If you’re sitting down with the audaciously titled Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eileen McNamara, you may find yourself exhausted by vicariously participating in the life of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the woman who most famously founded the Special Olympics but also served as cheerleader-in-chief for the Kennedy political dynasty.

Shriver, the fifth of nine children born to Joseph Kennedy Sr. and his wife, Rose, never stopped working for the causes she believed in. The book’s full title serves as a pointed reminder that had she been a man, Shriver would have been fully encouraged to ascend to the political heights achieved by her male family members, such as her brother, John F. Kennedy.

The Kennedys have fiercely controlled their family’s reputation, making honest biographies a challenge. But following Shriver’s death at 88 in 2009, members of the Shriver family provided McNamara with access to 33 boxes of private papers that open a window into a remarkable life, warts and all. Most amusing among the papers are Shriver’s notes to herself, including tips on how to make small talk at the many parties she attended.

But access isn’t everything, and McNamara wields a deft touch as she recounts Shriver’s role in the Special Olympics and extending rights for the developmentally disabled, which was surely influenced by the tragic story of her older sister Rosemary, who was born with intellectual disabilities and sent out of public view after a botched lobotomy. Audaciously titled or not, Eunice leaves no doubt that its subject truly changed the world.

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

As conjoined twins, Chang and Eng Bunker could easily have chosen to live as recluses, away from the public’s gawking stares. But instead, they traveled the world as entertainers. In Inseparable, Chinese-American professor Yunte Huang (Charlie Chan) faithfully chronicles their incredible story.

Born in Siam in 1811, Chang and Eng Bunker were the namesakes for the term “Siamese twins.” In their late teens, they were discovered by an enterprising Scotsman who convinced them to join him on an exhibition tour of Europe and America. The 19th century was a time when “curious freaks” were put on display. As noted by Huang, these carnival acts were “indubitably the birthplace of American mass entertainment.”

But the twins became adept and engaging performers. Financially savvy and frugal, they were able to save their earnings and settle in North Carolina, where they married two sisters and fathered a total of 21 children. This specific factor has long been a curiosity, and Huang surmises the twins’ lovemaking logistics and technique, referencing previous biographies, medical commentary and even the autopsy notes in which the lead doctor asked the widows “the most sensitive question about their sex life.”

Throughout the book, Huang provides historical perspective by noting other global events of the time, such as a slave uprising in New Orleans the year the twins were born and the political upheaval in 1830s America when the twins were taking their show on the road. Many of the subjects are timely today, such as the racial injustices the twins faced as Asian immigrants, often doubly worse for them due to their conjoined state.

As Huang points out, “[T]o them, being human meant being more than one, inseparable from the other—never alone in life, death, happiness, pain, procreation, or even answering the call of nature.” Inseparable is an engaging look at the lives of two singular people.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Yunte Huang about Inseparable.

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

Living long and reasonably well is at least some sort of revenge. But the adage that best sums up the life of Lettice Knollys is that double-edged blessing: “May you live in interesting times.”

Lettice Knollys, subject of Nicola Tallis’ biography Elizabeth’s Rival, lived to age 91—in effect, the entire Elizabethan age, as well as the first generation of Stuarts—and in her time was as famous and notorious as Queen Elizabeth herself. But her life has been nearly obscured since. Even this exhaustive profile, subtitled “The Tumultuous Life of the Countess of Leicester: The Romance and Conspiracy That Threatened Queen Elizabeth’s Court,” slides away from her name. Nevertheless, the “romance and conspiracy” were of crucial interest in the evolution of the Tudor dynasty.

Blood and romance were always in the mix for Lettice Knollys. Lettice was the daughter of Katherine Carey, the daughter of “the other Boleyn girl,” Mary. It was widely believed, if never acknowledged, that Katherine was the product of Mary’s affair with King Henry VIII, making Lettice not merely Elizabeth’s cousin but likely her niece, a theory bolstered by the women’s strong resemblance to each other.

As a young woman, Lettice was in the queen’s favor. Her first husband, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, led a royal army into Ireland not once but twice—expensively, ineffectually and eventually fateful, as he died of dysentery there. Conquering Ireland is just one of the instincts their son Robert Devereaux inherited.

Walter’s campaigns left Lettice in grave debt, but after his death, Lettice secretly married Queen Elizabeth’s longtime favorite suitor, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and all hell’s fury erupted. Elizabeth never forgave Lettice. After Dudley’s death, Elizabeth moved onto another favorite: Robert Devereaux, Lettice’s son. His relationship with the queen and his Irish war fared even worse that his father’s and stepfather’s similar designs. And it was he, in his spoiled self-confidence, who launched an insurrection that would doom himself and his second stepfather (Lettice’s third husband) to execution.

