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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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History

Grandmother’s gift inspires a lifelong fascination

Behind the Book by James L. Swanson

<b>Grandmother’s gift inspires a lifelong fascination</b> It was my grandmother who first got me interested in assassination. I was born on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12. When I was a child, from as far back as I can remember, I received Lincoln books, trinkets, medals and souvenirs as gifts. When I was 10 years old, I discovered the dark side of the Lincoln story. That’s when my grandmother Elizabeth, a veteran of the long-vanished, legendary Chicago tabloid newspaper scene, gave me what some might consider an odd gift for a child a framed engraving of John Wilkes Booth’s Deringer pistol, the one he used to murder Abraham Lincoln. Framed with this engraving was a clipping from the Chicago Tribune dated April 15, 1865, the day Lincoln died.

Unfortunately the clipping was incomplete, so when I was a child, I could read only part of the story. The article described the pistol attack on the president, Booth’s leap to the stage at Ford’s Theatre, the vicious knifing of Secretary of State Seward, and Booth’s escape across the stage and race to the back door leading out to the alley and then . . . nothing. Someone had cut off the rest of the story so the clipping would fit within the frame! I must have read that article hundreds of times over the next few years. I remember vividly one night when I read that clipping over and over and thought, I want to read the rest of the story. Little did I know that one day, I would write about that story in not one, but a series of books devoted to the end of the Civil War, Lincoln’s last days and his assassination and its unforgettable impact on American history and myth. And so it was my grandmother’s gift a priceless relic that still hangs on my wall that triggered my lifelong obsession with the Lincoln assassination and inspired me to write Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer and Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution. One of the most thrilling things I did as part of the research for my books was to acquire an entire run of rare, original issues of the Chicago Tribune about 100 newspapers from the end of the Civil War through the death of Lincoln and the trial of the conspirators. Whenever I look at them I am overcome with fond memories of my grandmother Elizabeth. When I grew older and learned more about Lincoln, I began collecting at a more advanced level books from the Civil War, newspapers, posters announcing the death of Lincoln, original prints and photographs and more. In high school, instead of buying a used car, I purchased one of the rare original reward posters offering a $100,000 reward for the Lincoln assassins. Once I got to college, I studied the assassination of Lincoln, and his era, ever more seriously. I was a student of John Hope Franklin at the University of Chicago and took his wonderful courses on the Civil War era and on the history of the American South. Manhunt and Lincoln’s Assassins are the result of a lifetime of study, plus several years of intensive research and writing. I’ve assembled a reference library of several thousand books, relics, documents and illustrations covering Abraham Lincoln, the presidency, the Civil War and 19th-century American history. Much of what I needed for Manhunt and Lincoln’s Assassins was already sitting on my shelves. I just needed to open these books and read them again. I also consulted my extensive collection of Civil War newspapers. Having so many priceless sources in my home library allowed me to work all day and then deep into the night my favorite time for research and writing. Public libraries close at night. My library was open 24 hours a day. These primary sources were absolutely essential. I could not have written the books without my collection of original materials.

I’ve tried to share many of these pieces in Lincoln’s Assassins, a book I consider the pictorial companion to Manhunt. Lincoln’s Assassins contains almost 300 color plates of the rare objects that have inspired my research, including the first publication ever of the entire series of Alexander Gardner’s notorious and haunting photographs of the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators. The book is a scrapbook that I hope will transport readers back to the saddest days in American history.

Of course, there are a number of wonderful relics that I haven’t discovered. Number one is Sergeant Boston Corbett’s pistol the one he used to shoot and kill John Wilkes Booth. It was a prize relic, even at the time. Collectors offered Corbett up to $1,000 for the pistol. He refused, but soon enough it was stolen from him, and it’s now been lost to history. The person who took it surely must have known its value, but I imagine that as it passed from hand to hand, and generation to generation, its history and importance have been lost. I’m betting that somewhere out there, a collector owns the revolver used to kill John Wilkes Booth and he doesn’t even know he has it. And then there are the Booth autopsy photos that vanished within days of his death.

