Jonathan Swift is often regarded as the finest satirist in the English language. He was a complex, fascinating and perplexing mixture of literary genius and contradictions in almost every aspect of his life. John Stubbs brilliantly captures all of this in his marvelously detailed and richly rewarding Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel. An intrepid researcher, Stubbs, the author of the award-winning John Donne: The Reformed Soul (described by Harold Bloom as “an exemplary literary biography”) mines many sources to give us a vivid portrait of his subject. Swift had “a tendency to love and hate things simultaneously, to grow attached to what he once despised and vice versa, and forget the opposite was ever true.”

If Swift had stopped writing in 1714 when he was 47 years old he would be remembered primarily as an excellent conservative writer and a defender of causes that often had reactionary sources and tangents. He had completed almost four years as an apologist and propagandist for the government in London and returned to his native Dublin, where he had been appointed Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a reward for his services to the Tory administration. His most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels, implicitly based on the vice and short-sightedness that he had observed in government, was still to come. When he was writing his masterpiece, he noted, “The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it.”

Swift’s “public career makes sense only when one understands the two desires he managed to harness together: an urge to dole out punishment and an irresistible delight in making mischief.” He was often disappointed, whether by his parents and relatives and the fact that he was born in Ireland and not in England, bothered by ill health, or that he failed to obtain a higher position in the Church. “At one and the same moment he was a stern authoritarian and a daring cultural bandit,” Stubbs writes.

Swift never married, but his best friend was Esther Johnson, whom he met at the home of statesman and man of letters Sir John Temple when Swift and Esther’s mother were on the staff there. When Esther was 20, he arranged for her and a companion, Mrs. Dingley, to move to Dublin, where they lived apart from him. The three of them often visited, always the three (sometimes including another person if Mrs. Dingley was not available) and Swift enjoyed Esther’s “turn of phrase, force of character, and intolerance of fools.” While he was away in London, he exchanged letters with Esther and she became the “Stella” of his Journal to Stella, in which he detailed his years in government. He did not believe in gender equality, but “he was keen to liberate women from being regarded as brittle idols or mere social accessories.”

Stubbs writes, “Almost every paragraph Swift wrote is multi-nuanced beyond definition or paraphrase, even though a ‘message’ is invariably clear.” His career as an essayist, poet, cleric and political pamphleteer demonstrated “the altogether inadequate expectations a moral person might have of life in this world.” But as his writings show, he dealt with that circumstance not by complaining or roaring, offering instead “a liberty of chiding, deriding, cajoling, bridling, impersonating, inverting, building up and laying bare; a liberty of making the powerful seem less so.”

This absorbing biography immerses us deeply in Swift’s world and is highly recommended.

Were you on the edge of your seat for the Netflix series “The Crown”? Do you still have the Charles and Diana coffee mug you badgered a London friend to send you 36 years ago?

If so, you’ll have a jolly good time reading Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, billed as the first major biography of the Prince of Wales in over 20 years. If not, you’ll still enjoy it as a psychological case study of a man who’s spent almost his entire life waiting for a role that might never be his. (For one thing, Charles’ mother, Queen Elizabeth II, remains active in her 90s.)

Charles, 68, has lived a life in the spotlight, with some of his most intimate secrets exposed thanks to those pesky intercepted phone conversations. So author Sally Bedell Smith doesn’t claim to expose any great secrets, concentrating instead on writing a highly readable account of Charles’ life, with emphasis on what makes him tick. In this she succeeds admirably.

As for the passions mentioned in the title, rest assured that Charles’ disastrous marriage to Lady Diana Spencer is recounted along with his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he married eight years after Diana’s death. But—you must eat your broccoli, you know—Smith devotes equal weight to Charles’ more prosaic passions, such as alternative medicine and environmental sustainability.

And the paradoxes? That’s where the psychology comes in, and Smith makes it clear that Charles could provide full employment for a team of psychoanalysts. And that’s with many more chapters of his life still to be written, kingship or not.

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

Even now, after all the mass killings of recent decades—9/11, Oklahoma City, all the rest—the Jonestown massacre is still staggering in its horror. More than 900 Americans—nearly 300 of them children—died in a Guyanese jungle in 1978 after a dangerous crackpot named Jim Jones told them to commit suicide by swallowing a poison-infused drink.

