Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Murders, kidnappings, perilous escapes, suicide missions, poisoned knives, marriage plots, witchcraft allegations: The Dark Queens has them all.
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ÊTalk about an unscheduled change of plans: Four and a half years ago, Alan Green set out to explore the possibility of writing a behind-the-scenes book about the new incarnation of zoos how they had begun to transform themselves from concrete-and-steel menageries to education-oriented bioparks. For Green, a veteran journalist based in Washington, D.C., the proposed investigation seemed like a natural: A few years earlier, he had worked as a volunteer in the Great Ape House at the National Zoo, and had actually twice considered chucking his writing career for a job as an orangutan keeper.

But when Green began examining box-loads of legal documents chronicling the affairs of a local petting zoo, he found something startling: paperwork showing that the National Zoo had sent some of its surplus animals to this same roadside zoo a practice that’s supposedly a no-no for reputable zoological parks. Thus began a four-year investigation of the domestic exotic-animal industry, an all-encompassing odyssey whose scope kept broadening until it not only included high-profile metropolitan zoos and low-rent roadside attractions, but also an elaborate network of breeders, dealers, and middlemen, as well as Harvard University Medical School and other prestigious schools. What Green found was that all these institutions seemed to be linked as trading partners, moving their unwanted animals from place to place, as if involved in an elaborate shell game. In the end, however, it seemed that the paper trails invariably grew cold and the animals simply disappeared.

In an effort to get at the truth, Green began a manic search for records that took him to 27 state capitals and had him hiring researchers elsewhere. With the backing of The Center for Public Integrity, a research organization known for its investigative reporting, Green culled through a few million documents until he was able to finally start piecing together those elusive paper trails. In the process, he unearthed startling often troubling revelations about the exotic-animal business and the self-appointed guardians of rare and endangered species. Bottom line, he discovered: While these caretakers of exotic creatures publicly trumpet their accomplishments about saving the species, they’re privately offloading other animals that land in basement cages, auction-house rings, and even so-called canned hunts. This is no animal-rights manifesto. It is rather painstaking and evenhanded investigative reporting in the grand tradition of the early 20th-century muckrakers a compelling behind-the-scenes look at a business whose operators have, until now, managed to conduct their seamy affairs entirely in secret. The reporting is so comprehensive that the revelations sometimes unfold in one sentence after another; reading some chapters can feel like being continuously pummeled in a boxing ring, as the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me stories keep getting hurled your way. It is often troubling reading, but it’s too gripping to abandon. And hopefully, it will be a catalyst for dramatic change. Because as the book makes abundantly clear, change is certainly needed.

Lorraine Rose is a writer and psychotherapist in Washington, D.C.

ÊTalk about an unscheduled change of plans: Four and a half years ago, Alan Green set out to explore the possibility of writing a behind-the-scenes book about the new incarnation of zoos how they had begun to transform themselves from concrete-and-steel menageries to education-oriented bioparks.…
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What’s black and white and red all over? America 1950 What often comes back to me from the early 1950s is the word communist. I vividly recall, growing up on the gritty sidewalks of the north side of Binghamton, New York, one of my playmates becoming angry when his mother wouldn’t give him money so he could join me in going to the movies. He ranted and stormed and raved and, at the height of his frustration, he reached for the most wounding insult he could think of. You . . . you . . . COMMUNIST! he spat at her, and stormed out the door.

I do not know now if we ever got to the movies, or if my friend was punished for his audacious outburst. I do know that neither he nor I nor his mother could tell a communist from a coloratura, but we all knew communist was not a nice thing to be called.

Communism is one of two chief topics of Lisle A. Rose’s The Cold War Comes to Main Street: America in 1950. Rose is not concerned with the social and cultural aspects of an age in which eight- and nine-year-old boys could walk unescorted to and from the movies in perfect safety. His canvas is national and global in extent and portrays an impulsive, often absurd obsession with communism so pervasive that it provided a ready epithet for a witless boy in upstate New York.

1950 is critical, Rose says, because it is when our postwar mood turned sour and uncertain. In 1949, we still exuded a breezy, can-do confidence. One year later, he writes, the United States had become another country. His subtitle could as accurately be America Leading up to 1950, because he roams back in time at some length to explain how the United States got to this pass. Basically, Rose finds a crisis in the old order, the Main Street-Wall Street nexus of Republicans that had ruled the country for decades under the comfortable myth of the moral superiority of commerce.

