Stephen Elliott

NonfictionSocial ScienceEnvironment

Valley So Low

Review by Stephen Elliott

The crusading savant with messy hair and scattered papers is a common protagonist in legal thrillers. The archetype—played by Mark Ruffalo or Julia Roberts or Matt Damon in films over the years—comes to life in attorney Jim Scott, the center of gravity in Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe. Here, Tennessee-based journalist Jared Sullivan chronicles a yearslong battle in the wake of one of America’s worst environmental disasters. 

In December 2008, a dike ruptured at a power plant in East Tennessee, deluging the surrounding rivers and landscape with more than 1 billion gallons of coal waste. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility corporation, pledged to clean up its mess, and hired engineering conglomerate Jacobs Engineering to oversee the work. 

It didn’t take long before the cleanup workers started falling ill. Though they’d been told repeatedly the site was safe and the air was clean, the workers began to suspect the coal ash they were cleaning up was to blame for their new ailments and faltering health. They alleged that Jacobs was preventing them from wearing protective gear and tampering with air quality sensor data in an effort to avoid further public scrutiny and speed the lucrative project along. 

Sullivan tells the story of the workers, the TVA and Jacobs officials in charge and, centrally, Scott and his collaborators, who took on the workers’ case in an effort to extract justice from the tragic disaster. The author paints vivid portraits of key characters; love lives and family dramas help render the victims in color, making their plight all the more upsetting. 

Horrifying details and anecdotes pile up as the story unfolds, and it’s easy to understand how righteous anger could fuel a lengthy legal quest with no promise of financial reward. Propulsive and written with flair, Valley So Low is a valuable addition to the pantheon of legal thrillers. 

Jared Sullivan’s Valley So Low chronicles an environmental disaster in Tennessee with the flair of a propulsive legal thriller.
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Paper of Wreckage

Review by Stephen Elliott

The oral history form can sometimes feel like a cop-out—a notebook dump that requires the author to do little but interview and transcribe and put passages in a reasonable order. 

But Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media gets a pass. The book’s subject, the New York Post’s past 50 years, includes so many famous and infamous characters, world events and weird historical side quests that the oral history form makes perfect sense. Plus, most of the subjects interviewed are colorful storytellers in their own right, making the blocks of text propulsive and vibrant without authorial intervention. 

This could be a book about journalism, sports journalism, political journalism, gossip journalism, celebrity, serial killers, labor, New York City, Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch. Instead, it’s all of the above. Authors Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, both Post veterans themselves, have a sense for narrative (or at times, comedic) timing. Some well-known figure is described negatively and then immediately shows up to defend themself (or admit wrongdoing). An interviewee describes a funny or bad experience with a Post co-worker, only for the co-worker to respond directly in the next paragraph. Even journalists remember things differently. 

Two ex-Posties compare Murdoch’s arrival at the tabloid in the 1970s to Hitler’s arrival in Poland. But for the most part, the crew at the newspaper didn’t take themselves too seriously. Some went on to illustrious stints at more respectable publications, but still recall their time at the Post as the most fun and memorable of their careers. It was a funnier, dirtier, meaner, more violent and more exciting newsroom than most—including the New York Daily News and New York Times, with whom the Post has traded scoops and staffers back and forth for generations. 

The story sobers as it nears the present day. The paper’s right-wing politics become more entrenched, and the embrace of longtime Page Six stalwart Donald Trump and his presidency sour even those who still held out hope for the paper. The publication whiffs on the transition to television and then the internet, and its sway in New York faded. But the ride up to that point will entertain anyone interested in media, politics, celebrity or good stories. 

Paper of Wreckage is a vibrant oral history of the New York Post that recounts the tabloid’s sordid—and legendary—glory days.
NonfictionHistory

Hiroshima

Review by Stephen Elliott

Four decades after the publication of his landmark on-the-ground reporting about the atomic bomb experiences of six Hiroshima survivors, journalist and author John Hersey returned to Japan to document what had become of his subjects over the years. Some embraced their hibakusha (the Japanese term for Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors) identity, becoming regular presences on the speaking and memorial circuit. Others had preferred to keep their experiences private at first, and engaged with the public later in life. Most experienced medical fallout for the rest of their lives, and some died before Hersey could return.

“His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty,” Hersey wrote of one survivor, decades after the bombing that killed some 80,000 to 150,000 civilians.

Now, four more decades later, M.G. Sheftall, an American professor living in Japan, has taken another crack at making sure the world’s memory remains clear. In Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses, he painstakingly reports on the lives of several other survivors in what, with remaining witnesses nearing 100 years old, could be the final firsthand recounting of the events of August 6, 1945. His subjects include a promising young student, girls tasked with working to prepare the city for an American invasion and a young military aide.

The similarities to Hersey’s findings do not stop with a title. Though Sheftall’s subjects were, generally, much younger than Hersey’s on the day the U.S. dropped the bomb, their lives tracked similar paths: chronic and debilitating medical conditions, survivor’s guilt, internal struggles over whether to publicize their experiences and a complicated blame game focused on both the Americans who wrought the destruction and a militaristic Japanese society that brought the war home.

