Jennet Conant’s latest book, Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, is a magisterial biography of one of the 20th century’s most influential men: her own grandfather. James B. Conant, a brilliant scientist, had a career that was so varied and vital to our country that this book could easily have been called “Man of Many Hours.”

To say that James realized an impressive array of achievements is to damn him with faint praise. An outstanding research chemist at Harvard, he was crucial to understanding the structure of chlorophyll. In recognition of his vision and talent, he was selected as the president of Harvard soon after turning 40. What would have been the capstone achievement for most people turned out to be a steppingstone for James.

Appointed by Eisenhower as the high commissioner to Germany, he ushered West Germany into NATO. Later, after sputnik, he became a powerful voice for strengthening the public school system. But James is perhaps most famous for his work on the Manhattan Project. It is likely that the Project would have failed without his steady and wise presence, but his most famous achievement haunted him. Postwar, James was horrified by the threat of nuclear proliferation, and he argued strongly against developing the hydrogen bomb. The politics of the time—McCarthyism, Stalin’s aggression, Truman’s inexperience—doomed his ideas, but one wonders what the world would be like now if James had been heeded.

Jennet Conant has written about her grandfather before, in her earlier books 109 East Palace and Tuxedo Park. But while there is genuine pride in her grandfather, she never allows it to cloud her judgment. Jennet can be quite critical of her subject, especially when detailing the devastating impact his prolonged absences had upon his wife and sons. In other words, she brings to her task the same objectivity, thoroughness and interest that her grandfather brought to his. Insightful and rich in detail, this book is a fitting tribute to a remarkable man.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, October 2017

Move over, Hamilton! Might there be room for a Broadway musical about Ulysses S. Grant? There’s certainly a vast treasure-trove of material in Grant, a stupendous new biography by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow, whose book Alexander Hamilton inspired the hit musical.

Grant is a larger-than-life figure, and Chernow has no difficulty crafting a fascinating and immensely readable (and immense) book. The author is aided by the existence of 32 volumes (comprised of 50,000 documents) of Grant’s papers, as well as Grant’s own memoirs, which he wrote while dying of throat cancer, spurred by a determination to provide for his wife, Julia.

Grant’s life was marked by sometimes bitter failures and hard-won accomplishments. By sheer grit, he managed to succeed in his courageous final endeavor, penning what Chernow calls “the foremost military memoir in the English language.”

Chernow’s biography is replete with fascinating details and insightful political analysis, a combination that brings Grant and his time to life. Grant played a key role in post-Civil War politics, battling Andrew Johnson in order to uphold the terms of surrender he’d negotiated with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. Later, Grant came to believe Lee harbored a fantasy that his “defeated cause would rise anew.” (Lee, Chernow tells us, testified in Congress against suffrage for former slaves. As for Johnson, Chernow says, “No American president has ever held such openly racist views.”) Grant sought instead to preserve the Union and safeguard the rights of those freed from slavery. He supported federal funds for African-American education and counted Frederick Douglass as an ally in the effort to stop the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan.

While Chernow’s biography may be hefty, it is also uncommonly compelling and timely. Perhaps a Broadway adaptation wouldn’t be such a bad idea. . . . In the meantime, put Grant on your must-read list.

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

Everybody likes Mikhail Gorbachev, right? All the former Soviet leader did was attempt to bring democracy to an authoritarian system, work for reform and seek to end the Cold War with a bold proposal to abolish nuclear weapons. But wait, Gorbachev isn’t universally loved? He was hounded from office, and today Russians regard him as the man who gave away their country? How can this be?

William Taubman takes on the complicated life of, as he puts it, “the Soviet system’s gravedigger” in Gorbachev: His Life and Times, a substantial volume that befits a substantial man, who remains a presence on the world scene at 86. With a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Nikita Khrushchev to his credit, Taubman is well-positioned to undertake the challenge, and he does so in a clear, direct style. Gorbachev’s cooperation no doubt helped, but cooperation doesn’t necessarily produce sympathy in this evenhanded work.

Particularly compelling is Gorbachev’s rise from peasant beginnings to the top of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. His ascent is in some ways conventional and in other ways not, but what’s important is what he did once he reached the summit. Was it his intent all along to replace autocracy with democracy, or was it a gradual shift? Did he really mean to let Eastern Europe go so suddenly, or did events simply overtake him?

The narrative is enhanced by a vivid cast of characters, including Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, and ally-turned-rival Boris Yeltsin, not to mention jousting foes such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Rarely seen photos made available by the Gorbachev Foundation add to the experience of reading this important book.

