Roger Bishop

NonfictionBiography

A superb biography of a master poet

Review by Roger Bishop

Only 100 of Elizabeth Bishop’s finely wrought poems were published before she died in 1979. Although her work was greatly admired and she received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, her shyness and extremely complicated personal life meant that she was, for the most part, not a public figure. Since her death, she has become one of America’s most revered poets. In the vivid and compelling Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, Megan Marshall, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and the Francis Parkman Prize for The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, explores the complex relationship between Bishop’s life and work.

Bishop endured a harrowing childhood: Her father died when she was only 8 months old, and when she was 5 years old, her mother was hospitalized for insanity. Bishop’s mother remained institutionalized until her death many years later at age 54, two weeks before Elizabeth graduated from college. The future poet was raised by aunts and uncles in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts.

“I really don’t know how poetry gets written,” Bishop wrote. “There is a mystery and a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.” Often poetry and alcohol were her twin compulsions and, Marshall writes, “By her fifties, poetry and alcohol had become organizing principles, more powerful even than love. . . .” Several women were her companions/lovers and as one of them said, Bishop “fell in love easily. She also fell out of love easily.” She lived at a time when same-sex love was taboo in the U.S. and the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, newly released in 1952, described homosexuality as a “ sociopathic personality disturbance.” Bishop lived an itinerant life for many years, spending long periods in Key West and Brazil.

Two major poets championed her work: Marianne Moore, early in her career, and later Robert Lowell. He became, in their exchange of 400 letters, Bishop’s most appreciative reader and booster. He especially admired a quality in her life as a writer that he could never achieve: “the pleasure of pure invention,” as if the poems had come from her imagination. Lowell was identified with “confessional” poetry, in which he wrote about his own life, an approach Bishop detested. We learn how she was able to transform her life’s experiences into poetry, although the process usually took place over a long period of time and was rarely recognized as directly personal.

Marshall’s biography has two significant features that distinguish her work from others who have written about Bishop. First, she gained access to a collection of her subject’s most intimate correspondence, thought to have vanished, after the death of her last lover in 2009. Secondly, Marshall, although not close to her, was a student in Bishop’s “Advanced Verse Writing” class, offered at Harvard University late in the poet’s life. Alternating chapters of the biography with the author’s memoir give us a first-hand glimpse of that time and place.

This carefully researched, insightful and well written account of a major poet’s life shows in detail the suffering and difficulty that made her art possible. I enjoyed the book tremendously.

Only 100 of Elizabeth Bishop’s finely wrought poems were published before she died in 1979. Although her work was greatly admired and she received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, her shyness and extremely complicated personal life meant that she was, for the most part, not a public figure. Since her death, she has become one of America’s most revered poets. In the vivid and compelling Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, Megan Marshall , winner of the Pulitzer Prize in biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and the Francis Parkman Prize for The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, explores the complex relationship between Bishop’s life and work.

NonfictionBiography

Portrait of a rebel

Review by Roger Bishop

Martin Luther was an unlikely revolutionary. When he posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517 (as the story goes, although Luther himself never referred to it), he was 33 years old, had been a monk for 12 years and had published very little. Yet within two months, the theses were known all over Germany and read by both clergy and laity. Luther’s propositions challenged the Catholic Church on major theological beliefs and practices and questioned papal power. Whether they were attached to the church door or not, the theses sparked the Protestant Reformation and radically changed Christianity.

As we enter the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation, Oxford historian Lyndal Roper explores the life and times of Luther in her absorbing and provocative Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. An authority on early modern Germany, Roper gives us a compelling and nuanced portrait of a person greatly influenced by his environment. Luther was courageous in stating his deeply held beliefs and well understood he would be labeled a heretic and likely become a martyr. He was a brilliant writer but also a vicious man and often a difficult friend, even to those close to him. Although an intellectual and scholar, he mistrusted “reason, the whore,” as he called it. His anti-Semitism was propagated by many of his supporters but went much further than many were prepared to go. 

Why did Luther prevail when other reform leaders did not? Among the most important reasons was his ability to write well and communicate his thinking to the public. He also understood the critical importance of printing. For example, in 1518, by the time he was ordered to stop publication of his first work in German for a wide public audience, he ensured that it was already on sale. “His use of print was tactically brilliant,” Roper writes. “No one had previously used print to such devastating effect.” Perhaps above all, Luther was a realist. “Time and time again, though he might rail against them and insult them . . . Luther would in the end always align himself with the [civil] authorities.” 

