Edna Bonhomme’s frank, timely A History of the World in Six Plagues reveals how infectious diseases have been leveraged by colonialism and capitalism.

Design, Nonfiction

Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.

History, Nonfiction, Women's History

Nonfiction Women's History History

Expect Great Things!

The inspiring, companionable Expect Great Things! celebrates the legacy of the Katharine Gibbs School for women and its tenacious scholars.

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The United Nations was created from the strategic vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who deemed it essential that the world have an effective international security organization. Even before the U.S. entered World War II, Roosevelt’s administration had begun planning for a postwar world. FDR died on April 12, 1945, just two weeks before the San Francisco conference on the U.N. was set to begin. New president Harry Truman was facing other major foreign policy questions, but his strong belief in the U.N. concept led him to proceed with the conference. The story of that crucial meeting, at which 46 nations gathered for two months to establish the organization, is told in Stephen Schlesinger’s compelling new book Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations.

At the heart of the narrative are two little-known but extraordinary men. One is Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, head of the U.S. delegation, who did an outstanding job of forging consensus. The other was Russian Å½migrÅ½ Leo Pasvolsky, a State Department official who was most responsible for writing the U.N. charter. His analytical skills and willingness to work behind the scenes made him indispensable.

Of the many issues covered at the San Francisco conference, probably the most contentious was that regarding the veto power in the Security Council. The understanding agreed to at Yalta gave the five permanent Security Council members absolute veto over “substantive matters” vague wording that prompted smaller nations to question the scope of the veto, a crisis that threatened the success of the conference. Among the journalists covering the event was a 27-year-old former naval officer, John F. Kennedy. In summarizing the results of the meeting, he wrote that, overall, “What [the] Conference accomplished is that it made war more difficult.” For all its successes and failures, the U.N. has played an important role in world politics for over half a century. Schlesinger’s impressive account of its founding deserves a wide readership. Roger Bishop is a bookseller in Nashville.

The truth behind a nautical legend

by bookpagedev

History

History

Unraveling the threads of a tragic fire

Review by bookpagedev

by Alan Prince

Its owner was correct when he said the 10-story Asch Building in downtown Manhattan was fireproof. The problem was that its contents were not. Thus, the cloth and paper used on the top three floors by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s garment workers fed the March 25, 1911, fire that resulted in the deaths of 146 people, the worst workplace disaster in New York City’s history before that Tuesday morning in September two years ago.

Other authors have told the story of the fire but probably never as completely and carefully as David Von Drehle in Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. Von Drehle, a journalist who pored over more than 1,300 long-lost, crumbling pages of trial testimony, examines the tragedy in a wider context than ever before and produced what historians likely will regard as the first complete and most reliable list of the victims and the people who identified the remains on the pier that became a makeshift morgue.

After taking us to the congested Lower East Side, with its dingy workshops and teeming mass of new immigrants, the author brings alive rich society matrons joining poor sweatshop seamstresses to defy thugs, cops and judges intent on breaking up their strike for decent wages, tolerable hours and voting rights. Von Drehle gives us a minute-by-minute replay of the fire itself, with some victims being burned alive, others plunging fatally down an elevator shaft, and, by one reporter’s count, 54 people mostly young women leaping or falling from window ledges to their doom. Then we visit the courtroom, where the tight-fisted factory proprietors managed to beat the accusation that they knew the building’s exit doors were locked an illegal practice that allowed guards to search workers’ purses for pilfered goods. A powerful story about a pivotal event in the maturation of our nation, Triangle is a valuable addition to the literature of reform in America.

Portraits of the artists

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Balancing on the Internet bubble

Review by bookpagedev

by Stephanie Swilley

With remarkable insight and honesty, Stephen Paternot has laid bare the wild ride of the Internet upstart that made him a millionaire and the even more spectacular fall as the stock market roof caved in. His candid memoir, A Very Public Offering, chronicles his six-year stint as CEO/co-founder of the- globe.com, an Internet company he and his partner Todd Krizelman started in their Cornell University dorm room.

His story starts with a bang as the globe’s initial stock offering set Wall Street records, and the 24-year-old’s share of the company was suddenly worth $97 million. But the heady days didn’t last, and Paternot describes the intimate details as the young CEOs fought for funding, battled the media and took a crash course in corporate politics. As the stock dropped to less than $1 a share, pressure mounted from co-workers and shareholders, and Paternot was forced to relinquish control as his millions evaporated. BookPage recently asked Paternot about his experience on the Internet bubble.

