Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Lawyer/historian James L. Swanson is the coauthor of Lincoln’s Assassins (2001), an enthusiastically received volume that primarily provided a visual record of the persons, places and events surrounding the April 1865 murder of the president and its aftermath. With Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, Swanson explores in dramatic detail John Wilkes Booth’s escape from Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., along with his subsequent flight through Maryland and Virginia, which culminated in his death at the hands of federal cavalry troops.

Rather than merely present a recounting of facts already fairly well known, Swanson draws on the official record and other published testimony and then infuses his text with a fictional sensibility that attempts to get inside the minds and hearts of the principals. Booth, a noted actor in his time and a member of a famous theatrical family, takes center stage, with Swanson offering a nearly heartfelt portrait of the man’s personal charisma and the fanatical devotion to the Southern cause that drove him to his deadly deed.

Swanson also comprehensively covers the backstory leading up to Booth’s history-changing act including his abortive scheme to kidnap Lincoln, which morphed by happenstance into a hastily arranged but effective assassination plan. Swanson’s depiction of the nation’s capital in the days following Lee’s surrender to Grant is vividly wrought, as are his profiles of the public officials determined to bring Booth to justice. In particular, we’re introduced to a heroic secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, who essentially took control of the government in the critical days following Lincoln’s slaying.

With its colorful historical backdrop and tragic underpinnings, the book gathers steam as it goes, with Booth, hobbled by a broken leg, haltingly making his way through the countryside and later across the Potomac River, eventually betrayed by Confederate sympathizers. This is a true-adventure tale of the first rank, and, not surprisingly, the book’s already been snapped up by Hollywood, with Harrison Ford tapped for the lead role as of one of the agents heading up the Booth manhunt. Martin Brady is a writer in Nashville.

Lawyer/historian James L. Swanson is the coauthor of Lincoln's Assassins (2001), an enthusiastically received volume that primarily provided a visual record of the persons, places and events surrounding the April 1865 murder of the president and its aftermath. With Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's…
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Since the 1981 assassination of her husband, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Jehan Sadat has created a new identity as a university professor, lecturer and activist for peace and women’s rights. Dividing her time between Egypt and the United States, she has a valuable perspective on both countries—and she is dismayed by what she believes are the damaging misperceptions held by many Americans about her culture and religion.

Sadat’s first book, the best-selling A Woman of Egypt, was the story of her life. Her new one, My Hope for Peace, timed for the 30th anniversary of the Egypt-Israel peace accord, is also personal in tone, but has a more varied mission. Writing for ordinary Americans not familiar with Islam and the Middle East, Sadat focuses on three themes: the imperative for a just, negotiated peace between Arabs and Israelis; the distinction between Islam as a worldwide faith and the horrific behavior of relatively few violent fundamentalists; and the search for peace within ourselves.

Mixing the personal and the political, Sadat uses simple, direct language to explain the basic history and beliefs of Islam. She makes a particular argument that Islam does not oppress women and can be the framework for their education and economic self-reliance. And she drives home the point that the forces behind the 9/11 terror attacks also killed her husband, whom she describes as a believing Muslim devoted to peace and progress. He remains a hero to his widow, who deplores the failure of both Arab and Israeli leaders to follow his example.

Certainly, Sadat sees the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes of an Egyptian committed to Palestinian rights. The reader will not find any criticism of the current Egyptian government, nor any friendly words for Ariel Sharon. Her approach is moderate and even-handed, always seeking a peaceful outcome for both sides. Sadat does not provide specific proscriptions, arguing instead that the most vital precursor for any real solution is the genuine intention of peace: “Lack of ideas is not the overwhelming hurdle, but rather the lack of political will and personal courage.”

