Ah, the metric system—the logical way of meting out the world that confounds most Americans. Readers who have failed to crack its code will find comfort in John Bemelmans Marciano’s Whatever Happened to the Metric System? How America Kept Its Feet, an intriguing look at why the system failed to take hold here.

The metric system is a surprisingly inflammatory topic—an issue with political, social and financial implications that has generated plenty of heat across the centuries. Marciano traces the system back to Revolutionary-era France, when a restructuring of measurements resulted in metrics as we know them today.

Cutting through the confusion and antipathy that have long surrounded the issue in America, Marciano provides a clear-eyed account of how Americans hung onto their inches, ounces and pounds. In 1875, Congress signed the Treaty of the Meter, which led to the establishment of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the agency that oversees the metric system, but Americans still had the option of using customary English units of measurement. A century later, when President Gerald Ford sanctioned the Metric Conversion Act, transition to meters and kilos seemed like a sure thing. But America stepped back from the brink again when the act met its end during the budget cuts of the early 1980s.

Today, the United States is one of only three nations in the world that have not adopted the metric system. Yet Marciano makes important points about America’s adherence to tradition. “To be for a metric America is to be for a global monoculture,” he says. Through the use of its customary system, America is “preserving ways of thinking that were once common to all humanity.”

Marciano’s narrative provides an overview of measurement in all its manifold forms, including currency, clock and calendar. Each chapter is broken up into easy-to-absorb sections that bring fluidity and logic to a complex tale. Weighty stuff, but the gifted Marciano makes light work of it.

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

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, August 2014

On July 8, 1879, cheering throngs watched as the USS Jeannette set out from San Francisco and sailed off like a “long dark pencil of shadow standing straight up against the vivid sunset.” Under the command of officer George Washington De Long, the steamer and its crew were attempting to reach the North Pole and confirm a then–popular theory that the polar sea remained ice-free and open north of the Bering Strait. The expedition was funded by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the wealthy and eccentric owner of the New York Herald, who had also financed Stanley’s mission to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone.

Drawing on newly available letters, diaries, journals and other archives, crackerjack storyteller Hampton Sides (Hellhound on His Trail) vividly chronicles the tale of the Jeannette, the excitement and optimism surrounding the expedition, the contentious arguments regarding scientific theories about the Arctic and the fate of the ship and its crew.

The expedition’s great hope of sailing unimpeded by the ravages of ice floes is shattered when the Jeannette becomes trapped in ice, and the crew must spend long, lonely weeks in unending darkness jammed fast. Two years into the voyage, ice breaches the hull, the ship sinks, and the crew finds itself thousands of miles from land.

De Long leads a heroic march toward safety over unforgiving ice and in conditions that punish every crew member’s body. The tale of De Long’s struggle for survival is also the tale of his wife Emma’s struggle to maintain heroic hope during his absence. Weaving her letters to her husband—which he never received—through the narrative, Sides captures this gnawing anxiousness and stoic optimism.

Compulsively readable, In the Kingdom of Ice brilliantly recreates a world, invites us to enter it and to experience the isolation, fear and hope of the people in it, and leads us back to our worlds with a clearer understanding of what motivates those who undertake daunting but heroic challenges.

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

French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi is best characterized by the following passage: “He was an egoist in human affairs; a humble man in the scale of the cosmos.” This elegant writing comes from Elizabeth Mitchell in Liberty’s Torch, the tale of how Bartholdi proposed the creation of the Statue of Liberty and spent much of his life making it happen. He knew that the statue’s completion would bring him fame. But he also knew that it would become a lasting symbol of what America represents: freedom and opportunity.

Liberty’s Torch challenges many of the myths surrounding the neoclassical statue. Legend has it that France donated the statue to the United States in 1886 as a gesture of respect to a longtime ally. In reality, Mitchell writes, the Statue of Liberty was the brainchild of Bartholdi, who had to sell both countries on the idea. His biggest challenge came in raising funds, which took 15 years. He staged shows and exhibitions of the statue’s renderings and models, while also encouraging Americans to donate their pennies.

Liberty’s Torch gets behind the regal facade of the Statue of Liberty to show that an iconic figure of freedom grew out of the inspiration and hustle of a single man, someone who longed to be honored during his life and to be remembered through the ages.

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

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.