Tragedy and miracles go hand in hand, intertwined in our experiences and so deeply woven that we struggle to pick out the threads of each. Why did this one survive, and this one not? Why a miraculous recovery from illness here but not there? Is it medicine? Is it luck? Is it truly the hand of God? The Day Donny Herbert Woke Up follows the pattern of tragedy and miracle in the life of Donny Herbert, a Buffalo city firefighter. In 1995 Donny was severely injured during a fire when a roof collapsed on top of him. Deprived of oxygen for six minutes, Donny was left in a persistent vegetative state, unable to communicate and seemingly unaware of his surroundings. His body could function, but his mind was, for all appearances, gone. Donny remained in this state for nearly 10 years, as his wife, family and friends struggled to move on, hoping and praying that someday, a miracle might happen.

In April 2005, it did. Despite doctors’ certainty that he would never be able to communicate or even respond, Donny simply woke up, able to speak and even toss a football with his now nearly grown sons, a miracle that lasted for nearly 18 hours.

How did this astonishing recovery take place? Did medicine play a part? Was it Donny’s indomitable will, working in him through the long, dark years? Or was it a miracle, attributed by some to a revered priest from Buffalo’s past? Rich Blake’s account explores all of these questions, though the answers remain as elusive as ever. Even if Blake cannot answer the questions, he does provide a compelling portrait of an ordinary man and his working-class community. In the life of Donny Herbert, readers will discover people who could live just down the street, and come to appreciate the strength that can exist in the everyday, especially when that everyday is girded with love.

For many of us of a certain age, the enduring image of Daniel Boone is coonskin-capped actor Fess Parker on the eponymous television series from the 1960s. Robert Morgan shatters that iconic image right from the get-go in Boone, his impressive new biography of the American legend. Forget the coonskin cap, he writes in the very first sentence, he never wore one. That’s just the first of many myths that Morgan a novelist (Gap Creek), poet and Cornell professor dispels in his meticulously researched and elegantly told book. Boone, as Morgan celebrates him, was many things, some of them contradictory. He was resourceful and intelligent; a visionary, to be sure, and a marksman without rival. A loving husband and father of 10, he spent a significant chunk of time away from the family he cherished and was frequently in debt. He was a gregarious, social man who preferred to be alone in the woods. Raised a Quaker though he nonetheless killed a few Indians in his time he later became a Freemason (and Morgan lays claim to being the first biographer to explore this particular philosophical bent, with its ideals of liberty and brotherhood, when evaluating the woodsman’s life.) As one might expect of a biography written by a novelist and poet, Boone places its fabled subject within the context of the late-18th/early-19th century Romanticism that spurred Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman in the United States, as well as their European counterparts ( General Boone appears in Byron’s Don Juan). James Fenimore Cooper was just one writer of the age who placed characters modeled on Boone at the center of novels, thus fueling the myth. Within decades of his death, Morgan writes, his image and his character would be portrayed and transformed in a hundred different ways and under different names to become a quintessence of America’s ideal of itself, its origins and aspirations, its destiny. But Morgan seeks to demythologize Boone, bringing him down to human scale, and he sets to this task with an exacting attention to detail. Those details take readers to the heart of day-to-day life in America both before and after the Revolutionary War (in which Boone himself played a role). Life on the frontier was hard, of course, and could be perilous at the best of times. Morgan is adept at recounting such harrowing events as the brutal torture and killing of a scouting party that included Boone’s eldest son, James, by an angry group of Cherokees, Delawares and Shawnees. He is very good, too, at conveying the optimism of seemingly endless possibilities that inspired the pioneers. Boone epitomized this spirit, clearing the path, both literally and figuratively, for the settlement of the West, and Morgan counts road maker among the man’s many achievements. The irony that is never far beneath the surface of this biography’s narrative, though, is that Boone’s almost religious fervor for taming the virgin wilderness ultimately helped hasten the destruction of the thing he loved most in the world.

