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The story behind America’s most iconic structure

French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi is best characterized by the following passage: “He was an egoist in human affairs; a humble man in the scale of the cosmos.” This elegant writing comes from Elizabeth Mitchell in Liberty’s Torch, the tale of how Bartholdi proposed the creation of the Statue of Liberty and spent much of his life making it happen. He knew that the statue’s completion would bring him fame. But he also knew that it would become a lasting symbol of what America represents: freedom and opportunity.
NonfictionMemoir

From the Canadian wilderness to the international runway

Review by Catherine Hollis

There are many reasons to love a good misery memoir: In my case, reading about other people’s dysfunctional childhoods offers a sense of community, a sisterhood of resilient Gen Xers who survived a 1970s childhood. Cea Sunrise Person’s engaging new memoir, North of Normal, evokes both the miserable excesses and occasional beauty of growing up in a counterculture family in the wilderness of the Me Decade.

For the Person family, the wilderness was real. Cea’s grandfather Dick was not only committed to living off the land, but highly skilled at doing so and deeply suspicious of Western civilization. He takes his family—grandma Jeanne, baby Cea, her teenage mother and two aunts—from California into the Canadian outback to live in a tipi and survive off game and wild plants. Clothing is optional, sex is out in the open, and much pot is smoked.

This outback idyll of sorts is broken up by Cea’s mother, who follows one man after another into questionable circumstances. Cea is lucky, she is told, to have a mother who loves her, but as Cea grows older she wants the one thing her mother can’t give her: normality. Leaving home at 13, Cea breaks with her family toward independence, which is seen as a betrayal.

While the strength and resilience Cea learns in the wilderness help her survive the predators of the “civilized” world (she goes on to become an internationally successful model), it’s a long journey to normal, whatever that is. There’s not a shred of self-pity here, which makes the depiction of a child adrift in hippie decadence all the more affecting. North of Normal offers readers a well-crafted story and a sensible, clear-eyed narrator.

 

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

There are many reasons to love a good misery memoir: In my case, reading about other people’s dysfunctional childhoods offers a sense of community, a sisterhood of resilient Gen Xers who survived a 1970s childhood. Cea Sunrise Person’s engaging new memoir, North of Normal, evokes both the miserable excesses and occasional beauty of growing up in a counterculture family in the wilderness of the Me Decade.

The three sides of William Tecumseh Sherman

Robert L. O’Connell’s Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman includes a photograph of the celebrated Civil War general with his staff. While the other men strike classic poses and gaze into the middle distance, Sherman sits slightly slumped, legs crossed, jacket unbuttoned, glittering eyes focused directly on the camera. It fits with the popular notion of Sherman, the man who invented “modern war” and whose soldiers burned a path of destruction through the American South.
NonfictionHistory

Travel back to Charles Dickens’ London

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

At the age of 12, when his father was imprisoned for not paying his debts, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a factory. He walked to his job, to his meager lodgings, to find his dinner in a market stall and to visit Marshalsea prison, where the rest of his family was living. Dickens never lost this habit of walking. And as Judith Flanders reveals in her stunning new book, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, the sights, sounds and smells of the city that infuse his novels were not simply the work of a brilliant imagination but “the reportage of a great observer.”

No mean observer herself, Flanders packs her narrative with intriguing details that bring the Victorian streets alive. She begins, as working people did, in early morning, when long lines of carts and costermongers converged on Covent Garden. Weaving a tapestry as colorful as a market flower display, Flanders not only describes such things as changes in transportation but takes us right into the streets, to battle the mud and to be smothered in dust.

The Victorian City is social history at its finest, a must-read for Dickens fans or anyone who loves London. It reminds us why this time period is endlessly fascinating to read about, but probably not a place we’d really want to live.

 

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

At the age of 12, when his father was imprisoned for not paying his debts, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a factory. He walked to his job, to his meager lodgings, to find his dinner in a market stall and to visit Marshalsea prison, where the rest of his family was living. Dickens never lost this habit of walking. And as Judith Flanders reveals in her stunning new book, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, the sights, sounds and smells of the city that infuse his novels were not simply the work of a brilliant imagination but “the reportage of a great observer.”

Two sides of a cultural coin

Although he speaks repeatedly of his “two Italies”—a phrase he borrows from the poet Shelley—Joseph Luzzi is neither fully at home among the coarse elements of Calabrian culture his immigrant parents brought with them to America nor within the borders of Italy itself, what with its infuriating mix of high art and low purpose. But it is this unresolved quality of Luzzi’s musings—the back and forth tugging of a splendid mind—that makes this book so alive and such a pleasure to read.
NonfictionMemoir

Life lessons from working with stiffs

Review by Amy Scribner

Amid the 21st-century glut of overindulgent memoirs, The Removers is a poignant, near-perfect addition to the genre. Andrew Meredith writes of growing up in a crumbling Philadelphia neighborhood, his family quietly imploding in the wake of a scandal that cost his father his university job.