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

They’re the greatest songwriters you've probably never heard of, but the songs that Boudleaux and Felice Bryant wrote might be part of the soundtrack of your life: “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bye, Bye, Love,” “Wake Up, Little Susie” and “Devoted to You,” all made famous by the Everly Brothers in the late 1950s. Fans of the University of Tennessee also sing one of the Bryants’ songs—“Rocky Top”—many times every game day, and the rousing tune is now the Tennessee state song. Just a glimpse at the list of singers who have recorded the Bryants’ songs reveals a gathering of the royalty of country, pop and rock music: Kitty Wells, Eddy Arnold, George Jones, Ricky Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Nazareth, Simon and Garfunkel, and Donnie Osmond, among many others.

In the lovingly crafted All I Have to Do Is Dream: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story, Lee Wilson (daughter-in-law of her subjects) offers a tender and passionate portrait of the Bryants, who were among Nashville’s first professional songwriters. Drawing on interviews, anecdotes and archives, Wilson provides both a fan’s appreciation and what appears to be the first biography of the couple. She traces the lives of Boudleaux and Felice from childhood and youth to their first meeting in a hotel in Milwaukee, their elopement, their early struggles as songwriters and their eventual success and rise to the top as two of Nashville’s most respected and sought-after songwriters.

Born in Georgia to a musical family, Boudleaux (named for a French soldier who saved his father's life in World War I) got a violin for his fifth birthday and by the time he graduated from high school he was playing with the string band Uncle Ned and His Texas Wranglers, and then with Hank Penny and His Radio Cowboys, and on the WSB Barn Dance. Felice was a native of Milwaukee and a natural actor; as a young child she “single-handedly re-enacted for neighborhood kids the musicals she saw, taking all the parts and singing them herself.” She loved music and words—she read and re-read The Best Loved Poems of the American People—and Wilson points out that Felice’s love of poetry gave her a familiarity with melody and rhythm that she brought to her writing. After eloping, the couple moved to Moultrie, Georgia, where they parked their trailer on Boudleaux’s parents’ farm and eventually started writing songs together. As Wilson points out: “Felice could compose lyrics and could come up with melodies, but she couldn’t write them down. Boudleaux could preserve Felice’s melodies on paper as well as compose his own, and he found that her ideas sparked his own creativity.”

Little Jimmy Dickens took the Bryants’ song, “Country Boy,” and turned into a hit, and the Bryants never looked back. They worked very early with Nashville’s premier A&R man, Fred Rose (who wrote songs for Hank Williams, among others), who was at MGM at the time and who became their publisher. They eventually moved to Nashville and parked their trailer in Hillbilly Heaven—the Rainbow Trailer Court—whose previous residents included country singers Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold and Cowboy Copas, among others. They lived just down the road from Chet Atkins, who said that the “Bryants changed the direction of music all over the world through their songs for the Everly Brothers.” In those early days, Boudleaux kept songs written on scraps of paper in his pockets; when he lost a coat whose pockets were filed with such scraps, Atkins suggested that the couple use accounting ledgers in which to write songs, and that became their method.

Among the best features of the book are the anecdotes from the couple that Wilson shares in sidebars. For example, Boudleaux on what makes a successful song: “I don’t know what makes a successful song. To carry that further, I would also say that nobody else knows. . . . The answer is somewhere beyond our ken, residing in that which is just outside reach of our normal senses, reposing in a benevolent providence, a bubble of luck, a good karma, or—well, your guess is as good as mine or anybody else’s.”

Boudleaux also reflected on making songwriting a career (and the hundreds of aspiring songwriters flocking to Nashville daily would do well to pay attention): “Unless you feel driven to compose and have all the instincts of a riverboat gambler, you should never seek songwriting as a profession. Unless you know in your heart that you’re great, feel in your bones that you’re lucky, and think in your soul that God just might let you get away with it, pick something more certain than composing, like chasing the white whale or eradicating the common housefly. We didn’t have the benefit of such sage advice. Now it’s too late to back up. We made it. Sometimes it pays to be ignorant.”

Wilson’s lavishly illustrated and fondly admiring biography provides a much-needed look at the lives and craft of two songwriters whose work should be even better known. 

Vladimir Putin is driven, outspoken and controversial. He is also a very mysterious man. While his motives may never be totally clear, Russia expert and author Richard Lourie (Sakharov: A Biography) provides some intriguing insight into what makes Putin tick in his new book, Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash, which raises the thought-provoking theory that Putin’s notorious and alarming behavior is actually setting himself—and Russia—up for an inevitable fall.

