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The truism that a man's worth is determined by his deeds is no more apt than in this biography of the late United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Written by Juan Williams, a national correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed Eyes on the Prize, it posits that Marshall, above any other individual, is responsible for radically changing the landscape of race relations in the 20th century.

Williams sees Marshall as part of a triumvirate of African-American leaders who sought justice for the impoverished and oppressed and for black people, in particular, in this country. The other two men Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X have become near mythical figures and icons while Marshall is less known and mostly remembered for becoming the first African American on the nation's highest court. Yet, his actual achievements have profoundly affected the lives of every person in the United States.

Williams's book meticulously chronicles the life of Thurgood Marshall from his upbringing in a proud middle class Baltimore family to his rise to the head of the NAACP's legal defense team to his attainment of a seat on the Supreme Court the crown jewel of the legal profession. Although Williams highlights Marshall's role in the landmark Brown court decision which outlawed racial segregation in public schools (see Richard Kluger's Simple Justice for the definitive history of this case), the author convincingly shows the tremendous impact on American society of the many other cases handled by Marshall as the NAACP's top lawyer.

Marshall's legal victories although achieved on behalf of African Americans expanded the individual rights and liberties of all Americans. Equality under the law became a reality to many due in no small measure to Thurgood Marshall. From voting rights to criminal justice, Marshall was at the forefront of protecting the rights of the individual. Indeed, the facts of each case speak loudly of Marshall's accomplishments. Additionally, Williams, to his credit and without much embellishment, lets the words of Thurgood Marshall and others provide insight into the character of the man.

The author suggests that the reason Marshall has not been placed in the firmament of civil rights leaders along with King (an advocate of nonviolent civil disobedience) and Malcolm X (a supporter of violent response to oppression if necessary) is that he used the tools of the establishment to end legal segregation. In essence, he used the law. It is unfortunate that we as Americans and those of us who are also African American have failed to recognize and acknowledge the incredible debt of gratitude we owe to Thurgood Marshall.

Perhaps this important book will help us to rectify that error.

 

Harold Evans practices law in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The truism that a man's worth is determined by his deeds is no more apt than in this biography of the late United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Written by Juan Williams, a national correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the…

When it appeared in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five turned Kurt Vonnegut—until then an admired, if pigeonholed writer—into a bestselling celebrity overnight. The novel, which drew on Vonnegut’s wartime experiences as an American soldier during the Battle of the Bulge and, most saliently, the Allied firebombing of Dresden, which occurred while he was held there as a POW, was anything but a straightforward war chronicle. With its darkly humorous tone, time-traveling structure and groundbreaking use of the author as a character/narrator, the novel hardly seemed mainstream. But its absurdity struck a chord with America in the midst of cultural upheaval, and Vonnegut’s unique vision spoke to two generations at once: those who had fought in World War II and those who were coming of age amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War.

A journalist outlines the story behind Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, and the wartime trauma that inspired it.

In The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five, journalist Tom Roston revisits the story behind the book, which Vonnegut struggled to write for many years until he finally found the right voice to use. The engrossing tale Roston reconstructs is twofold. It begins with an absorbing biographical study that explores what made Vonnegut Vonnegut, including not only the events of his war years but also traumas from his Indianapolis childhood and early adulthood that shaped his singular blend of pessimism and humor. Famously quirky in his demeanor as well as in his manner of writing, Vonnegut played by his own rules, even if that meant being incorrectly viewed as only a science fiction writer at the start of his career.

Roston ties Vonnegut’s sometimes peculiar behavior and outlook to his past, and in the latter part of The Writer’s Crusade (whose title is an homage to The Children’s Crusade, the alternate title of Slaughterhouse-Five), he contemplates whether Vonnegut suffered from what has come to be called PTSD. To this end, Roston speaks with other novelists whose work focuses on war, such as Tim O’Brien and Matt Gallagher, as well as with a number of veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He also talks with Vonnegut’s three adult children and others who knew him well. The verdict is inconclusive, but Roston does make a strong case that the roots of the novel—and its ultimate message—stem from Vonnegut’s attempts to process all he had witnessed in the war. Interestingly, Roston suggests that one of Slaughterhouse-Five’s legacies may be the role it played in changing public perception of PTSD, helping Americans recognize its existence and causes.