Roper’s great skill in interpreting Luther’s personal and public lives and explaining controversial theological subjects within their historical context makes this biography both enlightening and entertaining.

 

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

As we enter the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation, Oxford historian Lyndal Roper explores the life and times of Luther in her absorbing and provocative Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. An authority on early modern Germany, Roper gives us a compelling and nuanced portrait of a person greatly influenced by his environment. Luther was courageous in stating his deeply held beliefs and well understood he would be labeled a heretic and likely become a martyr. He was a brilliant writer but also a vicious man and often a difficult friend, even to those close to him. Although an intellectual and scholar, he mistrusted “reason, the whore,” as he called it. His anti-Semitism was propagated by many of his supporters but went much further than many were prepared to go. 

NonfictionHistory

A sweeping view of European history

Review by Roger Bishop

In 1815, those with political power in Europe—the aristocracy and the monarchy—felt that international cooperation was the way to restore political order and prevent a recurrence of social and political revolution. This was understandable following many years of war, even before the horrific spectacle of the French Revolution and the widespread destruction and death at the hands of Napoleon’s invading armies. There was some cooperation but what, for the most part, did happen gives the eminent British historian Richard J. Evans the title for his magnificent new book, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, the latest volume in the excellent Penguin History of Europe series.

Evans explores power in many manifestations, from that exercised by the state to the efforts of individuals and groups to improve their lot. During the century covered by this book, there were only a small number of wars in Europe, limited in impact and duration, but governments still sought imperial and diplomatic power and built up their armies, industrialists and bankers wanted economic power, and political parties and revolutionaries strove for political power. Nationalism became both a unifying force as well as a divisive force in numerous states.

Societies were able to increase their power over nature with advances in science, medicine and technology, and new sources of power emerged, from steam to electricity, and from the power loom to the internal combustion engine. Although Charles Darwin and the vast majority of scientists and scholars regarded their discoveries as being compatible with Christianity, their efforts opened the door for intellectual challenges by others to the power and influence of religion.

Part of the masterly narrative focuses on individual lives and shows that arguments and struggles about inequality were at the heart of 19th-century European politics. Millions of people, particularly women, peasants, farmers and Jews, were given greater equality of status. It should be emphasized, though, that equality and emancipation were only partial and conditional, often achieved at great personal cost. Women, for example, might participate in revolutionary uprisings and help build barricades, but men would not allow them to have a say in politics. In raising questions about the rights of men, however, by implication questions were raised about women’s rights as well, and some women used this opportunity to advocate for female emancipation.

The Revolutions of 1848, perhaps the most influential series of revolutionary actions of the age for those without power seeking it, came in the midst of a deep and widespread sense of economic malaise. Desperate, poverty stricken masses staged mass demonstrations that caused a great crisis of confidence in governments throughout Europe. Evans disagrees with those historians who have dismissed the 1848 Revolutions as timid affairs, citing the violence of the crowds, the lynching of hated officials and the storming of palaces and offices.

Throughout the book, there are brief sketches of important but not always well-known personalities who played important roles and information about origins of words coined in this period including “scientist” and “anti-Semitism.”

This outstanding and authoritative synthesis, weaving social, political, diplomatic, cultural, engineering, scientific and economic history, is eminently readable and so carefully crafted that I was always reluctant to put it down. It will help readers appreciate the period of Europe’s growing dominance in the world as seen from variety of perspectives and better understand some of the roots of World War I.

In 1815, those with political power in Europe—the aristocracy and the monarchy—felt that international cooperation was the way to restore political order and prevent a recurrence of social and political revolution.
NonfictionBiography

Eleanor Roosevelt’s work in civil rights and refugee resettlement

Review by Roger Bishop

In her exhaustively researched and beautifully written Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962, the concluding volume of her definitive biography, Blanche Wiesen Cook gives us a sympathetic but very human portrait of this “First Lady of the World.” 