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

Since the 1981 assassination of her husband, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Jehan Sadat has created a new identity as a university professor, lecturer and activist for peace and women’s rights. Dividing her time between Egypt and the United States, she has a valuable perspective on…

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Alexander Gerschenkron may not be a household name, but this brilliant Harvard economist left an indelible mark on 20th century intellectual thought with a theory he called Economic Backwardness. You don’t need to know anything about economics, though, to be captivated by this eccentric genius’ eventful life story, beautifully reconstructed by his grandson, Nicholas Dawidoff, in The Fly Swatter. Dawidoff, best-known for The Catcher Was a Spy, a widely acclaimed book about baseball player/OSS operative Moe Berg, clearly has a gift for biography. And in this case, it doesn’t hurt that he actually knew and loved his subject. Still, researching and writing this book couldn’t have been easy, since Gerschenkron, who died in 1978, was deliberately elusive about much of his early life. He rarely spoke of those years, during which he made not one but two dramatic escapes. The first was from revolution-torn Russia, when he and his father fled to Romania under darkness of night. Then, in 1938, he fled Vienna the day after the Anschluss by masquerading as a Swiss day laborer.

Dawidoff’s accounts of both of these escapes are gripping. And if the second half of the book, with Gerschenkron comfortably ensconced in American academia, can’t quite match that level of intensity, it is nonetheless fascinating stuff. Here was a man who played chess with Marcel Duchamp, sparred in print with Vladimir Nabokov, was close friends with John Kenneth Galbraith and Isaiah Berlin. Before landing at Harvard he worked in wartime Washington under FDR. Yet for all his accomplishments, Gerschenkron was also an enigma. He was inclined to tell people, for example, that he lunched regularly with Red Sox great Ted Williams (the two never met), and though he inspired a couple of generations of the nation’s top economic historians, he never produced a major, career-crowning book. The book’s unusual title comes from Dawidoff’s own memory of his grandfather, who would sit on his porch in New Hampshire doing battle with winged insects using an arsenal of seemingly indistinguishable fly swatters, each of which he insisted had its own capabilities. It’s a whimsical moment that captures the elusive charm of this true original. Robert Weibezahl writes from Los Angeles.

Alexander Gerschenkron may not be a household name, but this brilliant Harvard economist left an indelible mark on 20th century intellectual thought with a theory he called Economic Backwardness. You don't need to know anything about economics, though, to be captivated by this eccentric genius'…
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George Washington sat for at least 28 different portraits. As he became one of the best-known men in the world, he was increasingly in demand as a subject and though the process of "sitting‚" was uncomfortable for him, he recognized the importance of paintings—and by extension, engravings, etchings, woodcuts and mezzotints—to his new republic. In the delightful The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art, Hugh Howard develops the idea of Washington as a patron of the arts and examines how art and the painting of portraits developed in the United States.

Howard first introduces us to two artists who never painted Washington, Benjamin West and John Smibert, but who were crucial influences on those who did. However, it is Washington portraitists Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, Edward Savage and Gilbert Stuart who are among Howard's main interests. With quiet authority, he relates their quite different life stories and their struggles to reconcile their passion for painting with the necessity of earning a living. Their interactions with Washington and their approaches to him as a subject are told with verve and an intimacy that makes their personalities come alive on the page. Stuart's work is the best known to us today, especially his 1796 portrait of Washington, which is regarded as the best—and is reproduced on our dollar bill. Unlike Peale and Trumbull, who served in the military during the American Revolution, Stuart was not caught up in the cause. He left for London in 1775, returning in 1793 with a plan to paint a portrait of Washington that would make him a fortune and ease his persistent financial woes.

Howard also shows how during Washington's lifetime America changed from a group of colonies with little artistic culture to a new nation with art displayed in public buildings and galleries. As a much-painted cultural icon, Washington played a large role in those changes. "He was," as Howard notes, "a man who always agreed, admittedly with an air of resignation, to sit for yet another portrait."