A once promising student, Meredith drops out of various colleges and halfheartedly dates various women throughout his 20s. His zombie existence is punctuated by possibly the worst job in the world: Transporting bodies from houses and hospitals to a funeral home, then cremating them. He is joined in this work by his father, a poet and professor who is reduced to moving bodies to make ends meet. This story is bittersweet, but also frequently, improbably hilarious.

“Philadelphia, you big bitch, throw me a bone,” Meredith writes. “It’s June 1998. I’m twenty-two. I’ve bounced from failure at school to crappy job and back for two years. I spend my time outside the house either dragging the local dead around or getting drunk listening to rock and roll before coming chastely home to sleep ten feet down the hall from my parents. I’ve now handled far more dead women than live ones.”

Meredith is clear-eyed and generous in his storytelling, relaying with skill and honesty everything from his first sexual encounter to his family’s inability to communicate. While he creates a powerful sketch of a very specific time and place—a family in crisis in 1990s Philadelphia—this book will ring true to anyone who ever yearned to grow up, only to find that coming of age is more painful and beautiful than they ever imagined.

 

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

Amid the 21st-century glut of overindulgent memoirs, The Removers is a poignant, near-perfect addition to the genre. Andrew Meredith writes of growing up in a crumbling Philadelphia neighborhood, his family quietly imploding in the wake of a scandal that cost his father his university job.

Finding joie de vivre with a little elbow grease

It’s easy to understand why Don Wallace and his wife Mindy were captivated by a beautiful French island called Belle Île. Don, who grew up in California, and Mindy, who was from Hawaii, were living in a cramped, dark Manhattan apartment. Belle Île’s sunshine and surf spoke to their soul.
Nonfiction

The riddle of Harper Lee

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, July 2014

“In the summer of 2005, I was at a Burger King with Harper Lee.” With those tantalizing opening words, former Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills has us hooked. We want to know not just why the reclusive Harper Lee is talking to a journalist, but also why she and the novelist are sitting in a Burger King, of all places.

In The Mockingbird Next Door, a winning and affectionate account of her friendship with the noted author, Mills invites us to sit down on her front porch while she regales us with tales of Nelle Harper Lee and her sister, Alice, and the denizens of their hometown.

In 2001, Mills’ editor offered her what would turn out to be the assignment of a lifetime: Go to Monroeville, Alabama, and report on her experience of the town. Within a short time, she is chatting with Alice, and later Nelle, as she is known to family and friends, comes over to Mills’ motel room for a talk. A friendship eventually blossoms, and in 2004, Mills moves in next door to the Lees for almost two years.

Mills reveals no great secrets here, nor does she tell us more about the author than Lee herself wants to share. She offers no clues to solve the mystery of why Lee never wrote another novel after the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. As Alice Lee simply declares: “There were so many demands made on her. . . . People wanted her to speak to groups. She would be terrified to speak.”

What Mills’ portrait of the Lees does show is a pair of sisters who love feeding ducks at the local pond, who enjoy language and a good pun and who admire all things British. Nelle is spirited and can be impatient and suspicious, and Alice, who is still practicing law in her 90s, is the “steady, responsible, older sister.”

During her stay in Monroeville, Mills discovers a woman who is fiercely private yet willing to share her thoughts about the small-town South, her family and her writing life with a stranger whose own life has been deeply shaped by Lee’s famous novel. The Mockingbird Next Door offers a tender look at one of our most beloved and enigmatic writers, as well as the town that inspired her.

 

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

“In the summer of 2005, I was at a Burger King with Harper Lee.” With those tantalizing opening words, former Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills has us hooked. We want to know not just why the reclusive Harper Lee is talking to a journalist, but also why she and the novelist are sitting in a Burger King, of all places.

A deadly memory, a labor of love

Seven out of 12 young men on the Wilcox Expedition perished on the mountain during the storm. Many elements—inexperience, illness, personality conflict—may have played a role in the overall situation, but as Hall demonstrates, the ultimate factor was environmental. No one could have survived the 100 mile-per-hour winds strafing the upper limits of the mountain for a week.
NonfictionLiteratureArts & Culture

The subterfuge of a bestseller

Review by John T. Slania

Who said the Cold War is dead? The United States and Russia are at odds over Ukraine. Putin thinks Obama is a wimp. And Russia harbors Edward Snowden after he leaks American spy secrets. What great timing for the real-life Cold War thriller, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book.

This cloak-and-dagger account reveals the intriguing details of how the novel Doctor Zhivago came to be published during the height of the Cold War. Written by Russian poet Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago was kept under wraps by its author, who feared retribution from the Soviet government for the book’s critical portrayal of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its tepid treatment of socialism. After the novel was published in Italy in 1957, it became a bestseller, capturing the Nobel Prize for Literature and later inspiring an Oscar-winning film adaptation. But how Doctor Zhivago became an international sensation is almost as complex as the tortured love affair between protagonist Dr. Yuri Zhivago and his beloved Lara.