There will always be mysteries surrounding what is truth and what is fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut himself was cagey and inconsistent when talking about what happened to him or what transgressions he may or may not have committed in Dresden. “So it goes,” he enigmatically wrote after each death in the novel. Still, Roston hopes its writing brought the author some closure and that Vonnegut was able to make peace with his past.

Journalist Tom Roston outlines the story behind Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, and the wartime trauma that inspired it.

When people think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry, they might think of the greeting cards in which they’ve read her most oft-quoted lyric: “How do I love thee? / Let me count the ways.” Fiona Sampson’s dazzling and absorbing Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is likely to change that.

Sampson challenges the usual portrait of Barrett Browning as a “swooning poetess” whose identity is closely bound up with her father and husband. Modeled on Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning’s narrative poem divided into nine books, Two-Way Mirror chronicles Barrett Browning’s growth as a poet, her long-term illness, her marriage to Robert Browning and their subsequent lives in Italy.

Drawing on Barrett Browning’s copious correspondence, Sampson illustrates that the poet was a “pivotal figure” who was acknowledged during her lifetime “as Britain’s greatest ever woman poet” and who attracted international acclaim. Barrett Browning’s use of the female voice in lyric and narrative poetry represented a radical departure from other narrative poems, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath,” in which women characters were, as Sampson writes, “ventriloquized by men.” In the end, according to Sampson, “Elizabeth’s poetry too composes a kind of self-portrait, or rather mirror. As she became herself through writing, her writing reflected that developing self. And so her body of work creates a kind of looking glass in which, dimly, we make out the person who wrote it: her choices and opinions, what moved her, habits and characteristic turns of phrase.”

Two-Way Mirror will enthrall readers and encourage them to read Barrett Browning’s poetry, whether again or for the first time.

People often think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a “swooning poetess,” but Fiona Sampson’s dazzling and absorbing biography is likely to change that.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt described Joseph Patrick Kennedy as “a very dangerous man.” Kennedy became wealthy on Wall Street and in the movie industry and had political ambitions to be secretary of the treasury and then the first Roman Catholic president (a title that eventually went to his son John F. Kennedy). He became a prominent financial backer of FDR’s first two presidential campaigns and successfully served in two key governmental positions during FDR’s administration. Then he campaigned to be ambassador to Great Britain. Despite serious reservations, FDR agreed to the appointment for his own political reasons. The result was a major diplomatic disaster.

Using many newly available sources, Susan Ronald brings this pivotal point in history vividly to life in her meticulously researched The Ambassador: Joseph P. Kennedy at the Court of St. James’s, 1938–1940. As ambassador, Kennedy was primarily concerned with avoiding war. He grew close to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and became a fervent supporter of Chamberlain’s appeasement approach to dealing with Hitler. In a conversation with King George VI, Kennedy expressed his opinion that, if it came to war, “Britain will be thrashed and there will be nothing left of civilization to save after the war.” Kennedy was strongly anti-communist but failed to appreciate that fascism was not a better alternative.

The ambassador often differed with FDR on policy, so they maneuvered around each other for the most part. Despite the fact that Kennedy’s views often differed with his government’s, Ronald explains that Kennedy liked to give the impression that he was a policymaker and not just carrying out instructions. By tracing the opinions Kennedy expressed, Ronald outlines the likelihood that he was antisemitic and a fascist sympathizer. “He was bedazzled by the Vatican, which sympathized with Franco and Mussolini for religious and venal reasons,” she writes, “and sought to placate Hitler before he turned on Catholics once the Jews had been exterminated.” She adds that Kennedy was antisemitic “through his own ignorance and prejudices” and “placed prosperity above human life and liberty, above democracies being crushed.”