For me, the manhunt for Booth and the trial and execution of his conspirators continues. I’m still researching the topic, and I’m still hoping to discover other relics, letters, documents, or photographs that have been lost for more than a century, and that I can use in my next book about the thrilling manhunt for Jefferson Davis and the astounding, nationwide funeral events for Abraham Lincoln. This is the most alluring thing about writing history. The story never really ends, and you never know what amazing thing you might discover tomorrow.

<i>James L. Swanson is a legal scholar with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Manhunt, his account of the search for John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators, spent 13 weeks on the</i> New York Times <i>bestseller list and has 250,000 copies in print. A movie version starring Harrison Ford is currently in pre-production.</i> Lincoln’s Assassins, <i>a book co-written in 2001 by Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg, is being brought back into print this fall in a new edition from William Morrow.</i>

<b>Grandmother's gift inspires a lifelong fascination</b> It was my grandmother who first got me interested in assassination. I was born on Lincoln's birthday, February 12. When I was a child, from as far back as I can remember, I received Lincoln books, trinkets, medals and…
History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In his account of the 500-year sweep of interaction between American Indians and Euro-Americans, British writer and historian James Wilson attempts to right some of the wrongs of earlier historians. Fitting 500 years of history into fewer than 500 pages is no small task, but part of Wilson’s success is based on his weighting the second half of the 19th century the period when most of the decisions (i.e., mistakes) about the Indian problem were made. Wilson also gives the 20th century, especially the first half, ample space. The settling of the West, the displacement and near annihilation of the Indians, and the modern consequences of those events are treated fully.

For example, a century ago there were more than 300 [American Indian boarding schools] across the country with a combined enrollment of nearly 22,000, close to 10 per cent of the entire native American population at the time. These schools were the result of the Dawes Act of 1877, a piece of legislation that followed a nearly unbroken series of disastrous policies toward native peoples. The first of these schools to open, located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was made famous by its most renowned athlete, Jim Thorpe, and the movie based on his life. The sugarcoating job done by that 1951 film (starring the decidedly non-Indian Burt Lancaster) typifies the ongoing revisionism done by white American historians until relatively recently.

Of those boarding schools Wilson writes that native American schoolchildren were thrown into a hostile universe in which everything that made them what they were was systematically ridiculed and condemned. Not surprisingly, many did not survive and many who did survive were scarred for life. . . . He quotes Lakota spokeswoman Charlotte Black Elk who asserted that the Dawes Act was bureaucratic genocide. Children who were successfully civilized were not accepted by their own people. Attitudes persist, so it is easy to understand why little value is placed, even now, on a young person’s leaving the reservation to attend a white university.

Throughout, promises were broken, treaties were broken, and the hearts and wills of many strong people were also broken. And yet today native people are again growing in number and importance. James Wilson’s The Earth Shall Weep affords a good overview of an unhappy segment of the American past.

Writer James Grinnell lives in DeKalb, Illinois.

In his account of the 500-year sweep of interaction between American Indians and Euro-Americans, British writer and historian James Wilson attempts to right some of the wrongs of earlier historians. Fitting 500 years of history into fewer than 500 pages is no small task, but…

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

When Robert McCrum suffered a stroke at the age of 42, he joined a community of patients who endure insult to the brain and fight their way back to the lives they once took for granted. He chronicles his own battle to recover himself in My Year Off. Books and reading play a large part in McCrum’s account. As both a writer himself and editor to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje, McCrum is preoccupied by the literary, and books, reading, and writing are integral parts of his convalescence. His wife Sarah comforts him after his stroke by reading aloud from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he writes that Wordsworth, famously, spoke of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. In hospital, I experienced memory as emotion recollected in immobility. Throughout his account, McCrum often translates his experiences through literature. His wide usage of books and literary encounters constructs a widened lens through which the reader understands his episode. Writing itself is privileged through McCrum’s liberal use of his own diary as well as Sarah’s. Glimpses of their feelings as the stroke changes their lives add a measure of contemporary understanding that hindsight and editorial awareness sometimes elides. Sarah’s thoughts in particular widen the spectrum of the stroke’s impact. She writes despairingly, What I couldn’t say, though, was: I never learned to push a wheelchair that had my husband in it. . . . Why do you expect me to know what to do? but also with defiance: When people wouldn’t step aside to let [Robert] go I glared at them and made them feel bad. Her voice proclaims with authority like McCrum’s own, demonstrating the range of effect such an event has on the victim’s family as well as him or herself.

