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Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
NonfictionArtLifestylesArt

About Face

Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.
Jonathan D. Katz’s About Face celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with deep scholarship and thrilling artworks.
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NonfictionBiography

Ike for the ages

Review by Roger Bishop

Who was Dwight Eisenhower? His extraordinary leadership of the Allied forces in Europe led to victory in World War II. Under his presidency the nation enjoyed eight years of peace and prosperity. Yet several years after his death, when his widow Mamie was asked whether she felt she had really known him, she replied, “I’m not sure anyone did.” Jean Edward Smith, whose last book was the best-selling FDR, explores the public and personal life of the man he regards, second to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the most successful U.S. president in the 20th century in his absorbing Eisenhower in War and Peace.

Eisenhower wrote of himself: “I’m just folks. I come from the people, the ordinary people.” Smith goes behind such statements and perhaps comes as close as a biographer can in capturing those qualities of personality and judgment during his military career that so impressed his superiors. His affability and common sense enabled him to deal effectively with such strong personalities as Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, his longtime friend George Patton, Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall. Early in his career, Eisenhower worked with General John Pershing and General Douglas MacArthur; the latter found Ike so indispensable to him in Washington as a speechwriter and in other ways that he requested that he go with him to duty in the Philippines.

Smith emphasizes that Ike was not a battlefield commander, nor a great soldier, but outstanding as a theater commander and military statesman. He also had exceptional ability as an executive and knew how to assume ultimate responsibility and yet delegate to others. Among the many achievements of his life, Smith discusses his crucial role in the formation of NATO, his presidency at Columbia University and his “behind-the-scenes” approach in dealing with Senator Joe McCarthy’s abuse of power.

One clue to Eisenhower’s successes comes from his belief that his mother had by far the greatest personal influence on him and his brothers. All four of his remaining brothers (another had died as a child) agreed that Ike was the most like their mother. In contrast to their rather distant father, she was the constant presence who organized their lives, soothed them if necessary, praised their achievements and could often see the humor in virtually every difficult situation. When General Dwight Eisenhower was hailed as an international hero at the end of WWII, a newsman asked her if she was proud of her son. “Which one?” she responded.

As president, Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative, but he was not an ideologue of any kind. He was for a balanced budget but also aware of the need for such significant public works projects as the St. Lawrence Seaway and the interstate highway system, the largest public works project ever attempted. Among other initiatives, he expanded Social Security in 1954 to provide coverage for an additional 10 million self-employed farmers, doctors and others; he established the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and he approved funds to provide the Salk polio vaccine to the nation’s underprivileged children. He said that the decision to send federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the law regarding integration of the schools was the hardest he’d ever had to make except for the decision to go ahead with D-Day.

Meticulously researched, Smith’s book gives us a fresh and insightful understanding of the many aspects of Eisenhower’s full life.

Who was Dwight Eisenhower? His extraordinary leadership of the Allied forces in Europe led to victory in World War II. Under his presidency the nation enjoyed eight years of peace and prosperity. Yet several years after his death, when his widow Mamie was asked whether…

HistoryAmerican History

The forgotten history of the early frontier

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When we hear the word “frontier,” our thoughts often turn to the wild, untamed West, full of wagon trains, cattle drives and little houses on the prairie, where rugged men and women eked out a meager existence in their search for open space, gold or simply a new life. Yet, as historian Scott Weidensaul so eloquently points out in this absorbing chronicle, the earliest frontier in America stretched from the Atlantic coast inland to the high, rugged ranges of the Appalachians, and from the Maritimes to Florida. In the West, he observes, the frontier still seems close to the surface, but in the East, the old backcountry is often buried beneath strip malls and subdivisions. Weidensaul scratches the surface and uncovers the terrain of this lost world where Europeans and Native Americans were creating a new society and a new landscape.

Through brilliantly meticulous storytelling, Weidensaul traces the long history of this first frontier, from the Paleolithic Age through the age of European exploration and colonization, to the clash of imperial powers and pent-up Indian fury that led to the Seven Years’ War. For example, when European explorers arrived on the east coast of North America in the early 16th century, the land teemed with millions of indigenous people, so many that the explorers wondered whether there would be room for them to settle. Indians initially welcomed these settlers, who brought new technologies and goods, a cross-pollination of ideas and cooperation. But these warm feelings soon turned sour, for the Europeans were also rapacious and ruthless, and they started a disease epidemic that decimated the native population.