Although Kennedy failed as an ambassador and never again served in any public office, his wife and their large, attractive family made a positive impression on the American public. Three of his sons, with quite different political views from their father, were elected to high political offices. As John F. Kennedy said years later, “He made it all possible.”

When Joseph P. Kennedy campaigned to be ambassador to Great Britain, FDR made the appointment despite serious reservations. The result was diplomatic disaster.
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While Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential years have been exemplary, filled with significant humanitarian projects, his presidency is often regarded as a failure. Biographer and historian Kai Bird (American Prometheus) takes a fresh look in his balanced, detailed and very readable The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, summed up their administration’s aims: “We obeyed the law, we told the truth, and we kept the peace.” Carter added, “We championed human rights.” His radical foreign policy initiatives and stellar domestic legislative record made his term an important one. Bird argues that Carter will come to be regarded as a significant president who was ahead of his time, despite the numerous missteps, misunderstandings and gossip treated as investigative reporting during his administration.

Carter was an outlier, “a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system.” Deeply religious and fiercely committed to the job, he was not an ideologue but a liberal Southern pragmatist, a fiscally conservative realist. He was perhaps our most enigmatic president, basically a nonpolitician who “refused to make us feel good about the country. He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird writes. 

Two of Carter’s most successful foreign policy initiatives, securing Senate ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty and personally brokering the Camp David Accords, wouldn’t have happened without his persistence. He also normalized relations with China, negotiated an arms control agreement with the USSR and influenced his successors and others around the world with his human rights emphasis.

Domestically, Carter’s controversial appointment of Paul Volcker to lead the Federal Reserve helped to heal the economy. He appointed a record number of women and Black Americans to federal jobs, including a substantial number of nominations to the federal bench. He and Mondale also expanded the role of the vice president, creating the modern vice presidency we know today.

His first major mistake was to appoint Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was always a disruptive force, as national security adviser. Others in Carter’s administration were not Washington insiders, and there was often friction between them and the press, members of Congress and others who were lifelong politicians.

This compelling portrait of Carter, a complex personality who was finally undone by the Iran hostage crisis, is an absorbing look at his life and administration that should be appreciated by anyone interested in American history.

Bird argues that Jimmy Carter’s radical foreign policy initiatives and stellar domestic legislative record make his presidency important, despite the missteps.

No matter how hot it is outside, that first jump into the pool is always a shock. These five books are like that early summer plunge, each having transformed a well-loved genre into something totally surprising, gasp-worthy and deeply refreshing.


Severance

I have no idea why zombie movies and novels were such a thing in the 2010s, but it felt like everyone had an opinion about fast versus slow zombies, and nearly any stranger could tell you when and why they stopped watching “The Walking Dead.” Ling Ma’s spectacular 2018 debut novel, Severance, took the familiar zombie thriller and fused it with the fledgling millennial office novel to create something wholly original, using an apocalyptic framework to explore our daily routines and nostalgic obsessions. The story of a young woman who survives the plague and now finds herself homesick in civilization’s afterlife, Severance is a mashup, a sendup, a takedown. And the book continues to feel fresh in new ways nearly three years later: It’s about a global virus, but it’s also about continuing to work at your semifulfilling job while the unfathomable draws ever closer.

