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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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Review

Review by bookpagedev

Review by Michael Breen The first thing that will strike you after reading No Heroes is the irony of its title. Heroes fill the pages of this book, men and women doing a dirty, dangerous, and often thankless job for little reward. Their quarry are people who have no respect for the government or its laws, and view law enforcement officials as nothing more than targets. Danny Coulson is one of these heroes, a 31-year FBI veteran, serving in numerous roles including the first head of the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). Though Coulson did go after bank robbers and drug dealers, the heart of this story is the conflict between the FBI and those who rejected the government and used violence to forward their goals. Coulson discusses several anti-government groups, from the black revolutionaries of the 1960s and ’70s to the white supremacist groups of today, and vividly describes the struggle against these forces. It is a deadly contest, one made more difficult by the government’s unceasing efforts to use lawful and non-violent means against opponents who had no such restrictions.

But the struggle against the forces of crime and terror is only half of this story. Coulson also describes the conflict within the Bureau itself. This second war is one of doers vs. drivers. Drivers were those who worried more about rules, their reputations, political maneuvering, bureaucratic infighting, and spelling errors than catching lawbreakers. This tension is a constant in the book, beginning with the ossified late Hoover era administrators and ending with the finger-pointing after the Ruby Ridge debacle. Coulson shows numerous occasions where the drivers’ shortsightedness led to problems and even risked lives. Coulson’s portrayal of his stresses and their cost is powerful, though his writing style may be a little rough he is, after all, first and foremost an FBI agent. But it is this raw voice of experience that makes the book so gripping. Not only a tale of stakeouts, investigations, and sieges, it is a story that engenders a greater appreciation of those who are on the front lines of the war against terrorism.

Michael Breen is a reviewer in Lawrence, Kansas.

Review by Michael Breen The first thing that will strike you after reading No Heroes is the irony of its title. Heroes fill the pages of this book, men and women doing a dirty, dangerous, and often thankless job for little reward. Their quarry are…
LiteratureArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Review by Eliza R. L. McGraw Unsurprisingly, Philip Hamburger’s collection of essays from his years at the New Yorker is dedicated to Harold Ross, the curmudgeonly and astute editor who presided over the tenures of such New Yorker writers as James Thurber, E.B. White, and, of course, Hamburger.

Hamburger is in many ways a true Ross production, the kind of writer that made the New Yorker legendary. Friends Talking in the Night delightfully collects his best and most varied moments, from profiles to movie reviews.

Ever the New Yorker himself, Hamburger comments on the mayors of Gotham from the vantage point of his apartment across the street from Gracie Mansion in his 1953 essay, Some People Watch Birds. He writes that Fiorello LaGuardia was the busiest of our recent mayors and he spent, for a mayor, an inordinate amount of time at City Hall. Thanks to this perversity, I didn’t see as much of him as I would have liked. Hamburger’s comments on world affairs are equally as detailed as those on Gracie Mansion, but naturally graver. In Milan during Northern Italy’s 1945 liberation from Fascism, Hamburger stood in the Piazza Loreto as war criminals were executed: There were no roars of bloodcurdling yells; there was only silence and then, suddenly, a sigh a deep, moaning sound, seemingly expressive of release from something dark and fetid. Such serious events evoke Hamburger’s more somber tone, providing balance in the collection between his lighter work and his comments on global events.

Any student or lover of writing who leafs through Friends Talking in the Night may have a similar response to the one Hamburger had while watching Jimmy Stewart’s 1955 performance in High Noon: The mules know that no ordinary actor has hold of the reins. They know when a star has hold of the reins, and their ears go up. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times.

Eliza McGraw is a graduate student in English in Nashville, Tennessee.

Review by Eliza R. L. McGraw Unsurprisingly, Philip Hamburger's collection of essays from his years at the New Yorker is dedicated to Harold Ross, the curmudgeonly and astute editor who presided over the tenures of such New Yorker writers as James Thurber, E.B. White, and,…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Review by George Cowmeadow Bauman In 1997’s Booknotes, Brian Lamb collected a number of his interviews with writers who had appeared on his TV program of the same name. Now the man responsible for the oxymoronically named Book TV is at it again compiling irresistible reading for fans of C-SPAN’s Booknotes program, and for anyone interested in good writing and interesting lives.

