At the age of 12, when his father was imprisoned for not paying his debts, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a factory. He walked to his job, to his meager lodgings, to find his dinner in a market stall and to visit Marshalsea prison, where the rest of his family was living. Dickens never lost this habit of walking. And as Judith Flanders reveals in her stunning new book, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, the sights, sounds and smells of the city that infuse his novels were not simply the work of a brilliant imagination but “the reportage of a great observer.”

No mean observer herself, Flanders packs her narrative with intriguing details that bring the Victorian streets alive. She begins, as working people did, in early morning, when long lines of carts and costermongers converged on Covent Garden. Weaving a tapestry as colorful as a market flower display, Flanders not only describes such things as changes in transportation but takes us right into the streets, to battle the mud and to be smothered in dust.

The Victorian City is social history at its finest, a must-read for Dickens fans or anyone who loves London. It reminds us why this time period is endlessly fascinating to read about, but probably not a place we’d really want to live.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It is far easier to be morally outraged by a situation than morally engaged in confronting it. We look back at the horrors of slavery or the Holocaust and exclaim, “How could they have let this happen,” even as we effectively ignore the current waves of human miseries washing around our feet. Gil and Eleanor Kraus were no such antiseptic moralists.

In 1939, as Hitler’s persecution of the Jews reached new levels of torment, this prosperous, middle-class Jewish couple from Philadelphia took it upon themselves to select and bring back to America 50 endangered Jewish children from Vienna and to secure for them full financial support—with no government aid—until they could be reunited with their families or, failing that, adopted out. (They settled on 50 children by assessing the community resources available to them.)

Author Steven Pressman, who is married to one of the Krauses’ granddaughters and directed an HBO documentary about the couple, says they were not motivated by religion. Nor did they have any personal ties to the children they sought to save. For them, it was strictly a humanitarian effort. Gil was a lawyer, Eleanor a housewife. At the time they assumed the task, they had two children of their own, a son, 13, and a daughter, 9.

What stands out in 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany is how calmly, methodically and persistently the Krauses went about their work. Government officials discouraged them, as did other Jewish rescue groups who feared that such a high-profile undertaking would cause an anti-Semitic backlash. Moreover, they knew they would be in personal danger when they went into Austria and Germany to persuade the Nazis to let the children leave. Still, they plowed on. Assisting them in their endeavor was their friend and family pediatrician, Bob Schless, who managed to fall in love during the perilous and frustrating mission that took months to plan and complete.

Pressman’s account, which draws on a trove of Kraus family documents and pictures, illustrates just how resistant America was to admitting Jews—even Jewish children—when Germany was still willing to expel rather than exterminate them. This resistance makes the Krauses’ achievement all the more remarkable. As Paul A. Shapiro of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes in the afterword, “the United States took in a total of only about 1,000 unaccompanied children [during this period], of whom fifty—or one of every twenty—were saved by this one couple from Philadelphia.”

On the heels of her death in February comes an intriguing new book examining the legacy of Shirley Temple. Author John F. Kasson confines his study to the child star’s impact on popular culture at a time when escapist entertainment was both luxury and dire necessity. The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression may sound like hyperbole, but Temple’s impact on the nation’s self-image proves unimpeachable.

From humble beginnings in Santa Monica, young Shirley was groomed into star material by her mother, but her talent and charisma were what earned her fame. For four years, she was the top box office earner in the nation; adults complained that they couldn’t get in to see her films because the children in attendance wouldn’t leave the theater. Shirley Temple merchandise sold in the millions, and advertisers learned that marketing to parents through their children was a winning strategy.

Kasson parallels Temple’s success with Franklin Roosevelt’s election and the economic turnaround of the New Deal, describing her as crucial to national optimism at a tenuous moment. One reporter referred only half-jokingly to the TRA or “Temple Recovery Act,” equating her economic impact with that of the government programs of the time.

Little Girl isn’t a tell-all biography, but there’s mention of Temple’s tantrums and her parents’ disastrous mismanagement of her finances, which left her roughly $44,000 of more than $3 million earned. Her mother understated Shirley’s age, most likely to keep the child star young, and lucrative, for as long as possible. Despite such circumstances, she grew into a seemingly normal, well-adjusted adult. The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression will appeal to biography fans, but also to pop culture historians; her influence still resonates today.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Contemporary views of the Mormon Church have been shaped by influences as disparate as the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon, the HBO series “Big Love” and the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. Suffice it to say that most Americans have a shallow understanding of Mormonism. Some view Mormons as squeaky-clean apostles doing door-to-door missionary work. Others label Mormons as hedonistic polygamists, even though multiple marriages have been prohibited for more than a century by the official Mormon Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Journalist Alex Beam tries to provide some context in his historical narrative, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church. The book doesn’t try to correct the stereotypes of contemporary society. Rather, American Crucifixion explains the origins of Mormonism and shows that from the start, the faith was viewed with suspicion and hounded by detractors.

