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The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
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A Killer by Design

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Nowadays, encountering news stories about sexual crimes is a daily occurrence. But in the late 1970s, when the FBI noticed a marked uptick in reported sexual violence, such crimes were considered a strange new trend, which the agency decided they should address by educating all their agents.

However, as Ann Wolbert Burgess explains in her captivating and chilling A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind, there was a major roadblock to the FBI’s mission. “None of the agents had the background or expertise to speak about issues of sexual assault, rape, sexual homicide, or victimology,” Burgess writes.

That’s where she came in. For several years, Burgess—a forensic and psychiatric nurse with a doctorate in nursing science, et al.—had worked on a major study of what was called “rape trauma syndrome.” When Roy Hazelwood, a new agent in the FBI’s nascent serial killer-focused Behavioral Science Unit, caught wind of her work, he asked her to share her methods for analyzing and finding predictive patterns among sexually violent crimes.

Burgess sees her ability to “ground an infinitely complex human trauma into quantifiable data and research” as a hallmark of her work, and she taught FBI agents how to apply her methods in order to establish a reliable foundation for their investigations. For starters, standardized questions for all suspects are key, as well as analyses of perpetrators’ childhood experiences and similarities across crime scenes.

Although the BSU toiled in underground offices without a dedicated staff or budget at first, as the unit employed Burgess’ methods, their successes grew. Delving into the minds of everyone from Son of Sam to the BTK strangler, they solved dozens of cases, eventually garnering press coverage—and subsequent respect via above-ground digs. Their work also sparked the popular fascination with profiling borne out in a seemingly never-ending stream of books, movies, TV shows and podcasts. In fact, Burgess inspired a character in the popular “Mindhunter” Netflix show, which is based on a book by her FBI colleague John Douglas.

With A Killer by Design, Burgess takes center stage at last, offering important, fascinating new context and details about the history of crime-solving in America. It’s an inspiring and meaningful story, too, with its up-close look at people who have dedicated their careers to catching murderers and pushing for justice. As Burgess writes, “My decades studying serial killers weren’t for the game of cat and mouse, nor because I found these killers entertaining. . . . For me, it’s always been about the victims.”

When the FBI noticed a marked uptick in sexual violence in the 1970s, they called on Ann Wolbert Burgess to teach them how to profile—and catch—serial killers.
History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Patient readers will be richly rewarded once they get the hang of how Modris Eksteins, author of this combined history and autobiography, shies away from straightforward chronology. He moves backwards and forward through the years, presenting episodes that provide a history of Latvia, his birthplace, and of Eastern Europe and World War II. The events he describes so thoroughly are interspersed with his own life story and that of his family. The highly successful outcome of Eksteins’s roving through time is a remarkable depiction of reaching 1945, when the war in Europe ended and 30 to 40 million people were homeless. He converges on 1945 as the climactic year from two vantage points: his current position as a history professor at the University of Toronto, and Russia and the Baltic States in the 1850s.

The autobiography moves in reverse to Eksteins’s years as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in history; his experiences at Upper Canada College, Toronto’s elite private secondary school; his family’s 1949 arrival in Canada as Displaced Persons after the Canadian government overturned its negative attitude toward newcomers; and their horrible war experiences, battered by both the Germans and the Russians, after he was born in 1943. The vivid narrative includes his great-grandmother, born in 1834; his father, a Baptist minister; and his mother, who was the key to our survival. This is a story of achievement and triumph.

The historical sections emphasize World War II, when Latvia was made a part of the Soviet Union in 1940, liberated by Germany in 1941, and re-captured by Russia in 1944. The terror of those years is detailed with shocking figures regarding the fate of Latvian Jews and Western Jews sent to Latvia. Their slaughter was the highest percentage of eradication in all of Europe. Eksteins’s stress on the devastation of World War II, with its unprecedented number of deaths, contrasts with the contemporary characterization of World War II as a good war. This powerful book demonstrates that there is no such thing. ¦ Dr. Morton I. Teicher is a freelance writer who is on the faculty of Walden University.

