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Immigrant daughter goes back to her roots

Val Wang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., wondering about her place in the world. "I didn't feel as though I belonged there," she wrote, "or anywhere yet, and I itched to travel to exotic places far away to look for what was missing in my life."

Memoir

Finding a grandfather’s forgotten love

Review by Marianne Peters

Sarah Wildman knew her grandfather, Karl, escaped from Vienna on the eve of the Nazi occupation. One day after his death, however, she discovered a box of letters and photographs hinting that there might be another, truer version of his story, one that included a girl nicknamed "Valy."

Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind is a Holocaust memoir, a survivor's tale and a detective story all at once. After reading the letters and seeing Valy's smiling face in the photos, Wildman is determined to find out the fate of this mysterious Jewish woman her grandmother referred to bitterly as her husband's "first love." Her search takes her from Czechoslovakia to Berlin and deep into the maze of bureaucracy that traces those scattered by war. In an increasingly digital age, I was staggered by Wildman's description of the paper records that still exist, accounting for thousands of people both lost and found.

The author includes selections from Valy's letters, which glow with love for Wildman's grandfather. It's impossible not to root for her, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when, as the months pass after his departure, Valy's letters turn into desperate pleas requesting money and passage to America, even as she attempts to put a cheerful face on the increasing humiliations of life in WWII Berlin.

Paper Love is an intimate portrait of a woman caught in the Nazi net—a woman who might have been forgotten without Wildman's efforts. In telling Valy's story, Wildman reflects on the stories we tell about our own pasts, what we include and what—and who—we leave out.

Sarah Wildman knew her grandfather, Karl, escaped from Vienna on the eve of the Nazi occupation. One day after his death, however, she discovered a box of letters and photographs hinting that there might be another, truer version of his story, one that included a girl nicknamed "Valy."

Modern artists

One of the first artists featured in Sarah Thornton’s fascinating 33 Artists in 3 Acts is American Jeff Koons, who tells her that he never wants people to feel small when they view his art. Clearly Thornton ascribes to a similar principle. In this witty, smart follow-up to her 2008 bestseller, Seven Days in the Art World, Thornton generously cracks the sometimes perplexing code of modern art.
NonfictionHistory

Behind the scenes in D.C.

Review by Roger Bishop

During the years after World War II, a group of ambitious, idealistic, affluent and well-connected young people settled in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Until at least 1975, their strong influence was felt, for good or ill, in virtually every aspect of government, especially foreign policy decisions, and in shaping public opinion on such issues as the founding of NATO, the military and covert actions of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis and the war in Vietnam.

Historian Gregg Herken takes us inside this world in his meticulously researched and compellingly written The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington. At the center of the narrative is political and foreign affairs columnist Joseph Alsop, whose Sunday night supper parties became a Georgetown tradition. Vigorous discussions of issues dominated these gatherings. The guest list was nonpartisan and usually included members of Congress, foreign ambassadors, administration officials and, of course, Alsop’s well-connected friends and neighbors. These neighbors included Katharine and Phil Graham, publishers of The Washington Post; Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles, both deeply involved in covert activity; and diplomats Charles “Chip” Bohlen, David Bruce and Llewellyn Thompson. It was understood that any information from these gatherings could be used by Joe Alsop and his brother, Stewart, in their reporting. But it worked both ways: If a guest wished to leak information to the press, it was the perfect place to do so.

Senator John Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, were neighbors and occasional Alsop dinner guests. After the official events of JFK’s inauguration were over, the new president went to the Alsop home, without notifying the owner beforehand, where he stayed for two hours. When the Cuban missile crisis was developing, JFK went to a private party at the columnist’s home and stunned the host by confiding that there might be a nuclear war in the next five to 10 years. During the Watergate hearings, Alsop’s home became a kind of refuge for Henry Kissinger, who was having dinner there when President Nixon reached him by phone to give him advance word of his plans to resign. After Watergate, the Georgetown dinner party lost much of its drawing power.

