Due South: Dispatches from Down Home By R. Scott Brunner Villard, $19.95 ISBN 0375502556 Review by Taylor Cates Retrospectives of the 20th century note that developments such as television, the interstate system, the Great Migration, and the rise of the Sun Belt have virtually eliminated the distinctive characteristics of the South (capital S ). Indeed, reminiscences about the South these days seem to present two different yet equally distorted images: either a comedian’s portrayal of a backwards place festering in its own ignorance, or a nostalgic reverie of days gone by.

R. Scott Brunner, an Alabama native and commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, has compiled his radio essays about the region into Due South: Dispatches from Down Home. In doing so, he presents a picture of the South that includes aspects of both images, and yet captures some of the elements that continue to make the South a unique, elusive, and fascinating place.

Brunner’s topics range widely. Many of his essays are about the joys and aggravations of raising young children. He writes of his mixed feelings when he learned that his wife was carrying twins. He addresses the mystery of the contents of a baby’s diaper. These pieces are relevant whether the reader hails from Tennessee or from New York. Brunner hits his stride, however, when he focuses on the anachronisms and idiosyncrasies of his home state and its neighbors.

The best essays in the collection are those that record one event, one place, one memory. Brunner describes an unassuming barbecue restaurant and its patrons. He recalls a Bible quiz showdown at church camp. He relates a friend’s encounter with Eudora Welty. Like the best work of Lewis Grizzard, Brunner’s essays entertain by describing the familiar. Southern readers will nod their heads in recognition on every page. Readers from parts elsewhere will enjoy an authentic glimpse of Southern living.

Like Grizzard’s, Brunner’s work is funny. His analysis of Southern Provincial architecture, with its emphasis on lawn flamingos and See Rock City ads, is dead-on and hilarious. However, he falters with a few self-conscious attempts at humor. Bits on topics such as the Southern use of the phrase bless your heart read like forced Jeff Foxworthy.

The format of the book and Brunner’s origins in radio invite comparisons to Garrison Keillor. Brunner has Keillor’s skill in evoking a sense of community. Rather than focus on one town, however, Brunner casts a wider net, exploring topics such as language, food, and style that pervade the entire region. Due South is as engaging, as entertaining, and as charming as the South itself.

Taylor Cates is a reviewer in Memphis, Tennessee.

With obvious enthusiasm and fascination, Diana Preston spins exhaustive research into a tight narrative in The Boxer Rebellion. There are grand themes, evil villains, bumbling bureaucrats, sickening cowards, and dashing heroes competing to fill each page with tension, danger, and history.

The Boxer Rebellion focuses on peasant unrest in China, primarily in the summer of 1900. Spreading like wildfire, the Boxer way of life attracted peasants from throughout the country. (Boxers were so named because their Chinese boxing was alleged to bestow magical powers.) The Boxers soon grew so powerful that the confused, outmoded Manchu government believed it could win a genocidal war against foreigners by sanctioning Boxer activities. In this setting, Preston weaves a fact-based story of people, perseverance, accomplishments, and shortcomings during a dreadful eight-week siege of Beijing’s diplomatic quarter and all foreign settlements throughout China. The characters, from glamorous Tzu Hsi, last empress of China, to na•ve American soldier Oscar Upham, are realistically depicted, providing needed personal perspective. One of the few disappointments was the absence of a consistent Boxer voice. Then, as now, the winners write the history books, and there is little genuine Chinese perspective. The reader will come away with the overwhelming sense of slipping into a story far larger than anticipated. The Rebellion initiated major changes in global politics, the results of which are still felt today, most obviously in the prevalence of multinational peace-keeping forces, the first of which occurred during the Boxer uprising. Subtly, Preston points to the key issues troubling the rescue army, helping to point out how many of these issues still divide modern nations.

Providing a needed perspective on history, couched in an accessible, thorough narrative, The Boxer Rebellion succeeds in painting intriguing history with modern colors. If you are willing to learn about the world we live in on a sociological, historical, governmental, or political level this is a great place, and a fascinating era, in which to begin.

Andrew Lis writes from New York.

Patient readers will be richly rewarded once they get the hang of how Modris Eksteins, author of this combined history and autobiography, shies away from straightforward chronology. He moves backwards and forward through the years, presenting episodes that provide a history of Latvia, his birthplace, and of Eastern Europe and World War II. The events he describes so thoroughly are interspersed with his own life story and that of his family. The highly successful outcome of Eksteins’s roving through time is a remarkable depiction of reaching 1945, when the war in Europe ended and 30 to 40 million people were homeless. He converges on 1945 as the climactic year from two vantage points: his current position as a history professor at the University of Toronto, and Russia and the Baltic States in the 1850s.