Delving into Putin’s backstory and how he came to his current position as president of Russia, Lourie explores Putin’s difficult childhood in Leningrad and the significance of his family connection to that era’s ruler, Joseph Stalin—Putin’s grandfather was his cook. Joining the KGB in 1975, Putin worked for counterintelligence, catching the eye of his colleagues in foreign intelligence, which led to “foreign postings, action on the front line and access to goods,” which helped fuel Putin’s desire for authority. Although many aspects of Putin’s role in the KGB remain murky, Lourie’s comprehensive research provides enlightening details of Putin’s time with the KGB, as well as an informative timeline of the fall of communism in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and ’90s, chronicling his rise to power.

While Lourie admits that Putin did restore stability and a degree of self-respect to Russia, he also references Putin’s insecurity, pointing to his 2016 decision to create a National Guard as a “sign of a person feeling vulnerable, not one brimming with confidence.” He also covers other moves and missteps, including Putin’s seizure of the media, Arctic exploitations, suppression of dissent and invasions. However, Lourie theorizes that it will actually be his “failure to diversify the economy away from its dependence on gas and oil” that will seal both his own fate and that of Russia.

A timely history lesson, Putin is a must-read for anyone interested in Russia and in understanding how current events can provide a glimpse into the future.

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

Lady Anne Barnard’s early life unfolded like a Jane Austen novel. Fatherless at 18 and a titled Scot with no fortune, Lady Anne was meant to marry early to bring some money into her family. But as chronicled by Stephen Taylor in Defiance, Lady Anne did no such thing, instead enjoying many flirtations and friendships and writing the ballad “Auld Robin Grey,” a giant hit of its day. On her own, Lady Anne managed to become a woman of property in London, as well as the confidant of the most powerful men of the age, including the Prince of Wales.

Drawing on Lady Anne’s own memoirs and family letters, Taylor follows Lady Anne from early childhood on, and at 400 pages, Defiance occasionally feels long. But the story finds its heart in Lady Anne’s late marriage: At 42, after turning down at least 20 other suitors, she married Andrew Barnard, 12 years her junior. Andrew was posted to Cape Town, South Africa, and she went with him. “Their happiness flourished in this bizarre, magnificent space because it offered freedom of a kind unavailable at home,” Taylor writes, recounting the couple’s long journey to the South African interior, Lady Anne’s diplomatic skills hosting British and Dutch colonists and native Africans, and her naturalist work collecting plants and animals.

On a later solo trip to South Africa, Andrew had a liaison with an African slave, fathering a child, Christina. After Andrew’s death, Lady Anne learned about Christina and brought the girl to London, raising her in her Berkeley Square mansion. Christina served as Anne’s amanuensis as Anne wrote her memoirs, and she later married a Wiltshire landowner and had seven children.

In Defiance, Lady Anne’s engaging voice comes through clearly, along with her unconventionality, her talents and her compassion.

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

New York Times Magazine correspondent Suzy Hansen begins her book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, with her investigation into a lethal coal-mine fire in Soma, Turkey. She is shocked to learn of America’s role in the creation of an ineffectual union that failed to protect its members. Hansen had always assumed that American policies were essentially benign; we seek to “modernize” less developed countries and to democratize them—certainly not to cause harm.

Hansen argues that Americans are dangerously innocent about American interventions in other countries. When confronted with intractable hostilities abroad, we don’t realize these hostilities are frequently the result of U.S. policies that have caused great harm—a history that is rarely taught in American schools.

Raised in a conservative New Jersey town, Hansen, too, was “an innocent abroad” when she arrived in Turkey in 2007 on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs. Despite a Harvard education, Hansen had no understanding of how America’s fear of communism led it to support strongman dictatorships, destroy local economies and even encourage and support fundamentalist Islamist militants. Paradoxically, the foreign country she ends up taking notes on is her own.

Painfully honest, this book can be a difficult read, but Hansen leaves us room to hope that, while our innocence has harmed the world, self-knowledge and empathy can help heal it.

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

Sibling rivalries are as old as . . . well, you know. But if you like them with some extra snap, crackle and pop, your best bet is Howard Markel’s story of brothers John and Will Kellogg, who put Battle Creek, Michigan, on the map in the first half of the 20th century. In The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek, Markel tells their intertwined stories with a great deal of skill and flair, opening a window into both American societal history and the complications of familial relationships.