An entire way of life seemed to be slipping away from Main Street, Rose writes, and the fact that he seems to argue from an old-fashioned liberal point of view in no way diminishes the force of his argument. Anti-communism held an appeal for these foes of the liberal establishment who saw what they believed to be a golden age disappearing.

The apex of anti-communism was, of course, McCarthyism, which to Rose was not merely a partisan attack on the Democratic administration but the first and most piercing middle American protest against all the real and apparent soullessness and incompetence of a large, distant, often unresponsive and, above all, liberal government. As a political and diplomatic history, The Cold War Comes to Main Street is briskly told and formidably documented, though the author is harder on Whittaker Chambers than the facts warrant. He makes him out to be a kind of up-market McCarthy, which is certainly not true, as Sam Tanenhaus showed in his recent biography of Chambers.

Rose’s other chief topic is a related one: the Korean War, which was the Cold War against communism grown hot. In four chapters, he captures its salient political and combat elements. There are, however, a couple of highly disputable assertions.

For instance, he says of the North Korean People’s Army invasion of the south in June 1950, the criminal slowness of the NKPA in advancing into South Korea would cost it the war. For one thing, many Korea historians would disagree with this assessment. For another, why criminal ? Would he prefer that the invaders had succeeded? On the other hand, he is quite right to condemn MacArthur’s vainglorious hot pursuit of the North Koreans right up to the Yalu River. If anything was criminal, it was that. It led to, among other things, the bitter campaign of November-December 1950 when U.

N. forces were overwhelmed by the Chinese and the cold. Through mining newspapers and other contemporary periodicals, Rose gives us a sense of how awful the campaign was for the combatants.

Finally, one of the malicious pleasures of reading a history such as this lies in discovering how wrong newspaper and other pundits of the day got things. For example, in 1950 Hans J. Morgenthau, a leading political scientist, intoned about the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, In comparison with it, all the great issues of the postwar period fade into insignificance. Well, actually, no. Remember that the next time Rush or Maureen tells you something of national or global importance.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

What's black and white and red all over? America 1950 What often comes back to me from the early 1950s is the word communist. I vividly recall, growing up on the gritty sidewalks of the north side of Binghamton, New York, one of my playmates…

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Listen up, sports fans Joe Garner is the author/compiler of We Interrupt This Broadcast, a popular collection of audio highlights with accompanying text from some of the biggest news stories in the past 65 years. It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to figure out what the follow-up should be, since the formula worked so well. Sports events are made for this sort of project, and some of their biggest moments are brought back to life nicely in And the Crowd Goes Wild: Relive the Most Celebrated Sporting Events Ever Broadcast, narrated by Bob Costas. It’s easy to figure out why this volume works even better than the original. With a few exceptions, newscasts don’t feature live descriptions because they aren’t planned. In sports, however, broadcasters are usually on site to tell audiences about history-making events. It’s wonderful, then, to hear the original emotion in the voices of announcers describing such events as Bobby Thomson’s 1951 playoff home run, the New York Mets’ 1969 World Series championship, Jack Nicklaus’s 1986 Masters triumph, and Mark McGwire’s 62nd home run of 1998. There won’t be many avid sports fans who will be able to resist giving this a listen or a read.

Listen up, sports fans Joe Garner is the author/compiler of We Interrupt This Broadcast, a popular collection of audio highlights with accompanying text from some of the biggest news stories in the past 65 years. It doesn't take a leap of imagination to figure out…

In the first detailed account of the Harry Truman presidency in almost 30 years, Jeffrey Frank engagingly considers Truman’s most controversial decisions.
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Lifestyles of the artistic and famous Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists by Edward Lucie-Smith is at least three books in one: It is a comprehensive study of the vast expanse of 20th-century art, a presentation of the great movements in this century’s art, and the fascinating life stories of major artists. The book’s greatest strength is the masterful way in which it weaves the life stories of artists into the story of their art. We come away understanding not only what makes these artists work, but also having a good grasp of the significance behind what they did. The life stories are arranged chronologically by movement, from Cubism to American Pop Art. Each subchapter contains a picture of the artist accompanied by at least one well-selected color plate of his or her work. All the familiar names are covered, such as Picasso, Chagall, and Pollock, but also less familiar ones such as David Alfaro Siquieros (who botched an assassination of Trotsky) with life stories equally as riveting.

Lifestyles of the artistic and famous Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists by Edward Lucie-Smith is at least three books in one: It is a comprehensive study of the vast expanse of 20th-century art, a presentation of the great movements in this century's art,…

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Civil War scholar Carole Emberton titled this insightful study of “freedom’s charter generation,” the first group of enslaved people to be emancipated in 1865, after a soothing quote from the Bible (Psalm 119:45). But she is clear: There was nothing easy about this walk away from slavery for the Black Americans of the Jim Crow South. Their stories, gathered in interviews by the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression, are carefully retold in To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner, a necessary, judicious correction to previously published accounts.