Separating fact from fable, we meet a Daniel Boone who was indeed a leader, though not always comfortable in that role. His marriage to the uncomplaining Rebecca Bryan (whom Morgan portrays as the consummate great woman behind the great man), endured long absences, but indeed seems to have been the great romance it has often been painted as. Despite his inherent integrity and leadership qualities, Boone was different from most of the men of his age, Morgan says. His innate character as woodsman and hunter, a white Indian as it were, made him perhaps ill-suited for some of the political and business situations that would prove his undoing in later life.

Written with admiration and great care, Boone is a book for those who like their biography told with leisurely erudition, readers interested in taking the countless side trips that fill out the story and place it within a larger context. The narrative teems with fascinating asides: We learn, for instance, that Indian Summer is so named because it was the season when Native Americans were most likely to be on the warpath. Oh, and if you’re wondering, Boone’s real hat of choice was beaver felt. Robert Weibezahl is author of the novel The Wicked and the Dead.

A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway in 1947, signifying a brave new era for the arts. Along with pushing at the period’s sexual boundaries, Tennessee Williams’ provocative work showcased an electrifying 24-year-old newcomer. As the brutal Stanley Kowalski, Marlon Brando altered the very perception of the craft of acting.

To this day, Brando remains an audacious original. Marlon Brando, a new addition to the Penguin Lives series, adeptly explores the contradictions of his sometimes dazzling, often confounding career. Written by Patricia Bosworth biographer of Brando’s chief 1950s rival, Montgomery Clift the book examines the forces that shaped his career and the personal demons that were its undoing.

The son of a salesman and an alcoholic, would-be actress, Brando grew up in the Midwest. But it was New York that beckoned, following his expulsion from high school (for his elaborate pranks). He worked as an elevator operator, night factory watchman, cook and enrolled in acting courses. It was under the tutelage of Stella Adler, master of method acting, that he was able to channel his rage against his father into his performances. Ever in conflict with his father, Brando adored his mother. And he cherished the frail, bespectacled Wally Cox a friend since boyhood. (Cox became famous in his own right as a comic character actor.) Hard to believe, but at the height of his glory in Streetcar, Brando shared a filthy apartment with Cox and a pet raccoon named Russell.

But then, Brando always flaunted convention. Following his move to 1950s Hollywood, he made no secret of his many affairs (he preferred exotic women) or of his disdain for the politics of moviemaking. Still, it was the screen that enshrined his performance as Kowalski. He went on to strike an indelible pose in a black leather jacket and a biker cap in The Wild One and to win an Oscar for On the Waterfront. But eventually, he cashed in and began making movies strictly for the money. The resulting performances were almost always fascinating; the movies weren’t.

By the early 1970s he was considered unemployable. Then came an astounding one-two punch: The Godfather and The Last Tango in Paris. The latter, about a doomed three-day sexual relationship, was an art house sensation. The Godfather brought Brando his second Oscar. In one of the most memorable nights in Academy Award history, he sent an American Indian named Sasheen Littlefeather to reject the honor.

A skilled writer with a fluid delivery, the insightful Boswell delivers numerous memorable scenes (such as Brando in a physical tussle with Cox’s widow over possession of his ashes). She doesn’t delve into the tragedies involving his son Christian and daughter Cheyenne, and she all but sidesteps certain personal details, such as Brando’s homosexual liaisons. But if the book is not definitive on a personal level, it is a satisfying, exceedingly colorful biography of a career.

Biographer-TV producer Pat H. Broeske has a menagerie of animals that includes an orange cat named Stanley for Stanley Kowalski.

The sizeable townhouse where Alice Roosevelt Longworth lived and hosted her political salon for decades still stands square and formidable, just off lively Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. It seems a fitting stage for Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, who was nothing if not formidable, and was always happy to be at the center of the action.

Alice was a rare bird for her time and place: a truly free woman with an independent mind, who did and said exactly what she wanted from her teen years as Princess Alice in the White House to her old age as the witty truth-teller of the 1970s. Though Alice lived in the public eye daughter of a president, wife of House Speaker Nicholas Longworth she kept her inner life private. Now, 27 years after her death, biographer Stacy A. Cordery is able to tell us more than we’ve ever known about what went on in Alice’s head, thanks to access to her personal papers provided by the Longworth family. The resulting portrait in Alice shows a woman who came by her independence the hard way, as a defense against abandonment and grief.