It was the queen mother of all soap operas, and the book is littered with expensive gifts, castles, gems, balls and pageants as well as armadas and invasions, to the extent that Lettice is almost obscured once again. Tudor newbies may be overwhelmed, but this tale of a vengeful monarch and her necessarily wily relative is a pleasure.

“Dangerous” is probably not the first adjective that comes to mind when perusing Susan Ronald’s minutely detailed biography of Florence Gould, A Dangerous Woman. “Determined” and “devious” would be more apt descriptors, since this professional enchantress pursued her life of pleasures less by brute force than by working harder and smarter than anyone who stood in her way.

Born in San Francisco to French-immigrant parents, Florence, her sister and her mother decamped to Paris just months after the catastrophic earthquake of 1906 laid waste to the city by the bay. Except for occasional returns to the U.S., principally for business and philanthropy, Florence remained a Parisian. Her mother’s preferred child, Florence was blessed by remarkable beauty and animated by an iron determination to marry well. This she did via her marriage in 1923 to multimillionaire Frank Gould, son of the eminent robber baron Jay Gould.

The marriage vaulted Florence into the upper layers of Parisian society and insulated her from the discomforts the general population of Paris suffered as a consequence of the Great War, the Depression and the German occupation of the city during World War II. Among the many notables who enjoyed Florence’s friendship and largesse were Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Estée Lauder, Maurice Chevalier, Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel. Although Florence was clearly a Nazi collaborator and trader in stolen art, she remained essentially untouched after the war and ended her life as an honored contributor to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The one element missing here is the sound of Florence’s own voice. That’s because her estate denied the author access to its archives, including Florence’s letters. So while we’re told virtually everything she did and everyone she slept with (a long list), we know precious little of how she felt as she moved full sail through her momentous life.

One of the French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s favorite models was Suzanne Valadon, a working-class teen raised in the Montmartre district of Paris. In his paintings, she’s always softly pretty, vibrant, approachable. Aside from her physical appeal, Valadon was herself a talented artist. Her first serious self-portrait couldn’t have been more different from Renoir’s depiction: She portrayed herself as spiky and tough, with a skeptical look and sharp nose.

That might give you some hint as to why you know Renoir’s work but perhaps have never heard of Valadon. She became an admired professional painter, but she was never widely popular. She was too unsparing, too “unfeminine.” The title of Catherine Hewitt’s biography of Valadon, Renoir’s Dancer, helps place her in the artistic universe, but the book is very much about the Valadon of the self-portraits.

Born in 1865, the incorrigible Valadon was the illegitimate daughter of a linen maid. She became a circus acrobat, then a successful model—and the probable lover of Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. The latter recognized her talent and helped her connect with Edgar Degas, who became her tireless mentor.

She also had an illegitimate child, Maurice Utrillo, an emotionally troubled, alcoholic artist whose charming cityscapes made them both rich. Valadon eventually married one of her son’s friends, who was 20 years younger than her, and the trio lived a tumultuous life together.

You can’t go wrong with material like that, and Hewitt excels at re­creating the atmosphere of Montmartre as it evolved from bohemian enclave to tourist nightspot. The reader tags along with Valadon to heady establishments like Le Chat Noir and the Lapin Agile, where she stuns the men with her verve and intelligence. Hewitt introduces us to a frank, generous woman and bold artist who painted more nudes than babies. She ultimately overcame the prejudices: When she was 71, the French nation bought several of her works, and her paintings now hang in museums around the world.

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

Much has been written about Thomas Jefferson, his family and his illegitimate daughter, Harriet Hemings. But historian Catherine Kerrison eloquently manages to shed new light on the Founding Father and his relationships with three of his very different children in her new book, Jefferson’s Daughters.

Jefferson married a young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, in 1772, and eventually had six children with her, although only two would reach adulthood—Martha and Maria. But these girls had half-siblings mothered by Sally Hemings, a slave who was their lady’s maid and companion.

Each daughter took a different path. Jefferson brought Martha, the apple of his eye, along with him while serving as ambassador in Paris, where she thrived and received a top-notch education. Maria was a beautiful and feisty young woman who strove to break away from her father’s control, exhibiting an “emotional maturity that has been entirely overlooked” by scholars. And although she was born into slavery, Harriet was able to leave Monticello and escape slavery at the age of 21, passing as a white woman and obtaining the “privileges of white womanhood,” bearing and raising her children in freedom. However, this meant giving up her family name and being separated from her mother and younger brothers, who remained in slavery.