History comes alive in The First Frontier as Weidensaul retells the stories of many of the individuals whose lives both shaped and were shaped by this rugged, violent and often terrifying frontier. He regales us with tales of settlers such as Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Duston, each captured by the Indians, and their wildly different responses to their captivities. Rowlandson prayed for her captors and clung to her belief in God, interpreting her experiences through the lens of her faith, while Duston exacted violent revenge on her captors.

Weidensaul’s captivating chronicle offers a glimpse of this first frontier that was by turns peaceful and violent, linked by trade, intermarriage, religion, suspicion, disease, mutual dependence and acts of both unimaginable barbarism and extraordinary tolerance and charity.

When we hear the word “frontier,” our thoughts often turn to the wild, untamed West, full of wagon trains, cattle drives and little houses on the prairie, where rugged men and women eked out a meager existence in their search for open space, gold or…

Business & Finance

Say goodbye to your boss

Review by bookpagedev

Want to quit work? In Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom, co-authors Van K. Tharp, D.R. Barton Jr. and Steve Sjuggerud explain how to fulfill that dream, systematically focusing on the importance of passive income (having your assets produce cash flow). When monthly cash flow exceeds expenses, you’re financially free. This team of professional investors and newsletter publishers says most people can get there within five years or less. The authors offer strategies appropriate for different markets and situations, covering inflation, deflation, a rising or falling dollar, bear market funds and real estate. They provide a 1-2-3 formula that any investor can use to determine the state of the market and decide whether they have a green, yellow or red light to invest. As the lights change, follow some simple guidelines to profitably move in and out of investments. The final section of the book focuses on taking responsibility and getting the kids and grandkids to financial independence at a young age, making financial freedom a multigenerational project. Bobbye Middendorf writes from Chicago.

Want to quit work? In Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom, co-authors Van K. Tharp, D.R. Barton Jr. and Steve Sjuggerud explain how to fulfill that dream, systematically focusing on the importance of passive income (having your assets produce cash flow). When monthly cash flow exceeds…
Nonfiction

Shocking stories from a Mumbai slum

Review by Anne Bartlett

There are scores of heart-wrenching stories in veteran journalist Katherine Boo’s amazing book about a Mumbai slum. Here is one:

A garbage scavenger is hit by a car before dawn, and lies by the side of a road calling for help. A little boy passes, but is too frightened of the police to seek help. Schoolboys pass, but don’t want to be late for class. A woman passes, but is too preoccupied with helping her unjustly jailed husband. And so it goes, hour after hour. Finally, at 2:30 p.m., someone calls the cops to complain about a corpse. At 4 p.m., the body is picked up. The scavenger’s cause of death is recorded, falsely, as “tuberculosis,” because no one wants to bother with an investigation.

Such is life and death in Annawadi, a slum near Mumbai’s international airport, that is the scene of Boo’s first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Boo, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and her translators spent three years reporting in this “undercity,” exploring how ordinary people, particularly women and children, cope with inequality and the changes brought by globalism. She has produced a work of astonishingly good journalism.

Brace yourself: This is an unsparing view of a world of crushing poverty, disease, physical brutality and corruption. But, of course, actual human beings with dreams and ambitions live in this awful place, and Boo centers her story on about a dozen compelling characters who are trying to improve their circumstances.

Boo notes there are three ways out: entrepreneurship, corruption and education. Abdul and his family try to build a garbage-brokering business; Asha helps crooked politicians defraud anti-poverty programs; her daughter Manju tries to escape her mother’s schemes by finishing college; the street child Sunil makes a moral choice between scavenging and thievery. Boo delves far into what she calls their “deep, idiosyncratic intelligences,” and touches our hearts.

Perhaps most shocking to American readers will be the relentless graft that these slum residents face. No one with an official position does his or her job without soliciting a bribe, including doctors and victims’ advocates. Police routinely beat the poor, and have no interest in justice. Among Boo’s characters, four don’t survive slum life: One is murdered and three commit suicide.

