Separated by 227 years, two men paddled up the longest river in Canada, one in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, the other wondering why he had never heard of that man’s earlier journey. In 1789, Scotsman Alexander Mackenzie mapped out his journey along the river that would one day bear his name, planning to bring along fellow fur traders, indigenous guides and plenty of pemmican, a condensed food composed of protein, fat and dried fruit. He followed the river through Canada’s vast Northwest Territories, but could not find the mythical shortcut to China and Russia that would have aided global trade. In 2016, Brian Castner, writer and certified river guide, took the same trip with a GPS, paper topographical maps, one fellow paddler for each stretch of his 1,125-mile journey—and plenty of pemmican. Their stories are skillfully intertwined in Castner’s thoroughly intriguing and enlightening Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage.

The Mackenzie River—or the Deh Cho, or the Nagwichoonjik, or the Kuukpak, variously—is the second-longest river in North America, after the Mississippi. Threading north from the Great Slave Lake to the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean, it traverses “one of the last places on earth unmapped by Google Street View.”

Both Castner and Mackenzie grappled constantly with biting flies so big they’re called bulldogs, swarms of ravenous mosquitoes, perilous rapids and fierce summer weather. The isolated indigenous tribes they met along the way were sometimes helpful, often wary and always on the verge of change, both natural and man-made. Neither man’s journey went as expected. Both were dismayed by what they learned.

Mackenzie believed the river led to the Northwest Passage, but he was 200 years too early: The Arctic Ocean during his journey was an impenetrable frozen sea. He had failed. Castner, arriving at the same spot, found fast-melting polar ice. Pipelines and oil-rigs may soon further transform both the culture and land of the First Nations people. For anyone concerned with the global effects of climate change, the meaning behind Disappointment River becomes alarmingly clear.

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

When political leaders in America and abroad search for successful historical precedents for solutions to crises, we sometimes hear calls for “a new Marshall Plan.” That is not an easily attainable goal. The conditions and personalities that made the original plan possible were unique to a post-World War II world, as Benn Steil explains in his compelling, authoritative and lucid The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War.

By 1947, many of President Truman’s top advisers saw the unity of the Western world and its recovery as the only way to avert another major U.S. military commitment in Europe. Secretary of State George C. Marshall was tasked with creating a plan to stabilize Europe. What began as a humanitarian effort to assist Germany and our European allies—who were on the edge of economic, social and political collapse at the end of WWII—became a serious challenge to Joseph Stalin’s plans for taking over Europe and instituting communism. The crisis that ensued gave birth to the Cold War.

Steil’s superb narrative combines diplomatic, economic and political history with descriptions of such episodes as the Berlin Airlift, along with vivid portraits of the diverse primary personalities, who were often at odds with each other. Key shapers of the Marshall Plan included Ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan, who brought brilliant insights and a diplomatic strategy; William L. Clayton, who gave it economic principles; and future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who delivered a speech Truman later referred to as “the prologue to the Marshall Plan.” As essential as anyone was Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican from Michigan, who shepherded appropriate legislation through the Republican-controlled Congress. George Marshall later reflected that without Vandenberg, “the plan would not have succeeded.”

The Marshall Plan was followed by the founding of NATO and the European Union, important legacies that continue today. This dramatic and engaging account of one of the most complex but enduring achievements of American foreign policy deserves a wide readership.

In the traditional story of the conquest of Mexico, as told by the conquistadors themselves, the brilliant strategist Hernando Cortés and a small, valiant band of Spanish conquistadors marched into the capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan (where Mexico City now stands), on November 8, 1519. They were met by a weak and fearful Montezuma, who almost immediately surrendered his empire to the Spaniards. Montezuma was later stoned to death by his own people, and a war broke out in which the Spaniards were soon victorious. That a small band of conquistadors could defeat a massive army of Mesoamerican warriors proved the superiority of Western culture. For the next 500 years, the epic tale was embellished, streamlined and repeated so often that it assumed the aura of truth.

In his brilliant deep dive into the history and scholarship about this famous episode, Matthew Restall contests almost every assertion in the traditional account of the conquest of the Aztec empire. Restall is emphatic and witty in his argument that Montezuma did not surrender; the assumption that he did was the result of ignorance about the subtleties of the native language. Restall credibly argues that as the shrewd leader of a very advanced civilization, Montezuma was neither weak nor fearful. Nor was Cortés particularly brilliant, as his earlier career shows, and he was less in control of his comrades than he claimed. The conquistadors also benefited immensely from internal rivalries among the Aztecs and other Mesoamericans, and the catastrophic spread of disease.

Through diligent research, Restall presents readers with a fascinating view of Montezuma, mounting a convincing argument that Cortés’ self-serving accounts and the traditional narrative are almost surely false.

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

To be clear, the title of this book by Alexander Langlands is Cræft, not “craft.” When we think of craft, we tend to think of expensive handmade objects, often considered anachronisms in a world of mass production and mass consumption. Cræft (pronounced “creft”) is the Anglo-Saxon root for the modern word “craft,” and it includes both the product and the process of crafting. But cræft has a more profound meaning: It is the wisdom, handed down from previous generations, that enables the crafter to create a perfectly useful object.