You were 24 and worth millions (on paper, at least). What was it like to be the poster boy of Internet mania ? It was manageable at first as mostly business press came after us, but when all the pop culture/lifestyle press came after us, things became a bit more risky. I’d often be recognized on the subway with Hey, you’re the guy from the globe, can I give you my resume? . . . Wow, you’re like a rock star now. I often didn’t know how to react [other than] be embarrassed and then duck and hide. It became much tougher as the year progressed and much of the media and investors wanted to place all the blame on us for the fall of our stock. At that point I had fought so many battles that I just wanted people to leave me alone and to crawl under a rock.

You and your partner Todd Krizelman were both very young when you started, with almost no business experience. Was that a help or a hindrance? At first our youth worked against us especially when trying to raise money. We had no experience, no prior money, no major contacts or track record to show, and we hadn’t even graduated. And Todd and I looked young (Todd like he was 15 years old). On the other hand, it made us all the more determined to prove everyone wrong and to succeed.

What do you think are the most important qualities for an entrepreneur to have? Most important is a high EQ Emotional Quotient. Any entrepreneur will know that the idea alone is just 10 percent of the value. The other 90 percent comes from sheer pushing and not giving up along the way. There will always be a million pitfalls you have to navigate around, and he or she who can keep going will make it.

What lessons did you take away from the whole experience? It taught me that anything can be achieved if you put your mind to it. You may get a few curve balls thrown at you along the way, but getting to your end goal and beyond is possible. That is the greatest measure of success in my mind. The last thing you want to do is measure your success by your net worth, or you’ll constantly have days of desperate misery.

It also taught me humility. You can be president of the United States one day, and a regular Joe the next, so don’t forget to treat people well along the way. From everything that has happened, I feel a certain strength of character within me, a greater confidence, and greater prudence and awareness.

What’s the status of the globe.com now? The company is still in business and it has now been seven years, something to be very proud of. I still own 90 percent of my stock and hope that the company will keep on surviving, even if it is as part of a bigger parent company.

What will it take for an Internet company to succeed in today’s market? They’ll need to prove that their business model can become profitable on a much smaller scale and smaller investment. No one wants to take huge financial risks right now. Otherwise, it needs to be such a powerful business model that has so much potential that everyone is ready to throw money at it (less likely).

Will you ever start another company? Ever want to go public again? I’m sure that something interesting will happen again, whether a film project or something else. I’m sure that if the timing is right, and there’s a necessity for it, then we’ll go public again. Perhaps this time I’ll opt not to be the CEO though.

On the edge of extinction

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

The good doctor

Review by bookpagedev

by Edward Morris

Compared to Dr. Paul Farmer, Mother Teresa was a slacker. But she had better PR. That may change with the publication of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s engaging biography of the selfless, tireless, good-humored and still relatively young physician. Kidder, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Soul of a New Machine (1981), has been following the 44-year-old Farmer’s work on behalf of the poor since 1994.

Born in Massachusetts, Farmer grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where his family lived on an old bus and a salvaged boat. Despite these privations, he graduated at the top of his high school class and won a full scholarship to Duke University. While pursuing his degree there, he became interested in public health policies, particularly as they affected the downtrodden. Farmer began working with the poor in Haiti in 1983, the year before he entered Harvard Medical School. There, he met Ophelia Dahl, the daughter of actress Patricia Neal and writer Roald Dahl, who was working as a volunteer at an eye clinic. She would later bring her considerable administrative skills to the service of Farmer’s far-ranging vision. Farmer’s passion for helping the helpless also caught the attention of Boston philanthropist Tom White, who donated money for a clinic in the central Haitian village of Cange and set up the Partners in Health charity to help Farmer fund his projects. For his part, Farmer contributed both his own income and around-the-clock attention to his patients, whether in Boston or Haiti. On the faculty at Harvard, he soon rose to the post of professor of medicine and medical anthropology. Kidder accompanies Farmer as he trudges across the unforgiving Haitian countryside to care for patients or as he attends public health conferences and strategy sessions in Russia, Cuba, France, Peru, Canada and Mexico. Farmer’s amalgam of commitment, genius and energy constitutes a near irresistible force, and Kidder’s wonderful book is an antidote for cynics.

Compared to Dr. Paul Farmer, Mother Teresa was a slacker. But she had better PR. That may change with the publication of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder's engaging biography of the selfless, tireless, good-humored and still relatively young physician. Kidder, who won both the Pulitzer…

Museum-quality reading for art’s sake

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Kingston’s triumphant return

Review by bookpagedev

by Alison Hood

Kingston’s triumphant return Fire is fickle, unpredictable: a simple flame can warm and brighten, while a roaring conflagration can raze and kill. But fire holds the power to transform, and The Fifth Book of Peace, by Maxine Hong Kingston, the National Book Award-winning author of The Woman Warrior, is an eloquent testament to that fact. This work, Kingston’s first in more than a decade, is an unusual weave of memoir and fiction resounding with poignant voices that speak to the search for a new lexicon of peace.