Roosevelt’s public life was devoted to persuasion, and she used her many roles as president’s wife, newspaper columnist, author, public speaker, educator, presidential envoy and activist to influence events. In the midst of this work, she had to handle family matters and pursue private interests with many friends, whose rivalries and jealousies are detailed here. She admitted she “would never be any good in politics,” whereas her husband dealt capably with politicians and public opinion, which sometimes meant maneuvering through racial prejudice and anti-Semitism to reach a compromise or just inaction. Though she never overtly opposed FDR’s policies, a close reading of her columns reveals divergences. 

Two primary themes of this volume are Roosevelt’s civil rights work for African Americans and her efforts to rescue those fleeing the ravages of World War II in Europe. The depth of her involvement in these two efforts is one of the most compelling aspects of the book. Her sharp differences with her husband on these subjects contributed mightily to an already strained relationship between them. She had a significant influence on some of her husband’s decisions, although it is often difficult to trace. Both were keenly aware that it was politically unacceptable for her to appear to have influenced policy; her husband never publicly acknowledged “her role in his life.” Eleanor said they “argue about everything in the world,” but never tried to influence each other. Each would do, she said, what he or she “considered the right thing.” 

She was unanimously elected chair of the United Nations committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was to be “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” Since its passage in 1948, it continues to be the most important U.N. declaration on behalf of basic political freedoms, as well as economic and social rights. 

Anyone interested in the life of this towering figure in 20th-century history will want to read this book.

 

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

In her exhaustively researched and beautifully written Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962, the concluding volume of her definitive biography, Blanche Wiesen Cook gives us a sympathetic but very human portrait of this “First Lady of the World.”
NonfictionMemoir

Life behind the Iron Curtain

Review by Roger Bishop

When World War II ended in Europe, American, British and Soviet military units rolled into communities throughout Germany to establish order. Within a short time the country was officially divided into East and West zones, as was the city of Berlin. The Soviet Union occupied the East sector, and with the beginning of the Cold War and the establishment of a Communist-led government, the residents there would have their lives changed for decades to come.

In East Germany, one small, seemingly innocuous act judged, by a person in authority, as a challenge against the police state could lead to a reprimand, imprisonment or worse. Many were able to escape but many others were killed or captured during their attempts. A brave young woman named Hanna from the rural village of Schwaneberg was able to escape and eventually lead a free and happy life as a U.S. citizen. But her close German family, which included her parents and eight siblings, had been the center of her life, and she missed them terribly.

Nina Willner, Hanna’s daughter, tells the true story of what life was like for her mother and her East German family during this period in her compelling Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. Drawing on a wide range of sources including interviews with family members, memoirs, letters, archives, trips to relevant locations and historical records, this is a moving account of one family’s life under tyranny. In a fascinating twist, the author was the first woman to lead U.S. Army intelligence operations in East Berlin during the Cold War in the 1980s, and she relates some of her experiences.

At the heart is the story is Oma, the author’s grandmother, to whom the book is dedicated. Throughout the many devastating changes in their lives, she was able to keep up the morale of her children and her husband by word and deed, demonstrating the central importance of love and family.

After the war, as West Germany began to rebuild, people in the East went in the other direction, depriving many of basic items. The government’s propaganda, however, painted the West zone as much worse off.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect in the East was the establishment of the secret police, the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, for short. Eventually it became responsible for the wholesale manipulation and control of all citizens. The Stasi used clandestine operations, fear tactics and intimidation, attempting to get everyone to spy on everyone else as a way of life.

Forty Autumns includes a family and historical chronology that helps the reader put events in context. Willner’s sensitive and well-written account causes us to reflect on what is really important to us and how we would react in a similar situation.

Nina Willner tells the true story of what life was like her East German family during the Cold War in her compelling Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

A fresh look at America’s beginnings

Review by Roger Bishop

Our understanding of history does not always match the documented evidence. The American Revolution was not as orderly and restrained as we sometimes think. American colonists who remained loyal to the king and those wanting to break away often treated one another inhumanely. A plundered farm, the target of small raiding parties, was more common than a battle charge. After the war, 60,000 Loyalists became refugees. 

In his excellent American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor gives us a wide-ranging view that draws attention to the multiple empires clashing for land and power. The result, based on the latest scholarship, is a fresh and authoritative interpretation of the complex series of events that led up to the war and the many problems the new nation faced in the years immediately following.