—Cat, Deputy Editor


Anna K

I remember gasping aloud and then laughing with delight at the opening paragraph of Jenny Lee’s relentlessly effervescent re-imagining of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (which, confession, I have never read). It begins with a magnificent revision of Tolstoy’s famous epigraph, contains an unrepeatable expletive, name-drops Hermès, Apple, Madison Avenue and SoulCycle, and then ends with a parenthetical explanation that its subject’s “new gluten-free diet” prevents her from attending a “double sesh” workout. The whole thing serves to signal: Reader, you’re not in 19th-century St. Petersburg anymore. You’re in contemporary Manhattan amid a group of uber-wealthy Korean American teens whose social and romantic entanglements Lee chronicles with wit and style aplenty, not to mention a blunt frankness that would make even Gossip Girl blush. I can’t imagine anything more delicious than setting up poolside or stretching out on a park blanket under a tree and letting Lee’s sparkling prose and Anna and Vronsky’s life-changing love take me away. XOXO, indeed.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor


Mona in the Promised Land

Coming-of-age novels are far from rare, but acclaimed writer Gish Jen crafted one that rises above its genre in her beloved 1997 novel, Mona in the Promised Land. In the late 1960s, Chinese American teenager Mona Chang is growing up in the suburbs of Scarshill, New York, and struggling to find peace in her identity and to settle into her place in the world. Throughout Mona’s engaging exploration of Chinese, American and Jewish traditions, she finds love in a tepee, employment in a pancake restaurant and adherence to a new religion. It’s astoundingly refreshing to see a book effortlessly balance complex topics like race and identity with lighthearted moments and adolescent rites of passage. Through it all, Mona’s sharp wit and penchant for drama are her constant companions, making this lively book as entertaining as it is pensive. Jen takes a dynamic look at how important identity is for all of us while keeping the laughs coming. I loved every page of it.

—Caroline, Editorial Intern 


Red, White & Royal Blue

Even if you’re not a romance reader, you’ve probably heard of Casey McQuiston’s debut novel. (If you’ve been living under a rock, our interview with the author will catch you up.) But this love story between Alex Claremont-Diaz, first son of the United States, and Prince Henry of the U.K. deserves recognition for more than its stunning crossover success. When the novel achieved bestseller status, McQuiston proved that leaving LGBTQ representation in romance to the online-only and/or independent publishing realm meant leaving dollars on the table. She also gave the oft-gloomy, oft-toxic subcategory of New Adult (which features college-age protagonists), a much needed zap of positive, giddy energy. There are plenty of serious issues at stake—only a trusted few know that Henry is gay, and Alex must explore his bisexuality under a media microscope made even more intense by his Latinx heritage—but there are also karaoke extravaganzas, one of the rowdiest New Year’s Eve parties in fiction and a fan-favorite scene involving Thanksgiving turkeys.

—Savanna, Associate Editor


Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

I love family memoirs—the messier, the better. If the author has been disowned, neglected or mistreated, I’m there with bells on and bookmarks in hand. However, even someone whose literary appetite for drama is as bottomless as mine can appreciate the refreshing sweetness of Bess Kalb’s memoir about her late grandmother, Bobby. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me digs into generations of difficult family history—fleeing the pogroms in Belarus, immigrating to New York City, building a business and a home one scheme at a time—but the twist is that Kalb writes from a place of deep love and appreciation for her grandmother, in defiance of those trauma-informed books that tease apart years of hurt. As an added bonus, comedy and TV writer Kalb narrates this story in Bobby’s frank, anxious, singularly funny voice, like an adoring impression. This bold, fresh approach is a welcome deviation from the first-person introspection common to the genre. Kalb’s buoyant memoir floats splendidly alone on a sea of fraught familial tales.

—Christy, Associate Editor

These five books are like an early summer plunge, each having transformed a well-loved genre into something totally surprising, gasp-worthy and deeply refreshing.

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Road trip sagas can be unforgettable, whether it’s Jack Kerouac crossing the country in On the Road or Cheryl Strayed hitting the trail in Wild. That’s definitely the case with Annie Wilkins, a 63-year-old widow from Maine who made a bold decision when life handed her way too many lemons. In 1954, she suddenly found herself with no money, home or family, and her doctor had just told her she had only two years to live. 