How on earth could this have happened? Couldn’t someone have done something, anything, to prevent it? If there are answers to those questions, they start with examining Jones himself, the charismatic cult leader originally from small-town Indiana who drew thousands to his Peoples Temple, then destroyed those who followed him to his remote settlement. Writer Jeff Guinn, already a biographer of Charles Manson, provides a powerful account of Jones’ life based on a comprehensive examination of the records and new interviews with temple survivors and Jones’ relatives in The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.

Jones is ultimately more interesting than Manson because he was a man of real accomplishment. Particularly in his early days, the white preacher fought effectively for civil rights for African Americans. Even as he drifted ever further into lunacy, his organization’s social service programs were always genuinely helpful. But simultaneously, Jones ran his ministry as a narcissistic cult, luring followers with phony faith healing and half-baked “socialist” rants, then exploiting his followers financially and sexually.

Was he always a monster or did something change? Initially, he resembled a number of other unorthodox evangelists. Then a pivot occurred in 1971 when Jones became addicted to drugs—his promiscuity and paranoia surged, and a tragic outcome became more likely, if not inevitable.

Guinn’s blow-by-blow account of Jonestown’s final days in the book’s last chapters is riveting. Jones betrayed hundreds of people who worshipped him; Guinn helps ensure we’ll remember their ruin.

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

Only 100 of Elizabeth Bishop’s finely wrought poems were published before she died in 1979. Although her work was greatly admired and she received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, her shyness and extremely complicated personal life meant that she was, for the most part, not a public figure. Since her death, she has become one of America’s most revered poets. In the vivid and compelling Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, Megan Marshall, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and the Francis Parkman Prize for The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, explores the complex relationship between Bishop’s life and work.

Bishop endured a harrowing childhood: Her father died when she was only 8 months old, and when she was 5 years old, her mother was hospitalized for insanity. Bishop’s mother remained institutionalized until her death many years later at age 54, two weeks before Elizabeth graduated from college. The future poet was raised by aunts and uncles in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts.

“I really don’t know how poetry gets written,” Bishop wrote. “There is a mystery and a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.” Often poetry and alcohol were her twin compulsions and, Marshall writes, “By her fifties, poetry and alcohol had become organizing principles, more powerful even than love. . . .” Several women were her companions/lovers and as one of them said, Bishop “fell in love easily. She also fell out of love easily.” She lived at a time when same-sex love was taboo in the U.S. and the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, newly released in 1952, described homosexuality as a “ sociopathic personality disturbance.” Bishop lived an itinerant life for many years, spending long periods in Key West and Brazil.

Two major poets championed her work: Marianne Moore, early in her career, and later Robert Lowell. He became, in their exchange of 400 letters, Bishop’s most appreciative reader and booster. He especially admired a quality in her life as a writer that he could never achieve: “the pleasure of pure invention,” as if the poems had come from her imagination. Lowell was identified with “confessional” poetry, in which he wrote about his own life, an approach Bishop detested. We learn how she was able to transform her life’s experiences into poetry, although the process usually took place over a long period of time and was rarely recognized as directly personal.

Marshall’s biography has two significant features that distinguish her work from others who have written about Bishop. First, she gained access to a collection of her subject’s most intimate correspondence, thought to have vanished, after the death of her last lover in 2009. Secondly, Marshall, although not close to her, was a student in Bishop’s “Advanced Verse Writing” class, offered at Harvard University late in the poet’s life. Alternating chapters of the biography with the author’s memoir give us a first-hand glimpse of that time and place.

This carefully researched, insightful and well written account of a major poet’s life shows in detail the suffering and difficulty that made her art possible. I enjoyed the book tremendously.

Robert Lowell’s poetic imagination emerged from the extremes of New England’s weather, its frozen winters and fiery summers. Similarly, his temperament reflected the seasonal extremes of “passivity and wildness” in the depression and mania that afflicted him throughout his life. Scion of an old New England family with a history of mental illness, Lowell was able to transform his illness into art, becoming one of the 20th century’s most significant American poets. In her new book, Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, brings her medical and personal experience of bipolar disorder to bear on the entwining of Lowell’s poetry and psychology. 

