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NonfictionHistory

Henry VIII: And the Men Who Made Him

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Henry VIII is most often remembered as the king with six wives. But in her fascinating new biography, Henry VIII: And the Men Who Made Him, Tracy Borman argues that as a monarch and as a man, Henry is best understood by examining his relationships with the men who surrounded him.

Throughout his life, Henry was at the center of a tumultuous group at court, from advisers like Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell to scholar Thomas More and the powerful dukes of Buckingham and Norfolk. Borman writes, “It was these men who shaped Henry into the man—and the monster—that he would become.”

Borman, who serves as curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces, has a long familiarity with the Tudors. She has written a book about their private lives as well as a biography of Cromwell. (A confession: I can no longer imagine him as anyone other than Mark Rylance, thanks to his masterful portrayal in the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.) Here, Borman’s deep background knowledge serves her—and the reader—well. The pages and years fly by, and one has the feeling of stepping into an engaging historical lecture by a master of the subject.

The study follows a chronological approach, and Borman shines a light on some lesser- known characters as well as the major players. We also see more of how those in Henry’s inner circle of advisers, aristocrats and servants interacted with one another. Throughout, Borman uses events to peel back layers of Henry’s character, arguing that his relationships with men “show him to be capable of fierce, but seldom abiding loyalty; of raising men only to destroy them later.”

For readers curious about royal history or fascinated by the styles of leaders in our own time, Henry VIII: And the Men Who Made Him makes for a compelling read. And it will hopefully tide committed Tudor fans over until Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final book in her trilogy about Cromwell, comes out—whenever that may be.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Henry VIII is most often remembered as the king with six wives. But in her fascinating new biography, Henry VIII: And the Men Who Made Him, Tracy Borman argues that as a monarch and as a man, Henry is best understood by examining his relationships with the men who surrounded him. Throughout his life, Henry was at the center of a tumultuous group at court, from advisers like Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell to scholar Thomas More and the powerful dukes of Buckingham and Norfolk. Borman writes, “It was these men who shaped Henry into the man—and the monster—that he would become.”

NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryBiography

Bringing Down the Colonel

Review by Anne Bartlett

Madeline Pollard’s breach-of-promise lawsuit against famous Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge was the talk of Washington, D.C., in 1894. When close to 20 women arrived at the courtroom as spectators to the buzzy trial, the judge politely threw them out—the testimony was far too indelicate for ladies to hear. But women had the last laugh: Representative Breckinridge, an eloquent political superstar, couldn’t escape the women who testified against him, the wealthy female activists who publicly backed Pollard and the ordinary women of central Kentucky who campaigned against his re-election, decades before they obtained suffrage.

Patricia Miller’s marvelous Bringing Down the Colonel recounts Pollard’s sensational claim that Breckinridge had seduced her when she was 17, engaged in a years-long adulterous affair with her, then reneged on his marriage pledge when his wife died. Miller also tells a riveting broader story of the changing social mores in late 19th-century America, driven by the mass entry of women into the office workplace and a female-led movement to eliminate the “double standard” that penalized women for their sexuality.

Miller illustrates this time in America through the lives of three women key to the case: Pollard, who had a more complicated backstory than she revealed; Jennie Turner, a working woman recruited by Breckinridge’s backers to spy on Pollard; and Nisba Breckinridge, the congressman’s daughter. All were intelligent, educated, ambitious women, held back (at least initially) by sexism and straitened finances. All ultimately built independent lives; Nisba became a prominent social scientist.

This book comes at the perfect moment, as the #MeToo movement highlights sexual harassment and assault. Women in the 19th century faced the same challenges and more. Through cases like Pollard’s, Gilded Age social reformers advanced women’s rights in the voting booth, office and bedroom. Their example continues to resonate.

Madeline Pollard’s breach-of-promise lawsuit against famous Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge was the talk of Washington, D.C., in 1894. When close to 20 women arrived at the courtroom as spectators to the buzzy trial, the judge politely threw them out—the testimony was far too indelicate for ladies to hear. But women had the last laugh: Representative Breckinridge, an eloquent political superstar, couldn’t escape the women who testified against him, the wealthy female activists who publicly backed Pollard and the ordinary women of central Kentucky who campaigned against his re-election, decades before they obtained suffrage.