Her mother died at her birth. Her father couldn’t bear to be near a baby who reminded him of his dead wife. Her stepmother tried her best, but had a completely different personality. Her husband was a drunk with the sexual morals of a stoat. Her longtime lover couldn’t leave his wife. And her only child died at 31, in a possible suicide. No wonder Alice became tough-minded the only alternative would have been collapse.

Cordery, the author of a Theodore Roosevelt biography, mines diaries and letters for insights into Alice’s rebellious teen years, her marriage, and her love affair with William Borah, the maverick Republican senator from Idaho. Borah’s coded love letters to Alice confirm what has been assumed: He, not her husband, was the father of Alice’s daughter Paulina.

Borah and Alice were also political allies, and both were consistently on the wrong side of history. Alice inherited her father’s brilliant mind, but not his broad-minded compassion. She fought the League of Nations, the New Deal, intervention in World War II. Her vicious attacks on her first cousin Eleanor Roosevelt still make ugly reading. Cordery is able to explain them as the byproduct of Alice’s rage that lightweight cousin Franklin had usurped the position she thought her beloved brother Ted Jr. should have had. Alice calmed down in old age. She raised her orphaned granddaughter and befriended talented younger people of all political persuasions, among them Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. And she read. Alice was a lifelong autodidact with amazingly eclectic interests. After her political dinner parties at the house off Dupont Circle, Alice would retreat to her bedroom and read through the night poetry, biology, folklore, anything and everything. Cousin Franklin was famously said to have a second-rate mind and a first-rate temperament. Alice was first-rate on both counts.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Alex Kurzem had kept his silence for more than 50 years, leaking out to his family only sparse and misleading details about his boyhood in Russia during World War II. Then, in 1997, when he was around 62 years old (he never knew his birth date), he revealed to his son, Mark, this book’s author, that he had witnessed the mass slaughter of his mother, brother, sister and hundreds of other townspeople by local fascist forces. From this, he concluded that he was probably born a Jew. But he was so young when it happened, he cannot recall his original name. The Mascot continues in two stages: Kurzem’s dredging up of additional excruciatingly painful memories until he has pieced together a coherent narrative, and his son’s ultimately successful attempt to document those elusive memories. The ironic twist in this tale is that after the young boy escaped into the woods around the town where the massacre took place, he was rescued by Latvian SS troops who adopted him as their mascot, even dressing him in miniature SS uniforms. He would play that role until the war was over, alternating between being horrified at the brutality of the soldiers who protected him and reveling in the special treatment he received. In 1949, Kurzem immigrated to Australia, where he eventually married and raised a family. Most of the present-day action shifts between Melbourne and Oxford, England, where the author was a graduate student. Poignantly, the elder Kurzem had kept the visible scraps of his memory pictures and official papers in a locked box that he guarded zealously. His ever-so-gradual revelation of the mementos to his son in late-night sessions around the kitchen table makes for a suspenseful unraveling.

Even with the proof of his ordeal and survival it is difficult to believe some parts of Kurzem’s story. By the best estimate, he would have been only five or six years old when he fled into the woods. Yet he says he survived there for weeks, foraging on plants, tying himself into trees to avoid attacks by wolves, eluding soldiers, suffering bone-chilling cold. Still, his other recollections pan out so reliably that perhaps his survival really is the miracle it seems to be.

Louisa May Alcott and her father, A. Bronson Alcott, died within three days of each other in March, 1888. For most of their lives, it was Bronson, a self-educated philosopher and controversial education reformer, who was known to the public for both good and ill. One of the earliest Transcendentalists, he was a close friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He was also regarded by many as an impractical idealist who could not provide for his family. It was late in Louisa’s life with the publication of Little Women, followed by Little Men and Jo’s Boys that she far exceeded her father in renown, receiving much critical acclaim, best-selling success and substantial financial rewards.