Determined not to become a charity case, Wilkins remembered that her mother had always dreamed of saddling a horse and heading to California to see the Pacific Ocean. So, improbable as this sounds, that’s what Wilkins decided to do—never mind the fact that she had no horse and hadn’t even sat on one in at least 30 years. Elizabeth Letts tells Wilkins’ amazing story in The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America, drawing on Wilkins’ extensive diaries, postcards and more.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Elizabeth Letts discovered the freedom of the open road—in the midst of lockdown.


Wilkins is an extraordinary woman with an abundance of grit and wit—imagine Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, or Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland. She managed to buy a horse named Tarzan and set out with her beloved mutt, Depeche Toi—French for “hurry up,” which is something this unusual trio certainly couldn’t do. Wilkins wore layers of men’s clothing, had no map or flashlight, and only kept about 32 bucks in her pocket. Undaunted, she wrote in her diary, “I go forth as a tramp of fate among strangers.”

Wilkins was repeatedly hospitalized and encountered all sorts of weather and hardships, but she never gave up. Sometimes she slept in stables with Tarzan, and she often spent nights in jail cells—a somewhat common occurrence for thrifty travelers at the time. However, she also became famous as reporters shared her story, and many communities and households began to excitedly await her arrival. They showed her endless hospitality, putting her up in their homes and sometimes in fancy hotels. As Letts writes, “That was when Annie realized she wasn’t just riding for herself—she could carry other people’s hopes and dreams along with her.”

This is a feel-good story in every way, and Letts keeps the momentum lively, sprinkling in interesting historical tidbits that enrich the drama. The Ride of Her Life is an altogether quirky, inspiring journey that’s not to be missed.

This is a feel-good story in every way, and Elizabeth Letts keeps the momentum lively, sprinkling in interesting historical tidbits that enrich the drama.
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There are hundreds of biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, each with its own interpretation of the man: Napoleon the military genius, Napoleon the megalomaniac, Napoleon the savior of the French Revolution and Napoleon the betrayer of the French Revolution. But Napoleon the gardener? This is a new Napoleon indeed.

However, as Cambridge University historian Ruth Scurr demonstrates in Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows, gardening framed every stage of Bonaparte’s life, from his childhood in Corsica to his death on St. Helena. Even his most critical battle, Waterloo, was lost because he miscalculated the strategic importance of a walled garden.

Looking at Bonaparte through the lens of his passion for gardens brings out new and fascinating details about his life, including his love of science and engineering, his obsession with botany and especially his desire to stamp order upon an unruly natural and political world. Gardens, as this book makes clear, are the ultimate symbol of Bonaparte’s life—especially at its end, when every attempt to bring life and beauty to his final exile ended in dust and futility.

Scurr is well known for her inventive and absorbing biographies. John Aubrey, My Own Life, her critically acclaimed 2015 book about the 17th-century biographer, was written in the form of her subject’s imagined diary. So her decision to use such an original perspective in her latest book makes perfect sense. What makes Napoleon so satisfying is that it illuminates not only the emperor but also people from his life who in other accounts are, at best, mere witnesses to the man’s ambitions and exploits. We learn that the naturalists at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris were among his most faithful and honest friends. Most surprisingly, we discover that his wife, Josephine, who is frequently depicted as an extravagant social climber, was in fact a keen and respected (if acquisitive) amateur botanist and zoologist.

Napoleon is a rewarding book that gives intriguing and novel insight into a man about whom we thought everything had already been said.

Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon gives intriguing and novel insight into a man about whom we thought everything had already been said.

Of all the experiences we’ve craved over the last year, high among them is to spend an aimless afternoon browsing in a bookstore or library. When was the last time we thumbed through an overstuffed shelf and found ourselves nose-deep in a book we never would’ve expected? Here are five books we stumbled across and ended up loving.