"If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation," Kingston’s first line announces. While this proclamation may sound overwrought, it aptly frames the author’s heart-pounding firsthand account of the October 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Hills firestorm. This blaze, which took lives and homes, the author’s house included, also consumed her Fourth Book of Peace, a novel-in-progress. After the fire, Kingston realized that she had to write anew about peace, but from a different perspective. To research the new narrative, as Kingston recounts, she traveled to China in search of three mysterious Books of Peace. But they proved elusive, and while traveling she met a Chinese cultural minister who encouraged her to deepen her quest: "You imagined Books of Peace . . .

You write them yourself." Dismayed, she realizes, "It is my responsibility to pull the Book of Peace out of nothing." Kingston first re-created a smaller fiction from her lost novel, the story of Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese-American who takes refuge in Hawaii to avoid the Vietnam draft. She also invited war veterans, protesters and activists to submit writings on war, which she incorporated into the narrative. The result is a hybrid book containing intense prose that leaps like the fire it describes, as well as quieter passages that meander evocatively as the author searches for the lost Books of Peace. Kingston’s latest work is an extraordinary personal primer on making peace. She concludes, "I am coming up with a new rule for living: Only do things that make you happy, and you will create a peaceful world." Kingston, word by word, is doing just that. Alison Hood is a freelance writer based in San Rafael, California.

Kingston's triumphant return Fire is fickle, unpredictable: a simple flame can warm and brighten, while a roaring conflagration can raze and kill. But fire holds the power to transform, and The Fifth Book of Peace, by Maxine Hong Kingston, the National Book Award-winning author of…

Personal portrayals

by Martin Brady

Biography

Biography

Einstein, the joyous nonconformist

Review by Chris Scott

by Chris Scott

It is redundant to say that Albert Einstein is the world's most famous scientist. Merely stating his name is sufficient to make the point. T-shirts, posters, action figures and innumerable books all bear witness to the hold he exerts on society 52 years after his death. He is still quoted at length often out of context and his ideas are still hotly debated both inside and outside the world of science. But as with any celebrity, fiction and fact are so intertwined that our view of the man is clouded by myth. In Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson parts the clouds.

Best-selling author Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time and CEO of CNN, established his credentials as a biographer with Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003). The first writer to have full access to all of Einstein's papers, including newly released personal letters, Isaacson clearly put his access to good use. Einstein is superbly assembled and remarkably readable. Both the genius and the man shine through on nearly every page. And some of the most remarkable aspects of the man were his apparent contradictions: A young revolutionary who spent his mature years defending old ideas. A non-practicing Jew and fervent Zionist. A pacifist who encouraged the development of the atom bomb. An irreligious man and despiser of atheism. Einstein's relationship with the world was defined by his rebellious nature, a near hatred of authority that alienated his university professors, causing them to refuse to provide references; he had to accept a position in the Swiss patent office rather than academe. This fierce independence also made him a difficult man to live with. His romances were troubled and his marriages were subservient to his quest for scientific discovery. As Isaacson notes, "Personal relationships involve nature's most mysterious forces. It is clear from Einstein's life that the secret to love remained as elusive to him as a unified field theory."

First and foremost, Einstein was a scientist, a career well-suited to a nonconformist. Isaacson details each momentous contribution of the archetypal absent-minded professor. In the miracle year of 1905, Einstein published four papers so revolutionary that physics has not yet recovered. The most famous was his theory of special relativity, the result of a flash of insight followed by exhaustive work. But Einstein did not work in a vacuum. He read voraciously in physics and philosophy and communicated with anyone who had something worthwhile to say, whether he agreed with them or not. As Einstein himself said, "intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience." When his discoveries gave birth to the probabilistic weirdness of quantum mechanics, Einstein rebelled again, this time defending the old ideas of determinism and objective reality. The old man's humanity seemed to depend on the belief that God would not let a roll of the dice dictate the course of His creation. Niels Bohr, champion of quantum mechanics and Einstein's friend, loved to chide his more famous colleague for his certainty, once remarking, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!" Einstein is, as its subtitle declares, a summation of the great man's life and his universe, his foibles and his discoveries. It is well worth an allocation of the reader's time and space.

Chris Scott writes from Nashville.

From the mouths of children

by bookpagedev

Trending Nonfiction

Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.