Pasternak’s novel was smuggled out of Russia by an Italian publishing scout who was entrusted with the manuscript. Pasternak’s simple instructions: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.”

The smuggling was only the start of the intrigue. After the novel was published in Italian, the CIA saw Doctor Zhivago as a tool to spread dissent within Russia. So the CIA published copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian and had them smuggled back into the Soviet Union. The release of Doctor Zhivago within Russia not only intensified Cold War tensions, it put Pasternak’s life at risk. He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and subjected to KBG harassment until his death in 1960.

The Zhivago Affair is a well-crafted work with the kind of eloquent writing that makes it read like a spy novel. Co-author Peter Finn, national security editor of the Washington Post and a former Moscow bureau chief, has written extensively about Snowden and the NSA, which helps bring insight and perspective to The Zhivago Affair. Petra Couvée, a writer, translator and teacher at Saint Petersburg State University, brings her vast knowledge of Russian language, history and culture. Together, the two have produced a book rich in nuance and detail about international politics and the surprising ways in which the words of one author can enlighten the world.

This cloak-and-dagger account reveals the intriguing details of how the novel Doctor Zhivago came to be published during the height of the Cold War. Written by Russian poet Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago was kept under wraps by its author, who feared retribution from the Soviet government for the book’s critical portrayal of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its tepid treatment of socialism.

An unconventional roommate

Martin Windrow never intended to require visitors to his London flat to don protective headgear, but that’s what happened. He had to protect his guests from the eight long talons of Mumble, the tawny owl who lived in his small, urban apartment. All surfaces had to be covered with either plastic or newspaper to protect them from Mumble’s unpredictable and very messy emissions. How could cohabitating with such a creature be worth these high costs?

NonfictionBiography

A portrait of the Miss Havisham of the Upper East Side

Review by Alden Mudge

In the middle of her otherwise fascinating story about reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Meryl Gordon’s narrative suddenly flattens. The daily details of Clark’s life during this long period of seclusion are assembled from wan notes to almost-lost relatives, bank statements and legal correspondence, and the memories of the few close friends who received cards and phone calls—but never visits—from Mrs. Clark.

This flattening of narrative occurs because the subject of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue—the youngest daughter from the scandalous second marriage of robber baron William Andrews Clark—had almost succeeded in her desire to disappear. The last published photo of her was taken in 1928 during the honeymoon of her brief, ill-fated marriage. Some longtime members of the household staff in her 42-room apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue had rarely if ever seen her.

A clearer picture of Clark emerges after she was admitted to Doctor’s Hospital for treatment of advanced skin cancer in 1991, when she was 84 years old. After multiple surgeries, she was successfully treated, but the eccentric Clark negotiated to stay in the hospital and hire private nurses for around-the-clock care and companionship. This set off an unseemly “cash crusade” at the hospital. Over the next 20 years, one of those nurses, who worked 12-hour shifts 365 days a year, would receive from the always generous Clark roughly $31 million, in addition to houses, cars and jewelry. The nurse, who had a genuine if manipulative relationship with her patient, stood to inherit even more when Clark, who resisted acknowledging her own mortality, was finally convinced to update her 75-year-old will.

After Clark’s death, a nasty battle over her $300 million fortune was launched by descendants of her half-brothers and half-sisters, the side of the family she felt had grievously mistreated her mother. This very public dispute led to a cartoonish portrayal of Clark in the media. Extreme wealth and extreme eccentricity do sell, after all.

Through her assiduous research—she conducted more than 100 interviews and plowed through boxes of documents seized during the court battle—and canny analysis, Gordon gives us, yes, Clark’s perplexing eccentricities and the ins and outs of the fight between family members and loyal-but-incompetent friends and helpers. But The Phantom of Fifth Avenue also offers a believable, sympathetic portrait of a vulnerable perfectionist with an artistic temperament, who, as one of Clark’s young helpers would say, was “a very special person from a different epoch.”

 

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

In the middle of her otherwise fascinating story about reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Meryl Gordon’s narrative suddenly flattens. The daily details of Clark’s life during this long period of seclusion are assembled from wan notes to almost-lost relatives, bank statements and legal correspondence, and the memories of the few close friends who received cards and phone calls—but never visits—from Mrs. Clark.

A lost boy’s spectacular true story of retraced footsteps

Young Saroo loves his older brothers, especially Guddu, who at 14 is less and less at home. One night in 1986, Guddu comes back to his family’s poor village in India for about an hour, and 5-year-old Saroo can’t contain his excitement. When Guddu announces that he’s leaving, Saroo declares that he’s going off into the night with his older brother.

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