Langlands is an experimental archaeologist; he replicates ancient artifacts and processes to gain greater insights into the cultures that produced them. In Cræft, he explains how ancient craftsmen used their skill, available natural resources and especially cræft to solve the problems that life threw at them. Need temporary sheep pens? Use your weaving skills to create portable wicker fencing. Want a permanent solution for keeping sheep out of your grain fields? Forge tools that help you prune and manipulate trees to form hedgerows. No trees around? Use rocks to create dry stone walls of such cunning manufacture that they last for generations—without mortar.

Langlands is not merely describing the past; cræft has shaped our present and can enhance our future. Anyone who has walked in the English countryside can see how cræft molded the natural environment: Ancient burial mounds, weirs and dikes, even the barren moorlands that inspired the Brontë sisters testify to the human knack for devising ingenious solutions to difficult problems. The importance of cræft is demonstrated by the devastating effects its absence can have: The modern tendency to favor mechanization over cræft, Langlands posits, has resulted in flooding, soil degradation and global warming. In a world with diminishing resources, it might be wise to tap into cræft to ensure a sustainable future. Langlands has written an excellent introduction to guide us.

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

Unlike most histories of 16th-century England, which concentrate on the machinations and religious convulsions of the Tudor monarchy, London’s Triumph concerns itself with the capital city’s merchant class and what it did to launch the explorations and conquests that would ultimately result in the world-girdling British empire of the 19th century.

Founded by the Romans around 43 A.D., by 1500. London had grown into a city of about 50,000 residents. It bustled with the activities of “cloth workers, drapers, goldsmiths, skinners, tallow chandlers, vintners, butchers and so on,” but it still took a very distant backseat as a trading center to Antwerp. But by 1600, London had its own thriving financial hub, a reputation for opening new markets (Russia chief among them), merchant companies dedicated to sending trading expeditions into still-unmapped regions of the globe and a population of 200,000.

Stephen Alford’s descriptions of London and its growth are vivid. Tracing the footsteps of such larger-than-life personalities as the navigator Sebastian Cabot and the geographer Richard Hakluyt, he walks the reader down colorfully named streets and alleys, strides through the deafening clamor of trading stalls and peers curiously into the chapels and tombs of ancient churches. He also witnesses the city’s agonies as it is wrenched by plague, famine and an immigration crisis.

Of course, London wasn’t all about exploration and economic boil. Whether Catholic or Protestant, the rich, lavishly costumed merchants dutifully provided alms to the poor, worried that their business dealings might cross the line into usury and convinced themselves that bringing Christianity to distant lands was the fulfillment of God’s will. As the century came to a close, many were casting their missionary eyes on the alluring shores of America.

Poet and scholar Kevin Young offers a history of the hoax and a chilling indictment of our current moment in this ambitious book. Bunk opens in the 19th century—the days of P.T. Barnum, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe—as Young pulls back history’s curtain to reveal hoaxes, humbug and circus tents with a sideshow of spiritualism and sensationalism.

But Young is not content to remain in the sepia-toned past. “If all of this sounds familiar,” he writes, “it is because the transformative advent of the penny press most resembles the current change demonstrated, if not caused, by the internet.” Shifting effortlessly from the 19th century to the 21st, Young draws connections between words like swindler, diddling and confidence man and contemporary buzzwords like plagiarism, truthiness and fake news. In both eras, a disenfranchised racial other haunts the discourse.

“The exotic other, the dark double” is a key player in historical and contemporary hoaxes, from the colonialists who donned redface to confuse the British during the Boston Tea Party to Nasdijj, a white man who co-opted a Navajo identity in order to publish a variety of written work in 1999 and the early 2000s. Nasdijj was exposed the very month that James Frey admitted to grossly misrepresenting the facts of his life in his bestselling book A Million Little Pieces. More than simply recounting these incidents and dozens more, Young uses them to facilitate his larger goal: a theory of the hoax itself and the fantasies that it reveals. Like a joke that brings down the house, a hoax unites a cunning speaker with a crowd that wants to be fooled. And today the stakes are higher than ever. Young examines the effects of deception on American politics, literature and everyday life. Long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction, Bunk is a powerful, far-reaching read.

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As author and scholar Joanna Scutts writes in The Extra Woman, her provocative, in-depth look at 20th-century women and their historic struggle to find their place, “it’s easy to forget that exercising the right to live your life as you choose is still a political act, and a brave act—far braver for some people than for others.”

Among those brave women defying cultural expectations was Marjorie Hillis, a lifestyle guru whose self-help books, beginning in 1936 with the game-changing Live Alone and Like It, spanned the Depression, World War II and the reawakening of feminism in the 1960s. Dubbed “the queen of the Live-Aloners,” Hillis, a minister’s daughter and Vogue fashion editor, tackled the economic and social challenges for single women like herself (she married at 49). Her practical tips about decorating, dining, dressing and dating stayed clear of the soapbox, sparing her readers any moralizing about their lifestyle. No husband? No children? Make the most of what you have, Hillis advised, and do it all with style.

For Scutts, Hillis was a spark at the beginning of the rise of 20th-century feminism. Rosie the Riveter replaced the giddy flapper of the 1920s, becoming an icon for wartime women getting the job done. Sassy, sexy Mae West and spunky Kathryn Hepburn became, not without controversy, Hollywood idols. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown, future editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan— and unmarried until 37— wrote Sex and the Single Girl, and the lid came off that topic. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, asked, “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?”

Scutts covers a lot of ground here, and she does it all so well that her readers may be inspired to dig further: the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History, where Scutts currently serves as a fellow, is a good start.