Taylor emphasizes the crucial role played by the western expansion of settlers despite British efforts to restrict them. This expansion is essential to understanding both the causes of the revolution and the republic’s growth after the war. Between 1754 and 1763, the British and their colonists claimed the West as far as the Mississippi River. The colonists already here expected to share the fruits of victory. When that did not happen—instead, the British tried to protect Indian lands from settler expansion, made unexpected concessions to Francophone and Catholic subjects in Canada, and then imposed new taxes on the colonists—dissatisfaction began to stir.

Taylor’s focus on a larger area of North America gives us a more realistic understanding of the struggle. He shows “that relations with the native peoples were pivotal in shaping every colonial region and in framing the competition of rival empires. Enslaved Africans now appear as central, rather than peripheral, to building the colonies that overtly celebrated liberty.” 

Near the war’s end, black soldiers were one-tenth of the Continental Army. Women were also crucial to the Patriot war effort, running the farms and shops, keeping families together. Nevertheless, Patriots defended freedom for white men while continuing their dominance over Indians and enslaved blacks.

Taylor’s masterful account is consistently compelling whatever the focus—on diplomacy, religion, warfare, culture or slavery. Everyone interested in early American history should read this book.

 

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

Our understanding of history does not always match the documented evidence. The American Revolution was not as orderly and restrained as we sometimes think. American colonists who remained loyal to the king and those wanting to break away often treated one another inhumanely. A plundered farm, the target of small raiding parties, was more common than a battle charge. After the war, 60,000 Loyalists became refugees.
NonfictionHistory

Changing views of our revolutionary neighbors

Review by Roger Bishop

Accounts of relations between the United States and Latin America in the 19th century usually emphasize expansion, aggression and war. All three were certainly major aspects of the relationship. But from the founding of the U.S. until 1825, many people here cheered the anti-colonial revolutions to the South, viewing them as a continuation of what happened in the colonies in 1776. Newspaper editors, officeholders and people of all kinds cheered and toasted the victories of the revolutionaries and even named their children and communities after Simon Bolivar.

At the same time, however, many observers in the U.S. either ignored or looked positively on antislavery actions in the Southern Hemisphere while failing to take antislavery measures that would put our founders’ words about equality for all people into practice here at home. By 1825, the U.S. was the only American republic where slavery was expanding rather than receding. In her consistently enlightening and stimulating Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, historian Caitlin Fitz explores this complex and rarely noted aspect of a turbulent era. Her insightful narrative is not so much a history of early U.S. relations with Latin America as it an exploration of how former colonists in our revolutionary republic viewed our neighbors to the south favorably for years but eventually came to conclude that there were differences in goals and values.

By 1825 virtually all of the Western Hemisphere was independent of Europe. Contrary to what many people in the U.S. believed about their central role in inspiring change in the Southern Hemisphere, the truth was that violent warfare within the French, Spanish and Portuguese empires was much more important. Individual agents of revolution, a small and disparate group, some of them colorful characters, from those emerging republics did come to the United States to tell their stories and to ask for help. The most influential visitors were those who asked for weapons, ships and diplomatic recognition. They courted the press and were successful in flattering the populace but less so in shaping government policy. Probably a plurality of those who came, though, were victims of circumstance, exiles and fugitives, people who had to flee for their lives as rival political leaders assumed power.

Spanish America was so far away to people here that antislavery tactics there seemed more like an abstraction than a reality. Then, in 1819, divisive debates over allowing the Missouri Territory to enter the Union as a slave state became a major concern. Even then, prominent politician and Kentucky slaveholder Henry Clay noted that “In some particulars . . . the people of South America were in advance of us. . . . Grenada (Colombia), Venezuela and Buenos Aires had all emancipated their slaves.” Clay, keenly aware of American enthusiasm for events in Latin America and with his own political motives, became the nation’s leading congressional advocate of Latin-American independence. But slave owners began to press their case more vociferously, and public opinion eventually shifted against the emerging republics.

Fitz takes us to a place in our history where many of us have not been before and does it in an engaging and compelling way. 