Patient readers will be richly rewarded once they get the hang of how Modris Eksteins, author of this combined history and autobiography, shies away from straightforward chronology. He moves backwards and forward through the years, presenting episodes that provide a history of Latvia, his birthplace,…

Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Hemingway: The Final Years is the final installment in a multi-volume biography that has occupied Michael Reynolds for the last 20 years. This volume follows the writer’s life from 1940 through 1961. It is a superb account of Hemingway’s rise to literary stardom and public success contrasted against his private weaknesses and volatile relationships with women. This biography is such a well-crafted story that it seems more like a novel than nonfiction. Every chapter takes the reader deeper into the psyche of Ernest Hemingway, following his personal decline until his suicide in 1961 at the age of 62. Reynolds uncovers some of Hemingway’s lesser known activities as a journalist who briefly joined the French Resistance in World War II, as a civilian patrolling the waters around Cuba scouting for Nazi submarines, and other political acts that were kept secret until years later. His love of danger and espionage are a foreshadowing of his obsession with death. Reynolds notes, Part of Hemingway wanted to be the warrior he imagined himself as a young boy part of him was half in love with an honorable death, not one that he sought, but one that found him. Yet another part of him simply no longer cared if he lived or died. A major focus of the book, however, is his intense emotional relationships with his third and fourth wives, Martha and Mary. Reynolds skillfully exposes the dichotomy in Hemingway’s character, revealing how he could be a controlling bully and a vulnerable, insecure man at the same time. Hemingway was drawn to strong, career-minded women, yet he wanted them to submit themselves to him and leave their personal pursuits once they became involved with him. As soon as a passionate woman became his wife and mother to his children, he began to feel trapped; but should that woman leave him alone for longer than a week, he became morose, vulnerable, and began to speak of his own death. In his final years, as his depression worsened, Hemingway’s reputation and accolades increased. He became, as the biographer states, a man pursued, a writer not able to outrun his demons. Complementary to Reynolds’s biography of Hemingway, the writer and the man, is a smaller book focusing on the places he visited and made famous. In A Hemingway Odyssey: Special Places in His Life (Cumberland House, $12.95, 1581820240), H. Lea Lawrence creates a kind of travelogue, revisiting Hemingway’s favorite fishing and hunting spots in Michigan, Idaho, and Wyoming, as well as other vacation areas and homesteads in Europe and the Caribbean. It’s no surprise that the author has written articles for various fishing and wildlife magazines. His descriptions of Hemingway’s old stomping grounds could make any reader want to take up fly fishing. Lawrence’s biography is a unique approach to revealing how Hemingway’s favorite places and interests shaped the man and his writing. You don’t have to be an outdoorsman to appreciate this biography, but it may inspire you to become one.

Kim Spilker is a writer in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hemingway: The Final Years is the final installment in a multi-volume biography that has occupied Michael Reynolds for the last 20 years. This volume follows the writer's life from 1940 through 1961. It is a superb account of Hemingway's rise to literary stardom and public…

Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The artists and writers of the American cultural and literary movement known as the Beat Generation are popularly credited in the U.S. for having laid the groundwork for the explosion of personal freedom and expression that culminated in the 1960s. While the movement had a worldwide impact, most of the Beat artists’ works had a distinctly American flavor. However, like many eccentric American exiles and expatriate artists of the early 20th century Modernist Movement, a handful of the Beat’s luminaries Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and company made their homes in a small dive on the Left Bank in Paris. From 1957

The artists and writers of the American cultural and literary movement known as the Beat Generation are popularly credited in the U.S. for having laid the groundwork for the explosion of personal freedom and expression that culminated in the 1960s. While the movement had a…

Religion & Spirituality

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Ever since he composed his first line of hand-set type in 1969, Barry Moser, the extraordinarily talented book designer and illustrator of literary classics and children’s books, has dreamed of doing a Bible. With the publication of Moser’s magnum opus, The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible which he designed, handcrafted, and illustrated his dream is realized. It is a triumph of bookmaking and the art of the illustrated Bible. Using contemporary human beings, among other sources, as models, Moser presents over 230 images, with at least one for almost each book in the Bible. The last major work by a single illustrator to come close to the completeness Moser has achieved is Gustave Dore’s La Sainte Bible published in 1865. Moser observes that Dore didn’t bother with four of the five books of poetry. The best known example of an illustrated Bible in this century is Marc Chagall’s Hebrew Bible, published in 1957.

Moser emphasizes that The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible is first and foremost a reading Bible. A Bible to be enjoyed as a book as well as a sacred text. The King James Version of the Bible is used, following Frederick Scrivener’s 1873 critical edition of the Cambridge Paragraph Bible. In that edition, verse numbers were eliminated as well as much of the italic which had come to be used to indicate words not in the original languages. The design and type, composition and editing, and paper and binding have all been chosen and executed with the utmost care and expertise. The engraving medium, called Resingrave, has just recently been invented, and its results are virtually indistinguishable from wood engraving. The relief engravings, as Moser refers to them, are printed directly from the blocks.