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

George Washington sat for at least 28 different portraits. As he became one of the best-known men in the world, he was increasingly in demand as a subject and though the process of "sitting‚" was uncomfortable for him, he recognized the importance of paintings—and by…

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Former Newsweek writer Laura Shapiro continues her exploration of America’s relationship with food in Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. Part women’s studies, part cultural study, Shapiro’s entertaining and enlightening book charts a revolution in food creation and preparation. Ready-made food proponents were baffled when their “wave of the future” failed to catch on immediately. After all, didn’t women hate to cook? (Surveys from the 1950s show that, in fact, cooking was consistently among the top two favorite household chores.) This food was easy to make, and, often, cheaper than fresh alternatives. What manufacturers didn’t realize was that while prepared foods (which originated from soldiers’ rations during World War II) were definitely time-savers, quality and taste varied, and it was difficult to find a place for them within America’s strong notions about cooking for the family. Cooking was an integral part of the “perfect wife” package, and women who used pre-packaged foods even those as commonplace as instant coffee were perceived by their peers as lazy. Advertisers fought back. Prepared foods, they proclaimed, made gourmet taste accessible to the everyday cook. Soon, food writers began incorporating this message into their recipes. Shapiro comes to a different conclusion. Far from liberating cooks, pre-packaged foods were often another way of restricting them, changing cooking from an enterprise where the cook had the power to a practice devoid of creativity, a step-by-step, follow-the-rules procedure. Still, pre-packaged foods were seen as the way forward. It wasn’t until the publication of two seminal works Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Julia Child’s The French Chef that cooking would regain its equilibrium and offer choice once again. Shapiro’s comprehensive study of a watershed moment in America’s past evokes the paradoxes of post-war life, and makes the reader contemplate the history behind the question, “what’s for dinner?”

Former Newsweek writer Laura Shapiro continues her exploration of America's relationship with food in Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. Part women's studies, part cultural study, Shapiro's entertaining and enlightening book charts a revolution in food creation and preparation. Ready-made food proponents…
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Navajo poet Nasdijj has produced another triumph in his latest memoir, Geronimo’s Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me. Although the writer’s earlier works centered on his adopted children, in this new book Nasdijj explores his own abusive past and that of his brother, Tso. There’s no polite way to put this: Nasdijj and his brother were repeatedly raped and beaten by their father over a period of several years after their mother died. Nasdijj frequently emerged from these confrontations with broken bones that, he indicates, are to blame for a painful bone disease that threatens his life now that he is in his 50s. This cycle of abuse took place within the context of poverty, hunger and instability. A migrant worker, Nasdijj’s father moves his family every few weeks. A chronic alcoholic, he rarely gets around to shopping for food or cooking for his boys. Other migrants are too scared to report the abuse to the authorities. And the arm of the law isn’t long enough, apparently, to catch up with a migrant child molester.

Geronimo’s Bones is loosely woven around the brothers’ daring escape from their father. At ages 13 and 14, they pick their father’s pocket of several thousand dollars, steal a Corvette from a chop shop and drive it to California. One of their first stops is a House of Pancakes where they pick up a 16-year-old girl who is also running away from home. Her driver’s license facilitates their journey since she can legally drive and can check them into motels along the way. Their journey is not told in a straight line, however. Nasdijj deliberately fragments his story, going back and forth in time, slipping years ahead without warning. By organizing his story this way, he mimics the way the human mind deals with harsh memories in pieces that string together in random patterns.

“What pisses me off about the assumption that my life, and the life of my brother, can be explained in linear ways, is, too, an assumption that my father was destroyed in degrees,” explains Nasdijj. He goes on to write, “our father was destroyed in a thousand ways, a trillion ways, ways far beyond our limited ability to understand even as it was happening in front of our eyes. Even as it was happening to him, it was happening to us.” Nasdijj interweaves his narrative with Native American mythology, especially the myths surrounding Indian leader Geronimo. The author reinvents himself and his brother as mythological “war twins,” sons of Changing Woman, sister to White Shell Woman. Each new chapter of his narrative begins with myth, then gears back into the story of his own horrible childhood. In Geronimo’s Bones, Nasdijj casts a light on the psychology of abusive parents and children who are so disempowered they don’t appeal for help. Some people may find themselves drawn to this book for the lessons it offers psychologists and social workers. Others will be drawn to Nasdijj’s haunting poetic style. Whether for its sociological values or for its literary merit, most readers are bound to find Geronimo’s Bones a groundbreaking and important new work. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

Navajo poet Nasdijj has produced another triumph in his latest memoir, Geronimo's Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me. Although the writer's earlier works centered on his adopted children, in this new book Nasdijj explores his own abusive past and that of his brother,…

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