Fame eluded Gordon Langley Hall as a writer, even though he was a prolific scribbler of memoirs and novels. When he became one of the first people to undergo sex change surgery in America, Hall’s local notoriety in Charleston, South Carolina, was unpleasantly mixed with malicious gossip. Edward Ball’s new book, Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love, may give Hall, now dead, the recognition that eluded him in life. Ball (author of the National Book Award winner Slaves in the Family) set out to settle two mysteries that have circled one of Charleston’s most celebrated and outrageous personalities for decades. Was Hall, as he claimed, a hermaphrodite who was misidentified as a male at birth? And did Hall, as he also claimed, conceive and give birth to a daughter, Natasha? Ball’s quest to resolve these burning issues takes him from Charleston to England where, as a child of the servant class, Hall had few opportunities for economic and social mobility. Then the biographer tracks his subject to New York where Hall became the protege and, at least in some sense, the lover of Isabel Whitney, an heir to the cotton gin fortune. His liaison with Whitney, perhaps more than his subsequent sex change, altered Hall’s life forever. When she died, his mistress made him a millionaire. As a Charleston transplant, Hall charmed local society with his English accent. Charlestonians, Ball indicates, didn’t pick up on the cockney overtones that would have made Ball’s attempts to penetrate the upper classes a wash back in England. Then, perversely, Hall throws away his tenuous new foothold in the Charleston party circuit by changing his gender from male to female and re-emerging as “Dawn.” As painted by Ball, Charleston’s high society was far too prudish and inflexible to get over that one. Then, having forever trespassed on good taste, Hall takes his adventure one or two steps further. He marries an African-American man and appears to bear his new husband a child. Ball first gets a clue that Hall might be inventing fictions about himself when it turns out that Hall forged a document shaving 15 years off his age. From there, Ball is the relentless sleuth, separating fantasy from fact until he has the real story on Gordon Hall, alias Dawn Simmons. He interviews dozens of eccentric characters who knew Hall, and the tale of each informant is a story unto itself.

Echoing the formula of John Berendt’s best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Ball’s Peninsula of Lies is a must-read for people who enjoy well-crafted Southern storytelling. Lynn Hamilton is a writer in Tybee Island, Georgia.

One hundred years ago last summer, in another hour of national grief, Theodore Roosevelt, 42, became the youngest man ever appointed president of the United States. He assumed office following the murder of William McKinley, who was shot by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo.

The press had reported the president was recovering, and Roosevelt went on vacation in the Adirondacks to reassure the American people. But well-meaning doctors botched the effort to remove the bullet from the ailing McKinley. A messenger waving a telegram found the family atop a mountain, and Vice President Roosevelt sped through the night by buggy and train. While he was en route McKinley died, and the great responsibility, for which TR had been seemingly destined, devolved onto him. Thus there came to the White House one of the greatest presidents in America’s history.

In The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), author Edmund Morris told of Roosevelt’s meteoric ascent from New York assemblyman to colonel of the Rough Riders to governor of the Empire State to Vice President. Morris’ second volume, Theodore Rex, begins with that dark ride of September 14, 1901, then chronicles the two presidential administrations that ended eight years later.

Perhaps TR’s single most important contribution to American history was the creation of the modern presidency. Roosevelt saw the need to apply the power of the federal government to the regulation of big business. Manufacturers, financiers and railroad barons had come to dominate the nation’s life, often abusing their power through combinations in restraint of trade and exploitative working conditions in factories, mines and fields. Roosevelt asserted the concept of "the public interest," with Washington as its guardian. His administration sued to bring marauding corporations within the restraint of the law. It went on to seize the isthmus at Panama for the digging of the great canal, broker a settlement of the war between Russia and Japan, achieve campaign finance reform and create vast reserves of parklands, natural monuments and wetlands. TR the hunter even loaned his name to the Teddy Bear.

Morris’ book is a triumph of biographical art. Roosevelt strides through these pages as he strode across American life. Morris is a skillful literary stylist, and this long book flies by in the reading. The exuberance, the energy and the large, hearty, boisterous and sweet nature of TR abound here. So do insightful personal and character sketches of TR’s intimates, friends, supporters and enemies. Roosevelt was much more than a president. He had significant and substantive achievements as an explorer, naturalist, sportsman, historian and journalist. He was also a devoted husband and father, and somehow found time to write 35 books. He had as great a capacity for life as anyone you’re ever likely to meet, and 100 years after his presidency, TR’s life and accomplishments remain an asset and inspiration for our country.

