches constitutional law and politics, points out in his informative and stimulating The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, “two ingredients—popular sovereignty and a powerful executive—are an odd pair for the same constitutional system.” For many reasons, presidents can be tempted to overreach, but in our democracy, the legitimacy of the government comes from the preamble to the Constitution: “We the people.” The author reminds us that “The Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of constitutional meaning” and “constitutional rights throughout American history are won by citizens prevailing upon the political branches, not by courts proclaiming them out of thin air.”

This carefully researched book explores in detail how presidents in different eras abused their power. The Presidents and the People presents a litany of their misdeeds. When John Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798, he targeted editors of newspapers owned by his political opponents, and at least 126 defendants were prosecuted as a result. The policies of James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson advanced slavery, guaranteed white supremacy after the Civil War and nationalized Jim Crow, respectively. And then there’s Richard Nixon, who ordered his aides to abscond with potentially damning evidence that proved he undermined democracy in the wake of the discovery of the Pentagon Papers. 

But concerned individuals who responded to these presidents’ anti-democratic approaches are, Brettschneider writes, “a testament to the power of citizens to push past authoritarian moments toward democratic ones.” No one of them is more important than Frederick Douglass, who is featured prominently in four separate chapters. His influence on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant was crucial, as was his decision to support the Constitution rather than abandon it as other abolitionists advocated. Others who fought against abuse include journalists William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. 

These Americans stand as beacons of decency and hope, who sought to see the Constitution’s promise of “We the people” secured. Anyone interested in the ups and downs of American history should be inspired by reading about the courageous citizens who challenged powerful leaders and changed the direction of the nation.  

Corey Brettschneider’s carefully researched The Presidents and the People chronicles American heads of state who abused their power, and people who stood up to them.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Hamilton Scheme

Review by Roger Bishop

The difficult task of establishing a government for the United States required the development of a stable national economy that could deal effectively with a huge debt and other critical concerns. William Hogeland chronicles the twists and turns of the early years of the new republic in his drama-filled and insightful The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding. The nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, welcomed the challenge and had an approach he thought could not only save the country from catastrophe but also move it to become an imperial power. Hamilton’s plan, however, favored the elite, and failed to benefit the broader population that sacrificed much in the war. A scheme, Hogeland notes, “can mean simply a plan or design. But it can also mean a secret plan or design for nefarious ends.”

Hogeland writes of Hamilton’s biggest boosters and adversaries. Readers will not be surprised to see George Washington, who was “first and foremost a politically well-connected businessman,” among Hamilton’s supporters. On the other hand, the “flamboyant war profiteer” Robert Morris may be new to many readers. Coining the term “money connection,” Morris believed that the key to national greatness was “a consolidation of wealth and government.” His influence on the young treasury secretary was so strong that Hogeland contends that “without him the United States probably wouldn’t exist.”

Among those who disagreed with Hamilton was Albert Gallatin, “a brilliant, abstemious Genevan émigré” and treasury secretary to Jefferson and Madison who “[wore] himself down to the nub in the fetid summers of barely built Washington, D.C., trying to discover the antidote to Hamiltonianism.” Another was Herman Husband, an idealist, abolitionist and objector to the conquest of Indigenous North Americans’ land who was “so highly regarded by ordinary people in the remote western regions where he lived that he was . . . ranked by Hamilton as a danger above all others.” These finely drawn characters bring The Hamilton Scheme to life and show the divisions in postwar economic philosophy that are still at play today.

The Hamilton Scheme covers a lot of ground, sometimes at too fast a pace. However, it should be of special interest to readers who want to know about the beginnings of America’s economic history.

Drama-filled and insightful, The Hamilton Scheme chronicles the beginnings of America’s economic history.
Nonfiction

Ascent to Power

Review by Roger Bishop

Harry S. Truman had served only 42 days as vice president when Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Truman had been a respected senator, best known for creating a commission that tracked government spending and saved the country millions during World War II, but despite FDR’s ailing health, the president had done nothing to prepare his successor to assume the highest office in the country. In a pointed diary note from May 6, 1948, Truman wrote, “I was handicapped by lack of knowledge of both foreign and domestic affairs—due principally to Mr. Roosevelt’s inability to pass on responsibility. He was always careful to see that no credit went to anyone else for accomplishment.”

How Truman moved to end the war and met many other challenges with long-range implications in both international affairs and domestic policy is the subject of David L. Roll’s sprawling, insightful, well-researched and engagingly written Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged From Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World. This period, Roll writes, “spawned the most consequential and productive events since the Civil War,” and the U.S. “emerged from the Second World War as the most powerful nation in the world.” Skillfully presenting often conflicting accounts of events as perceived by key figures, Roll shows that despite numerous missteps, controversies and public criticism, the Truman administration’s record of achievement is ultimately impressive.

As the Cold War developed, Truman broke from FDR’s friendly approach to the Soviet Union, blaming the nation for “destroy[ing] the independence and democratic character” of Europe. Truman boosted U.S. military strength “as a means of preventing war.” Although he faced strong opposition from Congress, Truman continued to pursue New Deal policies and introduced a courageous civil rights agenda far beyond anything ever proposed by a previous president. His international affairs initiatives, which became known as the Truman Doctrine, helped revive the economies of Western Europe and Japan, and “made bold and risky decisions that led to the liberation of millions of human beings” abroad—though Roll also admits that Truman’s support of Zionism came “at great cost to the lives of Palestinian Arabs,” who were driven from their homes and businesses to become “starving and dispossessed.” 

In 1952, Winston Churchill told Truman, “You more than any other man saved Western civilization.” Ascent to Power’s carefully crafted narrative superbly shows how he did it.