A project funded under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the FWP sent mostly white interviewers across the South to record the stories of formerly enslaved people who were still living. But before publication, the interviews underwent heavy editing to make them align with a more nostalgic vision of the South’s past. It would take Sterling Brown, a Black poet and FWP leader, to insist on authenticity and restore the interviewees’ words. Almost a century later, here they are.

Emberton’s book especially focuses on one woman, Priscilla Joyner, who told her life story to the FWP. Born in 1858, Joyner was never formally enslaved, yet her struggle to be free lasted for her entire lifetime. After the Civil War, former slaveholders did their best to subvert and sabotage the new, fragile laws of Reconstruction. Shocked when the people they had enslaved walked away without looking back, and fearful of a new balance of power, they thwarted Black voting rights and menaced teachers at newly opened schools—or simply burned the schools down.

Joyner experienced much of this hostility firsthand. The white woman who called herself Joyner’s mother did little to nurture or protect her. Joyner’s darker skin enraged her white siblings, who tormented her until, as a teenager, she was abruptly given away to a Black family. Within that community, Joyner found her people, went to school for the first time, wore ribbons in her hair and dresses that fit, and fell in love. Yet she and her family continued to struggle against inequities in pay, health care, education and professional opportunities.

Emberton’s attention to detail, whether she’s describing an inept FWP interviewer, an intimidated storyteller or the heavy-handed project editor, succeeds in debunking any nostalgia attached to the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.

Carole Emberton’s insightful study of the first group of enslaved people to be emancipated is a necessary, judicious correction to Confederate nostalgia.
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“I loved secrets, even terrible ones,” writes Erika Krouse in her debut memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation. “Especially terrible ones. When people told me things, I felt happy. The more they didn’t want to tell me that secret, the happier I felt when they did.” When a lawyer unexpectedly offered the fiction writer a job as a PI in 2002, she found herself investigating members of a Colorado university football team who had raped their female classmates. Unbeknownst to the lawyer, Krouse had also experienced sexual abuse from the ages of 4 to 7 by a man she calls X. Krouse explores both the legal case and her own emotional minefield in compelling, precise prose.

For legal reasons, and to protect the victims, Krouse changes some identifying details about those involved with the case and never names the university, although a few well-placed clues allow readers to deduce the specifics. Thanks to Krouse’s sleuthing, one victim received a $2.5 million settlement in 2007 and another received $350,000. The football team, she discovered, had a history of institutionalized misogyny and had been using drugs, alcohol and sex as recruiting tools. After these revelations, the team’s coach was suspended and later fired.

Hear more from Erika Krouse, the writer who became a private investigator and helped crack a landmark sexual assault case.

With utmost care and consideration for the victims, some of whom chose not to come forward, Krouse gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the complications of pursuing a Title IX case. Her narrative voice is engaging, and she effortlessly relates legal complexities in succinct, easy-to-follow passages. As a result, learning how Krouse and her legal team patiently unraveled the scope of the university’s involvement reads like a detective novel. Particularly riveting are the scenes in which Krouse speaks with various witnesses, often in bars or restaurants, trying to parse out what happened on the night of that ill-fated party. Instead of fancy surveillance equipment, Krouse relies on the lure of free beer and nachos, noting, “Alcohol made football players arrogant enough to tell the truth; it made women sad and angry enough to trust me.”

Alongside the story of her investigative work, Krouse explores her personal life: falling in love with an acupuncturist, reflecting on her childhood and navigating difficult family relationships. Her mother refused to address Krouse’s sexual abuse even after Krouse was an adult, and their relationship remains a live grenade throughout the book.

Both the true crime and memoir components of Krouse’s book are extremely successful, and her reflections on the injured party’s difficult choice to make their pain public are crisp and on point. “Maybe I . . . was splashing around in other people’s pain just to avoid drowning in my own,” she writes. “Maybe I was only trying to help them because nobody helped me.” Tell Me Everything is a memorable, highly personal account of a landmark legal case, as well as a thoughtful examination of the long-lasting damage of sexual assault.

Erika Krouse’s memorable, highly personal account of a landmark Title IX case reads like a compelling detective novel.
The variety of voices and styles in The 1619 Project audiobook allows the listener to understand American history on a profoundly human level.

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