NonfictionAudioAmerican History

These Truths

Review by Sukey Howard

Top Pick in Audio, December 2018

In her new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore writes, “The past is an inheritance, a gift, and a burden. . . . There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.” To make our past more knowable, Lepore has penned an astonishingly concise, exuberant and elegant one-volume American history that begins with Columbus and ends with Trump. Lepore questions, as Alexander Hamilton did, “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” Lepore tells us upfront that much historical detail is left out; this is a political history, an explanation of the origins of our democratic institutions, and it lets history’s vast array of characters speak in their own words when possible. It also makes clear that slavery is an intimate, inextricable part of the American story. This is the past we need to know. Listen closely as Lepore reads with unexpected pizazz.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

 

In her new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore writes, “The past is an inheritance, a gift, and a burden. . . . There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.”

NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

The War Before the War

Review by Vanessa Willoughby

The general consensus about the origins of the Civil War point to one irrevocable catalyst: the institution of slavery in the South. With fine-combed research, Andrew Delbanco, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and 2012 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, argues that the Fugitive Slave Act was the centralized fuse that sparked the Civil War in The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.

The practice of slavery was threaded into American life from the United States’ inception. Following the end of the Revolutionary War, leaders in the colonies, including General George Washington, were concerned that Tories leaving the country would take fugitive slaves with them to freedom. Washington himself called for aid in locating his runaway slaves, unknowingly foreshadowing the Fugitive Slave Act.

By the time Lincoln became president, congressional attempts to appease opposing sides on the slavery issue had carved a path toward implosion, culminating in an attempt at uniting a fissured nation that utterly failed: the Compromise of 1850. Its inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Act, which decreed that fugitive slaves must be returned to their master even if they had reached a free state, was the divisive match that lit the powder keg.

As Delbanco convincingly argues, the Fugitive Slave Act not only put a microscope on America’s fractured moral psyche, but its consequences seem to have echoed into the current political and social landscape. Racism, simultaneously an agent of white supremacy and a symptom, routinely shapes national policies and national identity. Ultimately, the Fugitive Slave Act was not a salve for the deepening fissures in the country’s conscience, but a reflection of America’s inability to grapple with its moral ambiguities. In the hands of an author strictly committed to objective, hard-nosed facts, The War Before the War would read as coldly authoritative and dry. Yet Delbanco treats his subject matter as a historical artifact, a sprawling puzzle and psychological case study, viewing America’s past acts as a troublesome blueprint for America’s present and possibly its future.

The general consensus about the origins of the Civil War point to one irrevocable catalyst: the institution of slavery in the South. Although some would argue that the founding of the United States technically did not depend upon the issue of slavery, the practice had already been threaded into American life by the United States’ inception. With fine-combed research, Andrew Delblanco, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and 2012 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, argues that the Fugitive Slave Act as the centralized fuse that sparked the Civil War.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Shotguns and Stagecoaches

Review by Eve Zibart

If you assume that Hollywood went overboard portraying the derring-do of the shotgun riders of the Old West, think again. These guys were as daredevil, dogged and—according to the tintypes—dashing as any Louis L’Amour novel hero. And the highway bandits (and occasional Wells Fargo turncoat) were every bit as colorful and defiant as those in a romantic ballad. Shotguns and Stagecoaches author John Boessenecker is an unabashed lover of the wild, wild West, and quite frankly, he loves the tales of the bad men as much as those of the good guys. This fun, flamboyant read is his ninth book, and it reads a little like a wall of wanted posters, handlebar mustaches and all.

Henry Wells and William G. Fargo were owners of American Express, but after the discovery of gold in California, they realized that the western half of the United States needed a mail delivery system, especially for valuable commodities. So Wells and Fargo recruited a small army of armed guards, called shotgun messengers. Some of the property they were transporting was astonishing—like thousands of dollars’ worth of gold dust. And it wasn’t just shotguns they used to protect their cargo, but pistols, rifles, knives, whatever came to hand and sheer nerve.

The shotgun messengers were a truly colorful crowd, crossing the legal boundaries in both directions, and often more than once. Some were former or future justice officers, some just happened to be good shots, while others were failed gold miners at unwanted leisure. The luckiest, or smartest, lasted the longest: Henry Ward worked for almost 50 years as shotgun messenger and driver.

Most of the reference material Boessenecker uses is from the period, like contemporary newspaper reports, and the fervid prose has seeped into the text. But that’s much of the fun of the book; short, dramatic scenes and crosscutting violence.

Perhaps the most interesting, and saddest, facet of these mini bios is how many of the stagecoach heroes died lonely, crippled and even destitute—divorced after years of absence, wracked by wounds and hard riding and, in many cases, even harder drinking. Barkeep! Shots for the shotgun messengers.