Born to a pioneer family in rural Michigan, the brothers ascended to the top of their chosen professions—medicine for John, business for Will. But with contrasting personalities and an eight-year age difference, they were at odds almost from the beginning—and certainly to the end. It makes for a sad family history, but entertaining reading.

John, interested in medicine from an early age, founded the famed Battle Creek Sanitarium, known as “The San,” which thousands of people flocked to, seeking relief from various ailments. Will, the younger of the two, bounced around a bit before finding his niche running the sanitarium—and, fatefully, helping John develop health foods, including a ready-to-eat cold cereal that would replace the hot mush most families consumed in those days. That’s where the fissure turned into a chasm, as Will went out on his own to found the Kellogg Company, today a multinational food behemoth. The sanitarium started going downhill during the Great Depression and eventually was converted into a federal center.

Markel, an NPR contributor and a physician himself, doesn’t take sides as he leads us through the family thicket, and there’s plenty of blame to go around, anyway.

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

The titular engineer of Erica Wagner’s well-researched biography Chief Engineer is Washington Roebling, who saw the iconic Brooklyn Bridge through its construction. Overshadowed by his brilliant but abusive father, Washington came into his own after his father, John Roebling, died early in the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction. John Roebling was larger than life: a German immigrant who founded two towns, invented wire rope, masterminded the first American suspension bridges and made a fortune, he also beat his wife and children and superstitiously feared doctors.

Although his father’s life story intrudes on Washington’s, Washington still makes for a compelling subject. As a young man, he served in the Union Army during the Civil War, building bridges, tending the wounded and mapping battle sites from a hot-air balloon. The letters he wrote during this time give a vivid sense of the war’s horrors. Washington was an engaging writer in his own right, and Wagner quotes extensively from his letters and memoir.

The heart of Chief Engineer concerns Washington’s single-minded, intense work on the Brooklyn Bridge, which almost killed him: He labored underground in the bridge’s caissons, where compressed air was pumped in, which led to severe decompression sickness. Washington’s wife, Emily, filled in for her bedridden husband, serving almost as a chief engineer herself. Emily deserves her own biography, not only for her engineering work, but for her determination to study law, which she did through New York University’s women’s course. In her graduation lecture, she spoke on women’s rights.

Wagner quotes from a 1921 newspaper profile that described Washington as “a little old soldier of 84 . . . who has outlived his generation.” Washington, Wagner writes, was “a man born in the 1830s, who had fought in the Civil War, whose father had come to America in a sailing ship and who had lived to see the first airplane take flight—an airplane held together with the wire his company had made.” In Chief Engineer, Wagner has written a quintessentially American biography.

What's it like to spend hours with a murderous, monstrous world leader? Can such a person be capable of kindness?

In the summer of 2006, a group of 12 American soldiers deployed to Iraq were astounded to find themselves in a strange crosshair of history: They were assigned to guard fallen leader Saddam Hussein throughout his trial during the months leading to his execution on December 30. Calling themselves the "Super Twelve," and ranging in age from 20 to mid-30s, the men weren't allowed to take notes or tell their families about their mission.

Author Will Bardenwerper, a former Airborne Ranger in Iraq and Presidential Management Fellow at the Pentagon, listened to Army interviews with these 12 men and conducted hours of his own questioning of the group as well as others. The Prisoner in His Palace offers a behind-the-scenes look at history that's nearly impossible to put down. Interspersing tales from Saddam's past with scenes of his final days, Bardenwerper paints an intimate portrait of a man sometimes called "Vic," for "Very Important Criminal."

Hussein's atrocities are numerous and well documented. Desperately poor as a child and terribly abused by his stepfather, the CIA has described him as a "malignant narcissist" with certain "psychopathic attributes." He had his own sons-in-law assassinated and was responsible for the ruthless killing of many.

Interestingly, this bellowing showman who was on trial for his life immediately quieted down once out of the courtroom, often sharing expensive cigars with the Super Twelve while asking for stories of their families. An FBI agent described Hussein as "a genius in an interpersonal setting," and indeed, he proved to be an excellent listener.

Certainly a man of contradictions, this murderer was a germophobe, a skilled chess player and a neatnik who saved crumbs to feed the birds. Hussein even wrote a poem for his medic's wife, and urged the youngest of the Super Twelve to leave Iraq and go to college. In fact, he offered to pay for the soldier's college if he ever gained access to his bank account.

As he was being led away to his execution, Hussein thanked the 12 Americans guarding him, adding that "they'd become 'more family to him' than any Iraqis had been." The Prisoner in His Palace offers a mesmerizing glimpse into the final moments of a brutal tyrant's life.