In the years after World War I, as Hitler and his followers gained attention and then power in Germany, many foreign visitors, especially from Britain and the United States, poured into the country. Foreigners continued to be captivated by Germany’s natural beauty, its strong cultural heritage in literature, music and philosophy, its technological advances and the friendliness of its citizens. Years later, when those visitors looked back at their prewar visits, most genuinely claimed that they could not have been aware of the terrible actions of the Nazis. Despite rumors and evidence of disturbing activity, many had made up their minds before they came of what they were to see—or not see. Surprisingly few, it seems, had their minds changed as a direct result of their visits.

Julia Boyd has done exhaustive research on these visitors and their firsthand accounts of their visits. In her extraordinary and absorbing Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945, she tells their stories, often in their own words, as they “accidentally witnessed,” in varying degrees, the transformation of a government and its people before their eyes. The author’s nuanced and lively narrative shows that a vigorous propaganda campaign by the Nazis, targeted toward tourists and other visitors, was hugely successful for years but became less so as the government tightened its control on the eve of World War II.

Foreign diplomats and reporters followed events closely and generally understood what was going on. But others who were visiting for relatively short periods, including such keen observers as scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, were bewildered by the truth. In 1936, Du Bois wrote that it was hard to “express an opinion about Germany today which is true in all respects without numerous modifications and explanations.” That same year, author Thomas Wolfe, who loved Germany and whose novels were bestsellers there, dared to speak out in an essay critical of the regime after a Jewish acquaintance was arrested, leading to great personal cost.

These firsthand glimpses of a dark time in Germany show us the complexity of appearances, and Boyd’s book should be widely read.

The thrills of air racing, so popular in the 1920s and ’30s, are now mostly forgotten, along with the names of the aviators who risked their lives for huge crowds, three-foot trophies and, of course, the cash prizes. Lost with them was the story of the “Powder Puffs,” women who defied the time’s rampant gender discrimination and triumphed in (or plummeted from) the sky. Of these pioneer breakers of the ultimate glass ceiling, perhaps only one name has stayed familiar: the beloved and doomed Amelia Earhart. Keith O’Brien’s spectacularly detailed Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History changes all that, re-creating a world that can still inspire us today.

Meet Louise Thaden, a married mother of two; Ruth Elder, a beautiful Alabama divorcée; Ruth Nichols, a woman unhappily born into wealth; and Florence Klingensmith, whose promising aviation career ended in tragedy. True resisters, they were empowered by their recently gained right to vote and inspired by aviation’s rising popularity. Charles Lindbergh’s recent solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 was an achievement that begged for a female challenger, and it had one soon enough.

O’Brien keeps a sharp eye on the planes as well. The flimsily built early aircraft regularly lost their wings, shed their wheels and exploded in flames, sometimes miraculously leaving their pilots alive and eager to fly again. Men found financial support—and better planes—much easier to come by than women, who routinely faced reporters asking why they weren’t at home cooking dinner. Elder and Klingensmith tried to dodge the husband question, while Earhart allowed her husband, prominent New York publisher George P. Putnam, to be her relentless PR man who “probably saved her from becoming a nice old maid.”

The women of aviation were “friendly enemies,” competing for speed and distance records while supporting each other on the ground and in the air. Known collectively as the Ninety Nines, they encouraged young women to aim high. As Earhart said, a woman’s place “is wherever her individual aptitude places her.”

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

By the early 20th century, thanks to Queen Victoria’s prodigious matchmaking, almost all the ruling families across Europe were related. Among Victoria’s favorite grandchildren was Alexandra Feodorovna, who went on to marry her cousin Nicholas II, the czar of Russia. Alexandra’s new husband looked so similar to George, their mutual cousin and the future king of England, that they could have passed for identical twins.

So why, given all the family ties, were “Alicky” and “Nicky” left to die at the hands of revolutionaries? Many of the royal cousins attempted to create a plan for rescue, but the bulk of the blame for their deaths has generally been laid on King George V. But in her new book, The Race to Save the Romanovs, historian Helen Rappaport argues that British anti-royal sentiment in that era was so strong that rescuing the Romanovs could have been disastrous for King George’s family.

This is not the sweet, sacrificial Nicholas and Alexandra of other biographies. Rappaport writes—with substantial evidence—that the czar was a weak leader, and the czarina was a decided and sometimes oblivious partisan. They were, however, deeply devoted to one another and to their children. Rappaport concludes that no rescue attempt would have succeeded because the Romanovs would never have abandoned the motherland.

Ultimately, however, what resonates is the irony of the book’s title. There was no “race,” or even a jog: The Romanovs were all but abandoned by their extended family.

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

In 1542, the Omagua tribe of the Amazon River basin made a terrible strategic mistake: They saved the lives of a band of starving Spanish explorers. After the Spaniards recovered, they continued upriver, pillaging and killing. So began the violence and despoliation that continue today. The Omagua are barely hanging on; many other tribes are gone forever.