If you assume that Hollywood went overboard portraying the derring-do of the shotgun riders of the Old West, think again. These guys were as daredevil, dogged and—according to the tintypes—dashing as any Louis L’Amour novel hero.

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

American Dialogue

Review by Roger Bishop

What would our Founding Fathers think about the most divisive issues of our time? So many things have changed since the United States was formed. Joseph J. Ellis—one of the foremost scholars of early American history, a bestselling author and recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—explores this question in his richly rewarding American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. Ellis utilizes the documentary record the founders left behind to help readers better understand the world the Founding Fathers lived in. He includes sections on Thomas Jefferson and race, John Adams and economic inequality, James Madison and the law, George Washington on foreign policy and a section on leadership. The Founding Fathers often disagreed; their greatest legacy is for those who have followed to be able to argue differences, rather than provide definite answers.

All of our present problems have histories, but “none of them is as incomprehensible, when viewed myopically or ahistorically, as our racial dilemma.” Early in his political career, Jefferson advocated measures to end slavery, but he was unable to imagine a biracial society; he insisted on the inferiority of blacks even as he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Adams believed that all men are created equal—but also that inequality was the natural condition for human beings. Of all of the prominent founders, Adams was the only one who anticipated the country’s embedded economic inequality.

The founding of the nation, particularly the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, was a messy political process that, of necessity, involved various compromises. Jefferson wrote in 1816: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence. . . . They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human. . . . But I also know that law and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” These words are relevant today for those who believe in a “living Constitution.”

This immensely stimulating, in-depth look at the past and America’s challenges in the present should be read by anyone interested in American history.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What would our Founding Fathers think about the most divisive issues of our time? So many things have changed since the United States was formed. Joseph J. Ellis—one of the foremost scholars of early American history, a bestselling author and recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—explores this question in his richly rewarding American Dialogue: The Founders and Us.

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

In the Hurricane’s Eye

Review by Edward Morris

Bestselling author and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick subtitles his latest history “The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.” But it could just as accurately be, “the frustrations of George Washington.” Six years into the Revolutionary War, it was still a toss-up as to whether the American rebels or the British crown would prevail.

General Washington, still quartered in New York in 1781, realized that the revolutionaries’ success depended on the difficult task of coordinating with the French navy and persuading them to heed his strategies. But French intransigence wasn’t the totality of Washington’s worries. His troops were resentful at going unpaid, and the colonies were notoriously parsimonious in funding the larger war effort. Then there were the abiding distractions of the general’s inflamed gums, rotting teeth and failing eyesight.

Drawing on letters, journals and sea logs, Philbrick manages to impart the immediacy of breaking news to his descriptions of marches, skirmishes and battles. From describing crucial shifts in the wind during naval conflicts to detailing the unimaginable horror of war wounds, he places the reader in the midst of the fray. The successful three-week siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the fall of 1781 effectively won the war for Washington and humbled his tenacious adversary Lord Cornwallis.

The most tragic figures, however, were the slaves who joined the British in a bid to ensure their own liberation. As the siege tightened, Cornwallis decided that “despite having promised the former slaves their freedom, dwindling provisions required that he jettison them from the fortress” and into the hands of their former masters.

In the Hurricane’s Eye is illustrated with an array of useful maps and a section that reveals what happened to the principal American, French and British players after the war.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bestselling author and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick subtitles his latest history “The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.” But it could just as accurately be, “the frustrations of George Washington.” Six years into the Revolutionary War, it was still a toss-up as to whether the American rebels or the British crown would prevail.

NonfictionAmerican History

The Poison Squad

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

The phrase “celebrity chemist” sounds like an oxymoron, but at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was just that, a crusading chemist who fought for safe food and accurate food labeling. In The Poison Squad, Deborah Blum, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, tells Wiley’s story, as well as the larger story of what happened to our food supply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Indiana-born Wiley first tested foods at Purdue University, and then moved to the newly formed U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1883. As Americans flocked to cities and the demand for milk, meat and canned food grew, industrial producers added often-poisonous chemicals like formaldehyde, borax and salicylic acid to prevent or hide spoilage. Producers also had little compunction about false labels and ads, or about selling rotten meat and eggs. Wiley and his staff tested foods, drinks, spices and condiments, hoping to influence Congress to pass food-safety laws. Wiley also studied the effect of those chemical additives, recruiting men for what one reporter called the Poison Squad. The Poison Squad recruits ate food laced with borax, and only half the men made it through the five rounds of testing; the others dropped out because of illness, presumably brought on by the borax.