In her consistently enlightening and stimulating Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, historian Caitlin Fitz explores a complex and rarely noted aspect of a turbulent era.
NonfictionHistory

The long, buried history of America’s class separation

Review by Roger Bishop

Our understanding of the past often relies on mythmaking or selective memory. So it has been with American history. We often think of ourselves as a “classless society,” but the impoverished and landless are often missing from our story. Using a wide range of sources, historian Nancy Isenberg seeks the truth in her superb White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. This survey of social class is sweeping, detailed, carefully documented and well written. It shows that, contrary to what we may believe, marginalized and expendable people have been part of our heritage from the start. 

Most British colonizing schemes in the 17th and 18th centuries were built on privilege and subordination. Wishing to reduce poverty in England, those regarded as idle and unproductive, including orphans, were sent to North America where they worked as “unfree” laborers. Waste men and waste women, as they were called, were an expendable class of workers who made colonization possible. 

The much admired thinker John Locke, who greatly influenced American revolutionaries, was also a founding member of and the third largest stockholder in the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly over the British slave trade. Contemptuous of the vagrant poor in England and preoccupied with class structure, Locke, in his Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), basically declared war on poor settlers in the Carolinas. The area divided into two colonies in 1712, and Isenberg traces in detail the curious history of why North Carolina became, as she writes, “the heart of our white trash story.” 

Government efforts to improve the lives of the poor have repeatedly met with strong resistance. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865 to extend relief to “all refugees, and all freedmen,” and the Resettlement Administration of the 1930s both failed to produce long-term success. 

Isenberg writes: “Pretending that America has grown rich as a largely classless society is bad history, to say the least. . . . Class separation is and always has been at the center of our political debates, despite every attempt to hide social reality with deceptive rhetoric.”

Her incisive and lively examination of this phenomenon deserves a wide readership.

 

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

Our understanding of the past often relies on mythmaking or selective memory. So it has been with American history. We often think of ourselves as a “classless society,” but the impoverished and landless are often missing from our story. Using a wide range of sources, historian Nancy Isenberg seeks the truth in her superb White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. This survey of social class is sweeping, detailed, carefully documented and well written. It shows that, contrary to what we may believe, marginalized and expendable people have been part of our heritage from the start.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Facing the facts of the New England slave trade

Review by Roger Bishop

The African slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean existed for centuries before the English colonization of what came to be called New England. By the 17th century, when the English joined the race for land and resources, merchants, traders, religious leaders and the crown were quite willing to use slaves (Indians and Africans) to help achieve their objectives. In her provocative and compelling New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, historian Wendy Warren asks if the early colonists disapproved of slavery. Her answer, deeply researched and well documented, is a “resounding no.”

Slavery, as Warren shows in significant detail, was part of life in America’s English colonies from the very beginning. Puritan theology was not opposed to it, nor was Anglicanism. Puritans, with the authority of the Bible, believed in a hierarchical system where those who were “perpetually” enslaved, Africans and Indians, were the lowest of all. Warren’s research demonstrates conclusively that the realization of John Winthrop’s vision of “a city on a hill” was possible only because of a flourishing economic system joining the West Indies and New England with slavery at its center. Leading colonists owned and sold slaves and wrote about slavery. The author

s documentation includes wills, probate records, ledgers and personal correspondence. She shines a light on many heartbreaking stories of enslaved individuals whose travails have remained largely untold in histories of the period.

Warren brilliantly traces in detail the development of the system from 1638, when the first documented shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in New England, until the publication of Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph, the first New England anti-slavery tract, in 1700. Although there were many other aspects of the arrangement, including family connections, the basic situation was as follows: West Indies sugar meant great wealth for owners, but it was necessary for the New Englanders to grow crops and catch fish to be sent to the West Indies where English colonists there, with the profits from sugar, bought what they needed to sustain themselves and the slaves who produced the sugar. A large part of the early New England economy, perhaps as much as 40 percent, had direct ties to the West Indies sugar plantations. If enough people had said no, the system might have ended but they did not. Enslaved people worked in homes in New England but usually no more than one or two at a time. Hostile Indian slaves were sent to the West Indies where harsh working conditions often amounted to a death sentence.

The first legal approach to chattel slavery in North America, the Body of Liberties, came from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1641. The legislation made the perpetual bondage of Indians and Africans lawful. The Connecticut Code of Laws of 1646, published in 1650, made reference to Indian and African slavery as legitimate punishment for crimes.

