Though it may be best suited for initiates of Napoleona, The Invisible Emperor details the deceptively calm but ultimately catastrophic interlude in the 25-year military career of one of history’s most famous soldiers, Napoleon.

Historian Mark Braude has re-created a detailed description of the emperor’s 10-month exile from France to the island of Elba. Napoleon’s new dominion lay only six miles off the Tuscan coast and 30 miles from Napoleon’s native Corsica, but to his captors, it seemed isolated enough for security and near enough for scrutiny. At the time, Elba was a French territory, which allowed for some familiarity of language and custom for Napoleon, and his guards even cultivated some loyalty toward the stocky little soldier, who whether for comfort or clever camaraderie preferred worn-out and undecorated old military garb as he wandered about the countryside.

Napoleon’s primary jailor, Neil Campbell, was an injured British colonel assigned, rather ambiguously, to “accompany” Napoleon in his new estate, which was quite lavish for an abdicated general. Still titled “emperor,” albeit only of Elba, Napoleon threw parties, ordered extensive renovations for his wife and son when they joined him in exile (they never did), had ships, horses and carriages delivered, and picked out several residences with good views. A man who once controlled nearly the entire European continent between Russian and Great Britain could now truly say he was lord of all he surveyed—86 square miles.

But if Napoleon’s weakness was stubborn ambition, his strength was strategy. Within the year, with only a thousand or so soldiers, he marched to Paris without even a skirmish. The next few months, now known as “the Hundred Days,” culminated in the Battle of Waterloo and the deaths of nearly 50,00 combatants.

Braude’s narrow focus on this “invisible” interlude dangles bits of psychological suppositions not always entirely supported, but his view of a man still caught up in his own self-image—one which, it must be admitted, was shared by many others—is intriguing.

The 107th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has become an unlikely icon, a tiny-but-titanic 85-year-old whom popular culture has dubbed the “Notorious RBG.” She is showcased on everything from T-shirts to comedy sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” Lest this giant of jurisprudence lose her gravitas amid such fame, Jane Sherron De Hart does a daunting job of restoring Ginsburg’s impressive roots in Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. Hart’s biography is a studious walk through Ginsburg’s own keen recollections, arm and arm with explorations of many landmark cases, as well as their historical, social and political landscapes. Ginsburg’s colleagues on the Supreme Court, including the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and her fellow opera lover, the mercurial Antonin Scalia, are here as well, coloring the historical record and shedding up-close-and-personal light on the daily work of the court.

During her first year at Harvard Law School in 1956, Ginsburg was one of nine females in a class of 552, and the dean routinely asked her, “Why are you . . . taking a place that could have gone to a man?” Later, despite a stellar academic record, she had trouble landing a job. As she noted, “To be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot” was “a bit too much” in 1959.

By the time Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980, her record of advocating for equal rights for women and men had made her a hero among feminists. Nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, she has served since as a strident voice on both liberal and conservative courts. She is known for distilling legalese into language the press and public can understand, and her opinions and dissents have buttressed groundbreaking cases that involve such issues as abortion, immigration and gender equality.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” De Hart leaves no doubt that, in Justice Ginsburg’s hands, that arc will undoubtedly continue to bend.

Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you: Al Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion and not for murder. Fewer people know that the equally notorious Lucky Luciano was brought down in 1936 for compulsory prostitution. And almost nobody knows that the lawyer who brought Luciano to justice was a black female attorney working on Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey’s team. Eunice Hunton Carter, Invisible author Stephen L. Carter’s grandmother, was brilliant, ambitious and courageous. The fact that so few know her name has far more to do with bias than her ability or her determination.

Hunton Carter was the daughter of William and Addie Hunton, both prominent civil rights advocates. Addie Hunton in particular bore fearless witness to racial discrimination wherever she found it, whether in the heart of Klan territory or on the Western Front of World War I. Their daughter inherited their intellect, talent, drive and fortitude. With magnificent self-discipline, she achieved an impressive array of accomplishments, including earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Smith College, earning a J.D. from Fordham while doing social work full time, successfully negotiating the byzantine Harlem social pyramid and heading the largest division of the New York District Attorney’s Office. She was a tireless campaigner for the Republican party.

With this record, Hunton Carter should have been a judge or a prominent elected official. Instead, she was stymied, disadvantaged by her race and her gender, as well as by her brother’s communist leanings. A lesser woman would have thrown in the towel. Instead, Hunton Carter persisted, and she launched a new career as an international peace advocate.

In Invisible, Yale law professor and bestselling author Stephen L. Carter meticulously details his grandmother’s accomplishments and her disappointments. His admiration for this remarkable woman is infectious. Ultimately, the reader is forced to ask, “What if?” What if Hunton Carter had lived in a world where race and gender were irrelevant? What else would she have accomplished? And what would we have gained?