The Big Rewind

When a novel is described as “Raymond Chandler meets Nick Hornby,” you expect a certain kind of book. So I might’ve picked up Libby Cudmore’s debut looking for a hard-boiled music mystery, but instead I found myself bopping along to a Gen-X cozy mystery, as self-deprecating Brooklynite and wannabe music journalist Jett Bennett scrambles to solve the murder of her beloved neighbor, KitKat, and ends up digging into her own relationship history by way of a box of mix tapes. The Big Rewind has plenty of nostalgic 1980s and ’90s music references (The Smiths! Talking Heads! Cyndi Lauper!), a little bit of romance, great secondary characters, some too-cool New Yorker griping and, best of all, the comforting arc of a cozy, in which there’s a murder but it’s barely the point. Because what is a murder investigation, anyway, but an investigation into yourself? (Or something like that.) This is a punk grandma of a book, and I think we can all agree there’s nothing cooler than punk grandmas.

—Cat, Deputy Editor


Mrs. Bridge

Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge was originally published in 1959, and since then it’s gained a reputation as an underrated masterpiece. In 2012, the Guardian called it an “overlooked classic.” In 2020, Lit Hub called it a “perfect novel.” Meg Wolitzer and James Patterson have praised it in the New York Times and on NPR—but I didn’t know any of that when I checked it out from the library. As I dug into this strange, engrossing novel about an utterly conventional Kansas City housewife, I didn’t know what to expect. India Bridge’s life moves steadily by, with rare flashes of the extraordinary. Other characters experiment and act out, but Mrs. Bridge only occasionally flirts with action before deciding to stay the course of her conformist, upper-middle class, conservative way of life. If that sounds boring, it isn’t—but it’s difficult to explain why not. Connell’s keen insight into the mind of this midcentury woman is compelling, moving and ultimately masterful.

—Christy, Associate Editor


The Diana Chronicles

For the absolute life of me, I could not tell you why or how my middle school-aged self picked up a copy of Tina Brown’s seminal, definition-of-dishy biography of the late Princess Diana. Perhaps I wanted a more modern princess after finishing my umpteenth reread of every Royal Diaries book my library had on the shelves. What I do remember is that I inhaled this book with the rapture of a sheltered young history buff who had never encountered media more dramatic than a Disney Channel Original Movie. Brown, who covered and commented upon Diana’s life while serving as editor-in-chief of Tatler and then Vanity Fair, tells Diana’s story with witty relish and juicy details galore. But under all the tabloid fizz, Brown also paints a refreshingly complicated portrait of her iconic subject. Her Diana is not a sainted martyr or a hysteric with a victim complex, but a woman trying to vanquish her inner demons, who is on the verge of finding equilibrium when her life is cut unfairly short.

—Savanna, Associate Editor


Sloppy Firsts

Fall 2001, suburban New Jersey. I was 15, a sophomore in high school. My best friend had moved across the country over the summer, and the twin towers had come down on the fifth day of school. It’s almost always a weird time to be a teenager, but that year felt like an especially weird time. And then, on a shelf in the little bookstore next to the ShopRite, a lime green spine caught my eye. Jessica Darling, Megan McCafferty’s heroine, was also a sophomore in suburban New Jersey whose best friend had just moved away. (“I guess your move wasn’t a sign of the Y2K teen angst apocalypse after all,” Jessica writes to her in the letter that opens the book.) It felt like a sign. McCafferty’s funny, heartbreaking, often profane and deeply honest novel, in which Jessica grieves her friendship, grapples with mental illness and even falls in love, was exactly the book I needed at that moment to make 15 feel a little less weird.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor 


Peter the Great

I could have chosen any biography of a European leader to read for my college history class. Why I decided to go for a 1,000-page book about a Russian czar that was written before I could walk has been lost to time, but the ripple effect has been huge. Robert K. Massie won the Pulitzer for this biography, and his deep understanding of his curious, mercurial subject and 17th-century Russia made me feel like I knew Peter personally. That’s probably why I peppered my conversations with anecdotes about him for weeks. (Your dorm room is too small? Peter’s cabin was only about 700 square feet, and his bedroom was barely large enough for him to lie down! Hate your boyfriend’s beard? Take a cue from Peter and tell him if he enters your presence wearing one, you’ll rip it out!) In the years since, I’ve read the book twice more, as well as everything else Massie has ever published, and have found each of his books as immersive.