But some endure and rise. Young Sunil faces his world with bravery and hope. Boo tries to make sure we will remember him.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

There are scores of heart-wrenching stories in veteran journalist Katherine Boo’s amazing book about a Mumbai slum. Here is one:

A garbage scavenger is hit by a car before dawn, and lies by the side of a road calling for help. A little boy passes, but…

Social Science

The high price of food

Review by Pete Croatto

When journalist Tracie McMillan covered a cooking class run by a youth services agency in New York City, she got to know one of the teenage students. Vanessa, who liked fruits and vegetables, knew that she should eat better. But eating healthy was so expensive, and Burger King was so close.

McMillan, who has written about food, poverty and the politics of both for publications such as the New York Times and Harper’s Magazine, got curious. Why can’t everyone get access to the same food? To answer that and other nagging questions, she spent months away from her cozy life as a Brooklyn-based writer. Going undercover, she picked peaches and cut garlic in the California heat, stocked produce at a Walmart outside of Detroit and did prep work at a Brooklyn Applebee’s, a pleasant job that had an unfortunate ending. Each time, McMillan lived off the scant wages she earned.

Those first-person experiences, along with a heaping portion of facts and figures, are presented in The American Way of Eating. Readers may wish McMillan had stuck to either a straight-ahead investigation or a wide-eyed memoir—the “real life” approach sometimes overwhelms the objectives—but there’s still plenty of meat to chew on. Convenience cooking (e.g., microwave meals) isn’t just bad for you, it’s more expensive than making the meal from scratch; most farm workers, a vocation that can start as early as age 12, typically live in overcrowded housing. In many cities, writes McMillan, Walmart has “little incentive” to drop prices because it’s the “biggest game in town.”

What sticks with you about The American Way of Eating isn’t the statistics or the overriding theme of how hard it is to get quality produce—especially if you are overworked and underpaid. It’s that McMillan puts a face on a largely anonymous process. Everything we eat has a story, and it usually involves some kind of woe—from the garlic cutter in a constant uphill battle to reach minimum wage to the server at Applebee’s who’s juggling a baby and college courses with her shifts. McMillan’s covert journey on this less-than-glamorous path reveals that the various laborers involved in our meals pay a higher price than we can imagine—an issue that may even rival the importance of Americans getting fresh, healthful food.

When journalist Tracie McMillan covered a cooking class run by a youth services agency in New York City, she got to know one of the teenage students. Vanessa, who liked fruits and vegetables, knew that she should eat better. But eating healthy was so expensive,…

Memoir

A young Hollywood insider

Review by bookpagedev

She was a child of divorce at a time when broken families were considered a social stigma. But Nora Johnson was also a child of privilege. Thus, her memoir is set to the clickety-clack soundtrack of the streamliners, specifically the Twentieth-Century and the Chief, passenger trains that took her back and forth between her parents’ disparate homes and lives. "Ma" had a Manhattan apartment. Her father, the esteemed writer-producer Nunnally Johnson, lived in a Beverly Hills mansion. For Johnson, both locales brought bouts of loneliness and uncertainty, and the nagging fear that she didn’t belong at either. Coast to Coast: A Family Romance details her schizophrenic coming of age, while taking the reader on a deft, beautifully written tour of the 1940s and 1950s, as lived by the poor little rich girl.

Born during the Great Depression, Johnson vividly recalls family life during wartime and post-war recovery, the Commie witch hunts that haunted Hollywood, and the "I Like Ike" fervor of the new generation. She describes conversations, decor and fashions, as well as sounds, aromas and even tastes. At the home her father shared with his much younger wife and their children (of whom Johnson was jealous), Tyrone Power showed up to play croquet (first, he stripped off his shirt), and a party guest list included Bogart and Bacall. Anthony Perkins was a childhood friend; Sylvia Plath was a classmate at Smith. And during a shipboard journey, Johnson met the honeymooners Liz Taylor and Nicky Hilton. (While her new hubby played poker, Liz expounded on her love of baby animals and did an imitation of a chipmunk.) But the figure that looms largest in this volume, and Johnson’s life, is her complicated and gifted father, Nunnally. Johnson would go on to achieve success as a novelist and essayist, but she would never escape her father’s omnipresent shadow. Pat H. Broeske is co-author of the best-selling Howard Hughes: The Untold Story.

 

She was a child of divorce at a time when broken families were considered a social stigma. But Nora Johnson was also a child of privilege. Thus, her memoir is set to the clickety-clack soundtrack of the streamliners, specifically the Twentieth-Century and the Chief,…

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