This groundbreaking book gives us a new interpretation of the early colonists with regard to slavery, showing that it was part of New England life from the beginning. It also recounts the realities of settlement, violence and Indian removal, and how slavery became an accepted part of life in the colonies. Authoritative, extremely well written and humane, this important book presents a challenge to earlier accounts of the earliest English colonists in New England.

The African slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean existed for centuries before the English colonization of what came to be called New England. By the 17th century, when the English joined the race for land and resources, merchants, traders, religious leaders and the crown were quite willing to use slaves (Indians and Africans) to help achieve their objectives. In her provocative and compelling New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, historian Wendy Warren asks if the early colonists disapproved of slavery. Her answer, deeply researched and well documented, is a “resounding no.”
NonfictionBiography

Two very different writers, one unlikely friendship

Review by Roger Bishop

John Hay and Samuel Clemens were both rising writers when they met in the late 1860s. Hay, a poet, was one of two private secretaries to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Clemens, under the pen name Mark Twain, was known for his short stories and comic lectures. Both had grown up in small towns on the Mississippi River, and they admired each other’s work. Although never close friends (Hay’s wife disapproved of Clemens), in the late 1890s, the changing role of the U.S. in the world brought them back toward each other, on opposing sides.

In his absorbing The Statesman and the Storyteller, Mark Zwonitzer weaves their personal and public stories together as he explores the different responses of two very public figures to the complicated events of their time. Hay was a Republican in the original party sense: a strong believer in capitalism, wary of a shift of money to the working class and immigrants. Clemens considered himself a small-d democrat who was skeptical about government power and was an advocate for fairness in social, political and commercial matters. What continued to bind them were “unbreakable threads of affection and common experience” based on “a gut understanding of just how hard the other was running from desolate beginnings, and an admiration for how far the other man had traveled.”

During the period covered in the book, Clemens is deeply in debt and undertakes a world lecture tour to help right his financial ship, while Hay serves in the McKinley administration as ambassador to Great Britain. The supporting cast includes Clemens’ beloved wife, Livy, so important to her husband’s career that no manuscript ever left their home “without her signing off on every word and phrasing”; Hay’s best friend, Henry Adams, who knew all the influential political figures of the day; and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a major booster of America’s drive to become an imperial power. 

This book is so well written I did not want it to end. With exhaustive research and superlative descriptive skills, Zwonitzer is able to capture mood and tone, bringing his prolific and often-profiled subjects to life and leading the reader to consistently feel present in the moment. 

 

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

John Hay and Samuel Clemens were both rising writers when they met in the late 1860s. Hay, a poet, was one of two private secretaries to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Clemens, under the pen name Mark Twain, was known for his short stories and comic lectures. Both had grown up in small towns on the Mississippi River, and they admired each other’s work. Although never close friends (Hay’s wife disapproved of Clemens), in the late 1890s, the changing role of the U.S. in the world brought them back toward each other, on opposing sides.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Jefferson’s mission

Review by Roger Bishop

Thomas Jefferson was arguably the central figure in the early American republic. No one contributed more to the formation of the country or had more sustained influence. But how did he think of himself and what he was doing in the world? How did he want others to perceive him?

The authoritative and eminently readable “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” is an excellent place to look for answers to these questions. Annette Gordon-Reed, who received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her groundbreaking The Hemingses of Monticello, and Peter S. Onuf, the country’s leading Jefferson scholar, delve deeply into the development and evolution of Jefferson’s thought. They give careful attention to both his public and private writing to help define his attitudes about many subjects, including the role of women. 

Jefferson came to view the family as a microcosm of the nation. He may have idealized home so much because, as a committed patriot and skilled politician, he was so often away from his own. Born into the top of Virginia’s social stratum, he enjoyed extraordinary advantages. At the same time, perhaps more than any of the other founders, he wrestled with the moral and practical implications of long-term relationships among Native Americans, enslaved people and white settlers. He came to accept the concept of inevitable human progress, and he believed future generations would resolve these problems. 

A particular highlight of the book is a discussion of the critical importance of the years during his diplomatic service in France, when his slaves, James and Sally Hemings, lived with him. When he returned home, Jefferson’s attitude toward slavery changed. He continued to see it as an evil, but not as the main degrading foundation of his country’s way of life. At the same time, Jefferson insisted publicly that patriotism began at home. The bonds that sustained family life, he thought, were the only stable and enduring foundation for republican self-government.