James Summerville of Nashville serves as a trustee of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. 

During most of his adult life, Abraham Lincoln was a conscientious, ambitious mainstream politician. He was regarded by many in his own time and since as the least experienced and most ill-prepared man ever elected president. What distinguished Lincoln from other presidential hopefuls? How was he able to attract the support to win nomination and election? William Lee Miller explores Lincoln’s life and career from a unique perspective and helps us to better understand the man within the context of his times in his thoughtful, stimulating and very readable new book, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography.

"To an unusual degree," Miller writes, "Lincoln rose to political visibility by moral argument." Not as a moral philosopher or a prophet, however, but as a politician. The author writes, "it was exactly the prudent adaptation of the political possibilities, on the one side, that made the moral argument effective on the other. He managed, while responsibly attending to the political complexities and while dealing respectfully with those who disagreed, to state with great force, clarity, and persistence the moral argument at the foundation of the new majority-seeking party." Miller traces Lincoln’s life "selectively, for its moral meaning." He shows how Lincoln developed his own views and beliefs early on, regardless of differences with family and friends. We see Lincoln’s disciplined intelligence and strong will assert themselves, along with an appreciation for concrete reality. "Lincoln developed a confidence in his own powers of understanding and judgment that would be a key to all his accomplishments," writes Miller. This would include what the author calls a moral self-confidence as well.

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance in Lincoln’s moral biography of his 1854 speech in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which extended slavery to those territories. Lincoln wrote that he was "losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again." In his address, Lincoln said the heart of the matter was that the new act "assumes there can be a moral right in the enslaving of one man by another," something that had not been assumed before. Miller regards this speech as better than anything Lincoln said in the debates later with Stephen A. Douglas.

Miller guides us masterfully through Lincoln’s public career from 1854-1860, when he was engaged in "moral clarification" with the Declaration of Independence as his main criterion. During this period, and as president, Lincoln "would always oppose slavery strongly but within the law, under the Constitution, affirming the continuing bond of the Union." Throughout the late 1850s, Lincoln used his political skills to shape the Republican Party of Illinois, keeping focused on the new party’s defining objective of opposition to extending slavery because it was a moral evil. Miller notes that "For all his caution about the racial prejudice of his audience, Lincoln would make repeated affirmations of a humane universalism and egalitarianism." This outstanding interpretative biography does not always portray a flawless hero. In addition to some missteps, practical political calculations figured in all of Lincoln’s major decisions that had a moral basis. But Lincoln was a politician, and Miller deftly demonstrates how brilliantly he was able to weave morality and politics together.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

In 1931, a panel of notable American men named Jane Addams first on a list of the 12 greatest living American women. That same year she won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to be so honored. At her death in 1935, she was the country’s most widely lauded woman in public life.

Today we remember Jane Addams as the founder of Hull-House, an innovative settlement house in Chicago, but her path-breaking work as a social and political reformer and thinker, and her leadership in peace and justice are largely unrecognized. Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of political and social ethics at the University of Chicago and one of our foremost public intellectuals, hopes to change that. In a major new intellectual biography, Elshtain helps us to understand her subject in the context of her times, in large part by a careful and compelling study of Addams’ own writings.

Addams was not an ideologue of the political left or right and was involved in a wide range of issues, including "every major social reform between 1890 and 1925." Although often praised, Addams was also frequently the subject of controversy and misunderstanding. This was especially so because of her pacifist position during World War I and her defense of immigrants.

Elshtain writes that "All of Hull-House’s many activities pointed toward one goal: the building up of a social culture of democracy." Addams was not interested in "sweeping" theories and never talked about the proletariat or the bourgeois. Instead, Elshtain notes, she believed that "certain experiences are shared on a deep level by all human beings" and that understanding others is essential for social change.

This biography is rich with interpretation and analysis of the life and works of a brilliant woman, and it will fascinate anyone interested in America’s social history.

Obscure wars breed little known and forgotten heroes. The job of the historian is to resurrect these paladins and explain their deeds to a new generation. Stephen Decatur is one such forgotten soldier: the youngest captain in American naval history, a hero of two wars and the star of a new generation of civic leaders. His life, so replete with action and honor, is vividly chronicled by naval historian James Tertius de Kay in his latest book, A Rage for Glory: The Life of Commodore Stephen Decatur, USN. Decatur’s life was epitomized by the pursuit of glory, honor and fame, and de Kay admirably sticks to those core elements in his examination of the man and his many accomplishments. Decatur fought daringly against Barbary pirates, even torching a captured U.S. ship in the enemy’s own harbor, and likewise bested the British navy during the War of 1812, towing the frigate Macedonian 2,200 miles back to America as a trophy. Unfortunately, it was his code of honor that also led to Decatur’s fatal duel with his former comrade, James Barron. The duel imbues the entire narrative with its malevolent inevitability, and de Kay details a cogent conspiracy theory against Decatur that drew him to his death.