Booknotes: Life Stories is being published to celebrate the program’s tenth anniversary, and it is Lamb at his finest. He’s collected 75 interviews with biographers who responded to Lamb’s questions about their subjects and the process of turning inspiration into print. Included are Susan Butler on Amelia Earhart, Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King, Jr., and Norman Mailer on Lee Harvey Oswald. Walter Cronkite, Frank McCourt, and Katharine Graham discuss their own lives, public and private. Lamb describes his interviewing style in the book’s Introduction: I’m not in that chair on behalf of intellectuals; my job is to ask questions on behalf of the average George and Jane, Cathy and Jim. In the interest of making the collection more readable, Lamb’s questions have been deleted. The biographers’ comments about their subjects are conversational.

An appendix lists all of the Booknotes interviews over the ten-year run of the program. It’s an impressive collection of the best nonfiction writers during that period.

Readers who enjoy American history will find a wealth of material here. Historical misunderstandings are corrected. For example, Paul Revere never said, The British are coming! The colonists still thought they were British. Instead, he shouted, The regulars are out! Whether Booknotes: Life Stories is read for enjoyment or is used as a reference, it will cause the reader to give thanks for the national literary treasure known as Brian Lamb.

George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of Acorn Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio.

Review by George Cowmeadow Bauman In 1997's Booknotes, Brian Lamb collected a number of his interviews with writers who had appeared on his TV program of the same name. Now the man responsible for the oxymoronically named Book TV is at it again compiling irresistible…

Nature

Behind the Book: Entering the deadly kingdom

Behind the Book by Gordon Grice

“But why can’t we go look at it?” I asked my mother.
 
“Because it’s dangerous,” she said.
 
“We could watch from the car.”
 
“We’ll go back into town and let Granddad handle it.”
 
“We never get to do anything fun,” I said, but the argument was already lost, the red cedar fence posts clicking by faster and faster outside the car window. I picked at the threads in the green upholstery of the back seat. Mom was putting miles of safety between us and the cougar treed in front of our farmhouse. My grandfather had waved us down as we drove home from errands and told us to proceed no further. I was six; it didn’t occur to me to worry about my grandfather. I only knew I was missing out on something.
 
The next time I saw him, Granddad was the same as always, tossing his silver head as he told his jokes, smiling in his broad but mysterious way, like the man on the Quaker oats box. He had little to say about the fate of the cougar.
 
The real cougar passed from my life permanently. I never even glimpsed him. But the memory of him was written in fire. It seemed a special cruelty for my elders to deny me his company, for I was already obsessed with wild animals and wanted to see him more than I can perhaps make clear. I had heard the voice of the bobcat and followed the delicate and sinuous track of the rattlesnake; soon I would begin to keep insects and spiders in jars; within a few years I would fill notebooks with my observations and drawings of wildlife. Our home in the Oklahoma Panhandle offered daily lessons in biology: a two-headed Hereford calf at the local museum, plagues of grasshoppers and jackrabbits, mastodons dug out of the fields, the tracks of Allosaurs found in stone. One summer when I was 10, prodigious congregations of black crickets rose from the soil. They seethed beneath the outdoor lights. Once they came pouring over the edge of our front porch, where a friend and I had just squashed a grasshopper. It seemed, for a panicky moment, like retribution.
 
Of course those crickets were really harmless, like most of the animals I watched. But the dangerous ones kept a special fascination for me. As an adult, I wrote magazine stories about obviously dangerous animals like cougars and surprisingly dangerous ones like armadillos, which can give you leprosy if you eat them. They can also scratch you, but that was my own fault for picking the thing up. In my first book, The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, I wrote about my own encounters with rattlesnakes and coyotes.
 
It was a happy coincidence when one day a dusty bookshop yielded two classic surveys of my favorite subject. Roger Caras’s Dangerous to Man (1964) was full of quotes from scientists; James Clarke’s Man Is the Prey (1969) was a spicier volume of anecdotes. They were both well-researched and interesting books, and they both had it all wrong.
 
That’s not a knock on Clarke and Caras. They’d done their homework. It was the world that had changed. It was no longer true, for example, that cougars didn’t consider people prey. A few famous fatalities made that clear. There were more people spread over larger areas, and relations between the species had changed. Science had made progress, too: now we knew about the surprisingly dangerous venoms of komodo dragons and hobo spiders. And then there were the changes in people. It’s become surprisingly common for suburban Americans to own monkeys and chimpanzees, despite the tendency of these primates to bite off human fingers.
 