—Trisha, Publisher

When was the last time we thumbed through an overstuffed shelf and found ourselves nose-deep in a book we never would’ve expected? Here are five books we stumbled across and ended up loving.

Though their poetry, personalities and lives were vastly different, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are inextricably bound in the public imagination. Just a few years apart in age and hailing from the same Massachusetts town, these two poets pushed boundaries in their highly confessional work. Additionally, the fact that both women died by suicide fuels their legacies.

Plath and Sexton did know each other, though not well. In 1959, shortly before Plath moved to England, the two women attended a Boston writing workshop led by Robert Lowell. After class, they would convene at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton to talk poetry and, one presumes, share some intimate details from their lives. These undocumented, informal gabfests provide the thin thread with which Plath scholar Gail Crowther connects the pair in Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, her thoroughly engrossing examination of these two disparate, talented and troubled poetic geniuses.

The casual acquaintance of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton takes on a greater significance in an engrossing new study.

Crowther synthesizes Plath’s and Sexton’s individual stories into a seamless narrative. Many details will be familiar to die-hard acolytes of either or both poets—the bouts of mental illness and failure of psychiatric treatments, the turbulent marriages and sexual indiscretions, the unyielding resistance they encountered when they dared to play by their own rules—but Crowther’s clever integration of these two lives reveals the strong connections between them in new and surprising ways. For example, she rightly identifies both women as rebels who fearlessly pushed against social constraints before second-wave feminism made it more acceptable for women to bare the truth about their inner conflicts, contradictions and sexuality.

Crowther also searches for the differences between how Plath and Sexton conducted their lives—as daughters, wives, mothers and poets. Although the contrast between the orderly Plath and the wild-spirited Sexton could at times be dramatic (a difference that plays out in their poetic voices as well), there is a shared poignancy in the personal struggles these women experienced.

Since there was no fly on the wall during those martini-soaked afternoons at the Ritz, we, like Crowther, can only surmise what was said. And with little evidence to draw on beyond a few passing comments in diaries and letters, and one poem Sexton wrote after Plath’s death, Crowther perhaps speculates a bit too much about what each of these women may or may not have thought of the other. Despite this leap, she makes a convincing case that the ripple effects of Plath’s and Sexton’s not-so-quiet rebellions are still being felt. “Plath and Sexton are still with us,” she writes near the end of this passionate and affecting study, “agitating with their voices, exposing all those wrongs that still exist, and all those universal themes that will never go away: love, death, sex, pain, joy.”

In an engrossing new study, Crowther reveals the parallels between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton—two disparate, talented and troubled poetic geniuses.

Although Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel The Yearling is well known—it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939—its author has yet to receive the same level of attention. A contemporary and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway (with whom she fished) and Thomas Wolfe (with whom she shared the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins), Rawlings captured the raw beauty and untamed wilderness of north central Florida and its denizens long before the area cut down its orange groves to make way for unbridled commercial development. Ann McCutchan offers an absorbing, affectionate and long overdue portrait of Rawlings and her writings in The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling.

Drawing deeply on Rawlings’ archives, McCutchan chronicles the details of Rawlings’ life, from her childhood in Washington, D.C., where she won a prize in a writing contest for her story “The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty”; to her college years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she edited the literary magazine and met Charles Rawlings, who would become her first husband; to her early years as a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York; to her eventual move to Cross Creek, Florida. There, she established herself as a writer, creating enduring, memorable portraits of rural Florida and its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman.