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, October 2018

Frederick Douglass was the most famous African-American of the 19th century, and his life story continues to inspire people around the world. An escaped slave who fled brutal treatment, he became a radical abolitionist, world-renowned author of three classic autobiographies, a noted journalist and editor, a public intellectual, one of the greatest orators of his time and a prominent government official. Yale historian David W. Blight brilliantly captures this legendary figure and his times in the magnificent Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, one of the best biographies of recent years. Blight’s portrait of Douglass is engrossing, moving, nuanced, frightening—and certainly thought-provoking.

Douglass is a complex figure, and he lived in a transformative time—from 1818 until 1895. His slave owner’s wife taught him to read before he escaped as a young man, and the only weapon he had against racism were words, both written and spoken. Extremely intelligent and ambitious, he thrilled and challenged audiences throughout the country and abroad with his oft-eloquent words. He frequently drew on his study of the Bible and was an Old Testament-like prophet himself, decrying the actions of not only slave owners but also other abolitionists with whom he disagreed. Douglass was both secular and religious, an advocate of self-reliance, deeply moralistic and yet pragmatic, a philosopher of democracy and natural rights.

Douglass’ turbulent life was full of pressures and controversy at each stage. He traveled widely and was frequently away from his dysfunctional family. His first wife, Anna, was largely illiterate, but she devoted her life to him and their five children during their 43 years of marriage. The need for money was a constant concern for Douglass, both to fund his newspapers and to help support his adult sons and son-in-law.

There are generous quotations from Douglass’ passionate speeches and writings woven throughout Blight’s biography. One of the many quotes that might best sum up Douglass’ lifelong work comes from a speech he gave in 1893: “Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.”

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

Not only is 2018 the 50th anniversary of the national premiere of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but—as two feature films and this full-length biography attest—it is also a moment when our culture is feeling particularly nostalgic for the Presbyterian minister in his cardigan sweater and sneakers. Maxwell King, former director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, prepared to write this biography of Fred Rogers by interviewing many people who knew Rogers best—from Rogers’ wife, Joanne, to the attendant who saw him every morning at the gym before his swim and Rogers’ many friends and co-workers.

King offers a comprehensive look at Rogers’ life in The Good Neighbor, from his privileged childhood in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, through his difficult college experiences (dropping out of Dartmouth College to pursue a music degree from Rollins College) to his early days in broadcasting and his meticulous work on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The show was unique in the landscape of children’s television, and Rogers’ fingerprints were on every element. The opening credits feature his hometown of Latrobe; the songs, which he wrote, reflect his deep commitment to social and emotional education; and the puppets embodied characters Rogers first imagined when he was a child.

Rogers emerges from this biography much like I imagine he did every morning from his swim: fresh and glowing with health, secure in his identity, calm and creatively focused. His passions for puppetry, childhood development, faith and music come through clearly. It is undeniably heartening to read about someone who cared so deeply for children and childhood.

Rogers’ ideas will make readers want to cheer. “There are many people in the world who want to make children into performing seals,” he once said. “And as long as children can perform well, those adults will applaud. But I would much rather help a child to be able to say who he or she is.” In a time when antagonism seems to divide us, Rogers’ messages of authenticity, respect and neighborliness continue to refresh.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Maxwell King about The Good Neighbor.

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

Betty Ford has become so closely tied with her eponymous addiction treatment center that it’s easy to forget that she was an extraordinary woman for many other reasons. Lisa McCubbin’s insightful portrait is admiring without being fawning, candid without a whiff of tabloid salaciousness.

Ford grew up in the Midwest as Betty Bloomer. An aspiring modern dancer, she was a beauty who had her eyes set on New York City and the studio of Martha Graham. But her adolescence was not idyllic: Betty’s father struggled to hold down a job, and he committed suicide when she was in her teens. Pressured by her mother to return home to Grand Rapids after a brief stint in Manhattan, Betty found herself in an unhappy—and likely abusive—marriage. Although divorces were rare in the 1940s, Betty put an end to what she called “the five-year misunderstanding.”

Mutual friends introduced Betty to Gerald “Jerry” Ford, a handsome local lawyer and former football star at the University of Michigan. Thus began a deep, lifelong romance that carried them through the exhilaration of raising a family and the sorrows of Kennedy’s assassination and Watergate.

When Jerry took the presidential oath of office in one of the darkest times in American history, Betty quickly became a beloved and admired figure. She was an outspoken and slyly funny woman who spoke openly of her battle with breast cancer, her views on parenting and, later, her own alcoholism and addiction to pills.