What I wanted was a new bestiary for the 21st century. And I wanted to be the one to write it. It took me seven years to finish Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals. There was some unusual research. I stuck my arm into the flensed skull of an alligator to see how it felt. I searched for the black bear my neighbor spotted on her morning jog. I read things in medical reports I’d rather forget, and I learned all over again how gorgeous even the humblest animals can be. And in the end, I saw animal attacks in a new light, not just as interesting and disturbing events in their own right, but also as products of poverty, war and environmental carnage. It’s always been this way for me: looking at other animals is my way of looking at us.
 
Photo credit: Parker Grice

“But why can’t we go look at it?” I asked my mother.
 
“Because it’s dangerous,” she said.
 
“We could watch from the car.”
 
“We’ll go back into town and let Granddad handle it.”
 
“We never get to do anything fun,”…

History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Henry Kissinger is one of the towering and most controversial American statesmen of this century. Even his critics can attest to his brilliance. In the third volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal, Kissinger offers a detailed account of his service as Secretary of State to Gerald Ford. He also offers insight into the legacy Richard Nixon left foreign policy and reflections on the nature and practice of American foreign policy. Kissinger writes gracefully, and his subject is an important one.

Discussing Nixon the man, Kissinger writes, The Richard Nixon with whom I worked on a daily basis for five and a half years was generally soft-spoken, withdrawn, and quite shy. Nixon, according to Kissinger, had a fear of being rejected, but also a romantic image of himself as a fearless manipulator. Kissinger contrasts Ford’s decent, straightforward leadership style with Nixon’s. Ford worked hard to grasp the essence of issues, and, unlike Nixon, was far more involved in the execution of policy. Kissinger discusses Ford Administration foreign policy achievements, including disentangling the U.

S. from Vietnam and keeping the U.

S. military strong while continuing talks with the U.

S.

S.

R. Kissinger also answers his critics on both the Right and Left of the political spectrum. He and Nixon viewed foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point, unlike the dominant view among liberals and conservatives, who were seeking a series of climaxes, each of which would culminate its particular phase and obviate the need for a continuing exertion. This is a major work of diplomatic history, and anyone who wants to better understand American foreign policy from the 1960s on will want to read it.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Henry Kissinger is one of the towering and most controversial American statesmen of this century. Even his critics can attest to his brilliance. In the third volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal, Kissinger offers a detailed account of his service as Secretary of State…

Arts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Voter turnout is in steep decline. Public policy debates grow ever-more uncivil. Even mainstays of civic life like the PTA struggle to maintain members. So is good citizenship dead? Michael Schudson, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego, doesn’t think so. In The Good Citizen, a history of three centuries of American civic life, Schudson argues essentially that practices of citizenship have changed and evolved as the American political system has changed and evolved.

According to Schudson, we have passed through three distinct eras of civic life and have now entered a fourth. Each era has formulated its own model of citizenship, with its own unique virtues and shortcomings. All of these past models continue to influence our thinking and behavior. The cherished ideal of the informed citizen, for example, is a still-powerful vestige of the progressive era of the last century.

But, as Schudson convincingly points out, none of these earlier models is adequate for our present era, a period defined by a profound revolution in rights, with politics permeating virtually every aspect of life. So Schudson proposes a model he calls the monitorial citizen. Such citizens, he says, are like parents watching their children at the community pool, seemingly inactive but poised for action if action is required. Citizenship of this sort may be for many people much less intense than in the era of parties, but citizenship is now a year-round, day-long activity, as it was only rarely in the past. This is a fascinating, if somewhat academic, argument. It certainly merits wider thought and discussion. But readers can strongly disagree with Schudson’s analysis or simply ignore it and still find The Good Citizen an interesting read.

Like all good histories, The Good Citizen forcefully reminds us that what seems chiseled in stone today was often a matter of contentious debate in an earlier time. For example, strong political parties are seen today as one of America’s chief contributions to the democratic process; but parties and factions were loathed and feared by the Founding Fathers. We often point to the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a high point in our political discourse; but as Schudson slyly points out, these debates had no effect on the election (since U.S. Senators were selected by state legislators at the time).

Schudson weaves these and other equally interesting observations together to make another important point: there has never been a Golden Age of good citizenship before which our own age pales. As Schudson says, citizenship has not disappeared. It has not even declined. It has, inevitably, changed. That’s good news.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Voter turnout is in steep decline. Public policy debates grow ever-more uncivil. Even mainstays of civic life like the PTA struggle to maintain members. So is good citizenship dead? Michael Schudson, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego, doesn't think…

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