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NonfictionHistoryArts & CultureArt

Behind the art world’s most famous face

Review by Anne Bartlett

Leonardo da Vinci was an outlier in so many ways: a peripatetic polymath, handsome, unmarried, an innovator, unquestionably an artistic genius. He doesn’t typify his era any more than geniuses ever do. Leonardo was a party of one.

Ah, but then there’s Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo: Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”—probably. Other candidates do exist, but most experts now believe this Florentine merchant’s wife was the model for the iconic portrait in the Louvre, arguably the world’s most famous painting. And as author Dianne Hales notes in the engaging Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, Lisa was an ordinary woman, albeit one with a wealthy husband. Her life provides an excellent entry point into early Renaissance Florence.

Hales, an experienced journalist, weaves the stories of Lisa, her older husband Francesco and Leonardo into a rich tapestry of family life, mercantile society, politics and artistic development. Hales acknowledges that we really don’t know anything about Lisa’s inner life, but we do know a good bit about her ancestry and circumstances, and the author is able to make some informed guesses. Thanks to public records, Francesco comes through more clearly as a sharp-elbowed opportunist. He likely met Leonardo when he was dickering with the artist’s notary father over a financial dispute with a monastery represented by Ser Piero da Vinci.

Particularly enthralling are Hales’ near-cinematic descriptions of Florence’s lively social life—its street festivals, baptisms, weddings. She also lets us in on her own effort to uncover Lisa’s life by taking us along on her visits to Lisa’s old neighborhoods and to contemporary scholars. Hales even introduces us to the present-day Italian aristocrats descended from Lisa, the Guicciardini Strozzi family, who are as charming as one would hope. And might that be a special smile on the príncipe’s lips?

 

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

Leonardo da Vinci was an outlier in so many ways: a peripatetic polymath, handsome, unmarried, an innovator, unquestionably an artistic genius. He doesn’t typify his era any more than geniuses ever do. Leonardo was a party of one.
NonfictionHistory

Marooned in the ice

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

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.

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.
NonfictionPoliticsHistory

Friends in high places

Review by Roger Bishop

When 43-year-old John F. Kennedy assumed the U.S. presidency in January 1961, he appeared to have little in common with 66-year-old British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The latter, son of an American mother and a British father, was a publisher, conservative politician and statesman and a wounded hero of World War I. Despite many personal differences, the two leaders shared a love of books and reading. In 1915, when he was seriously wounded on the Western front, Macmillan was found on the battlefield reading Prometheus in Greek. In later life, in moments of crisis he could be found sitting quietly and reading from Jane Austen. But during the 33 months that the two leaders, both pragmatists, worked together they came to deeply appreciate each other. Macmillan initiated their relationship with a “Dear Friend” letter, using the same appellation he had used with President Eisenhower, whom he had known for many years and worked with during World War II. As JFK pointed out in an interview: “I feel at home with him because I can share my loneliness with him. The others are all foreigners to me.” Christopher Sandford writes engagingly of their close relationship during some of the most important years of the Cold War in Harold and Jack: The Remarkable Friendship of Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy, a fascinating glimpse into the role of personal relationships in diplomacy.

In 1962, Kennedy estimated that 80 percent of his first year in office had been spent dealing with foreign policy. During their overlapping years in high office, he and Macmillan shared involvement in crises that included the building of the Berlin Wall by the Soviet Union, the Cuban missile crisis and numerous regional clashes. Above all was the issue of nuclear arms control. Macmillan believed that his supreme challenge in life was to avert a nuclear holocaust.

When he was 18, Kennedy studied for a year at the London School of Economics, and several years later was with his parents in the House of Commons when Neville Chamberlain explained his country’s decision to declare war on Nazi Germany. The future president’s book on Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, Why England Slept, published in 1940, was a bestseller. During his time in England, Kennedy began a lifelong fascination with that country’s social and cultural elite.

Sandford covers a lot of ground in Harold and Jack, in particular the two most significant shared achievements of the two men. First, Macmillan was instrumental in keeping the NATO and Commonwealth leaders supportive of Kennedy’s decisions during the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kennedy wrote that without Macmillan’s support, “our position would have been seriously undermined.” JFK himself told the British ambassador that “with the exception of Bobby, the Prime Minister was (the) one I felt the most connection to” during that fateful week of October 22, 1961. Secondly, in July 1963, three-way negotiations with the U.S.S.R. resulted in the limited nuclear test-ban agreement. The treaty barred tests underwater, in the atmosphere, and in space and allowed up to seven annual on-site inspections by each side and was acclaimed around the world. It was, in a sense, the beginning of the end of the Cold War. JFK wrote to Macmillan: “No one can doubt the importance in all this of your own persistent pursuit of a solution. . . . [M]ore than once your initiative is what got things started again.” Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger said the treaty “would not have come about with the intense personal commitment of Kennedy and Macmillan.”