Wiley could be rigid, coming into conflict with his boss and with Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, who worried about government overreach. But he was beloved by the Agriculture Department’s clerks and secretaries for his decades’ worth of efforts to protect the nation’s food. In his 60s, Wiley married ardent suffragist Anna Kelton, a late-life love story. The Poison Squad offers a well-researched portrait of Wiley, rather unappealing food facts and an era of rapid American growth, with a government scrambling to catch up.

The phrase “celebrity chemist” sounds like an oxymoron, but at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was just that, a crusading chemist who fought for safe food and accurate food labeling.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Black Flags, Blue Waters

Review by Anne Bartlett

Pity poor, honest Robert Snead. A justice in colonial Philadelphia in 1697, he was determined to enforce the laws against piracy by arresting members of pirate Henry Avery’s crew who were living in the city. But the governor’s daughter was married to one of them. Snead’s fellow justice also had a relative married to a pirate. They blocked him at every turn. Ultimately, the sheriff let the criminals “escape.” A disgusted Snead gave up.

In a nutshell, that’s how the so-called “Golden Age” of piracy from 1680-1726 became so golden. American colonists not only tolerated piracy, they built their economy on its loot. As author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates in his gripping Black Flags, Blue Waters, colonists and pirates were “partners in crime”—until their interests diverged.

Dolin, who has previously written popular narratives about whaling, the fur trade and opium trafficking, finds another can’t-miss subject in the adventures of Kidd, Bonnet, Blackbeard and their ilk. Dolin makes it fresh by focusing on the interaction between pirates and the British colonies. His evidence is irrefutable: pirate cash and stolen goods were invaluable to colonial ports.

As long as the pirates were attacking Spanish and Muslim ships, the colonists were delighted to abet them. But, inevitably, the authorities got around to cracking down, and the pirates sought new victims closer to home. The culmination was Blackbeard’s blockade of Charleston, which led to the exciting chase that ended in his death. The colonists were now pirate hunters.

Many of the infamous pirates were hanged, and they didn’t leave behind buried treasure. But Dolin ends with real treasure: the discovery in 1984 of the wreck of Samuel Bellamy’s pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod, producing “a torrent of artifacts.” Our fascination with the robbers who sailed under the black flags is unlikely to end any time soon.

Pity poor, honest Robert Snead. A justice in colonial Philadelphia in 1697, he was determined to enforce the laws against piracy by arresting members of pirate Henry Avery’s crew who were living in the city. But the governor’s daughter was married to one of them. Snead’s fellow justice also had a relative married to a pirate. They blocked him at every turn. Ultimately, the sheriff let the criminals “escape.” A disgusted Snead gave up.

NonfictionWomen's HistorySocial Science

Rage Becomes Her

Review by Vanessa Willoughby

Under the rules of the patriarchy, an angry woman is a more than a minor inconvenience: She is a problem. When a woman expresses her anger, she betrays the parameters of femininity imposed by a society that views men as humans and women as passive objects. Our society still operates on tired gender roles and misogynistic stereotypes that routinely silence, shame and demean women. Anger is regarded as a positive trait when associated with masculinity, yet it is simultaneously seen as the antithesis of what is acceptable behavior for women.

In the age of the #MeToo movement, the concept of recognizing and validating women’s anger has reached a palpable sense of urgency. For too long, women have been told that they should not only regulate their emotions but bury them while society encourages men to disregard emotion in favor of physical aggression. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger is part cultural analysis and part call to arms. Chemaly—an award-winning author, activist and the Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project—writes with clear-eyed conviction. Using an arresting combination of personal anecdotes, interviews and heavily researched data, Chemaly argues that women should reclaim their anger. She acknowledges that this process varies between women of different races, namely the ways in which white women can weaponize their privilege and anger against black women. While white women are routinely treated as “fragile” and “delicate” damsels in distress (see “Missing White Woman Syndrome”), black women’s anger is pathologized as dangerous, volatile—even criminal.

Nevertheless, women have historically been forced to undertake immense emotional labor that comes at the expense of their mental, emotional and physical health. For Chemaly, a liberated woman is one who can freely find strength in her rage.