Jefferson’s character has been the subject of much scrutiny, particularly after DNA testing documented a connection between Sally’s youngest child, Eston, and the Jefferson male line in 1998. Although Jefferson promoted individual liberty, he contradicted this endorsement by owning slaves. Kerrison writes about this contradiction with thoroughness and candor, piecing together massive amounts of research, including letters, journal entries, financial accounts and commentary from family descendants. In meticulous detail, her knowledgeable yet conversational style makes Jefferson’s Daughters a thought-provoking nonfiction narrative that reads like a novel.

If something called the American dream is still alive, it’s personified by the protagonist of the captivating The Monk of Mokha, Dave Eggers’ latest work of narrative nonfiction. In it, Eggers marshals the storytelling talent he displayed in Zeitoun, his 2009 account of a Syrian-American family devastated by Hurricane Katrina and inane bureaucracy, to explore the story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young Yemeni American who must overcome civil war, terrorism and his own inexperience and self-doubt to pursue his singular vision of entrepreneurial success in the specialty coffee business.

In 2013, while employed as a doorman at a posh apartment building in San Francisco, 25-year-old Alkhanshali, who’d already demonstrated his superior salesman skills by dealing everything from Banana Republic clothing to Hondas, hatched a plan to revive the coffee business in his ancestral homeland. Eggers explains that although Ethiopia lays claim to the discovery of the coffee fruit, the first beans were brewed in Yemen, giving birth to the coffee known as “arabica.”

Alkhanshali’s audacious business model involved the promotion of the direct trading of rare coffee varietals to premium roasters. Ignoring a State Department travel warning, he left for Yemen amid U.S. drone strikes, the attacks of Houthi rebels and the constant threat of terrorism from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

In the final third of The Monk of Mokha, Eggers, who has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, describes Alkhanshali’s harrowing journey back to America, carrying suitcases packed with coffee beans whose quality he hopes will secure both his business’s future and the prosperity of his farmer clients. It’s a nail-biting account, with each checkpoint and interrogation posing a new peril.

Propelled by its engaging main character and his improbable determination, The Monk of Mokha, for all its foreign elements, is at its heart a satisfying, old-fashioned American success story.

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

Max Boot’s The Road Not Taken is a page-turning story of a how a now largely forgotten figure could have turned the tide of the Vietnam War if someone in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had just listened to him.

Drawing deeply on previously unavailable archival materials, Boot deftly chronicles the life and career of Edward Lansdale, the CIA operative and Air Force officer who allegedly was the model for Alden Pyle in The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Tracing Lansdale’s sheltered childhood and youth, Boot portrays a young man fascinated by the perceived romance of Southeast Asia. Later, in his short-lived career in advertising, Lansdale developed his trademark knack for honesty, insolence and an ability to see others as equals—qualities that would lay the foundation of his successful covert work in the Philippines and Vietnam.

During the United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Lansdale, working as a CIA operative, argued that the U.S. could operate most effectively not by increasing firepower but by making Saigon’s government more “accountable, legitimate, and popular to the people it aspired to serve.” Boot sums up Lansdale’s policy of friendly persuasion to win “hearts and minds” with three L’s—Look: understand how the foreign society works and don’t impose outside ideas that won’t translate to the society; Like: become a sympathetic friend to the leaders of the society; Listen: hear out the leaders’ ideas.

Boot’s mesmerizing, complex biography and cultural history not only recovers Lansdale and his foreign policy strategies but also illustrates the ways that those strategies might be effective in dealing with various military conflicts today.

Maybe you never expected to read biographical analyses of Shirley Temple and Bill Gates in the same book, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. It certainly did to Ann Hulbert, author of Off the Charts.

Hulbert, who previously covered a century of child-rearing advice in Raising America, turns her sights to the intriguing phenomenon of early genius. In Off the Charts, she peers into the formative years of 15 individuals, combining lively biographical sketches with serious analysis of the factors that contributed to their ascendancy in the public eye. Most of these prodigies we know, while some—such as precocious novelist Barbara Newhall Follett—have been virtually lost to history, but all offer important lessons.

Not surprisingly, those lessons tend to circle back to the prodigies’ parents—who run the gamut from free-range advocate to prison warden without the charm—and in many ways the book is as much about the parents as it is about their progenies. Wisely, Hulbert downplays judging the children’s genius and lets the facts—and often the prodigies—speak for themselves.