The autobiography moves in reverse to Eksteins’s years as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in history; his experiences at Upper Canada College, Toronto’s elite private secondary school; his family’s 1949 arrival in Canada as Displaced Persons after the Canadian government overturned its negative attitude toward newcomers; and their horrible war experiences, battered by both the Germans and the Russians, after he was born in 1943. The vivid narrative includes his great-grandmother, born in 1834; his father, a Baptist minister; and his mother, who was the key to our survival. This is a story of achievement and triumph.

The historical sections emphasize World War II, when Latvia was made a part of the Soviet Union in 1940, liberated by Germany in 1941, and re-captured by Russia in 1944. The terror of those years is detailed with shocking figures regarding the fate of Latvian Jews and Western Jews sent to Latvia. Their slaughter was the highest percentage of eradication in all of Europe. Eksteins’s stress on the devastation of World War II, with its unprecedented number of deaths, contrasts with the contemporary characterization of World War II as a good war. This powerful book demonstrates that there is no such thing. ¦ Dr. Morton I. Teicher is a freelance writer who is on the faculty of Walden University.

My teenage son is of the opinion that because I watch the History Channel, I have embarked upon the path of middle-aged dorkdom. I refuse to believe this. The quest for knowledge is an itch that needs to be scratched, regardless of age. At some 700 pages of relatively small print, Ancient Mysteries isn’t for your average television clicker cowboy. Instead, it is a wide-ranging and richly detailed look at parts of our past that grab the imagination. Some are comfortable and familiar trails; others take a well-known story up a new road; still others are dark and overgrown paths that you never even knew existed.

James and Thorpe tackle the theories you’d expect myths of modern culture such as Atlantis and they deconstruct them, not without a certain amount of glee. They also consider some of the more obscure mysteries, such as the Dogon tribe, the Orion pyramid alignment, and the Piri Reis map. Lest you think the two authors are nothing more than professional skeptics, consider this: They’re also not afraid to postulate their own unconventional theories. In their earlier work, Centuries of Darkness, they challenged decades of conventional wisdom about the supposed dates of events in early Mediterranean civilization. The biggest surprises are those legends that have a basis in fact, such as the labyrinth of the Minotaur, those women warriors called Amazons, and King Arthur. The king of Camelot is particularly compelling because of the sheer number of archeological puzzles that revolve around his legend and the names and places linked to it.

The layout of this book is excellent; you can read it front to back, as I did, or pick your way through its thoroughly cross-referenced pages, with one subject serendipitously leading to another. Sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure book for adults.

Whether the subject is a comet (possibly Halley’s) over Bethlehem 2000 years ago or a comet striking the earth 65 million years ago, Ancient Mysteries will give you endless enjoyment.

James Neal Webb writes from Nashville, Tennessee.

In the words of noted military historian John Keegan, World War I was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. In the summer of 1914, Europe enjoyed peace and prosperity that depended to a great extent on international cooperation in the commercial, intellectual, philanthropic, and religious spheres. Keegan notes that a belief in the impossibility of general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms. Yet, in a short time, the states of Europe proceeded, as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its civilization. Keegan concedes that the origins of the war and the course it took are mysteries. Why did diplomatic efforts fail? Why were certain strategies and tactics employed that, in hindsight, appear unrealistic, even futile? Keegan, the author of twelve previous books including The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, and The History of Warfare, helps us gain a much better understanding of personalities, decisions, and events in his authoritative and eminently readable overview, The First World War.

The author recreates the environment in which diplomats, without the benefit of modern means of communication, were unable to defuse the powder keg. At the time many countries in Europe required young men to receive military training, with the result that there were large armies of serving and potential soldiers. Keegan relates that All European armies . . . had long-laid military plans, notable in most cases for their inflexibility. The most important of these was the Schlieffen Plan in Germany, which Keegan considers to be the most important document written in any country in the first decade of the twentieth century, perhaps even the most important official document of the last hundred years. It was a plan for quick victory in a short war. Although it did not start the war, once this plan was adopted it determined where the war’s focus would lie, and its flaws and uncertainties led to the widening conflict. But, Keegan emphasizes, even Germany had not wanted war. Although by 1915 there was a line of earthworks for 1,300 miles, the author points out that there was no standard trench system. Keegan details the differences in approach taken by different armies, depending on a wide range of factors. He disagrees with younger military historians who think that, as terrible as the early offensive was, it was part of a learning process that eventually led to the victories in 1918. The simple truth of 1914-1918 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers. The development of the tank and its effective use were significant assets to the Allies.