Using an arresting combination of personal anecdotes, interviews and heavily researched data, Soraya Chemaly argues that women should reclaim their anger.
History

Drawn to the City of Light

Review by Sukey Howard

When it comes to making history live, nobody does it better than David McCullough. Now, with The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, he’s done it again in spades. You won’t find Hemingway or Gertrude Stein or any of the Americans we usually associate with the City of Light. The Yankees in McCullough’s account were the first wave of “talented, aspiring Americans” who began to make the transformative, transatlantic voyage in increasing numbers in the 1830s. From James Fenimore Cooper, Samuel F.B. Morse, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Elizabeth Blackwell to Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and Harriet Beecher Stowe, they came to learn and to immerse themselves in a kindred yet very different culture where wine was cheaper than milk, the food was fabulous, the boulevards were broad and the astounding treasures of the Louvre were open to the public. Weaving detailed bios of these Americans into the colorful fabric of Parisian history from 1830 to 1900, McCullough makes excellent use of his ability to simultaneously entertain and educate, while master narrator Edward Herrmann’s perfect pacing makes this journey from apple pie to tarte tatin into compelling listening.

When it comes to making history live, nobody does it better than David McCullough. Now, with The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, he’s done it again in spades. You won’t find Hemingway or Gertrude Stein or any of the Americans we usually associate with the…
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Leadership

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

With Leadership: In Turbulent Times, pre-eminent presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin turns her perceptive lens to a question on the minds of many Americans these days: What is leadership?

But the “turbulent times” of the title are not, in fact, our own. Instead, Goodwin examines the leadership styles and challenges facing four previous United States presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Goodwin has written about these men in previous works, but her approach here uncovers new insights and understanding—both for readers and for herself. “After five decades of studying presidential history, examining these four men through the lens of leadership allowed me to discover so many new things about them that I felt as if I was meeting them for the first time,” Goodwin reflects.

Readers will share that sense of discovery. Goodwin divides her study into three thematic areas: Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership; Adversity and Growth; and The Leader and the Times: How They Led. Within these sections, she devotes a chapter to each president. These chapters are chronological, allowing the reader to better appreciate and understand the historical forces that shaped the four presidents’ growth and decisions.

In the final section, Goodwin examines different kinds of leadership: transformational, crisis management, turnaround and visionary. Readers follow Lincoln as he grapples with the Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy Roosevelt as he deals with the coal strike of 1902, FDR through the first hundred days of his presidency in 1933 and Johnson as he approaches civil rights.

In an epilogue titled “On Death and Remembrance,” Goodwin reflects on the final days of each president and their legacies for us today. With Leadership, Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin cements her reputation as a scholar with a remarkable ability to bring the complexities of our past to life for everyday readers. It’s a welcome gift indeed.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With Leadership: In Turbulent Times, pre-eminent presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin turns her perceptive lens to a question on the minds of many Americans these days: What is leadership?

NonfictionWomen's History

Pure

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Refugees from the “purity industry,” which had a heavy influence on evangelical youth in the latter years of the 20th century, may recognize themselves in Pure, Linda Kay Klein’s eye-opening study of what went wrong when strict interpretations of biblical Scripture became cultural touchstones.

In the evangelical community, sexual shaming and a focus on purity were used to promote strict sexual abstinence before marriage, especially for girls. Girls raised within this culture knew little about their own sexualities and were discouraged by parents and pastors from questioning the biases of their gender roles. If boys were tempted by a girl, or even if she was raped, it was her fault: She became a “stumbling block,” and her body became a shameful inspiration toward sin. If a woman managed to save herself for marriage, she was expected to know how to fulfill her husband’s desires, and if she could not and he left or committed adultery, this was also her fault; she had failed to satisfy him in her wifely duties. 

Klein experienced all of this firsthand, and she bears the scars. She was raised in this culture but began to question its focus on female sexual purity when a youth pastor in her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a child. Klein has since spent years interviewing many women about their church experiences, and their accounts are strikingly similar, graphic and disturbing. The “nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia” they suffered amounted to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: “We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.” For many, the results were, and continue to be, devastating.

Klein’s research supporting the need for reform is compelling, and she makes it clear that sexism and sexual shame directed toward women and young girls are endemic in our society. Today, more enlightened and inclusive church communities are led by youth pastors who are comfortable exploring the larger issue of sexual ethics and decision-making. For those who seek spiritual community without gender bias, Klein offers empathy and new choices. 

Refugees from the “purity industry,” which had a heavy influence on evangelical youth in the latter years of the 20th century, may recognize themselves in Pure, Linda Kay Klein’s eye-opening study of what went wrong when strict interpretations of biblical scripture became cultural touchstones.

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