Their father-daughter relationship was not always easy, as John Matteson vividly demonstrates in his engrossing Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. For Louisa as well as for Bronson, Matteson writes, life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection. Both had ambitions of altering the world through literature. In ways that neither anticipated and in widely varying degrees, they succeeded. Yet it was in the lives they lived, rather than in the words they wrote or spoke, that they fought hardest for redemption: both to redeem themselves from their perceived failures and to redeem the world at large from the wickedness that both father and daughter sought earnestly to reform. Matteson calls Louisa the most intensely practical of [her father’s] children and says Bronson took pride in her many admirable qualities. However, he says her instinctive pursuit of pleasure was to lead Bronson for many years to view Louisa as the most selfish of his children. He was especially concerned about her strong will and temper, in which she resembled her exemplary mother, Abigail, known as Abba. In many ways this is a family biography with Abba as the central figure. A social activist and humanitarian in her own right, Abba nurtured her daughters and supported her husband through thick and much more often thin. Matteson follows the Alcotts through Bronson’s two most notable but short-lived educational and social experiments: the Temple School and the utopian community of Fruitlands. The family moved often. Louisa’s most enjoyable times were spent in Concord, where Emerson encouraged her to read books from his personal library and she learned about the natural world from Thoreau.

Louisa’s volunteer service as a nurse during the Civil War was life-changing in several ways. She comforted a dying soldier in a hospital in Washington, D.C., and Matteson believes this moment exemplified what she came to see as the greatest good in life: the sharing of another’s adversity. In much of her best fiction, emotional climaxes occur when central female characters offer to share the burdens of those they love. Alcott’s heroines tend to interpret times of challenge as opportunities to transcend selfishness. It was a publisher who suggested she write a book about girls. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, she wrote. But when she did write about life within a family much like her own, she found great success. Matteson writes insightfully about both her well-known works and others virtually forgotten. His study of the Alcotts is a sensitive and very readable exploration of prominent figures in 19th-century America.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Americans may soon know more about Richard Nixon’s personality and escapades than they do about Paris Hilton’s. At least, Americans who read will. Books on the disgraced but unsinkable 37th president just keep on coming. Recently, Margaret MacMillan examined Nixon’s most fruitful political achievement in Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World. Nixon also figures prominently, albeit without star billing, in Jim Newton’s Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made. The four new books here continue the presidential probing, buttressed by a wealth of White House tapes, insider diaries and eyewitness accounts.

Elizabeth Drew’s Richard M. Nixon, part of Times Books’ American Presidents series, offers the widest view of his administration. Drew covered Nixon for the New Yorker while he was still in office and thus brings a reporter’s summarizing directness to her account. Although she acknowledges Nixon’s intelligence, doggedness and occasional successes, she ultimately concludes that his personality made him unfit to lead the country.

An innocent error in judgment by geographers in 1507 at St. Die, then a sovereign duchy located between France and Germany, led to the naming of the Western hemisphere’s continents after the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512). We know more about Vespucci than any of the other explorers of his time, except Christopher Columbus. The problem is that little of Vespucci’s writings survives, and sorting out the truth about him has confounded scholars for years. In a fascinating exploration of Vespucci and his times, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, noted historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto now believes he has overcome enough serious questions to give readers a coherent, but, of necessity, at times speculative, biography.

Although Vespucci sailed for Spain and Portugal, there is documentation of only one fleet for which he was to be captain and that ship never sailed. Fernandez-Armesto describes him as a master of relentless self-invention, from which sprang a dazzling succession of career moves. From early on in Florence he was engaged in all kinds of business dealings, primarily as a commission agent buying and selling gems for others. He became a fixer with a talent for wheeling and dealing for a wide circle of clients, including the Medici family. Vespucci moved to Seville and became a long-range, large-scale merchant, working with Gianotto Berardi, a prominent slave dealer who financed Columbus’ voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. Upon Berardi’s death, Vespucci, as his agent, was responsible for the debts incurred by these failed voyages. Then, when others were allowed to make the transatlantic voyage for Spain, Vespucci, with no known maritime experience or qualifications, made the trip, probably because of his expertise about pearls, which Columbus had discovered. After this voyage, Vespucci presented himself as a nautical authority and next turns up in Portugal, where the king asked him to sail on a voyage whose purpose is still unclear.