Sheftall’s story is brutal but necessary (a second volume about Nagasaki survivors is on the way). In carefully recording the experiences of remaining hibakusha, he is providing crucial labor in service to our collective memory. But he does so with a literary flair that belies any stereotypes of academic writers and at times surpasses Hersey’s famous work of journalism.

Painful in substance but lyrical in form, Hiroshima should be required reading for political leaders, those interested in war and peace, and anyone who has grown numb to the specific horrors of World War II.

In this careful recording of the experiences of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, M.G. Sheftall provides a crucial service for our collective memory of Hiroshima.
NonfictionTrue Crime

I Am on the Hit List

Review by Stephen Elliott

It’s not a total mystery who killed Gauri Lankesh, a hard-charging local journalist and activist in the South Indian city of Bangalore who was assassinated in 2017.

Lankesh, the daughter of a famous Indian writer and publisher, was an aggressive critic of India’s right-wing religious groups, which have grown in power, prominence and violence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party.

While a few alternate theories are proffered about her death, I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India is not really a whodunit. Instead, it’s an obituary of a complicated woman and a portrait of a country’s descent into chaos, hatred and lawlessness. (Don’t worry: You still find out whodunit.)

The assassinated journalist’s life is both inspiring and perplexing, as her understated career in niche local tabloids blossoms into martyrdom and legend upon her death. Lankesh was fearless—some argued reckless—in her opposition to government corruption, creeping religious fervor and the subjugation of women and minority groups. She fought with her dear friends in the pages of her newspaper, and her antagonism of powerful forces had those same friends and family worrying for her safety. And for good reason. It’s a story of complex family relationships, both within the Lankesh family specifically and Indian civil society more generally.

As the story of Lankesh’s life and death unfolds, Rollo Romig, an American journalist with marital ties to Bangalore, sends the reader on several tangential journeys of varying levels of relevance: the story of Christian apostle “doubting” Thomas’ maybe-apocryphal mission to India, the history of the restaurant industry in India, a dazzling description of Bangalore’s astonishing book district. But the author’s reporting about the case has clearly been relentless; he traveled multiple times to the region and interviewed countless figures with connections to Lankesh, modern Indian politics and the case itself.

The complex ethnopolitics of the region and the country offer a disturbing but vivid backdrop for the murder. India’s retreat from pluralism and growing embrace of bigotry and oppression mean that Lankesh’s story is just one of untold many of murder, political violence and religious strife in a desperate country.

 

I Am on the Hit List pairs relentless reporting and historical context in a vivid exploration of a fearless Indian journalist’s assassination.
NonfictionTrue Crime

A Gentleman and a Thief

Review by Stephen Elliott

The media obsession that followed jewel thief Arthur Barry in the 1920s and ’30s looks familiar today, as true crime podcasts and TikTok “investigators” descend on the buzziest, splashiest cases, ethics and tact be damned.

The crimes of Barry, detailed in Dean Jobb’s A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, typically did not cause too much harm (with notable exceptions). He targeted the fabulously wealthy in and around Jazz Age New York City. “Anyone who could afford to wear a $100,000 necklace could afford to lose it,” he said, predating the similar ethos of Cary Grant’s character in To Catch a Thief.  

Jobb’s book tells Barry’s full story, from his hardscrabble youth to service in World War I to the crimes that made him famous. At times, it can feel that the buildup is too thorough, too slow, but the narrative soon gets a move on. The story of Barry’s escalating crimes—from robbing normal rich bankers in the suburbs to casing literal royals ensconced in an opulent estate—followed by his inevitable downfall, is breezily told. Even after he is caught (how investigators fingered him for the crimes is not entirely clear here), the story is not over, as Barry can’t help but find the limelight again. 

Barry’s escapades have elements of our favorite fictional thieves and con men. He palled around with a future king and the Long Island set that inspired The Great Gatsby. Though he comes off as glamorous and charismatic, Barry was no Robin Hood: He stole millions of dollars’ worth of precious gems, only to quickly spend almost all of his proceeds on luxury cars, blowout nights on the town and gambling sprees. 

Too bad today’s omnipresent surveillance would make it nearly impossible to walk into the Plaza Hotel and walk out with someone’s famous jewels, and not immediately be tracked down. 

But Barry could. At least for a while.

You can’t help but root for the glamorous gentleman jewel thief at the center of Dean Jobb’s immersive true crime saga, the aptly titled A Gentleman and a Thief.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Demon of Unrest

Review by Stephen Elliott

There’s no such thing as a spoiler alert when a story’s subject is taught in most every American history class across the country. Injecting hold-your-breath suspense into a narrative history, particularly one in which we already know the story’s ending, is a task that Erik Larson has mastered. In the Garden of the Beasts took on Nazi Germany on the cusp of war; The Splendid and the Vile explored Winston Churchill’s stewardship of under-siege England. In his new book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, Larson turns his attention to the immediate aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the unlanced boil where the war began: Fort Sumter.