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character is a compelling and intuitive account of his life and poetry against the backdrop of repeated hospitalizations for mania. Much of Lowell’s -poetry—including important poems like “For the Union Dead” and the collection Life Studies—emerged from a fertile “hypomanic” state, when an elevated mood and quickened mind helped the poems spill out onto the page. As Jamison discusses, many other artists have shared this combination of genius, creativity and illness. But Jamison, who received unprecedented access to Lowell’s medical records, doesn’t glamorize or trivialize the experience of mania or the havoc it caused Lowell’s family and friends.

The poet’s nearly annual hospitalizations were finally slowed late in the 1960s, after lithium was introduced as a treatment for bipolar disorder. The medication gave him a stability he’d never experienced before. But would the same medication have altered his poetry had it been available sooner?

Jamison has been studying the complex relationship between brain chemistry and creativity throughout her career; in Lowell, she has found her ideal subject.

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

Marilyn Monroe suffered so much emotional pain throughout her life—from abused child to tormented movie star—one can only hope that 1955, the year she spent in New York, was as euphoric and productive as Elizabeth Winder portrays it in Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy. At war with her studio over the frothy movies it forced on her, Monroe and fashion photographer Milton Greene came to New York in December 1954 to set up a production company that would give the actress enough clout to choose her own roles. Monroe also wanted to immerse herself in the city’s artistic ferment and, above all else, to study at Lee Strasberg’s fabled Actors Studio, then the incubator of such radiant talents as Marlon Brando, Eli Wallach, Shelley Winters and Lou Gossett Jr. All of this she achieved.

The author bases her gossipy chronicle on having sifted through all the major Monroe-related biographies, filmed interviews about her, newspaper and magazine accounts and hundreds of photographs taken during the year in question. The effect of this accumulated minutiae is to put the reader at Monroe’s elbow as she nightclubs with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Frank Sinatra, swills champagne in bed and sits timidly at the back of the classroom as Strasberg pontificates to his more confident young lions.

The artsy crowd virtually swoons over Monroe. She enthralls the likes of Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, columnists Elsa Maxwell and Earl Wilson and even Strasberg himself, as well as the normally imperious Sir Laurence Olivier. She begins dating Arthur Miller (who emerges as something of a cold fish) and ultimately negotiates a contract with her studio that gives her story, director and cinematographer approval—plus the highest salary of any actress at that time.

With a magical year behind her, Monroe heads west, ready to give her dramatic all to a new film, Bus Stop, and what will prove to be the finest role of her career.

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

Martin Luther was an unlikely revolutionary. When he posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517 (as the story goes, although Luther himself never referred to it), he was 33 years old, had been a monk for 12 years and had published very little. Yet within two months, the theses were known all over Germany and read by both clergy and laity. Luther’s propositions challenged the Catholic Church on major theological beliefs and practices and questioned papal power. Whether they were attached to the church door or not, the theses sparked the Protestant Reformation and radically changed Christianity.

As we enter the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation, Oxford historian Lyndal Roper explores the life and times of Luther in her absorbing and provocative Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. An authority on early modern Germany, Roper gives us a compelling and nuanced portrait of a person greatly influenced by his environment. Luther was courageous in stating his deeply held beliefs and well understood he would be labeled a heretic and likely become a martyr. He was a brilliant writer but also a vicious man and often a difficult friend, even to those close to him. Although an intellectual and scholar, he mistrusted “reason, the whore,” as he called it. His anti-Semitism was propagated by many of his supporters but went much further than many were prepared to go. 

Why did Luther prevail when other reform leaders did not? Among the most important reasons was his ability to write well and communicate his thinking to the public. He also understood the critical importance of printing. For example, in 1518, by the time he was ordered to stop publication of his first work in German for a wide public audience, he ensured that it was already on sale. “His use of print was tactically brilliant,” Roper writes. “No one had previously used print to such devastating effect.” Perhaps above all, Luther was a realist. “Time and time again, though he might rail against them and insult them . . . Luther would in the end always align himself with the [civil] authorities.” 

Roper’s great skill in interpreting Luther’s personal and public lives and explaining controversial theological subjects within their historical context makes this biography both enlightening and entertaining.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, January 2017

One cold winter day in January 1991, Amy Gary, the owner of a small publishing company, struck gold in a living room in Vermont. The sister of the late children’s author Margaret Wise Brown showed Gary a trunk brimming with unpublished material—songs, music scores, stories and poems. From that moment on, Gary’s life changed, as she explains: “For over twenty-five years, I’ve tried to live inside the wildly imaginative mind of Margaret Wise Brown.” Her latest contribution to Brown’s legacy is the fascinating biography In the Great Green Room.