McCutchan looks closely at Rawlings’ letters, stories, novels and memoirs and mines the ways they reveal Rawlings’ writerly mind, her desire to probe the relationship between men and women, families and individuals, and her ability to evoke a sense of place, especially the paradise of her corner of Florida. Rawlings was also, according to McCutchan, cosmically conscious, which led her to write about the interconnections between all living things. The Life She Wished to Live is the biography that Rawlings has long deserved.

The Life She Wished to Live is the biography that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has long deserved.
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Five hours after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, his son Robert Todd Lincoln wired David Davis, one of the president’s closest friends and an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to come to Washington “to take charge of my father’s affairs.” At the same time, Lincoln’s two devoted secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, assembled the president’s papers, including Lincoln’s private notes to himself, called “fragments.” In Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President, Lincoln scholar Ronald C. White selects 12 of the 109 known fragments, places them in their historical context and analyzes their representations of the president’s life and thoughts.

Almost every fragment begins with a problem Lincoln was facing, and it’s fascinating to see how he grappled with each one. A few fragments may have been first drafts for speeches, but most are reflections that never reappeared elsewhere. Among the issues Lincoln examined are slavery, the birth of the Republican Party, God’s role in the Civil War and how to be a good lawyer.

Lincoln frequently tried to see things from his opponents’ points of view. In a fragment on slavery, Lincoln does this by giving three justifications for being pro-slavery. Then he shows the basic contradictions within each reason and demonstrates how race, intellect or interest could easily be turned around to make the enslaver the enslaved.

Lincoln wrestled with his decision to join the Republican Party. As a longtime Whig, he questioned the meaning, mission and challenges of the new party. To sort out his thoughts, his fragments reveal that he turned to the U.S. Constitution and the historical record, two sources he often used when analyzing a problem.

A fragment on the Civil War begins, “The will of God prevails.” Both the Union and the Confederacy claimed God was on their side, but that couldn’t be true. As Lincoln meditates on how God acts in history, he writes that “it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.”

These glimpses of Lincoln’s thinking offer us a fresh way to view him. White’s commentary is excellent, and anyone interested in Lincoln will want to read this book.

In a must-read book for anyone interested in Abraham Lincoln, a scholar analyzes the president’s most personal notes to himself.
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Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the brilliant inventor of the telephone. The “speaking telegraph” was a game changer for the mid-19th century and indelibly altered the way humans communicate. Yet there was a darker side to Bell, obscured by the glow of his genius. In The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness, Katie Booth vigorously revises the historical record.

Booth’s research journey is also personal. The book opens as her grandmother is dying, isolated and ignored by hospital staff because she is deaf. Booth seethes with outrage at the doctors’ indifference to her grandmother’s needs and comes to blame Bell for shaping such discriminatory behavior toward deaf people.

Bell’s wife and mother were deaf, though not congenitally. They inspired what Booth calls his “quest to end deafness,” an honest intention that would go badly awry. Determined to bring deaf people into the speaking and hearing world, Bell followed his father’s techniques as an elocutionist. He met his future wife, Mabel, when she was a child, and as her teacher, he insisted she learn to speak. The schools Bell began and the teachers he trained were opposed to the use of sign language and instead supported “oralism,” the use of speech alone, even for children who were born deaf and had never heard a word. Students caught using sign language got their hands slapped.

Bolstered by the power of his fame as an inventor, Bell was heralded as a champion of people who were deaf. But those who believed in the power of sign language, as a way to communicate and as a tool to bring the Deaf community together, opposed his methods. Bell denied the existence of a Deaf culture and saw deafness as a defect that needed to be erased, by speech or, later, by eugenics.

Booth reveals a rich history of heights and depths in The Invention of Miracles, including the questionable patent process that secured Bell’s name in history, the evolution and empowerment of the Deaf community, and Bell’s endearing marriage, which survived his own misguided intentions.

Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the brilliant inventor of the telephone, yet there was a darker side to him, obscured by the glow of his genius.

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