On January 31, 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy sent Macmillan a deeply personal, eight-page letter concerning her husband’s life and legacy. She referred to her husband and Macmillan as the “two greatest men of our time.” It was the beginning of a long correspondence, affectionate and sometimes touchingly intimate, that ended only with Macmillan’s death in 1986.

Sandford’s book is a fascinating look at the mix of the personal and the public in high stakes foreign affairs.

When 43-year-old John F. Kennedy assumed the U.S. presidency in January 1961, he appeared to have little in common with 66-year-old British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The latter, son of an American mother and a British father, was a publisher, conservative politician and statesman and a wounded hero of World War I. Despite many personal differences, the two leaders shared a love of books and reading. Christopher Sandford writes engagingly of their close relationship during some of the most important years of the Cold War in Harold and Jack: The Remarkable Friendship of Prime Minister Macmillan and President Kennedy, a fascinating glimpse into the role of personal relationships in diplomacy.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The 1970s: A transformative decade in American politics

Review by Roger Bishop

The 1970s were a tumultuous time in the U.S, defined by such events as the Vietnam War; the Watergate scandal; the Arab oil boycott; serious economic problems; and shocking revelations about illegal activities by our intelligence agencies. At one point, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Americans believed the government lied to them. All of this happened as the nation, somewhat dispirited, celebrated its bicentennial. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Rick Perlstein captures all of this and more in his sweeping, insightful and richly rewarding The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. His riveting narrative continues the author’s efforts to chronicle the ascendancy of conservatism in American political life (following the acclaimed Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America).

At the heart of Perlstein’s book is the question of what kind of nation we want to be. The turbulence of the 1960s and ’70s had given Americans an opportunity to reflect on our power and what some considered our arrogance. Many reasoned we should become more humble, question authority and have a greater sense of limits. Politicians, labeled “Watergate babies,” were elected to Congress, pledged to reform the country’s broken institutions. But that approach did not prevail. Among major political figures, only Ronald Reagan took a different path. He rarely discussed Watergate and Vietnam and, when he did, he downplayed their place in history. He described Watergate as a “witch hunt” and “lynching” and said the conspirators were “no worse than double parkers.” On Vietnam, his view was that America had not expended enough force; “the greatest immorality is to ask young men to fight or die for my country if it’s not a cause we are willing to win.” Instead, Reagan and others continued to emphasize that the U.S. was “the greatest nation in the history of the world.” The Invisible Bridge examines how such rhetoric came into being and how such hubris has come to define us.

The most important political expression of this belief was Reagan’s announcement that he would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president of his own party, for the presidential nomination in 1976. Reagan and Ford believed many of the same things, but they had very different styles. Every major distinction between the two had to do with the kind of nation America was. Ford liked the idea of national modesty; Reagan felt that the world’s rules didn’t necessarily apply to America

At more than 800 pages, Perlstein’s book is a work of prodigious research. He appears to have read virtually all of the available contemporary accounts of political life in the ‘70s and watched many of the era’s television news programs. He is also keenly aware of social currents and popular culture in the decade as well. The Invisible Bridge delves into the lives of colorful personalities and discusses significant events that influenced the political landscape at the time but are almost forgotten today.  This is a fascinating, extremely readable account of an important decade in America’s political history.

 

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

The 1970s were a tumultuous time in the U.S, defined by such events as the Vietnam War; the Watergate scandal; the Arab oil boycott; serious economic problems; and shocking revelations about illegal activities by our intelligence agencies. At one point, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Americans believed the government lied to them. All of this happened as the nation, somewhat dispirited, celebrated its bicentennial. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Rick Perlstein captures all of this and more in his sweeping, insightful and richly rewarding The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.
NonfictionHistoryArts & Culture

What our architecture says about us

Review by Roger Bishop

If we choose, we can avoid most forms of art. Architecture is not one of them. It is all around us. In his wide-ranging and stimulating new book, Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made, Tom Wilkinson explores many of the aspects—morality, power, economics, psychology, politics and sex are some—that help us better understand how architecture “shapes people’s lives and vice versa,” from ancient times to the present. His diverse selection of buildings includes Nero’s Golden House in Rome and the Festival Theatre in Beyreuth, as well as the Finsbury Health Centre in London and the Footbridge in Rio de Janeiro. Ten buildings are covered in detail, serving as springboards to discussions of related subjects.