Some of the people in this book have written their own memoirs or been the subjects of books by other writers. Herken works through this material to give us a balanced view of the mark they left on history. This compulsively readable group portrait of movers and shakers shows how major government decisions were influenced by an elite few during a dynamic period of national and world events.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

During the years after World War II, a group of ambitious, idealistic, affluent and well-connected young people settled in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Until at least 1975, their strong influence was felt, for good or ill, in virtually every aspect of government, especially foreign policy decisions, and in shaping public opinion on such issues as the founding of NATO, the military and covert actions of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis and the war in Vietnam.
NonfictionMemoir

Reflections on a Ukranian-American identity

Review by Heather Seggel

“Running a totalitarian regime is simple: tell the people what they’re going to do, shoot the first one to object, and repeat until everyone is on the same page.” Such was life in Ukraine for young Lev Golinkin and his family, and it might have been tolerable had he not also suffered daily beatings in school for being a Jew. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the family fled to Austria where they lived in a refugee hotel before immigrating to the U.S. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka is the story of that journey and of Golinkin’s struggle to reclaim his identity.

When the family finally makes it to the America extolled in folk songs and held out as their greatest hope, assimilating is as hard as you might imagine. Golinkin’s father, an engineer in the Ukraine, spends eight months sending out resumes in order to land an entry-level job in his field. His mother, a doctor, struggles with the language barrier while pulling espresso shots as a barista. Lev and his sister Lina are the family’s great hope, but while she studies, he struggles to dismantle his internalized anti-Semitism.

Golinkin writes with dry humor about his experience but connects emotionally when describing how a lengthy stint doing charity work in college finally led him to investigate his past and the people whose charity made his own life not just better, but possible at all. A friend in Vienna steered them to Indiana so they wouldn’t be lost among refugees in Brooklyn, and the efforts expended to get the children into college were heroic. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka blends memoir and history into an intimate tale of personal growth.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Running a totalitarian regime is simple: tell the people what they’re going to do, shoot the first one to object, and repeat until everyone is on the same page.” Such was life in Ukraine for young Lev Golinkin and his family, and it might have been tolerable had he not also suffered daily beatings in school for being a Jew. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the family fled to Austria where they lived in a refugee hotel before immigrating to the U.S. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka is the story of that journey and of Golinkin’s struggle to reclaim his identity.

A sister speaks out

A few years ago, I taught Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in a college freshman writing class. I thought the story of Chris McCandless, who turned his back on civilization to hike into the Alaskan wilderness, would resonate with undergraduates. Chris’ tragic journey may have ended with his death, but his quest for purity and adventure was inspirational. Or so I thought.
Business & Finance

A case against death row

Review by Edward Morris

Bryan Stevenson was fresh out of Harvard Law School when he embraced—first in Georgia, then in Alabama—the mission of defending death row inmates and others facing undeserved or disproportionate prison sentences. An African American from a poor family in Delaware, Stevenson accepts as a starting point the maxim, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

In Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, he builds his case against the flaws of America’s judicial system by clustering his observations around the case of Walter McMillian, a black man who first drew community ire by having an affair with a married white woman. Subsequently, a drug dealer who associated with the same woman, in an attempt to lessen his own jail time, told authorities that McMillian had killed a local college girl. The dealer’s ever-changing testimony was transparently false from the outset, but eager to close the case, the authorities arrested McMillian for murder, a jury with only one black member convicted him and a judge sentenced him to death. In succeeding chapters, Stevenson describes his struggles to exonerate McMillian.

His primary adversaries are deep-seated racism, tough-on-crime politicians, ambitious prosecutors, by-the-book judges, incompetent for-hire “expert” witnesses, a Supreme Court more interested in judicial expediency than actual justice, the rise of the victims’ rights movement (which recognizes only the initial victims of crimes), the burgeoning private prison lobby and the “good Germans” among us who piously avert our eyes as we go about our daily business.

Although Stevenson writes in a calm, deliberate style, there are passages here so harrowing and outrage-provoking that sensitive readers may need to set the book aside periodically until they can clear their minds of the foul images it conjures up. Anyone animated by a modicum of fairness will recognize Just Mercy as a de facto call to arms.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bryan Stevenson was fresh out of Harvard Law School when he embraced—first in Georgia, then in Alabama—the mission of defending death row inmates and others facing undeserved or disproportionate prison sentences. An African American from a poor family in Delaware, Stevenson accepts as a starting point the maxim, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

America’s feminist superhero

A harried reader could get the gist of The Secret History of Wonder Woman by opening it just past dead center and reading through the 16-page comic-book version of the story.
Social Science

Tapping the power of innovative thinking

Review by bookpagedev

Steven Johnson writes about intricate subjects; his previous books have addressed communications technology, medical epidemics, the impact of popular culture—even the life of English theologian, clergyman, philosopher and inventor Joseph Priestly. Now, with Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson examines the critical factors that are almost always present when human innovation occurs.