Vespucci was well-read, and Fernandez-Armesto says that when he related his experiences, he filtered them through his reading. He meticulously elucidates how the genres of romance, travel, and hagiography were so interpenetrated that it was hard to tell fancy from fact and says that to separate one from the other in Vespucci’s writings is a work of critical literary exploration. Nevertheless, he is able to establish a checklist of characteristics of Vespucci’s writing style that help him to measure authenticity.

Amerigo offers many historical riches, among them that those early scholars only meant to attach Vespucci’s name to the southern part of the hemisphere, where tradition placed the Antipodes and where Vespucci thought he had found them. The book also includes an ongoing discussion of the ties between Columbus and Vespucci and the claims by the partisans of each man that their hero has been fairly or unfairly treated.

Fernandez-Armesto considers Vespucci of particular importance as a representative of a strange, world-shaping breed . . . Mediterranean men who took to the Atlantic. He finds it hard to believe that without the initiative of Mediterranean participants, the Atlantic we now inhabit the home sea of Western civilization, across which we traffic in goods and ideas and around which we still tend to huddle for defense ever would have come to be. As we acknowledge the 500th anniversary of the naming of America, it is good to have this fine book to tell us how it came about.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

<b>A filmmaker’s dramatic rise and fall</b> Oscar Micheaux was an innovator and a revolutionary force as a filmmaker, entrepreneur and novelist, unquestionably black America’s first multimedia champion. But as Patrick Milligan’s exceptional new biography <b>Oscar Micheaux</b> shows, he was also a complex, driven figure whose ambition sometimes clouded his judgment, and whose objectives were so epic he was fated to fail in a society that during his lifetime neither acknowledged his greatness nor respected his achievements. Yet Micheaux wrote, produced and directed 40 feature-length films in every genre from musicals to Westerns, romances, gangster sagas and comedies during an amazing run from 1919 to 1948.

Micheaux considered himself a cinematic propagandist, and his productions an antidote to the horrendous images Hollywood was presenting where blacks were consigned to roles depicting them exclusively as servants, sexually crazed hoods or lazy bums. He had no limits regarding concept and saw absolutely nothing odd or unconventional about including interracial romances in films, examining color issues within the black community or spotlighting cruelty and injustice that occurred among everyday people.

But as Micheaux steadily built his film empire, he regularly encountered controversy and difficulty. Milligan details accusations of preference toward lighter-skinned performers and reveals that the celebrated director engaged in one case of plagiarism that had tragic consequences. Still, he also was responsible for numerous landmark feats, among them writing, producing and directing <i>The Homesteader</i> in 1919, not only filling all three roles on a production two years before Charlie Chaplin did the same thing to much larger fanfare, but also becoming the first African-American to do so; and later releasing <i>The Exile</i>, the first full-length African-American talking film, in 1931.

Milligan leaves no source untapped in his comprehensive account, using unpublished letters and financial records, among other things, to trace Micheaux’s life, fully documenting his spectacular rise and subsequent sad fall (he died in poverty in 1951). Though he was honored with the Director’s Guild of America Golden Jubilee Special Award in 1986 and a year later given a star on Hollywood Boulevard, Micheaux’s remarkable contributions remain unknown to even many hardcore film buffs. Fortunately, Milligan’s seminal work at least begins the process of getting him the attention and respect he deserves.

<i>Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville</i> City Paper <i>and other publications.</i>

<b>A writer’s life, layer by layer</b> Although this book is too chronologically ordered to be called stream-of-consciousness, German author Gunter Grass does ping-pong freely along the linear time scale as one remembered image, sound or smell incites another. His is less a conventional biography than a series of glimpses into the thought processes of an evolving artist. Translated into English by Michael Henry Heim, <b>Peeling the Onion</b> covers Grass’ life from his pre-World War II childhood in Danzig to his move to Paris in 1956, where he began writing <i>The Tin Drum</i>.