Beam tells the story of Joseph Smith, a humble farm boy from upstate New York who said an angel had told him about a set of golden plates bearing the religious history of America. Smith said the angel directed him to the buried plates, and he set about translating them into the Book of Mormon, which was published in 1830. The 600-page book was a retelling of the Bible, including a story of two ancient tribes of Israel that made their way to America and buried the golden plates in the hope of future discovery. After claiming to find the plates, Smith declared himself a prophet and founded the Church of Christ.

Critics immediately lashed out at Smith and his new religion, and the Mormons were repeatedly ostracized and uprooted, marching westward to Ohio and later to Missouri. Mormonism became even more controversial when Smith started accumulating multiple wives and polygamy became an accepted part of the faith.

It was in the Mississippi River town of Nauvoo, Illinois, that tensions reached a crescendo. Upset with Smith’s polygamy policy and his building of a temple, locals imprisoned him in neighboring Carthage, Illinois. Beam gives a vivid description of the events of June 27, 1844, when a mob stormed the jail, killing Smith and his brother, Hyrum, his would-be successor. It was church leader Brigham Young who assumed control, leading the Mormons once again westward to Utah.

American Crucifixion details the mystery and controversy that has followed Mormonism from its inception. The book provides important perspective as to why today, some still violently reject its doctrine, while others follow with faith.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

No burning bushes need apply, nor any partings of the sea, and definitely not any tablets of the Law given to Moses at Mount Sinai, written (as the Torah reports) by the finger of God Himself. For historian Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews belongs only and literally—splendidly and literately—to what can be found written down in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic or any other of the languages spoken and written by Jews over millennia of wandering. This record of Jewish writing (overlapping with the Bible itself, of course) is so significant, so astonishing in its testimony of the daily lives of Jews for 3,000 years, it would be perverse, Schama implies, to confound the powerful narrative of Holy Scripture with the ample and still-growing documentary evidence we have about the real lives of real Jews from very early on.

Whether it’s papyrus or potsherd or parchment (the trinity forming the title of Schama’s magnificent volume, the first of a planned two-volume set), stone inscription or scroll or codex, archaeologists have worked together with historians to piece together an account of early Jewish history that neither refutes nor essentially undermines the Bible, but rather illuminates and complicates that unmanageable pile of sacred books. Schama’s unique achievement as our best public intellectual—a presenter in the great company of Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski, and who (walking sandal-shod in their footsteps) can be seen on PBS this spring, doing the film version of this book—springs largely from his flawless intuition about which stories to relate, those telling anecdotes that open up entire worlds of historic relations. For instance:

The presence of Jewish mercenaries in the 5th century BCE, living not in denial, but in the Nile (on an Egyptian island), just a century after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, defies (but does not deny) Biblical history, most of all in the striking evidence it gives of a pattern of symbiotic coexistence between Jews and non-Jews that endures for many centuries, until (alas) a new pattern of persecutions by Christians begins in the Middle Ages.

Up to the horrific expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, each of Schama’s accounts becomes more vivid, and gorgeously illustrated, than the last, as the material evidence grows thicker with the passage of time. Jews may not have invented writing, but we certainly invented the idea of writing as a very heaven upon earth, against severe odds. You will find a great and habitable corner of that paradise in Schama’s book.

Michael Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in 1961 while on an art-collecting trip in the Asmat region along the coast of southwest New Guinea. His boat capsized in rough waters, and, after he and a companion had waited overnight for rescue, Rockefeller decided to swim to shore, buoyed by two empty gasoline cans. He was never seen again—at least not by any witnesses who’ve been willing to come forward.

The official cause of death was drowning at sea. But even as the search for young Rockefeller was still going on, rumors began surfacing that he had been killed and eaten by Asmat natives, among whom cannibalism was still a common and sacred practice. The aim of Savage Harvest is to settle the question of Rockefeller’s fate, just as earlier books and articles have attempted.

Since Carl Hoffman opens his narrative with a jarringly graphic description of what might have been Rockefeller’s last agonizing minutes, it will come as no surprise that he is indeed convinced that the young man was cannibalized. A contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler, Hoffman forms and undergirds his thesis by visiting the same villages Rockefeller scoured for art objects, interviewing descendants and kinsmen of those rumored to have killed him and uncovering personal correspondences and official documents concerning the disappearance. He also explains how the politics of the region— waning Dutch colonialism vs. rising Indonesian nationalism—figured into the story.

Hoffman depicts Rockefeller as a young man bent on pleasing his doting father—talented, to be sure, but a bit overeager and entitled, and oblivious to the fact that the art objects he was acquiring so matter-of-factly still had deep spiritual significance to their creators. Among local tribes, the author explains, taking revenge against one’s enemies was a way of restoring balance to the universe. He speculates that Rockefeller was probably killed in response to a Dutch raid on a native village three years earlier in which the main tribal leaders were slaughtered.