Brown, who wrote more than 100 children’s books, is best known for two beloved classics, Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. Yet her personal life was the antithesis of those soothing bedtime tales, filled with drama, exuberance and, at times, sorrow and loneliness. Gary’s account captures Brown’s life in vivid, novel-like details and descriptions.

The glamorous children’s writer was certainly a study in contrasts. The woman who wrote about furry bunnies and other animals was a hunter—this book describes one such hare hunt with hounds. She was also wildly fun and inventive, throwing parties and leading a group of editors and writers in a self-proclaimed “Birdbrain Club.”

Born in 1910 and raised in a privileged background, she was educated at exclusive boarding schools in Switzerland and New England; however, she failed freshman English at Hollins College. Despite her success as a children’s writer, she longed to write more “serious” adult literature, but couldn’t.

Brown desperately tried to avoid the unhappiness she saw in her own parents’ marriage, and yet for most of her life, her love life was a shambles. While summering on the Maine coast she adored, she fell in love with a well-known womanizer who refused to marry her. She also loved and moved in with a woman 20 years her senior, the former wife of John Barrymore, who was often condescending toward Brown’s work. Finally, she found love with James Stillman Rockefeller Jr. (who writes a captivating foreword), a kind, energetic soul about 15 years her junior. They were about to be married when Brown tragically died at age 42, suffering an embolism after having an appendectomy in France.

For children’s literature buffs and fans of intriguing biographies, In the Great Green Room is a must-read.

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

The Roosevelts were arguably the most powerful and accomplished of American families. There was Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider, a president remembered for his trust-busting and land conservation efforts. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency began during the Great Depression and ended with World War II. Then there was Eleanor Roosevelt, an independent, energetic first lady who became a role model for women. The lives and relationships of these American icons are examined in detail in William J. Mann’s new book, The Wars of the Roosevelts.

This exhaustively researched group biography explores the fascinating Roosevelt family tree: Teddy and FDR were fifth cousins. Franklin and Eleanor were fifth cousins, once removed. Teddy, Eleanor’s uncle, walked his niece down the aisle when she married Franklin.

While there was love, there was also war. Mann writes that the Roosevelts were ambitious and competitive, leading to some bad blood. Teddy was frail and asthmatic as a boy, and brother Elliott was better looking and more athletic. Through hard work and perseverance, Teddy grew to be a sportsman and soldier, while Elliott succumbed to alcoholism and fathered a son out of wedlock. He was hidden away in a sanitarium so Teddy could begin his political ascent free of scandal. When Elliott Roosevelt died at age 34, his daughter, Eleanor, was left with his broken legacy and an illegitimate brother, Elliott Roosevelt Mann, whom she refused to meet.

Eleanor’s remarkable life continued with her marriage to FDR and his rise to the White House. But she also faced additional challenges with her husband’s remoteness and clandestine affairs.

The Wars of the Roosevelts offers a glimpse into the secret lives of a family, which by all appearances seemed happy and successful. Unlike other biographies of the Roosevelts, which focus on their political accomplishments, this book looks closely at the family’s complex, often messy relationships, making it even more impressive that they went so far, considering all the baggage they carried.

Just in time for the release of the latest Star Wars movie, Brian Jay Jones (author of Jim Henson) offers a cinematic and engrossing look at the life of filmmaker George Lucas.  

From the start, Lucas wouldn’t bend to anyone else’s creative vision, whether it belonged to film school professors or the studios backing his movies. Early relationships with Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg shaped Lucas’ work and place in Hollywood—and foreshadowed what was to come.

When the book turns to the first Star Wars film, readers observe Lucas’ tortured creative process. He wrote treatments of the screenplay longhand in pencil and painstakingly edited snippets from other movies to show how he wanted Star Wars to look and feel. The result forever changed how Americans experience film.

For movie fans or anyone fascinated by the creative process, this is a well-researched and illuminating biography.

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

While thousands worked on the Manhattan Project, it is doubtful that e = mc² would have been translated into the atomic bomb without Enrico Fermi. Given his role in ushering in the Atomic Age, it is surprising that, until now, there has been no major biography of Fermi in English; The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age, by husband and wife authors Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin, does an excellent job of filling that gap.

