Al Roker, co-host and weather anchor of NBC’s “Today,” vividly re-creates the tragedy of the Johnstown Flood in Ruthless Tide. In what he calls an “unnatural disaster,” 20 million tons of water hurtled past a failing dam and into a Pennsylvania valley on the afternoon of May 31, 1889, tossing animals and trees, crushing houses and killing 2,209 men, women and children. By supplying plenty of detail, Roker brings the reader so deeply into the moment (it took about 10 seconds for most of Johnstown to be utterly destroyed) that you can almost hear the water’s roar and feel the thundering crashes as rooftops and locomotives banged into buildings ripped from their foundations.

Roker makes it clear that this disaster was created by humans. A frequent recreational retreat for wealthy members, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in Pennsylvania resisted any local concerns about the club’s dam, which was built to create a private lake. Stocking the lake with premium fish was more important than relieving water flow. Landscapes were deforested in the name of industry, but without trees, the hillsides had no resistance against flooding. Worries were ignored, warnings went unheeded, and bad decisions trumped the advice of those who knew better.

Today, one may think we are environmentally aware enough to ensure that such a catastrophe could never happen again. But one must ask if any lessons have been learned. Consider, for example, the levees and Hurricane Katrina—and remember the Johnstown Flood.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Al Roker about Ruthless Tide.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It's not your father's Father of His Country at the forefront of Peter Stark's Young Washington. Think more along the lines of a rash nephew. That's because in his pre-Revolutionary War days, George Washington was anything but the placid aristocrat gazing forth from the dollar bill. He was, as Stark puts it, “a very different Washington from the one we know and hold sacred.” Young Washington is Stark's explanation of how the gap was bridged.

Stark, a historian and adventure writer, gives us plenty of both as he starts with a vivid depiction of Washington deep in the Ohio Valley wilderness, carrying a message from Virginia's colonial administrator to a French military officer. (Stark skips over Washington's boyhood, so no cherry tree is harmed in the production of this book.) It's 1753, and the British and French are jostling for supremacy in the region. Later, Washington's surprise attack on a French reconnaissance party becomes the opening salvo in the French and Indian War. He serves alongside the British, fighting rough terrain, reluctant colonial soldiers and the occasional bout of “bloody flux” (dysentery) as well as the French and their tribal allies.

Stark, at one point using 11 uncomplimentary adjectives in one sentence, doesn't sugar-coat his subject. The young colonel is vain and frequently threatens to resign his commission, and he isn't above bending the facts in letters to authorities. He also unapologetically hangs two deserters “for example's sake,” in his words. Along the way, he finds time to court wealthy widow Martha Custis while professing love for the unattainable wife of a friend. But that's just a sidelight in Young Washington. In the crucible of war, he learned to control his passion in more ways than one.

Robert Barnwell Rhett Sr. certainly had a knack for speedy reinvention. The Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper owner was among the most vehement proponents of slavery and secession before the Civil War. Yet only a decade later, he was denying that slavery was the main motive behind the conflict. Rhett helped lead the way for generations of white Southerners who propagated the “Lost Cause” myth: the gauzy tale of kindly slave masters who had fought only for states’ rights. It was a pervasive myth in white Charleston, where “willful forgetting,” as authors Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts call it, became a way of life.

The married historians’ book Denmark Vesey’s Garden is a remarkable exploration of the radically different memories of antebellum Charleston that coexisted for 100 years. In white Charleston’s memory, your granddad wasn’t a slave trader, and slaves were happy “servants.” Old plantations were marketed to visitors as “gardens.” Black Charlestonians begged to differ. Immediately after the war, when it was still safe, they held citywide freedom festivals. Later, with Jim Crow laws grinding them down, they taught black history in segregated schools, quietly telling their grandchildren how they really felt about Old Master.

Starting with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the two worlds finally collided. Change was slow and fitful, but it was real. One emblematic example: A statue of Denmark Vesey, the leader of an 1822 slave rebellion, was erected in a public park in 2014, though not without contentious debate.

Kytle and Roberts caution against complacency in the face of racism. Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine African-Americans in Vesey’s old church in 2015, had visited the city’s historical sites ahead of the massacre—and learned all the wrong lessons.