Hoffman’s quest is to discover physical or eyewitness evidence that Rockefeller made it to shore and there met his end. Whether his findings achieve the level of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” readers are left to decide for themselves.

The damp practically floats off the pages in Astoria, the sweeping tale of John Jacob Astor’s attempt to settle the remote Pacific Northwest coast in 1810. Astor’s vast wealth enabled him to send two expeditions: one over land and one by ship. His plan was to set up a fur trade, the first on this particularly harsh stretch of the West Coast. Whoever could settle the area would lay claim to a vast area rich with sea otter and beaver fur, salmon and other seafood.

It’s hard to decide which party had the rougher journey. The overland party climbed snowy mountains, nearly starved and was attacked by Native Americans. The seafarers didn’t do much better, a motley crew of Americans and Scots who encountered rogue waves, endured water shortages and squabbled their way around Cape Horn to the rocky coastline where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean.

Author Peter Stark retraces the journey in spellbinding detail, making use of journals to get inside the minds of these explorers who set out just two years after Lewis and Clark successfully crossed the continent.

“We climbed mountains so high that I could hardly believe our horses would get over them,” wrote Wilson Price Hunt, whom Astor chose to lead the overland party. “We could advance only with the greatest difficulty because of the sharp rocks, and the precipices plunge to the very banks of the river.”

Almost half of the 140 travelers died before ever laying eyes on Astoria. Those who did straggle in to the muddy settlement found something other than paradise awaiting them.

“[I]magine the rude shock of arrival in the coastal winter or early spring,” Stark writes. “It’s cold, it’s raining—as it is nearly two hundred days a year at the mouth of the Columbia—the infinite gray coastline stretches away backed by the thick, dark rainforest—soggy, choked with rotting cedar logs, prehistoric sword ferns, and the dark columns of towering fir and spruce whose outstretched limbs are draped with lichen in giant, ghostly cobwebs.”

Stark is a correspondent for Outside, and his outdoor-writing bona fides are put to excellent use here. Astoria brings to life a harrowing era of American exploration.

On July 21, 1999, a crane lowered experienced construction diver DJ Gillis and four other men down a 420-foot shaft to the opening of an almost 10-mile tunnel beneath Deer Island in Boston Harbor. At the end of the day, only three men would return alive.

In a compelling tale of corporate and public mismanagement, Boston Globe Magazine writer Neil Swidey tells the gripping stories of courage, deceit and devastating loss that emerged from the Deer Island debacle in Trapped Under the Sea.

After Boston Harbor was rated one of the most polluted in the nation, public officials launched a $300 million project in the early 1990s to pipe wastewater through a tunnel to the ocean. In spite of significant early progress, work on the tunnel eventually bogged down. By the time Gillis and his co-workers were hired to unplug a series of smaller pipes, the companies that built the tunnel had all but abandoned it, raising many questions. “How could this idea of sending divers to a place as remote as the moon, asking them to entrust their lives to an improvised, untested breathing system, have ever made sense to sensible people?” Swidey asks. “The answer,” he points out, “lies in the dangerous cocktail of time, money, stubbornness, and frustration near the end of the over-budget, long delayed job.”

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Swidey pulls us into the lives of the divers and the aftermath of the perfect storm of forces that led to the deaths of two of them. He chronicles the psychological trauma into which the three surviving divers spiral, emphasizing that no matter how the tunnel project was successfully completed, “no one came out of this feeling like a winner.”

In this compelling page-turner, Swidey grabs us as soon as we enter that narrow elevator shaft and never lets up as we accompany the men on their sad and frightening journey.

Dreaming of April in Paris? In How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, astute cultural observer Joan DeJean argues that Paris has been a modern, alluring city far longer than we usually imagine. Although we tend to think of 19th-century Paris as the bustling epitome of “la vie moderne,” the roots of all we know and love about Paris today actually came into being in the 17th century.

While DeJean’s depth and scope of research are impressive, this fascinating portrait is anything but a dry history. Like its subject, DeJean’s biography of Paris emanates charm and wit. She builds her argument for the 17th-century origins of modern Paris piece by piece, unraveling the stories of how the city’s architectural elements helped to shape its urban landscape to make it “the capital of the universe.”

She begins with the oldest bridge in Paris—the Pont Neuf—which served as the 17th century’s equivalent to the Eiffel Tower (which wasn’t erected until 1889). Created by Henry IV as a center for his new capital, the Pont Neuf ushered in the concept of modern street life, including a sidewalk for promenading and street vendors.

DeJean unveils fascinating details about other aspects of the emerging city, covering the Place des Vosges, the enchanted oasis of Ile Saint-Louis and the city’s great boulevards and parks. What makes DeJean’s analysis so intriguing is her capacity to weave strands of history together. She shows, for example, how the freedom women achieved by walking along the Pont Neuf and the city’s boulevards translated into other areas of social discourse. With such rich context, How Paris Became Paris is more than a history: It’s the best kind of travel guidebook.