Wilkinson begins by expressing his skepticism about the various myths concerning the origins of architecture. He demonstrates that historians writing on the subject often conveniently overlook their own limited knowledge and biases such as nationalism and colonialism. He is keenly aware that buildings have great potential to inspire and empower people, while the same structures may enslave others and cost them their lives. Wilkinson introduces us to Giovanni Rucellai, who was not an architect but devoted his energies to architecture and his business of building (and self-promotion) became an art in itself. We learn of Le Corbusier (a pseudonym), the 20th century’s most famous architect, and his mad passion for a house in France designed by Eileen Gray and her resentment of his obsession.

Monuments honor the memories that communities and nations are built on. They may appear eternal but they can be damaged, restored or destroyed and given new meanings by rulers or the populace. The Bastille had a double image, changed by revolutionary action from a symbol of despotism to a symbol of freedom. It should be pointed out that when the Bastille was liberated there were only seven prisoners, none of whom were allied with tyrannical oppression. Monuments are often built by the “winners” in history and are frequently, as Walter Benjamin has written, “documents of barbarism.” Wilkinson cites what may be “the most controversial modern mausoleum,” located outside Madrid, built by Francisco Franco to commemorate the Spanish Civil War. Although the complex has been called a monument to national reconciliation, most of those interred there were nationalists and fascists. As for Franco himself, the numerous statues of him were removed from every public space in Spain under the Law of Historical Memory passed by the government in recent years.

The only U.S. building of the 10 is architect Alfred Kahn’s Highland Park Car Factory in Detroit, a collaboration between the unlikely team of anti-Semitic industrialist Henry Ford and Kahn, the son of a rabbi. Their Highland Park plant, a huge, austere shed, led to greater production and changed the world of business. After four years, the original plant was obsolete, so the two men worked on more appropriate structures. “Perhaps more than anything else, it was the contingency of Ford’s buildings—his and Kahn’s reconception of architecture as a process rather than something fixed and eternal—that marks them out as new,” WIlkinson writes. Kahn’s sheds had a great influence on European modernist architects. He had one of the biggest architectural practices in the world, and by 1929, he was producing one million dollars’ worth of new buildings a week. Kahn’s view was that architecture was 90 per cent business and 10 per cent art.

Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil’s most famous architect, said that “Life is more important than architecture.” Wilkinson picks up on that idea and points out that many people in the world today live in inadequate buildings made without architects. “The biggest challenge facing architecture is the provision of housing for ordinary people,” he argues. Reaching this goal is not impossible; he says; “examples of superb, cheap design abound in developing countries.”

This thought-provoking exploration of different kinds of architecture helps us better understand something we often take for granted or consider too specialized.

If we choose, we can avoid most forms of art. Architecture is not one of them. It is all around us. In his wide-ranging and stimulating new book, Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made, Tom Wilkinson explores many of the aspects—morality, power, economics, psychology, politics and sex are some—that help us better understand how architecture “shapes people’s lives and vice versa,” from ancient times to the present. His diverse selection of buildings includes Nero’s Golden House in Rome and the Festival Theatre in Beyreuth, as well as the Finsbury Health Centre in London and the Footbridge in Rio de Janeiro. Ten buildings are covered in detail, serving as springboards to discussions of related subjects.
NonfictionHistory

The story behind America’s most iconic structure

Review by John T. Slania

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.

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.
NonfictionHistory

Travel back to Charles Dickens’ London

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

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.

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.”
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The beginning of the American Revolution

Review by Roger Bishop

Who fired the first shot on Lexington Green on the morning of April 19, 1775, remains in dispute. Both the British regulars and the American rebels vehemently denied that it came from their side. What is agreed on is that after that first shot was heard, there was immediately sporadic and then volley fire from the British regulars. In June, there was the catastrophic Battle of Bunker Hill. While the result was indecisive, it was a self-proclaimed British victory at a staggering cost. The engagement was costly for the rebels as well, but they left no doubt that they were not about to give up. This was all-out war.