“While being First Lady was certainly not a position Betty Ford had ever aspired to, let alone imagined she might become, as it turned out, she was exactly what America needed,” McCubbin writes.

A journalist and co-author of several bestselling memoirs from Secret Service agents, McCubbin has deftly unearthed stories from those close to Betty Ford: her children, friends and former employees. The result is a vivid picture of a singularly influential woman.

Editor’s Note: This review has been edited to reflect that Gerald Ford did not play the quarterback position at the University of Michigan.

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

How do you tell the truth about a liar? You might discount everything the liar says, hoping that the truth is the exact opposite, but what if you are dealing with a skilled liar, one who knows that the most enduring lies have a dash of truth? How do you know if you are following a clue or falling down a rabbit hole?

This is the problem Javier Cercas set for himself in writing The Impostor. Cercas’ biography recounts his efforts to find the truth about the life of a man named Enric Marco. At one point, Marco was, in Cercas’ words, a “rock star” on the political stage of Spain. An anti-Franco freedom fighter during the Spanish Civil War and a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Flossenbürg, Marco rose to prominence as a union organizer, an education leader and a spokesman on behalf of the Spaniards sent to concentration camps by Franco.

All this crumbled, however, when a diligent historian discovered that Marco had never been deported and had never been in a concentration camp. But even after the disclosure of his deceptions, crucial questions remained: Was any part of his story true? And more critically, why ? Was Marco simply a narcissist whose entire sense of self demanded a more grandiose, heroic past than his actual biography could provide? Or, as Marco would have it, was he telling a “noble lie” in order to force Spaniards to face their history?

Cercas, an author of both fiction and nonfiction, including the acclaimed novel The Soldiers of Salamis, struggles to disentangle the strands of truth from Marco’s web of lies. But Marco is such an artful spinner of tales that Cercas can never be sure if he is being used by Marco, somehow rescuing Marco or exploiting Marco for his own gain. Trying to understand Marco is like looking for a phantom in a house of mirrors, but Cercas’ attempt is an important investigation of the role of the writer, the nature of truth and the battle between memory and history.

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

It’s all in good fun for an American to wake up early for Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding or to binge-watch “The Crown.” But it doesn’t seem like it’s very much fun to be a royal, especially on a hot summer’s day while wearing pantyhose. Before Fergie and Diana, Princess Margaret was the original unhappy princess. Margaret was Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister, the more glamorous and mischievous of the pair, whose love for Group Captain Peter Townsend was so cruelly thwarted.

In Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, award-winning journalist Craig Brown offers an acerbic biography of the star-crossed princess, one that is hilarious and bittersweet in turns. The chief biographical events of Margaret’s life—her doomed affair with Townsend, her unhappy marriage to Tony Snowden, her taste for bohemia and louche ’70s vacations on the Caribbean island of Mustique—are told with a postmodern flair. All of these stories have been told countless times already, and Brown rather brilliantly parses the different accounts for what they tell us about the teller. Brown considers all the angles of many apocryphal stories, especially the ribald ones.

All of this makes for a surprisingly substantial page-turner. Brown’s gift for satire is tempered with a genuinely humane portrayal of the emptiness of the princess’s life. Yes, she was a ruthless snob and an appalling dinner guest, but what else? If she became a caricature of herself in later life, it was—as Brown suggests—because her act mirrored the ridiculous behavior of her aristocratic groupies. Brown’s book is highly recommended for all American royal-watchers.

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

The grim story Eliza Griswold tells in Amity and Prosperity will seem familiar to readers who know the tale of New York’s Love Canal or have read Jonathan Harr’s prize-winning book A Civil Action. Griswold’s penetrating story explores the consequences of our nation’s ill-advised zeal for exploiting abundant natural resources and features rapacious corporations, inept—if not complicit—regulators and hapless victims in a small Pennsylvania town. Hapless, that is, until they hire an unlikely husband-and-wife legal team to help them seek justice.

Most of the action unfolds in and around the small town of Amity in southwestern Pennsylvania. Beginning in 2010, Griswold made 37 trips to the region to report the story, and she focuses her careful investigation on nurse Stacey Haney and her two children. The Haneys’ farmhouse is located downhill from a pond containing waste products from the process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which is used to extract natural gas from the underlying shale deposit.

The Haneys’ worsening financial and health problems eventually drive them to lawyers John and Kendra Smith, partners in a small, local law firm. Though the Smiths’ dogged efforts in the face of fierce resistance from gas producer Range Resources and other defendants yielded only mixed results for the Haneys and their neighbors, they were able to creatively invoke Pennsylvania’s Environmental Rights Amendment, successfully using it for the first time in an action against polluters.