Moser’s hope is that his pictures might draw an entirely new audience [to the Bible], an audience that might not be particularly religious. Or perhaps a religious audience who might have grown tired of the piety and indexterity that is so ubiquitous in ÔBible pictures’ . . . My intention is to strip away the layers of pious heavenmindedness that have been applied by centuries of devout limners and expose the flawed, human veneers underneath. And, indeed, the engravings do seem to portray ordinary human beings either caught up in, or at the center of, extraordinary events. The individuals are not larger than life; they are life itself. They are at turns haunting, disturbing, and tragic, but they are consistently compelling and thought-provoking. Moser’s model for Jesus was a chef at an Italian restaurant; for the Virgin Mary, a waitress; for Job, South-African playwright Athol Fugard.

Do these illustrations represent Moser’s personal interpretation of the Bible? He responds that his work is more of a personal response as opposed to interpretation. He says that a lot of my images could be seen to be sermons of sorts, and like a preacher, it would take me half an hour at least to explain what I mean. Moser, who is now 57, in fact did have a preacher’s license and served Methodist churches in his native Tennessee and in Georgia many years ago. He told a Newsweek reporter that I quit being a preacher because I fell into utter disenchantment with the church. But I never became disenchanted with the idea of God. The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible is an extraordinary achievement, but Moser does not expect everyone to like it or agree with it. I just hope it makes them think, he says. Perhaps to think on an old verse or story in a new way from a new point of view. That, after all, is the responsibility of an illustrator, otherwise it’s just a matter of making some pretty pictures and sticking them into a book and calling them illustrations. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Ever since he composed his first line of hand-set type in 1969, Barry Moser, the extraordinarily talented book designer and illustrator of literary classics and children's books, has dreamed of doing a Bible. With the publication of Moser's magnum opus, The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible…

FilmArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Not since Francois Truffaut took on Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s has there been such an illuminating exchange in print between a director and a critical fan. In Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films, filmmaker and writer Jeff Young interviews the renowned and controversial director Elia Kazan over an extended period, beginning the interviews in 1971 as the director neared the end of his career. The publication of Kazan’s autobiography contributed to the delays this book encountered in seeing print.

Kazan’s career as a movie director began with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 and ended with The Last Tycoon in 1976. His total output of 19 films include the classics East of Eden, which introduced James Dean to the world, and On the Waterfront, which similarly introduced Marlon Brando. Kazan was also a prolific novelist and theater director. Unfortunately, his achievements as a director are often eclipsed by the controversy over his naming names testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy days of the 1950s. Many of Hollywood’s liberal members, such as actor Nick Nolte, sat on their hands in protest during the applause for Kazan as he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1999 Academy Awards. Young is unabashed in his admiration for Kazan’s work. His films moved me more than anyone else’s, he writes. I was transported, taken into the worlds they depicted, made privy to the inner tensions, conflicts, and feelings of Kazan’s characters, in whom I’d always found some part of myself. . . . Kazan’s films both forced and enabled me to think about my life and to view the world around me as I never had before. This was artistry of a very high order. In an age in which artistry seems replaced by gimmickry, and in which computer-generated worlds replace the landscapes of the human soul, an artist like Kazan stands as a reminder of what great cinema is all about. Kazan’s greatest strength as a director understanding acting and how to bring out the best in actors is increasingly becoming a lost art. Reading this book is inspirational, because it transports the reader back into a value system that needs to be rediscovered by the next generation of filmmakers. This book is not merely an homage by an admiring fan. Instead it is an exchange between two filmmakers on the art of filmmaking, which forces the director into a searching examination of his work, blemishes and all. With a chapter on each of Kazan’s films, the interviewer pushes the director to provide reasons for doing what he did, even when they are in disagreement. As I said, all of my sentiments are diametrically opposed to yours. Nothing you’ve said changes that, Young interjects during a discussion of Kazan’s incriminating Congressional testimony. At another point, when Kazan tries to defend his direction of Gentleman’s Agreement, admittedly one of his weaker works, Young challenges Kazan by saying, “I disagree. I think the details were not done well at all. The party scene at Celeste Holm’s apartment is full of cliches and stereotypes. When Kazan tries to defend his direction of Gentleman’s Agreement, admittedly one of his weaker works, Young challenges Kazan by saying, I disagree. I think the details were not done well at all. The party scene at Celeste Holm’s apartment is full of cliches and stereotypes. With this frank, sometimes confrontational, but always admiring style, Young brings out the best thoughts from the fertile mind of this great filmmaker. It is invaluable for filmmakers wanting an inside look into the reasoning that goes behind the thousands of decisions made in the creative filmmaking process. After you’ve read the book, you’ll want to rent the movies.

David Hinton is the dean of Watkins Institute College of Art and Design.

Not since Francois Truffaut took on Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s has there been such an illuminating exchange in print between a director and a critical fan. In Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films, filmmaker and writer Jeff Young interviews the renowned and controversial…

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