Grass explains his limitations (and displays his generally droll style) thusly: Having grown up in a family that was expelled from house and home, in contrast to writers of my generation who grew up in one place . . . and are therefore in full possession of their school records and juvenilia, and having ipso facto no concrete evidence of my early years, I can call only the most questionable of witnesses to the stand: Lady Memory, a capricious creature prone to migraines and reputed to smile at the highest bidder. The son of a small-time grocer, Grass recalls that even as a child, he felt a genteel contempt for his family’s petit bourgeois ways; however, he earned his spending money by collecting overdue bills for his father. His mercantile canniness would later serve him well at an American prisoner of war camp and as he searched to find his own place in Germany’s postwar economy.

In recounting his life, Grass shifts fluidly (and sometimes maddeningly) between first and third person. And he can be a bit coy: My new marching orders made it clear where the recruit with my name was to undergo basic training: on a drill ground of the Waffen SS, as a Panzer gunner, somewhere far off in the Bohemian Woods. Inducted near the end of the war, he saw relatively little combat but quite enough to disabuse him of any lingering romantic or nationalistic notions. (And enough to lead to considerable discussion of his previous silence on the subject when the book was published in Germany last summer.) Threaded through Grass’ narrative are visceral accounts of his coming to terms with his three great appetites food, sex and art. He also repeatedly cites specific situations and characters that later found their way into his fiction (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1999). For most of this book, Grass is simply another wartime survivor searching for an identity. But as his artistic vision takes form and draws him into the company of kindred seekers, one can sense the excitement of a new generation on the move.

<i>Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.</i>

Dearest Reader, It is my sincerest hope you will not consider me a shameful gossip if I whisper to you in these brief lines some of the subjects elucidated in Janet Gleeson’s Privilege and Scandal: The Remarkable Life of Harriet Spencer, Sister of Georgiana. Many secrets, hitherto buried between the lines of Harriet’s many letters (both to her and from her), are forthrightly revealed in Gleeson’s edifying, yet thoroughly beguiling biography of this vivacious, attractive and intelligent woman. Harriet Spencer, (who became Countess of Bessborough and is a feisty ancestor of the famed, though ill-fated, Princess Di) turned heads and raised eyebrows in 18th-century Britain by embroiling herself (a married woman!) in many peccadilloes regarding her participation in politics, gambling and illicit amours. The salacious details of that which I can only hint at here her lifelong involvement with a younger man, the painful particulars of her dalliance with playwright Richard Sheridan and how she managed to keep secret the birth of two of her six children are to be discovered in Gleeson’s detailed accounting.

But remember, dear reader, that a lady’s reputation in the Regency era is everything, and that such a lady a dynamic and influential figure of the Whig aristocracy, who braved social condemnation by giving voice to the reasoning of her acute mind, who was ever a faithful sister and friend, and who was such a loving and devoted mother, that, upon hearing her son was wounded in the Battle of Waterloo, raced alone across war-torn Europe to be at his side to such a one should every courtesy of confidence be given. Therefore, lest my words insinuate more than they illuminate, I pray you, burn my letter, and buy the book! Linda Stankard, your faithful correspondent, writes from Nanuet, New York.

In this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, Applegate takes a fascinating look at the life of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, brother of the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. An energetic Congregationalist clergyman and outspoken abolitionist, Beecher achieved renown during the mid-1800s, when his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn drew people from all over the country. He was a charismatic speaker, a powerful writer and one of the first public personalities in America who could rightly be termed a celebrity. His perception of God as a merciful rather than an unforgiving figure was a new and welcome view, as was his overall take on Christianity, which he believed could serve as a path to happiness and forgiveness. Well-connected socially, he appreciated books, music, art and although he was married the company of women. When well-known feminist Victoria Woodhull publicly accused Beecher of committing adultery with a member of his church, her claims made national headlines. A trial ensued that absorbed America’s attention almost as much as the Civil War. How Beecher fared after the scandal makes for a gripping historical tale. Readers with an interest in American history will relish Applegate’s well-written, engaging narrative.