No one writes about history like Judith Flanders. Reading her work (The Victorian City, Inside the Victorian Home) is like going back in time with an expert guide at your side.

In her new book, The Making of Home, Flanders ventures beyond one city or time period to explore the political, religious, economic and social factors that led to the notions of home that still influence us today. Make no mistake—this is not a history of decoration or architecture. As Flanders puts it, “It is not the style of chair that is my primary concern, but how people sat on it.” 

While such a broad topic might be dry in the hands of a lesser writer, Flanders boasts an astounding ability to seamlessly weave facts and ideas. In her discussion of the evolution of lighting inside and outside houses, we’re treated to Robert Louis Stevenson’s comments on gas street lamps: “The city-folk had stars of their own; biddable domesticated stars.” Like those stars, every page of this remarkable book sparkles with insights. 

If you’re left curious to know more about, say, the impact of technology on kitchen design and women’s lives, The Making of Home includes extensive notes and an 18-page bibliography.  

As Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home.” In The Making of Home, Flanders helps us appreciate how much there is to know about something we care about so deeply.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, September 2015

David Maraniss didn’t set out to write a ghost story, but Once in a Great City, his glimmering portrait of Detroit, has a lingering, melancholy quality that will leave the reader thoroughly haunted. 

The story begins on November 9, 1962, a day of tragedies: The Ford Rotunda, an architectural masterpiece that was once one of the nation’s top five tourist attractions, burns to the ground. On the other side of town, the Detroit police ransack the Gotham, a landmark hotel memorialized in prose by Langston Hughes. The Gotham eventually becomes a parking lot, and the Ford Rotunda is never rebuilt.

These troubling opening passages seem to portend the storms that will crash upon the city, yet Maraniss doesn’t linger in the gloom. Instead, he regards them as cracks in an otherwise gorgeous facade, for Detroit in the early 1960s was a tremendous place to be. From the inventors of the Mustang to the producers of Motown Records, Detroit’s movers and shakers were extraordinary. Maraniss brings them to life in vivid flashes, recounting details like the story behind Motown producer Berry Gordy’s nickname, and the tenor of the voice of civil rights advocate Reverend C.L. Franklin, the father of Aretha Franklin.

Once in a Great City has it all: significant scenes, tremendously charismatic figures, even a starry soundtrack. (I challenge anyone to read this book without sneaking off to listen to old Motown favorites like “My Guy.”) Maraniss chronicles events from the fall of 1962 through the spring of 1964. Reading about the city in its heyday is like falling backward in time and running into someone whose youthful blush you’d completely forgotten. Detroit is that someone. She is bright and laughing, flickering before you like a specter from the past. I doubt I’ll forget her anytime soon.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, Dr. Sumner Jackson, a high-profile American-born surgeon, found himself in the perilous position of living a few doors down fashionable Avenue Foch from the Gestapo headquarters. At the time, Jackson was in charge of the American Hospital in Neuilly, only a brisk bicycle ride away from the home he shared with his wife, Toquette, and teenage son, Phillip. America was not then at war with Germany, but Jackson had worked in Paris long enough to count himself among the vanquished and, thus, sympathetic to the resistance.

Alex Kershaw (The Bedford Boys) describes in stark detail how the City of Light quickly became a city of intrigue and terror. Jackson’s neighbor and nemesis was Helmut Knochen, head of the Gestapo in Paris. In addition to the spying apparatus he imported from Germany, Knochen also tapped into the local criminal underworld to recruit an army of informants and torturers. At first, Jackson’s high-placed connections insulated him and his hospital from oppressive German oversight. But his and his wife’s willingness to aid members of the resistance kept them in constant danger of being discovered.

Kershaw shows how Parisians generally and Jews specifically suffered terribly under the occupation. While German officers dined in splendor, ordinary citizens faced starvation. And there were other outrages, too. In 1943, the Germans publicly burned more than 500 works by Miro, Picasso and other artists, deeming them “degenerate.”

A few months before the Allies liberated Paris, the Germans finally imprisoned the Jacksons, including son Phillip, whose family archives and personal recollections served as principal sources for this tense and compelling narrative.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.