Rest assured, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to rearing a genius. And even the most seemingly well-adjusted prodigies don’t exactly breeze through adolescence. The “hidden lessons” are there in plain sight, but many of them are impossible to avoid.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Ann Hulbert about Off the Charts.

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

Edward Garnett, a reader with exquisite taste, a perceptive critic and a writer, played a crucial role in the literary history of Britain between 1887 and 1937. His unique talent for recognizing and promoting future noteworthy authors is legendary, and he became many writers’ devoted friend and editor. Those authors include Joseph Conrad, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett and more. E. M. Forster noted: "[Garnett] has done more than any living writer to discover and encourage the genius of other writers, and he has done it all without any desire for personal prestige."

Helen Smith's absorbing An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett captures Garnett’s extraordinary life and times. Smith’s extensive research includes fascinating excerpts of letters and recollections of Garnett’s friends.

Garnett insisted he was an "outsider," by which he meant "outside all coteries and collections of people," as a reader and critic. But he was well connected in the literary world. His father was Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, and Garnett’s wife, Constance, was well known for her groundbreaking translations of Russian classics into English. She and Garnett led quite interesting and unorthodox lives, which Smith discusses in detail.

As an author himself, Garnett was often disappointed. His novels, poems and plays were not successful, although his reviews, essays and short author biographies were generally well received. The discovery of a writer was always the greatest pleasure of Garnett's professional life.

This enlightening and intimate biography looks behind the scenes to show how much time and effort went into the making and maintenance of promising , sometimes struggling, writers who became prominent authors.

As a connoisseur of memoir, I thought I had read it all: stunningly dysfunctional families, toxic relationships, addictions. But I have never read a memoir as terrifying as Maude Julien’s The Only Girl in the World. Newly translated into English, this is the must-read memoir of the season for those who, like me, have read them all.

Today Julien is a French psychotherapist specializing in patients who are recovering from extreme psychological and behavioral control, such as cult victims. Julien had the misfortune of being born to a completely unhinged father who was able to disguise his insanity from the outside world. A high-ranking Freemason, he believed that his daughter would become a “supreme being” as long as she was raised under his control in complete isolation.

Julien’s father had previously adopted, raised and “trained” her mother, and he turned their remote château in the French countryside into a chamber of horrors. As a child, Julien was introduced to unthinkable trials designed to toughen her up: meditations on death in a rat-infested cellar, being forced to hold onto an electric fence. Written in a childlike first-person voice, this memoir brings to life Julien’s horrifying experiences and her subtle rebellions against her parents as she refuses to be broken. The reader, too, is trapped and riveted by her story. An epilogue, written from her adult perspective, explains Julien’s theory of the cultlike psychological and behavioral control she was subjected to, and how it continues to shape her dreams and fears. This is a truly fascinating and intense read, and highly recommended.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, December 2017

Step aside, James Bond. There’s a new sexy spy hero in town, and this one has the advantage of being real. His name is La Rochefoucauld, Robert de La Rochefoucauld, and his career as a résistant in Nazi-occupied France is the subject of Paul Kix’s The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando.

La Rochefoucauld, the carefree second son of one of France’s most distinguished families, was an unlikely hero. A bit of a ne’er-do-well, La Rochefoucauld was in no way the exemplary son that his beloved elder brother was. But La Rochefoucauld inherited the same sense of duty that had marked generations of his family, and at the age of 19, when France capitulated to Germany, he was determined to continue the fight against the Nazis.

After rigorous—and downright dangerous—training in England, La Rochefoucauld parachuted into France and began his spectacular career as a saboteur of Nazi operations. Captured, tortured and condemned to death by the Germans, La Rochefoucauld managed to escape from certain doom time and time again. If this were fiction, the plot would be fantastical; as a work of nonfiction, it is a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of the human spirit.

Kix’s sharp, well-paced writing is perfect for telling La Rochefoucauld’s story. But this is more than a gripping yarn of daring-do. La Rochefoucauld was a complex character, and Kix’s portrait is nuanced and moving. We are introduced to La Rochefoucauld when he is about to testify in the trial of an accused war criminal and collaborator—for the defense. Obviously, this is not your stereotypical resistance fighter, and Kix’s book poses the big questions: What is duty? What is courage? What is loyalty?

Like many veterans of his generation, La Rochefoucauld rarely spoke about his experiences to his family. We are fortunate to have Kix’s richly detailed book so we can remember the remarkable courage of an extraordinary man.

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