Although Fermi didn’t discover nuclear fission, he arguably made the greatest contributions towards harnessing its power. The first nuclear chain reaction took place in December 1942, at the University of Chicago, under his direct supervision. Afterward, he was a leader in the development of the atomic bomb.

The main problem for any biographer of Fermi is the nature of his work, which depended upon complex mathematical models, an intuitive understanding of the workings of the atomic nucleus, and intricate experimentation. Happily, the authors’ clear explanations ensure that the reader is not only able to follow Fermi’s contributions to science, but also understand their impact on his life story.

Segrè and Hoerlin both had family connections with Fermi: His uncle was one of Fermi’s closest colleagues, and her father worked with him on the Manhattan project. Together, they paint an affectionate and honest portrait of a man who was defined by his contradictions. Fermi, nicknamed “The Pope” for his infallibility, was both a theoretical and an experimental physicist, nearly a contradiction in terms. He was deeply apolitical, but politics nevertheless molded his life, from his increasingly uneasy relationship with Mussolini, which culminated in his arrival as a refugee to the United States, to his defense of Robert Oppenheimer during the McCarthy era. Unemotional, he inspired great love from his wife, friends and colleagues, and yet his own children suffered from his aloofness.

In all, this comprehensive and enjoyable biography is a valuable introduction to the life of Fermi. 

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the glory days of Al Capone—Scarface, Big Al, Public Enemy Number One—is how short they were: six years, from mid-level thug to big boss to jail. So why is he still the iconic American gangster, nearly 70 years after his death from the complications of syphilis? 

Well, he loved publicity. But because his legend was a creation of newshounds and Hollywood, much of what we think we know is wrong. Biographer Deirdre Bair tries to uncover the man behind the flamboyant image in Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend. It seems a surprising project for an author who has written about Samuel Beckett and Carl Jung. Bair fell into it by happenstance when she met a man who was trying to find out if he was related to Capone. Eventually, she was able to talk extensively with Capone descendants.

They mostly turn out to be private, law-abiding folks whose reminiscences are engrossing and sometimes touching. Capone’s Irish-American wife, Mae, is at the heart of their memories—a woman who was, in their eyes, decent, loyal and loving. Syphilis, likely contracted from a prostitute, destroyed Capone’s mind, but Mae never gave up on him.

Bair carefully tries to sort out truth from baloney. No one knows how many people Capone and his minions killed. But Bair can say with confidence that the federal income tax evasion case that sent him to prison would have fallen apart if he hadn’t had incompetent lawyers and a biased judge.

Bair is particularly good at putting the Capones in the context of the Italian immigrant culture that shaped them. Capone himself wouldn’t have liked that; he always stressed that he was American-born, not an Italian. But he would have gotten a huge kick out of his enduring fame.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her exhaustively researched and beautifully written Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962, the concluding volume of her definitive biography, Blanche Wiesen Cook gives us a sympathetic but very human portrait of this “First Lady of the World.” 

Roosevelt’s public life was devoted to persuasion, and she used her many roles as president’s wife, newspaper columnist, author, public speaker, educator, presidential envoy and activist to influence events. In the midst of this work, she had to handle family matters and pursue private interests with many friends, whose rivalries and jealousies are detailed here. She admitted she “would never be any good in politics,” whereas her husband dealt capably with politicians and public opinion, which sometimes meant maneuvering through racial prejudice and anti-Semitism to reach a compromise or just inaction. Though she never overtly opposed FDR’s policies, a close reading of her columns reveals divergences. 

Two primary themes of this volume are Roosevelt’s civil rights work for African Americans and her efforts to rescue those fleeing the ravages of World War II in Europe. The depth of her involvement in these two efforts is one of the most compelling aspects of the book. Her sharp differences with her husband on these subjects contributed mightily to an already strained relationship between them. She had a significant influence on some of her husband’s decisions, although it is often difficult to trace. Both were keenly aware that it was politically unacceptable for her to appear to have influenced policy; her husband never publicly acknowledged “her role in his life.” Eleanor said they “argue about everything in the world,” but never tried to influence each other. Each would do, she said, what he or she “considered the right thing.” 

She was unanimously elected chair of the United Nations committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was to be “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” Since its passage in 1948, it continues to be the most important U.N. declaration on behalf of basic political freedoms, as well as economic and social rights. 

Anyone interested in the life of this towering figure in 20th-century history will want to read this book.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.