Decatur’s hero status is undeniable, but heroes are not infallible, and de Kay’s narrative suffers from occasional touches of hero-worship and hyperbole. Decatur’s arrogance is sometimes dismissed as elan, his failures as victories, and his death as a tragedy unparalleled in American history. Yet, this audacity of narration mirrors Decatur’s own boldness in warfare and self-promotion, creating a kind of synergy between the biographical portrait and the character at its center. In this well researched work of popular history, de Kay skillfully brings Decatur to life and weaves together a narrative that reads like an adventure novel. Jason Emerson is a freelance writer based in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

<B>The dark side of Guthrie’s glory</B> Populist righteousness and homespun eloquence marked the songs of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, the Oklahoma balladeer whose career was as remarkable for its brevity as for its impact. But like a tornado churning across the prairie, Guthrie’s life was marked by turbulence, a struggle in which demons and angels battled and danced.

Author Ed Cray documents the singer’s life thoroughly and engagingly in the new biography <B>Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie</B>. Each page comes packed with details about Guthrie’s peculiarities his habit of not wearing underwear, or his aversion to the texture of peach fuzz, for example. Gradually these dots connect into a bizarre narrative, through which Guthrie traipses. His path seems aimless: months after being signed to host his own network radio show, he loses interest and drifts off to spend his days hitchhiking, his nights singing for pennies in saloons, and his mornings waking up drunk under bridges.

For 10 years he wandered through towns and hobo jungles, fell in and fled from love, and wrote about pretty much everything he saw. His songs came as fast as he could type them songs that recounted the trivial and the epochal with equal artistry. The best of them could summon Whitman’s spirit, dress it in sweat-stained denim, and send it into battle against capitalists, union busters and anyone else who blocked the sun from shining on the sainted working class.

Despite Cray’s painstaking effort to portray Guthrie, his subject’s character remains elusive. Guthrie could be brusque and crude to his closest friends. He could show up unannounced at someone’s house, spend the night crashed out on the couch and steal the silverware before slipping out the next day. He could guzzle free booze and insult the guests at parties thrown in his honor. He sometimes hit the women he worshipped. In other words, he could be a jerk.

Why? His illness the Huntington’s disease that wore him down for 13 years before killing him at 55 surely had something to do with it. But real insight into this process somehow hovers just beyond our apprehension, leaving Guthrie a figure in the distance: a minstrel onstage, a voice on the radio, a boxcar jockey, or a broken man, old before his time, always thumbing toward some new horizon.

Ellis is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the author of the best-selling books Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. His latest volume chronicles the life of America’s first president, shedding new light on the background of the great leader and his contributions to the incipient republic. Writing with his usual aplomb, Ellis traces the remarkable man’s ascension to commander-in-chief: we see Washington fighting in the French and Indian War, running his Virginia plantation with his wife Martha, acting as head of the Continental Army and assuming the presidency after the defeat of the British forces. Washington led the country for eight years, during which he instituted the federal government as we know it and established the nation’s capital city. In addition to an overview of his many accomplishments, Ellis also explores the president’s viewpoints on slavery and the rights of Native Americans. He goes beyond the facts to provide a colorful and well-rounded portrait of a remarkable man a political innovator who was aloof but kind, distant yet compassionate. Washington’s image is one of the most ubiquitous in our culture, and now, thanks to Ellis, we have an even clearer picture of this founding father. A reading group guide is available in print and online at www.readinggroupcenter.com.

<B>Jefferson’s link to the slave states</B> Like many prospective readers, I fear, my first thought when I spotted the words "Negro President" emblazoned across a portrait of Thomas Jefferson was, "Do we really need another book about Sally Hemings?" To my delight I discovered inside not the familiar story of Jefferson and his slave mistress but a fresh and provocative interpretation of the influence of the slave states on the third president.

Garry Wills, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <I>Lincoln at Gettysburg</I>, has published two previous books looking at Jefferson as author of the Declaration of Independence and as founder of the University of Virginia. In his new book, <B>Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power</B>, Wills examines how the power of the Southern slave states defined and shaped Jefferson’s presidency from its inception.