Events during the first six months of 1775 were crucial to determining whether the colonies were to remain obedient to Great Britain or to become independent and form a more representative government. Walter R. Borneman’s superb American Spring: Lexington, Concord, and the Road to Revolution tells the story of that period in significant detail with descriptions of military engagements and legislative actions, but never loses sight of the personalities at all levels. To a great extent, Borneman relies on the original affidavits, correspondence and memories of the participants and views events from their perspective—before they knew what the outcome would be—giving us a remarkably fresh look at this transformative period.

Among the colorful figures are two unlikely couplings. There was politically savvy Samuel Adams, a failed businessman and part-time brewer, and the wealthy merchant John Hancock. For their own reasons, having to do with money or lack of it, they worked for rebellion. A second coupling, the ambitious wheeler-dealer Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, a frontiersman of bravado and bluster, teamed to capture Fort Ticonderoga. Lesser-known figures who played important roles include John Derby Jr., who was entrusted with delivering early reports of the Lexington battles to moderates in Great Britain sympathetic to the rebel cause. Unknown to him, the person who was to receive these documents, Benjamin Franklin, had sailed for North America. But Derby reached the helpful Lord Mayor of London who helped to spread the rebel version of events before the official version arrived from General Thomas Gage.

Borneman’s authoritative, carefully structured and very well written account often seems to place readers in the moment with events that changed the course of history.

 

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

Who fired the first shot on Lexington Green on the morning of April 19, 1775, remains in dispute. Both the British regulars and the American rebels vehemently denied that it came from their side. What is agreed on is that after that first shot was heard, there was immediately sporadic and then volley fire from the British regulars. In June, there was the catastrophic Battle of Bunker Hill. While the result was indecisive, it was a self-proclaimed British victory at a staggering cost.

NonfictionHistory

Facing personal danger for a mission of mercy

Review by Edward Morris

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.”

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.
NonfictionHistory

A little help from Shirley Temple

Review by Heather Seggel

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.

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.

NonfictionHistory

A balanced look at the history of Mormonism

Review by John T. Slania

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.

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.

NonfictionSportsHistory

The walking craze that swept America

Review by Catherine Hollis

Pedestrianism is the biggest American sport craze you’ve never heard of. Imagine thousands of rowdy fans, drinking and smoking, packed into Madison Square Garden for days on end. What is this event they are watching and betting on, that’s making headlines in all the newspapers? Men in tights are walking around a track. For six days.

As Mathew Algeo explains in Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport, his well-paced and absorbing new book, long-distance walking races fired up the American public in the decades immediately following the Civil War. The sport began with a simple bet: Edward Payson Weston wagered against Lincoln winning the presidency in 1860 (despite voting for him). When Lincoln won, Weston had to walk from Boston to Washington, D.C. to attend the inauguration ceremony. Weston’s walk “went viral,” in Algeo’s words, electrifying a nation rife with divisions. Crowds met Weston along his route as telegraphs and newspapers reported on his progress from North to South across the Mason Dixon line.

America was a walking nation, Algeo explains, and a working class nation, and pedestrianism united the two. By the time the Irish immigrant Dan O’Leary challenged Edward Weston to a 500-mile walking match in 1875—and won—America found its first spectator sport. Throughout the 1870s, Weston and O’Leary continued to meet up in public spaces—Chicago’s Exposition Building, London’s Agricultural Hall, New York’s Madison Square Garden—to stage these six-day races (avoiding the Sabbath). Taking only brief nap breaks, and refueling with champagne, the men would walk until they had finished 500 miles, or collapsed.

Walking was a sport particularly suited to laborers used to hard work, and challengers quickly emerged to race against Weston and O’Leary, such as Frank Hart, the first black athlete featured on a trading card. Wealthy sponsors backed competitions like the Astley Belt, and thousands of spectators of all classes jammed into crowded halls to watch the men walk, stagger or limp. Predictably, scandals emerged: accusations of doping (with coca leaves) or races that were “fixed” by athletes in cahoots with bookies.

With a storyteller’s voice and a historian’s perspective, Algeo narrates the fascinating birth of American sports culture through the simple act of walking.

Pedestrianism is the biggest American sport craze you’ve never heard of. Imagine thousands of rowdy fans, drinking and smoking, packed into Madison Square Garden for days on end. What is this event they are watching and betting on, that’s making headlines in all the newspapers? Men in tights are walking around a track. For six days.
NonfictionHistory

Tracing the rich written record of Jewish experience

Review by Michael Alec Rose

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.

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.

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