The authors are often asked, “What is left to be known and said about Thomas Jefferson?” Their reply is “Everything.” This stimulating book is a valuable guide to our most intriguing founding father.

 

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

Thomas Jefferson was arguably the central figure in the early American republic. No one contributed more to the formation of the country or had more sustained influence. But how did he think of himself and what he was doing in the world? How did he want others to perceive him?
Audio

Inventing Existentialism

Review by Roger Bishop

Existentialism is said to have begun in 1932 when three young philosophers sat in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, getting caught up on each other’s lives and drinking the house specialty, apricot cocktails. Jean-Paul Sartre was inspired that day by talk of a new philosophy called phenomenology, concerned with life as it is experienced. His study of that approach changed the direction of his life and led to what came to be called existentialism.

In her sweeping and dazzlingly rich At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Sarah Bakewell introduces us to those most closely associated with existentialism by approaching “the lives through the ideas, and the ideas through the lives.” She shows how the key thinkers disagreed so much that, however you describe them as a group, you will misrepresent or exclude someone. Some of them never met, some had close or intersecting lives, and others had major public differences.

At the center of her book are Sartre and his longtime lover, Simone de Beauvoir, whose pioneering feminist work, The Second Sex, can be considered the most influential work to come out of the existentialist movement. The lives of Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Wright and Iris Murdoch, among others, are also discussed.

Bakewell, who received the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, sees her cast of characters engaged in a “big, busy café of the mind.” Their ideas remain of interest, not because they were right or wrong in their decisions, but because they dealt with real questions facing human beings.

This wonderfully readable account of one of the 20th century’s major intellectual movements offers a cornucopia of biographical detail and insights that show its relevance for our own time.

 

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

In her sweeping and dazzlingly rich At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Sarah Bakewell introduces us to those most closely associated with existentialism by approaching “the lives through the ideas, and the ideas through the lives.” She shows how the key thinkers disagreed so much that, however you describe them as a group, you will misrepresent or exclude someone. Some of them never met, some had close or intersecting lives, and others had major public differences.
NonfictionSocial Science

An intricate portrait of Iran

Review by Roger Bishop

In 1979, Iran became a revolutionary theocracy. Since then, to the outside world, the country has been identified with repression, false confessions, brutality, torture and worse. But as journalist Laura Secor demonstrates in her compelling, enlightening and often disturbing Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, there is another aspect of the country’s modern history, a “revolutionary impulse as complexly modern as the society that produced it.” These are the heroic efforts of ordinary citizens who exhibit extraordinary courage in endowing the Islamic Republic with their dreams, who embody “the soul of the matter, the experience of politics as it is lived.” They have not moved to overthrow the government but instead challenge injustice, encourage electoral participation and push the government to function in the best interests of the populace. 

Between 2004 and 2012, Secor made five trips to Iran, where she observed four elections. Her extensive research included interviews with over 150 people, both inside and outside the country, about conditions there. They ranged from journalists and bloggers to philosophers and political operatives, most of them activists and survivors of imprisonment and torture. Almost all of her interviewees have been forced to leave the country. 

The story of Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the republic that followed “is not only—perhaps not even primarily—a story about religion,” she writes. It is about politics and identity, about social division and cohesion, the convergence of many streams of thought and activism.

Among the many examples of bravery and idealism profiled in the book is Abdolkarim Soroush, a lay theologian who argues that religious knowledge, like all human knowledge, is subjective and open to question. He believes the Islamic Republic made a fatal mistake in emphasizing Islamic jurisprudence over every other aspect of Islam. Soroush was seriously threatened because of his views.

Anyone who wants to better understand the modern history of Iran as it has been lived by people there should not miss Children of Paradise. It is an insightful mix of first-rate reporting, eyewitness accounts and intellectual history, told in a style that holds us in its grip from page to page.

 

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

In 1979, Iran became a revolutionary theocracy. Since then, to the outside world, the country has been identified with repression, false confessions, brutality, torture and worse. But as journalist Laura Secor demonstrates in her compelling, enlightening and often disturbing Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, there is another aspect of the country’s modern history, a “revolutionary impulse as complexly modern as the society that produced it.”

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