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Roger D. Hodge couldn’t get out of Texas fast enough. After a boyhood spent doing the things that a South Texas kid from a ranching family does—working with livestock, hell-raising in Mexico—he drove off to college at 18 and didn’t look back. He never planned to become what he calls a “professional Texan.”

But it’s not easy to extract your homeland from your heart. The legendary Texas borderland ranch culture is fading, and Hodge takes an unsparing look at how it developed, what it meant and how it’s dying in Texas Blood.

Texas Blood, a title that refers to the blood of Hodge’s ancestors and the blood of Southwestern violence, is a heady, sometimes humorous mélange of family history, memoir, research and travelogue. In the course of the book, Hodge retraces his forebears’ path south from Missouri, drives pretty much the entirety of the Rio Grande Valley, interviews border patrol agents and his grandma, hangs out with Mexican-American pilgrims at the Cristo Rey shrine and explains why Cormac McCarthy’s novels are more realistic than not.

Hodge’s first Texas ancestor, Perry Wilson, was a typical mid-19th-century roamer, making perilous journeys to California and Arizona as well as Texas. Wilson’s descendants stuck around the general vicinity of Del Rio, Texas. Hodge illustrates what their lives were like with contemporaneous books, letters and diaries, the most moving stories coming from ordinary settlers.

Border history is savage. Everyone was killing everyone: Spanish versus Native Americans, Comanches versus American settlers, scalp bounty hunters versus anyone they could pretend was a Native American. But people like the Wilson-Hodge clan worked incredibly hard and built a community worth remembering in a beautifully austere land.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Roger D. Hodge about Texas Blood.

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

Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of a new century, a great transformation—technological, economic, social, cultural, religious and political—took place in the United States. The rise of wage labor led to bitter union and management confrontations. Reformers crusaded for women’s suffrage and Prohibition. Reconstruction brought official gains against slavery, but racism continued against black, Native American and Chinese populations. Contemporaneous historian of the time Henry Adams, from the family of early Adams presidents, believed that by the 1870s, American governance and even democracy itself had failed. The war had extended the role of the federal government, and there was widespread corruption in business and government, while capitalism thrived.

The latest title in the Oxford History of the United States series is the superb The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by acclaimed historian Richard White. His brilliant and sweeping exploration focuses on the big picture as well as on individuals, including the true stories behind legends like John Henry, Buffalo Bill and another courageous and very impressive Henry Adams, a freed slave who fought racism in Louisiana. White touches on some deeply ingrained myths. “There is probably no greater irony than the emergence of the cowboy as the epitome of American individualism because cattle raising quickly became corporate.” The American West, often regarded as the heartland of individualism, was where some of the first government bureaucracies began. Railroads also were a symbol of the age, but they proved to be dangerous workplaces where a high number of fatalities occurred in the course of routine work. Railroads were often in financial distress, and by 1895, 25 percent of them were in receivership.

White’s masterful book offers a treasure trove of information about a pivotal time in American history, crafted with a compelling combination of well-written recreations of events and careful analysis based on the latest historical research. The Republic for Which It Stands is the best available guide to the period.

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

Sons and Soldiers, the new offering from bestselling author Bruce Henderson, is a compelling account of Jewish refugees who came to the U.S., then returned to Germany to fight against Hitler. Nearly 2,000 German-born soldiers of the U.S. Army were sent to the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. Known as the “Ritchie Boys,” the soldiers were trained to use their language skills as interrogators in the field.

Although nonfiction, the book reads like a novel, as Henderson focuses on six young men, each with a harrowing personal story of escape from Germany. Martin Selling was especially lucky. In November 1938, as part of the violent campaign known as Kristallnacht, he was sent to Dachau for several months. Thanks to the efforts of an aunt, Selling was freed, and eventually made his way to America. Although he had experienced the horrors of Nazi interrogation firsthand, he developed a non-confrontational debriefing technique that uncovered information that saved American lives time and time again.

Getting to know the men as unique individuals adds depth to their later wartime experiences serving in campaigns such as D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect is the young soldiers’ attempts to find friends and family members after the end of hostilities as they—and the world—came to realize the full horror of the Holocaust.