McCrum’s affinity for detail codifies his experience for his audience with humor and perspicacity. He writes: [Stroke] is like losing your wallet every day. Your wallet and your Filofax. The same sense of

When Robert McCrum suffered a stroke at the age of 42, he joined a community of patients who endure insult to the brain and fight their way back to the lives they once took for granted. He chronicles his own battle to recover himself in…

Memoir

Charting an unexpected course down the Mississippi

Behind the Book by Mary Morris

I once heard someone say that if you want to find out what you aren't going to be doing for the next 10 years, make a list of your goals. Then at least you'll know a few things that won't be happening. The point being that life is really about the detours, not the destinations. But I'm a planner. I make itineraries, lists. And, as I prepared to write my latest book, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to go down the Mississippi River in a houseboat that I would pilot myself. Why this lunacy came to me is a much longer story indeed it is what The River Queen is about but I wanted to do this. In the 1920s my father lived along the banks of the Mississippi and I was raised on his river tales. I was going to visit the places my father knew. I would do the whole river over a period of about two months. After all, I'd written a proposal, a very exacting 57-page document, a testament to what I was going to do, and a very fine publisher had agreed to publish it.

Never mind that I knew little about boats, let alone locks and dams. I bought books. I learned nautical terms as if I were studying French. I studied the basics of hydraulic engineering until I knew more than anyone I know who isn't a hydraulic engineer. I understood, for example, exactly why the levee-only policy had been bad for New Orleans. But then in May, three months before I was to leave, my father died. He was almost 103 years old, so his death shouldn't have surprised anyone, but his mind was intact and I thought he'd just keep going.

I had a long grocery list of things I intended to ask him. What was the name of that island where you spent your summer? Tell me more about Klein's, the clothing store where you worked as a young man. Talk to me about the river when you were a boy. His death threw me into a depression I couldn't seem to snap out of. I had no desire to move, to travel, to go anywhere, let alone plan a huge trip. But I was committed and so I went up to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where my nephew lived and where I found two river pilots, charmingly named Tom and Jerry, who convinced me with great laughter and guffaws that it was impossible to go down the river in a houseboat alone. But Jerry had a boat he wanted to move south. They agreed to take me halfway and arranged for a friend to take me the rest.

Two weeks before I was to leave, Katrina happened. As I watched the horror unfold, which I don't think I need to describe here, my trip took a turn, a bend, I hadn't imagined. How could I sail in my boat all the way south? As I sailed with Tom and Jerry, it seemed I literally had to go with the flow. I had no idea how far this journey would take me. There was a tremendous sense of the unknown. My father's death meant he would not be telling me which island he'd visited or more about his time in Hannibal. But it also meant, in retrospect, that I was free to write about him in a way that I never could while he was alive. I did not anticipate this feeling, for I missed him terribly, but there were things left unsaid.

As the aftermath of Katrina unfolded and the price of gas soared, the whole venture to New Orleans was looking more and more moot. But I had things in my favor. Tom and Jerry were good guys, great guys actually, and, by a bit of luck, excellent river pilots, and they also immediately became great characters. I knew I wanted to stay with them and our wreck of a boat as we journeyed south. It wasn't long before I found myself standing on the bow of our boat, phoning my editor to tell him that I was throwing the well-wrought plan for my book out the window. Nothing that I'd exactly foreseen about this book was coming to be. And my editor replied that he didn't give a flying fattuty (or words to that effect) about the history of the locks and dams. Just tell me about your father, is what he said.