Keegan paints vivid portraits of the generals and the foot soldiers in the conflict. Of the former, Joffre Haig, Foch, Hindenberg, and others were widely regarded as great men in their time. As the memoirs and novels of the war were published, they seemed much less so. Technology that was adequate for mass destruction of life was inadequate to give the generals the flexibility that would have kept that destruction within bearable limits. The book includes major battle-by-battle accounts on both land and sea. Keegan also discusses wartime activity in Africa and the Middle East. The reader is assisted greatly by numerous maps.

This outstanding account of the war deserves a wide readership.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the most revered and influential public figures in recent history. Her efforts to improve the lives of human beings both here and around the world earned her universal respect and admiration. In the early 1900s, Eleanor’s cousin Alice, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, became a household name and was, according to one of her biographers, the first female celebrity of the 20th century. Later, as Alice Longworth, she presided for decades over a Washington salon where she was famous for her irrepressible and irreverent wit. Eleanor was, of course, a Democrat; Alice, a Republican.

Although we have read about the women in other major American political dynasties such as the Adamses and the Kennedys, until now the Roosevelt women as a group have not received similar attention. Historian Betty Boyd Caroli, whose other books include First Ladies and Inside the White House, corrects that oversight with The Roosevelt Women.

Caroli points out that two traits that appear in Roosevelts of both sexes are their high energy and their intellectual curiosity. She also stresses their strong sense of family, especially among the women. Even after the Democratic Franklin branch broke away from the Republican Theodores and feelings between the two sides became very bitter, Eleanor insisted that they were all family. The author emphasizes that because of their privileged background, several of the Roosevelt women were opposed to women’s suffrage. Theodore’s sister Anna opposed it, but, as Caroli notes, In her day and among women of her circle . . . intelligent women like herself would always find ways to act behind the scenes in politics. Two of the most compelling portraits found in Caroli’s book are of Theodore’s mother, Martha Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, and Sara Delano Roosevelt, Franklin’s mother. They are, in part, revisionist views. Mittie has often been portrayed as fragile, notably by her dynamic sons and daughters. Caroli sees her as a complex person who wrote remarkably intelligent and insightful descriptions of her travels and whose actions were often definite and determined.

In recent decades, Sara Delano has been pictured as a domineering matriarch who interfered in the marriage of her only child. By contrast, Caroli details her involvement in political campaigns and her support of various social causes. She was also a major financial source for her son and daughter-in-law. During her lifetime observers frequently commented on her spunk and intelligence. In addition to those already mentioned, other subjects include T.

R.’s wife Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, his daughter Ethel Roosevelt Derby, and niece Corinne Roosevelt Robinson Alsop. Their achievements were many and varied. Caroli gives us insightful profiles of both the public and private lives of key women in one of our nation’s most prominent political families.

Roger Bishop contributes monthly to BookPage.

Louis Kilzer has taken on one of the most intriguing puzzles of World War II in his gripping, well-researched book about treachery in the Third Reich. Most war historians suspected that Hitler had a traitor who was leaking internal secrets, but who was that person? In a carefully woven story, Kilzer unmasks the only one who could have been the world’s most successful spy.

Russia’s Red Army ran a highly sophisticated spy ring in Switzerland, orchestrated by Maria Poliakova, who was recruited early in life as a member of the intelligence service. Her code name was “Gisela” and the network she ran was known as “Gisela’s family.” The spy ring had a number of sources from which to draw, ranging from the Army’s high command to the German foreign office. But the most important spy of all was known as Werther. His information would ultimately help destroy the Third Reich.

After the conquest of France, Hitler moved the bulk of his troops to the Eastern Front. The intent was to destroy the Red Army of Russia and grab hold of Moscow. Only two things stood in his way: weather and Werther.

Of the two, Werther was by far the most deadly. When the Germans were bogged down around Stalingrad, Werther supplied Stalin with detailed information about the location of Hitler’s panzers, where they were headed, and precisely how many troops were in reserve.

So detailed were Werther’s reports to Moscow Center that it tried to “backcheck” his information. Stalin once insisted on knowing his identity. The spy network refused, which is one of the few times Stalin was rejected. It may be that the spy network didn’t actually know who Werther was.