Based on interviews with the veterans and archival materials, Henderson has crafted a fascinating narrative that also serves as a somber reminder, once again, of the devastating personal toll that World War II exacted from innocent, loving families.

Benjamin Franklin’s public life as scientist, inventor, diplomat, publisher and author, among other activities, is well known. His private life, however, is another matter. Franklin had a complex relationship with his family, and while in his 20s and married, he fathered an illegitimate son, William, whom he adopted. They enjoyed a close relationship for many years, the son assisting his father with scientific and diplomatic matters, performing admirably in the military and impressing many with his intelligence and charm.

Their relationship changed dramatically with the coming of the American Revolution. As Daniel Mark Epstein demonstrates in his well-researched and absorbing The Loyal Son, their decisions to support opposite sides in the conflict led to an irreparable break. By 1776, William was Royal Governor of New Jersey, a post he did not want to give up, and Benjamin had many important responsibilities in the years ahead, including the chairmanship of the Continental Congress’ Committee of Secret Correspondence, the “first CIA.” William was imprisoned for a significant period, under difficult circumstances, but was eventually released thanks to the efforts of Benjamin’s friends and allies. Even then, William volunteered for additional efforts for the Empire.

Epstein, the author of many books, including the acclaimed The Lincolns, offers a balanced, nuanced study, sympathetic to but not uncritical of either man. Shortly before he died, Benjamin wrote to his son, “nothing has ever hurt me so much . . . as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune, and life were all at stake.”

The gripping narrative illustrates the public issues that drove the father and son apart and illuminates in detail the agonizing cost to each man.

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

In 1849, after serving one term in the U. S. Congress, Abraham Lincoln returned home to Springfield, Illinois, to resume his law practice. In retrospect, Lincoln portrayed himself during the years after his return as virtually retired from politics. But as an astute and well-connected political strategist, concerned about the future of the country, he also remained involved in public life. He and his law partner, William Herndon, had the best private library in town, subscribed to many newspapers and journals from around the country, and both regularly wrote anonymous editorials for a Whig Party newspaper. As Herndon pointed out about Lincoln, “He was always calculating, and always planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” In his magnificent Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. 2, 1849-1856, Sidney Blumenthal explores in superbly researched and beautifully written detail the crucial period when “Lincoln’s public and private statements” began to reflect “a moderate politician with radical thoughts.” Events in Washington and elsewhere threatened to tear the country apart over the extension of slavery in the West. And the Whig Party, for years Lincoln’s political home, was collapsing and the Republican Party was being established.       

Lincoln’s personal experience also shaped his thought. A turning point came in autumn of 1849 when he was in Kentucky, a state that was supposed to be an example to guide other Southern states to move slowly toward emancipation. Instead, he saw the ruthlessness of the pro-slavery forces crush the benevolent paternalism and gradual emancipation plans of Lincoln’s political hero, Henry Clay. Several months later the Compromise of 1850 passed the Congress and President Millard Fillmore proclaimed it a “permanent settlement” of the extension of slavery question. The landslide victory of Franklin Pierce in 1852 seemed to confirm this judgment. But not for long.

Excerpts from Lincoln’s speeches and other writings reflect his deep understanding of the racist undercurrents of his time and the strong tensions between and among various political groups. His outstanding abilities as a thinker and his elegant mode of expression are also revealed. The best example of this is a speech delivered in Springfield in 1854, almost 17,000 words in published form, probably the longest he ever delivered, which laid the foundation for his politics through 1860. Lincoln delivered the speech several times and in longer versions. It is an early (that is before the more celebrated Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858), devastating critique of Stephen A. Douglas’s defense of slavery and, among other points, presented his understanding that the founding generation tolerated slavery only by “necessity,” because it already existed and went to great lengths to limit it with the goal of ending it. The excerpts from the speech and Blumenthal’s masterly description and analysis of it make for great reading.

The first volume of Blumenthal’s projected four-volume biography, A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849, was widely praised by Lincoln scholars and many other reviewers. This second volume, by a writer with years of experience as a political journalist and presidential advisor, is also extremely well done, and anyone interested in Lincoln’s political career will want to read it.