It was as if I had been banging my head against a wall and someone opened a door. I walked through a portal I hadn't seen and wrote the book I never anticipated writing. I began with the stories my father had told me, memories of his humor and his anger, moments I had never tapped into before. As I say in The River Queen, what began for me as an adventure and a lark turned into a journey into memory, childhood and the past. And it was definitely not what I had planned.

 

Acclaimed writer Mary Morris blends memoir and midlife journey in her latest book, The River Queen. The author of three travel books, six novels and three collections of short stories, Morris teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

I once heard someone say that if you want to find out what you aren't going to be doing for the next 10 years, make a list of your goals. Then at least you'll know a few things that won't be happening. The point being that life is really about the detours, not the destinations. But I'm a planner. I make itineraries, lists. And, as I prepared to write my latest book, I knew exactly what I was doing.
Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

One has the right to expect decency even of a poet, George Orwell said, poet standing for both the supercilious, sandal-shod poetaster of yore and for self-absorbed, courtesy-flouting artists in all media who feel that their high calling allows them to treat the feelings and even lives of lesser mortals with contempt. Not to mention their attitude toward rival poets, which is often one of feral savagery.

Well, you can expect ’til the cows come home, as Orwell well knew, and you are likely to come up empty-handed. The poet, like his distant cousin, the academic, lives with an abnormally high fear that someone may be gaining on him and, what is worse, with the secret knowledge that the someone deserves to.

Too bad Orwell never met Ross Macdonald. The encounter would have gone a long way toward restoring his faith in the decency of poets. But Orwell died in 1950, just about when Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, was beginning his quarter-century run with his series of novels featuring the private detective Lew Archer.

Fortunately we can meet him in Tom Nolan’s Ross Macdonald: A Biography, one of the finest and most affecting biographies I have read in years. It sensitively and intelligently covers all aspects of Millar’s art and life. The greatest of its virtues, I think, is that it gives us, largely through extensive interviews with people who knew him, a rounded picture not only of Macdonald the writer, but of Millar the man, husband, father, and citizen.

But, as the Wise Old Newspaper Filosofer once said, one thought per column, and the thought I’d impress upon you in this column is . . . what a thoroughly decent, considerate, kind, ethical, and humble man Millar was. Not simply because those can be rare qualities in the arts, but because they form a strain running all through Nolan’s book.

Millar gave aid and comfort to fellow writers and to aspiring writers. He wrote long, thoughtful replies to fans who sent him enthusiastic letters. He helped those in trouble; the singer-songwriter Warren Zevon credits Millar with saving his life. Millar was even nice toward those who treated him shabbily, like his forerunner and eventual rival for literary reputation, Raymond Chandler, who apparently thought (correctly) that someone was gaining on him.

Nor was he, as so often happens, a hero to the world and a monster to his family. His wife Margaret Millar, equally renowned as a mystery writer, apparently could be a bit of a dragon, but they loved and supported each other through more than four decades of marriage. Both agonized over the emotional troubles of their only child Linda, who died at 31.

Still, one thought per column aside, they don’t write biographies of people for being nice; they write them because they achieved something. It would be futile in this short oblong of space to try and explain Millar’s achievement as a writer. Nolan and his interviewees explain it superbly. A Bantam publicist caught it succinctly. With Lew Archer, the publicist said, Ross Macdonald began the trend away from writing mystery novels to writing novels that dealt with mysteries. The distinction is everything, and Macdonald did it with distinction.

There is much more besides in this superior biography. For one thing, an examination of Southern California culture, which was Macdonald’s essential subject. It also evokes the wonderful time in publishing before the book culture broke down into the blockbuster mentality, when a writer could turn out a book a year, each one better than the last, and, though none sold in great numbers, be patiently supported by his publisher (in this case, Alfred A. Knopf), who saw merit in what the writer was doing and the possibility of greater profits on the horizon.