Larson covers just a few months of American history—but perhaps the most consequential few months. Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and other well-known figures from the period play key roles, but so too do a British journalist on assignment, a young private stuck in the besieged fort and a Southern society woman watching the events unfold. They aren’t key characters in the grand arc of the Civil War or the country’s history, but they did write a lot down. Their accounts help Larson propel the narrative without relying entirely on the stories of people who have already been the subject of hundreds or thousands of other books.

There are obvious parallels to the current moment: a refusal to accept the results of a presidential election, threats to march on the Capitol, a tendency toward civility and appeasement in the face of existential threat and other more subtle links to the present. Some of the connections are unavoidable and necessary; others, Larson perhaps injects as a result of recency bias.

Even after a century and a half of books about the subject, it remains remarkably unclear what course of action key figures should or could have taken to avoid America’s bloodiest war. Maybe we’ll never figure that out, but The Demon of Unrest is a damn good read.

In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson crafts a tale of hold-your-breath suspense about the crucial three months leading up to the Civil War.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Hell Put to Shame

Review by Stephen Elliott

Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery is the type of history that can be hard to pick up because it forces the reader to confront a tragic injustice. How can something so horrible have been forgotten to history? Like David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, this book tells the story of a century-old series of murders, committed by or at the behest of white power brokers seeking a dollar—a tale as old as time.

Journalist and author Earl Swift’s book is set in rural Georgia in the 1910s and ’20s, where wealthy plantation owner John S. Williams entrapped and kept Black people against their will and forced them to work his plantation. The murders in this story were highly publicized at the time, dubbed the Murder Farm case in newspapers across the country. But this narrative transcends the true crime genre. In telling the story of the killings, Hell Put to Shame offers a look at the unkept promises of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a preview of the Civil Rights battles to come, a Southern courtroom drama akin to John Grisham and a character study of complicated people like Georgia Gov. Hugh Dorsey and crusading NAACP investigator Walter White. It reminds the reader of a cruel system of near-slavery that persisted for decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, unchecked by various white power centers.

Several key figures in the story died or had scattered to the wind soon after the murders were exposed. Swift tracks down descendants who had little or flawed information about their relatives’ roles in the crimes. But limited records and eyewitness accounts can at times limit the storytelling, as, for example, the reader gets to know the prominent Dorsey and White better than the central figures, who left a daintier paper trail.

Swift’s frustrated search for the paupers cemetery where some of the victims were allegedly buried is representative both of the challenge of telling a 100-year-old story and our culture’s willingness to actively forget events that make us uncomfortable. There is no monument or plaque to recognize the victims’ lives or deaths. Though incomplete, Hell Put to Shame provides a vital look at a neglected history.

Hell Put to Shame is a courtroom drama, a true crime tale and a finger in the eye of those who sweep our ancestors’ shame under the rug.
NonfictionMiddle Eastern HistoryHistory

The Achilles Trap

Review by Stephen Elliott

With its near 500-page count and robust endnotes, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq might at first glance scare off readers who haven’t sniffed a textbook in years. But thanks to Steve Coll’s crisp and dynamic prose, what’s between the covers feels little like an academic tome.

Despite appearances, The Achilles Trap is not really an Iraq War book (just as Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is not really a 9/11 book). Yes, you get there eventually, but Coll, like Wright, has more to say about the years leading up to that cataclysm. The narrative details Saddam’s upbringing, rise to power and entrenchment as a key strongman in the Middle East, sometimes allied with the United States and sometimes its biggest pain in the ass—and sometimes both at the same time.

In the two decades since the American invasion of Iraq began, Saddam Hussein has become a sort of caricature. Here, Coll reintroduces the dictator to an audience that has either forgotten his nuances or never knew them. There is unimaginable cruelty, family drama and even comedy—like when Saddam sets out on a career as a historical romance novelist just a few years before his death.

Coll, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and a longtime journalist for The New Yorker and The Washington Post, has a special combination of mostly unrelated skill sets that eludes so many narrative nonfiction writers: He’s a groundbreaking reporter and researcher who is able to uncover new information in a tightly wound arena, but also a deft stylist with a natural gift for both narrative structure and fluent yet surprising writing. Like a baseball player who can both pitch and hit with the best, the rare union places Coll at or near the apex of the craft.

Detailing Saddam’s own cruelty does not mean Coll lets the U.S. off the hook, though. Sprinkled among what is at times a tense political thriller are scenes of astounding myopia, hubris, miscommunication, dark hypocrisy, betrayal, stupidity, cruelty and violence of our own. Though the events of The Achilles Trap concluded 20 years ago, there are few better roadmaps to where American foreign policy in the Middle East has ended up today.

With agile prose, groundbreaking reporting and narrative splendor, The Achilles Trap is a gripping history of the Iraq War.

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