Griswold’s sobering book is yet one more in a growing roster of works that detail the price some members of American society have been forced to pay to serve the convenience and comfort of their fellow citizens.

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

The cultural impact of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is undeniably huge. It’s difficult to think of a book that has been adapted, copied or parodied more than this 1818 novel. But if you ask anyone about its author, you are likely to receive a blank stare. Some might be able to identify her as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but little else is generally known about the young, almost girlish author who took up Lord Byron’s challenge to “write a ghost story” during literary history’s most consequential slumber party.

In Search of Mary Shelley is Fiona Sampson’s attempt to pin down this elusive woman. It’s not a conventional biography; instead of trying to reconstruct every stage of Shelley’s life, Sampson focuses on key episodes that provide essential clues to understanding the author. Each episode is like a tile in a mosaic, beautifully crafted and essential to Shelley’s complex portrait. Or, given Sampson’s status as one of England’s pre-eminent living poets, perhaps it is more apt to say that each chapter is like a stanza, resulting in a poetic exploration of one of the most influential novelists in English literature.

Wracked with guilt for causing her mother’s death, who died shortly after giving birth to her, rejected by her adored father upon his second marriage and passionately in love with the feckless and narcissistic Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley was practically doomed to sacrifice her happiness, reputation and talent in service to others. She suffered the deaths of all but one of her children, the humiliation inflicted by her faithless husband and many betrayals by supposed friends. Yet she somehow managed to write Frankenstein, a novel that continues to engage and challenge readers.

Sampson’s biography illuminates a woman whose genius enabled her not only to survive but also to triumph.

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

What is the lesson of the tin soldier? The mightiest may someday melt down, but never retreat.

Addiction is a catchall phrase these days, and Robin Williams, who killed himself in 2014, was certainly an alcoholic and addict off and on throughout his life, but his real cravings were emotional and psychological. His explosive comedic energy, which at times poured out as if he had plunged a needle into some secret vein of creativity, rushed him toward success just as it pushed him continually to get higher. He idolized many who admired him, but rarely felt secure in their estimation. Ultimately, his desire for laughter and critical affirmation—despite the peer and public acclaim for his work—escalated to a level that could never be fulfilled.

Dave Itzkoff’s exhaustive and exhausting biography of the inimitable comedian and actor, Robin, meticulously traces Williams’ life and career, his seemingly overnight success, marriages, infidelities and closest friendships, using extensive personal interviews of family and friends. Itzkoff largely allows Williams’ inner circle to supply the psychological analysis on the late creative genius.

The fable of the sweet-tempered Williams grows sadder, of course, and the details of his final years are excruciatingly sad: Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he was forced to witness the deaths of two of his closest friends, Christopher Reed and Richard Pryor, from physically debilitating diseases. After Williams’ suicide, the autopsy revealed that he was suffering from not only depression and heart disease but also Lewy body dementia, misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease, which in addition to increasing motor problems causes insomnia, paranoia, hallucinations and other symptoms that would have terrified even someone whose mind was not his universe, as Williams’ was.

Oh, and the soldier? Robin’s first childhood audience was his toy soldiers, who marched around the world—perhaps the universe—at his command. He never stopped loving them, and they were on guard during Williams’ final days.

Drawing on copious interviews and verbatim excerpts from the subjects’ social media, Åsne Seierstad offers us an over-the-shoulder look at a Somali family in Norway being torn apart by the religious fanaticism of the family’s two teenage daughters. Two Sisters is a harrowing read, as it lays bare the most barbaric aspects of humanity, taking us into the ISIS camps in Syria where young children are brutalized and made to participate in beheadings, stonings and crucifixions all in the name of pleasing God.

Ayan and Leila migrated with their family from Somalia to Norway in 2000. Initially, they acclimated well to their new surroundings. They adopted local customs and clothing, generally shone academically and took to social media with the expertise and enthusiasm of their native-born peers. Gradually, though, they embraced fundamentalist goals and values, calling for a caliphate in Syria and the imposition of sharia, demanding special accommodations from the school system, preaching death for nonbelievers, applauding the killing of Norwegian soldiers in Afghanistan and smugly asserting they were spiritually infallible. They encountered no significant pushback from the state.

To help finance their flight from Norway, Ayan, by then 19, ran up huge credit card bills and signed up for numerous phone services and then sold the phones. They fooled their parents, who didn’t know anything was amiss until they disappeared. Attempting to bring his daughters back, the father spent all he could borrow on trips to Syria and was nearly killed more than once. The heartbroken mother retreated to Somalia for a period with the two younger sons. Disgusted by his sisters’ cruel indifference, the oldest brother announced he had become an atheist.

This is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a society moves from simply tolerating antisocial religious beliefs to actually incubating and enabling them.