Chris Feliciano Arnold’s The Third Bank of the River presents a wide-ranging panorama of this vast region in western Brazil, so full of both promise and suffering. Combining history, contemporary reporting and memoir, Arnold entwines the stories of the region’s Amazon River basin’s endangered indigenous tribes, the violence of the jungle city Manaus and its economy of environmental exploitation and cocaine trafficking.

The days when rubber barons worked natives to death are gone, but the tribes still face threats—particularly from the diseases of Caucasians. In one astonishing incident from 2014, an isolated tribe under pressure from illegal loggers raided a less isolated village, but were gravely sickened by contact with stolen clothing.

In Manaus, the paramilitary police have become a gang competing with drug cartels. In retaliation for the killing of an off-duty cop, death squads of officers assassinated dozens of random victims in drive-by shootings during 2015’s “Bloody Weekend.” Arnold follows the investigation into the massacre, and uncovers the life of one victim—an ordinary man who loved to dance.

In these travels, Arnold is undergoing his own process of self-discovery. Born in Brazil, then adopted as an infant by an Oregon family, he sees how easily he could have been one of the lost boys of Manaus. But all is not hopeless: public health experts treat the tribes, anthropologists debate how best to protect them, missionaries do their best to help. Brazil’s political system may be in crisis, but decent individuals persevere.

Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy.

Along the way, Rhodes introduces readers to inventors and scientists whose discoveries fueled work on various methods of extracting and harnessing different sources of energy. Readers will be familiar with stories about Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity and James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, but Rhodes also introduces lesser-known innovators like Denis Papin, the 18th-century scientist who invented a double-acting steam engine that Watt used as a model, but whose inventions were never supported by others, and Richard Trevithick, the 19th-century inventor of a portable steam engine, among many others.

Rhodes judiciously points out that the overdependence on various sources of energy leads to their depletion and to dangerous threats to health such as air and water pollution. Rhodes concludes that the greatest challenge for the 21st century will be limiting global warming while providing energy for a population that will grow by 25 percent by 2100. This exceptional book is required reading for anyone concerned about the human impact on the future of the world. Rhodes optimistically predicts that by using all sources of energy—nuclear, solar and renewable resources—the world can meet the needs of its growing population.

What did the founders intend to be the heart and soul of our country? In his carefully crafted, sweeping and beautifully written The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer and historian Jon Meacham finds the answer in the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and it is “incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities.” The struggle to be “the better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln’s words, must contend with contrary forces such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Scare, which divide rather than unite us in the effort to achieve that vision. Issues of extremism, racism, nativism, isolationism, gender equality and others that we face today are not new. How Americans have addressed such issues in the past gives Meacham reason to be optimistic about our future.      

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote shortly before her death, “One thing I believe profoundly: We make our own history.” But it is important that we know and understand what has happened in our collective past, and Meacham explains that past brilliantly. He writes, “Many Americans are less than eager to acknowledge that our national greatness was built on explicit and implicit apartheid.” Even Americans with historical amnesia cannot refute Meacham’s rigorously documented text.   

Reformers and citizen activists can wield great influence, but the leadership of the president is crucial. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted during the 1932 campaign, “The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it . . . it is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” Meacham says he wrote this book “not because the past American presidents have always been right, but because the incumbent American president is so often wrong.”

The better presidents and many others, such as Martin Luther King Jr., do not give in to the mentality that would use hate and fear and sometimes violence to achieve their ends. Instead, “they conquer them with a breadth of vision that speaks to the best parts of our soul.” The compelling narratives presented here show that, despite tremendous pressure to surrender to the forces of division, we can all work to achieve the founders’ vision. This insightful and reader-friendly book should be widely read and discussed.     

In 2010, historian and author Graham Robb and his wife found themselves at the railway station in Carlisle, in the far northwest part of England near the Scottish border. They had just purchased a house in the area. But the move didn’t herald long, exploratory car trips. Instead, the couple brought only their bicycles.

On their journeys, they meet people like Wattie Blakey, an elderly mole catcher, just one of the many characters—some from history—who spring to life in Robb’s new book about a desolate border tract known as the Debatable Land, the oldest territorial division in Great Britain.

While the Debatable Land itself is only 13 miles long, the region is a site of legend, conflicts, battles and mystery. In digging up its history, Robb covers a large swath of time. But in true cyclist fashion, the telling is not rushed but leisurely: The author stops to show us points of interest and sights along the way. We learn about the terrain, the wind and the seasons as we accompany Robb on research trips by bicycle, or even as he passes a band of Scottish sheep while scrunching through the snow to his mailbox. This intimate portrait of the land helps us imagine its colorful past of rebellious clans and border raiders.

In this way, readers become part of this erudite historian’s own process of discovery. Robb doesn’t end his exploration in the distant past. Instead, he ventures into the 21st century, when the Brexit vote has raised the possibility of a new referendum on Scottish independence. For Anglophiles, history lovers and, yes, cyclists, The Debatable Land is a journey worth taking.

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