Ascent to Power is a carefully crafted biography that superbly captures the presidency of Harry S. Truman.
NonfictionHistory

An Emancipation of the Mind

Review by Roger Bishop

“The idea of America that we celebrate today—the one against which we constantly test an imperfect reality—dates not from 1776 or 1787 but from 1865,” writes historian and philosopher Matthew Stewart. With a combination of in-depth scholarship and beautiful writing, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America shows how Enlightenment-era visions of freedom, reason, justice and humanism inspired Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and prominent abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. With others, they helped to bring about a “refounding” of the country.

Stewart stresses that for the three men, “philosophy was an indispensable guide on the road to emancipation. They turned to reason because, as they understood it, reason is the great enemy of unreasonable distributions of wealth.” They had their work cut out for them. By the mid-19th century, Stewart writes, slavery had undergone a “colossal transformation” that was “grander in scope, more calculated in its cruelty, and far more deeply integrated in the political economy of the new republic.” The country so relied on slavery that the “factories of New England and old England alike were scarcely conceivable without the produce of enslaved people in the American South.” Slavery gave rise to an oligarchy that not only developed a racial caste system, but also became a fundamental ill of American history, relying on the appearance of democracy to achieve undemocratic ends.

The story of abolitionists, writes Stewart, “is about an emancipation of the mind as much as of the body.” Stewart not only dives into the work of Douglass, Lincoln and Parker, but also profiles little-known figures who played important roles—some as thinkers from abroad, others as activists in the U.S.—in opposing slavery, and paints an inspiring portrait of those who wanted to “make the world anew.” Anyone interested in American history or real-life applications of philosophy should find this splendid narrative eye-opening and thought-provoking.

An Emancipation of the Mind is a splendid, eye-opening narrative that charts the philosophical underpinnings of Civil War-era abolitionists.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

In True Face

Review by Roger Bishop

Jonna Mendez sums up her extraordinary 25 years at the CIA thusly: “It was a career I loved. I was doing work that mattered, work that made a difference—making history in some small way. It wasn’t a path I’d ever imagined for myself. I was, after all, just a girl from Wichita, Kansas, seeking adventure, never dreaming that would translate into a life that was both covert and trailblazing.”

But it was not easy. She tells her engaging and enlightening story of service, primarily during the Cold War years, in In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked. The challenges of the work itself were great. And although against official policy, misogyny was the way of life in the agency, and Mendez’s experience with gender discrimination provides a look into that environment. CIA historian and journalist Tim Weiner wrote that “apart from the Marines, there is no branch of service in the United States government as hostile to women as the clandestine services of the CIA.” Despite the efforts of some men who went out of their way to undermine Mendez, she showed courage and fortitude, and, in time, she found male allies who were helpful and supportive.

Beginning as a secretary for her CIA agent husband, Mendez rose through the ranks of the organization. Her skills with photography and disguise eventually led to extremely important roles, including Chief of Disguise, in operations around the world. In True Face includes fascinating accounts of the wide range of her activities. She trained couples, usually married, for work as agents in Moscow; disguised a prime minister; and “match[ed] wits” with Russia’s KGB, East Germany’s Stasi, and Chinese and Cuban intelligence. Mendez, in disguise, even visited the White House to meet with President George H.W. Bush.

This consistently absorbing book is a wonderful memoir that offers more than simply a compelling life story. Mendez says discussions with other women in the early stages of the project convinced her that her experiences should be understood “in the larger context of women in the CIA and indeed, women in the American workplace.” So we have “two stories—one in the world of espionage, the other in the world of women.” And both of them are very well told.

In True Face recounts Jonna Mendez’s experience rising through the ranks of the CIA, from disguising spies and planning special operations to grappling with gender discrimination.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean HistoryAmerican History

Churchill’s American Network

Review by Roger Bishop

Winston Churchill’s close ties with the United States began with his mother, Jennie Jerome, who at age 20 married Lord Randolph Churchill. As an author and prominent public figure, Winston developed an extraordinary relationship with the United States, and a keen interest in the Civil War. Over the years he had two basic goals related to the U.S. First, he believed it was in Britain’s national interest for the two countries, with their shared purposes and similar concerns, to stay close. The second was personal. He lived extravagantly and was always looking for ways to expand his resources. His books were published and reviewed in the U.S. and he was paid well for his lectures and magazine and newspaper work. Like his mother, who had used her influence to advance his early career, he became a world-class networker himself as he met American leaders.

How this developed is the subject of Cita Stelzer’s fascinating Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship. In Churchill’s age, the public got the news from newspapers and magazines. Stelzer’s research largely is sourced from “rich and relatively underutilized” local and national press reports of Churchill’s U.S. visits—ranging from where he went and with whom, to local responses at his public lectures, his humorous quips, what he ate for lunch and how he found his accommodations. Stelzer brings to life a cast of characters Churchill brought into his network, among them media giant William Randolph Hearst, actor and director Charlie Chaplin, journalist Edward R. Murrow, steel magnate Charles M. Schwab and socialite and suffragist Daisy Harriman.

While Stelzer does not claim Churchill single-handedly influenced Roosevelt’s decision to come to Britain’s aid during World War II, she makes clear that his relationships with American politicians and leading thinkers “were a helpful offset to the noninterventionist and isolationist, even pro-German background of public opinion.” Churchill’s network “reenforced the favorable view of Britain,” Stelzer writes, “and enlisted others in support of his view that the Anglo-American alliance . . . was key to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world.”

Stelzer’s scholarship on Churchill has been highly praised: 2019’s Working With Winston explores the world of Churchill’s secretaries, and 2013’s Dinner With Churchill focuses on the prime minister’s dinner table diplomacy. Churchill’s American Network is another enlightening look at the statesman, one with an even broader scope.

Cita Stelzer’s enlightening Churchill’s American Network explores the statesman’s nexus of influencers in a country he loved.

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