Jefferson was dubbed the "Negro President" in the wake of the election of 1800, when the Electoral College deadlocked, forcing the election into the House of Representatives. There, by a mere eight votes, the Virginian wrested the presidency from incumbent president John Adams, thanks to the provision in the Constitution that allowed Southern states to count their slaves as three-fifths of a person when determining a state’s representation in Congress and the Electoral College. As Wills makes clear, the curious three-fifths ratio gave the South disproportionate control of the government up to the Civil War.

Although Jefferson recognized the evils of slavery, he felt powerless to challenge it. "Though everyone recognizes that Jefferson depended on slaves for his economic existence," Wills insists, "fewer reflect that he depended on them for his political existence." Brimming with cogent arguments gracefully expressed, this volume will become a standard source on the Sage of Monticello and his time. <I>Dr. Thomas Appleton is professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University.</I>

John Dean, who served as Nixon’s counsel during the Watergate era, takes a look at another president with a troubled reputation in Warren G. Harding. No stranger to controversy and condemnation in a chief executive, Dean considers the legacy of scandal associated with Harding and winds up with a convincing redemptive portrait. Tainted in history (and after his death in office) by the subsequent exposure of the infamous Teapot Dome scandal, Harding is often pilloried as leading “the most corrupt administration in American history.” Accused of complicity, laziness and lack of intellect, Harding has for many years served as a prime example of an administration gone wrong. Yet Dean places the realities of Harding’s actions and decisions under a microscope and argues that the label is largely myth. The result is an eye-opening examination of just how popular misconceptions can falsely darken the legacy of able men. Dean’s book provides an informative look at a relatively forgotten time in American history and may well change your view of Harding and his presidency.

Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.

Finally, the last book in the trio deals with a man for whom the myth approaches glory: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Few presidents have undergone more biographical treatment than FDR, but series general editor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sought a somewhat different view. To give this book a freshness for American readers, British biographer, Labour politician and peer of the realm Roy Jenkins (Lord Jenkins of Hillhead) was chosen to profile FDR. Jenkins offers an interesting outsider’s assessment of both Roosevelt and the American state he led and indelibly changed. Jenkins skillfully explores the “American aristocracy” that produced the young Franklin Roosevelt and shows how his relationships within that social structure (and the example of his illustrious distant cousin, Theodore) influenced his character. The book reveals FDR in his remarkable political achievements and his equally stunning missteps, examining how these contributed to his development into the pre-eminent world leader in World War II and resulted in making the United States the dominant force in world affairs, a role it retains today. Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.

As a child, whenever I came upon a strange door, stone steps that seemed to lead nowhere, or (of course) a wardrobe, I wondered if they might take me someplace different. And there was always that moment, just before the door swung open or I took the last step, when I sensed that this time, the Narnia I sought might really be there.

The idea that another world could be just beyond the next door has made the Chronicles of Narnia one of the most beloved of all children’s series. In December, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will be released as a big-budget film on a par with The Lord of the Rings movies. Along with new editions of the novels themselves, a blizzard of Narnia-themed books will hit the shelves to coincide with the film’s release. We’ve selected three of the best books that open new doors into Narnia and the mind of its creator through works of literary criticism, inspirational study and biography.

Just as one cannot separate Narnia from Christianity, one cannot separate this fanciful realm from its creator, C.S. Lewis. His life and faith are masterfully explored in Alan Jacobs’ The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. An English professor at Wheaton College, Jacobs is both a scholar of exceptional ability and a writer of marvelous skill. Throughout the book, he delves deeply into Lewis’ developing theology and philosophy, revealing how the experiences of his life shaped his beliefs and writings. Jacobs focuses closely on Lewis’ relationships, especially the pivotal friendship with his Oxford colleague J.R.R. Tolkien whose theory that pagan myths point to the coming of Christ led both to Lewis’ conversion to Christianity and Tolkien’s own explorations of the theme and Lewis’ marriage at the age of 57 to American divorcŽe Joy Davidman, whose love and death shaped his remaining years.

Jacobs argues that Lewis had "a willingness to be enchanted," a quality that enabled him to create remarkable books that captivated the imaginations of children worldwide. The author also corrects many misconceptions about Lewis’ life and work, successfully disputing the claims of both critics and devotees. The Narnian is thoughtful, intriguing and inspiring a treasure for Narnia fans, as well as aficionados of fine biography.