It ends sadly. Alzheimer’s disease began eroding Millar’s powerful intellect and creativity around the age of 60. It is as pitiful to read about as the stroke that left H.L. Mencken, famously verbal all his life, inarticulate for eight years. Margaret took care of Millar, and if occasionally she did it with less than perfect grace, well, she had her own physical frailties to deal with. Millar’s grace, however, was fully intact. He made no claim for sympathy, a friend said, no protest against fate. Kenneth Millar died in 1983 at the age of 67. Margaret died in 1994, aged 79. Nolan’s book makes you mourn their loss nearly as much as that of your own kin.

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

One has the right to expect decency even of a poet, George Orwell said, poet standing for both the supercilious, sandal-shod poetaster of yore and for self-absorbed, courtesy-flouting artists in all media who feel that their high calling allows them to treat the feelings and…

Memoir

BEHIND THE BOOK

Behind the Book by Susan Richards Shreve

Just after my 11th birthday, in the summer of 1950, I moved from Washington, D.C., then a small, segregated Southern town, to the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation where I would live without my parents off and on for two years. When I left Warm Springs precipitously following a disastrous accident in which my young and secret love, Joey Buckley, and I had raced downhill in our wheelchairs and flipped, I was almost 13. I was the perpetrator of that adventure that much I’ve always known or at least suspected but what went on with me at Warm Springs before I was expelled, who that young girl, restless and rebellious, growing up in the sunny banality of 1952 had been, was the impetus for writing Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven.

After I left the hospital with my father who had been dispatched to collect me pronto, as he told me, I never looked back until now. I never asked my parents what had happened and they never told me not why I was considered enough of a danger to the other children to be kicked out, not what had happened to Joey Buckley nor reprimanded me, nor inquired as to how I got myself in so much trouble. The questions I would ask them now I had no interest in asking in my 20s and 30s before they died. I had infantile paralysis when I was a year-old toddler living in Toledo, Ohio, so the fact of polio never changed life as I knew it. I walked with a brace and not particularly well, and so as a child, normal was my destination which I imagined as slipping seamlessly into the school group picture exactly like every other girl in penny loafers. Arriving in Warm Springs, after a fifth-grade year of remarkable failure in academics and deportment, I was thrilled to move to a place where crippled children were considered ordinary, only to discover that I was not crippled enough to qualify. As a novelist, I have been suspicious of memoir (although I love to read the memoirs of others), preferring the process of invention to retelling my own story, happier offstage behind the scenes. So I came to this book through the back door. We were sitting one night my husband and I at a bistro in one of those banquette seats beside a couple whose conversation was more compelling than our own and so we found ourselves included by proximity, when the husband asked us to join them. They were scientific researchers at the National Institutes of Health examining the very particular relationship between the AIDS and polio viruses. What struck me was the surprising similarity in social context between AIDS and polio, both viewed as a kind of moral stain. In the case of AIDS, the shame was sexual, with polio it was social a false conclusion that the virus struck only the filthy houses of the urban poor. Shame was the operative word for me, the catalyst which set me on a course.

And so began a circuitous journey back to the years I had lived at Warm Springs. I read about the history of polio and FDR’s impressive contribution to Warm Springs and the eradication of polio. I read about the silent generation of the 1950s and thought about the shame of illness, the character-defining frustration of a child locked in a paralyzed body, the dilemma of the sick child who feels responsible for changing the family’s daily life. A book was beginning to take shape, one in which my own story was the center of a larger subject. But I couldn’t find the center of my own story. Then one night as I was describing to my husband what had happened to me with Joey Buckley, I could feel in myself the fear and danger of telling truth and knew with a kind of crazy relief and excitement that the race I had instigated with Joey Buckley was the screen around which the rest of my memories of those two years could assemble.

And I began to think of what it had meant to me to live in a village of cripples, to travel the distance between childhood and adulthood for that short time by myself discovering the lure of religion and romantic movies and the danger of sexuality lurking in the embryo of adolescence.

The author of 13 novels, Susan Richards Shreve is a professor of English at George Mason University and the former co-chair and president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Just after my 11th birthday, in the summer of 1950, I moved from Washington, D.C., then a small, segregated Southern town, to the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation where I would live without my parents off and on for two years. When I left Warm…

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