The investigation begins with Charles Darwin and his observation of coral reefs, which he understood to be living ecosystems. From there, Johnson’s coverage ranges widely, with discussion of corporate, governmental and private innovation, including Gutenberg’s use of a wine press to develop the printing press; the development of the GPS based on early observations of the satellite Sputnik by Johns Hopkins physicists; the sonic explorations of British musician Brian Eno; the brilliantly improvised steps that led to the invention of the incubator; Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix; and the latest in video and social networking, such as HDTV, YouTube and Twitter.

Johnson’s historical overviews are arranged within seven essential chapters, whose titles—“The Adjacent Possible,” “Liquid Networks,” “The Slow Hunch,” “Serendipity,” “Error,” “Exaptation,” “Platforms”—signal the key elements whose presence gives rise to new discovery. He believes that “the more we embrace these patterns—in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools—the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.”

Johnson keeps the discussions of hard science to a minimum, though his sidebar about carbon as an essential component of life is certainly intriguing. Otherwise, his chief focus is on the various social and structural working models that create a fertile environment for creative thinking, collaboration and a culture in which information not only flows but is recycled. In his view, those “Eureka” moments are way overrated, and “environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. . . . Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.” Johnson proves to be an excellent guide to that process.

 

Steven Johnson writes about intricate subjects; his previous books have addressed communications technology, medical epidemics, the impact of popular culture—even the life of English theologian, clergyman, philosopher and inventor Joseph Priestly. Now, with Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson examines the critical factors that are almost always present when human innovation occurs. The investigation begins […]
NonfictionBiography

A queen who made her mark

Review by Kelly Blewett

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, November 2014

From “Game of Thrones” to The Pillars of the Earth, popular culture offers up medieval stories where royals grab for power, where crucial alliances are built between church and state, where important people suddenly fall over dead after a sumptuous meal, poisoned by a hidden rival. But this world did, in fact, exist, and the subject of Kirstin Downey’s fascinating new biography, Isabella: The Warrior Queen, maneuvered through it with unlikely and thrilling success.

Most have heard of Isabella and Ferdinand, the monarchs who commissioned Columbus’ famous voyage, but what is less widely known is that Isabella ran the kingdom while Ferdinand merely signed the papers. Born in 1451, she left her fingerprints all over Spain by initiating the Inquisition, waging war against foes, pursuing a trans-Atlantic empire and brilliantly matchmaking her five children.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of an acclaimed biography of Frances Perkins, Downey is a brilliant storyteller. Despite the difficulties posed by a limited and inevitably incomplete archive, she writes with eloquence and intensity about Isabella’s life. And readers will quickly see why she chose to write about this medieval queen, whose life often seems pulled from the pages of a novel. Take, for example, Isabella’s engagement to a man she passionately did not want to marry. She prayed to God to smite either the man or her, and the suitor died on the road of a sudden illness.

Because she wanted her daughters to be powerful leaders, Isabella made sure that their education (unlike her own) included instruction in Latin. And when she encountered the articulate dreamer Christopher Columbus, she chose to financially support his expeditions against the recommendations of her advisors. Downey’s Isabella is a generous, insightful and extremely ambitious leader who was determined to expand her kingdom against daunting odds—and who helped shape the world we inhabit today.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our Q&A with Downey about Isabella. 

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From “Game of Thrones” to The Pillars of the Earth, popular culture offers up medieval stories where royals grab for power, where crucial alliances are built between church and state, where important people suddenly fall over dead after a sumptuous meal, poisoned by a hidden rival. But this world did, in fact, exist, and the subject of Kirstin Downey’s fascinating new biography, Isabella: The Warrior Queen, maneuvered through it with unlikely and thrilling success.

First in war, first in peace

While we all know George Washington as our first president and leader of American forces in the Revolutionary War, in The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson illuminates another key role he played: leading the Constitutional Convention.

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