Werther acted with impunity, and it is difficult to understand why Hitler, with all his resources and his canny insight, didn’t know of the traitor in his bosom. But as Kilzer notes, “For whatever reason, Hitler allowed the culture of treason to surround him until it destroyed him.” At one time or another, it appeared that everybody in high places conspired to destroy the little man with the funny mustache. One bomb went off at his East Prussian headquarters, but Hitler was unharmed. The plotters or some of them were quickly executed.

Certainly one branch of the conspiracy was the Abwehr the Army’s own intelligence organization. Gen. Hans Oster, the number two man, almost openly talked of bringing Hitler down. My choice for Werther would have been Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, who headed the Abwehr. But the chronology doesn’t fit. Hitler sacked him before Moscow Center got many of Werther’s messages.

Kilzer, the author of Churchill’s Deception, has done a bang-up job with his latest book. We now know who Werther was. Hitler’s Traitor is guaranteed to keep the reader spellbound while the agent is unmasked.

Lloyd Armour is a retired newspaper editor in Nashville.

Solving the ultimate caper BookPage recently talked to Louis Kilzer, an investigative reporter with the Rocky Mountain News and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, about his search for the true identity of the spy in Hitler’s inner circle.

BookPage: The obvious first question about Hitler’s Traitor is whether you worked from back to front. That is, did you begin with a conviction that Martin Bormann was a traitor to Hitler or did you discover that along the way? Louis Kilzer: I had suspicions before I started the book, but I didn’t know how strong of a case it would end up being. It turned out to be a pretty strong case.

BP: How and when did you first get interested in this project? LK: I did a book in 1994 [Churchill’s Deception] about the Rudolf Hess mission that entailed research that occurred from 1991 onward. I went to the Soviet Union in May 1991, just three months before the Soviet Empire ended, to access KGB records. Then I did extensive research at the U.S. National Archives and developed a suspicion at that point that Bormann may have been involved in this ultimate caper.

BP: Did it surprise you that women played such an important role in this story? LK: That was fascinating. The people who first wrote about the Swiss spy ring were all men and they, of course, were credited by male historians with having run the ring. But when you look into the original OSS and CIA records, it becomes obvious that the key roles were played by women.

BP: How did your opinion of Bormann change while writing the book? LK: Bormann is a mystery figure. My view of him hardened. I did not know the extent to which he contributed to the Holocaust until I researched this book. He was, in fact, one of the prime movers of the Holocaust. Put that together with what he was doing in the spy ring, and it is very difficult to understand. I don’t fully understand it to this day.

BP: If this information about Bormann had been discovered in the immediate aftermath of the war, what effect do you think it would have had? LK: I believe the Soviets would have been rather embarrassed. The Soviet Union had no interest…in letting that secret out because, for the Soviets, it was the Red Army that won the war and not a spy ring. That would take away from the prestige of the Red Army.

Good writing. A gripping story filled with drama and suspense. Colorful characters who come alive on the page. All these elements, which we usually associate with novels, come together to make this history of the gay rights movement in America a fascinating, as well as enlightening, book.

During the 1950s and 1960s, gay rights activists such as Frank Kameny, Phyllis Lyon, and Del Martin established the fundamental principles of the movement that homosexuals were normal and had a right to express their love and enjoy civil liberties. Out for Good begins with the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City. It was after Stonewall, claim authors Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, that gay and lesbian activists adopted the more radical tactics that actually brought about significant change. The book ends in 1992, when presidential candidate Bill Clinton spoke out for gay and lesbian rights at a gay fund raiser.

Meticulous and exhaustive research is what transforms Out for Good from a historical account into a human narrative. In addition to pouring through archival and library collections, New York Times journalists Clendinen and Nagourney conducted almost 700 interviews with 330 people. As a result, they are able to present key characters such as Martha Shelley, one of the dominant personalities in the Gay Liberation Front; Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church; and Gay Activist Alliance member Ron Gold.

Clendenin and Nagourney admit up front that their history isn’t comprehensive or encyclopedic. Rather, they claim, their almost 700-page book provides a definitive look at a unique civil rights movement, unique because it is shaped, as no other movement has been, by sex and the AIDS plague.

It’s easy to take things for granted. A well-told history such as this one reminds us, whether we are young or old, heterosexual or homosexual, that whatever rights and acceptance gays and lesbians now enjoy were hard-won by courageous men and women who stood up for themselves and, in many cases, became heroes to their cause.

Connie Miller is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing.