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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.
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NonfictionEssays

Writing about remoteness

Review by bookpagedev
Once upon a time there was a young writer named Meghan Daum whose work won the admiration of one of cyberspace’s many inhabitants. The fan in question, a certain PFSlider, emailed Daum, told her he had a "crazy crush" on her, proposed marriage and asked her to lunch. The meeting that ensued between reader and writer—boy meets girl, with a contemporary twist—is recounted in "On the Fringes of the Physical World," an essay in Daum’s new collection My Misspent Youth.

Such is the effect of Daum’s work on her readers. Full of honesty, insight and wicked wit, My Misspent Youth is her first book, and it has garnered Daum comparisons with Joan Didion. Examining a society lost in the allure of material possessions, the collection probes modern life using Daum’s own experiences as a filter. With velvet incision, she pierces "the personal banalities to something larger and worth telling," both issuing invitation and provoking challenge to readers interested in having an authentic relationship to the world around them.
 
Heard frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition reading sharp pieces about her new home in rural Nebraska, Daum may be best known for the essay, "In My Misspent Youth." Originally published in The New Yorker, the narrative examines the clash of romantic fantasies and financial realities that characterize living in New York City.
 
In this wonderful debut collection, Daum escorts her readers through such diverse subjects as the publishing industry, polyamorous subcultures and the world of flight attendants.
 
Despite their disparity, these pieces successfully hang together because, as Daum puts it, "they are about remoteness. They are about missing the point. They are about the fictional narratives that overpower the actual events, the cartoon personae that elbow the live figure out of the frame."
 
These essays, written not in breath-taking, but in authentic, breath-giving prose, probe experiences to which we can all relate. My Misspent Youth marks the arrival of a brave new writer.
 
Temple West writes from Norfolk, Virginia.

 

Once upon a time there was a young writer named Meghan Daum whose work won the admiration of one of cyberspace's many inhabitants. The fan in question, a certain PFSlider, emailed Daum, told her he had a "crazy crush" on her, proposed marriage and asked…

The Bald Eagle

In this rich cultural and natural history, Jack E. Davis’ dazzling writing evokes the bald eagle’s majesty as he explores its place in American history.
HistoryBlack History

Carry Me Home

Review by bookpagedev

will likely be one of the most widely read and hotly discussed books of the year. The scholarship is meticulous, the story-telling is fascinating, and the actual events portrayed are so monumental they deserve everyone’s careful attention.

Even the most avid civil rights history buff will find revelations in Carry Me Home. Author Diane McWhorter, a journalist who has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post, grew up in Birmingham and was a member of a prominent country club family. The author’s hometown became a crucial battleground in the struggle for equality, and McWhorter looks back almost 30 years later to assess the city’s role.

She offers strong evidence that Martin Luther King was not the sole or even the most active leader of the civil rights movement. McWhorter acknowledges that he was certainly the most articulate, but she also recounts his repeated reluctance to participate in, and his early departure from, some of the events with which he was later credited. Many forgotten and deserving civil rights figures step forward. Fred Shuttlesworth, a firebrand Birmingham preacher, emerges as the common sense, we-have-to-keep-going leader. Activist Jim Bevel mobilizes the 1963 jail-filling children’s march that effectively propels passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Carry Me Home is also the story of the segregationists. We follow the wealthy white DeBardeleben family from their early union-busting days under patriarch Henry, through their support of Hitler’s fascism, and down through the generations to Margaret DeBardeleben Tutwiler, who served in both the Reagan and first Bush administrations, eventually becoming spokesperson for the State Department. We venture inside Klan meetings and through the tangled web of police and FBI collusion in Klan activities.

McWhorter’s original motivation was to determine whether her complex, difficult father had participated in the bombings that earned Birmingham the nickname “Bombingham.” Throughout the narrative, she intersperses snapshots of her personal life. She tells of attending the Birmingham premiere of To Kill a Mockingbird with her classmates, including Mary Badham, who played Scout in the movie. She writes of “the racial guilt we [privileged white girls] shared in rooting for a Negro man.” McWhorter draws on almost 20 years of research to make the reader a participant in both segregationist and movement activities, using actual, almost verbatim recounts by the original participants. Extensive notes give the sources of McWhorter’s narrative and include hundreds of documented interviews. McWhorter also read many thousand historical public and private documents. In 1982, her early research landed her on Governor George Wallace’s “sissybritches” enemies list.

Carry Me Home is filled with small moments of revelation. For example, Alma Powell, the wife of Secretary of State Colin Powell, is the daughter of R. C. Johnson, former principal of Birmingham’s Parker High School. Many of his students participated (without permission) in the children’s marches, while he sat outside his home at night with a shotgun, determined to protect his daughter and new baby granddaughter while his son-in-law earned military recognition in Vietnam.

In Carry Me Home you will learn of the early communist versus fascist struggle beneath the racial battleground; you will find out which entertainers supported the civil rights movement; you will read about the sexual blackmail triangle involving J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Almost every page brings a new insight or shock about an era, a place and a movement that changed our nation forever.

Mary Carol Moran’s Clear Soul: Metaphors and Meditations (Court Street Press).

 

will likely be one of the most widely read and hotly discussed books of the year. The scholarship is meticulous, the story-telling is fascinating, and the actual events portrayed are so monumental they deserve everyone's careful attention.

Even the most avid civil…

NonfictionTravelHistory

The Far Land

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

The tale of a British ship called the Bounty and the subsequent mutiny of some of its sailors has been endlessly scrutinized, romanticized and depicted ever since the event occurred in the late 1700s. With so many memoirs, historical accounts and fictional tales based on the Bounty’s story, it’s easy to assume that nothing new could be unearthed or written about it. But in his debut book, The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific, travel journalist Brandon Presser does exactly that, and brilliantly. By sifting through many of these prior texts, as well as other resources such as captain’s logs and interviews, Presser has managed to create a fact-based book that reads as grippingly as any thriller.

As a travel writer, Presser has crisscrossed the world to report on memorable locales and adventures. When he was offered the chance to do a story on Pitcairn, the tiny, isolated isle in the South Pacific that became the home of the Bounty’s mutineers, and where 48 of their descendants still live, he knew he had to take it, driven by his need “to know what happened when you fell off the map.” Visiting Pitcairn, a full month’s journey from his home in New York, certainly falls into that category.

Presser spent three years researching and writing this thorough account of the mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath. In the process, Presser spent time on both Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island in Australia, where some of the mutineers’ descendants later migrated. His narrative toggles between past and present, fleshing out the timeline of events—epic in nature and sprawling in scope—and cast of characters, particularly the Tahitians who accompanied the mutineers to Pitcairn and whose roles have previously been underrepresented.

Although some facts remain a mystery (such as the breaking point that made Fletcher Christian snap and take over the ship from Captain William Bligh), Presser’s detailed interpretation allows many of the formerly fuzzy pieces to fall into place. His personal experience on the islands combined with fastidious research make The Far Land such an incredible, unforgettable tale that Presser had to stress in an author’s note that it is “indeed a work of nonfiction.”

Brandon Presser's brilliant book about the infamous 1700s mutiny aboard the Bounty is as gripping as any thriller.

In Love

Amy Bloom is known for examining the dynamics of intimacy in her fiction, but she has never gotten closer to the flame than in this memoir of her marriage.
Animals

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Our cousins the apes have been getting a bad rap for decades. Victorian scientists derided the notion that such primitive animals might be related to the lofty Homo sapiens. Savants regularly dismissed as hoaxes reports of a man-like creature living in the tropics until confronted with proof of the orangutan’s existence. Making a case for the apes today is noted author and scientist Robert Sapolsky, who discovered through years of psychological study that the creatures lead remarkably ordered and intelligent lives. Sapolsky shares his findings in A Primate’s Memoir, a lively account of the time he spent on the Kenyan plains studying these complex, highly evolved animals. Sapolsky first met his baboon troop as a young student fulfilling a lifelong ambition to study primates. He quickly discovered that his Brooklyn upbringing ill prepared him for life on the Serengeti plains and in the cities of Kenya. He writes about this clash of cultures with great wit and sensitivity. As a stranger in a strange land (he lived in the middle of the plains with no radio, electricity or running water) Sapolsky had many hair-raising encounters. He was, by turns, kidnapped and held at gunpoint discouraging initiations into African culture, but, thanks to the author’s skill, incidents that make for great reading.

Spending more time in the company of baboons than with humans, Sapolsky began to recognize individual personalities and complex social interaction among members of the troop. In clear, entertaining prose, he relates fascinating findings like the discovery that lower-ranking members of a troop have higher stress levels, which seem to adversely affect their health. The fact that stress affects the health of humans as well is taken for granted today, but Sapolsky was among the first researchers to document the connection between these two elements. One of our foremost science writers, Robert Sapolsky is the author of The Trouble with Testosterone and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. With A Primate’s Memoir he has given us another accessible, work full of humor and profound insight.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor in Indianapolis.

Our cousins the apes have been getting a bad rap for decades. Victorian scientists derided the notion that such primitive animals might be related to the lofty Homo sapiens. Savants regularly dismissed as hoaxes reports of a man-like creature living in the tropics until confronted…

History

After Lincoln: Johnson, partisanship and Reconstruction

Review by bookpagedev

Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, was chosen by the 1864 Union Party convention (a coalition of Republicans and so-called "War Democrats" opposed to the Civil War) as Abraham Lincoln’s vice-presidential running mate because he was a Southerner and a Democrat. A steadfast defender of the Union throughout the Civil War, Johnson was placed on the ticket as an expression of national unity.

After the assassination of Lincoln, Johnson’s greatest challenge was the reconstruction of the nation. The most adamant Congressional opponents of slavery, the Radical Republicans, sought major changes in the secession states and in ways to assist the freed slaves. Johnson did not share their principles or their goals. With increasing bitterness, the president and the heavily Republican Congress fought over issue after issue. When Republicans increased their numbers in Congress after the 1866 elections, they decided to take the extreme measure of impeaching the president, for the first time in American history.

In his magnificent Impeached: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy, David O. Stewart, author of the highly acclaimed Summer of 1787, provides an extraordinary narrative that brings the many key players vividly to life while at the same time exhibiting an admirable clarity in discussing issues and events.

Although procedurally judicial, impeachment is a political action. Stewart excels in describing the often-complex strategies and machinations of the politicians on both sides as they use all legal, and even illegal, means to prevail. The author notes that definite conclusions are elusive, but the evidence indicates that corruption–bribery and patronage–may well have determined one of the critical moments in American history: Johnson was acquitted by a single vote in the Senate.

At the heart of Stewart’s re-creation of the period is Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. As a lawyer before the war, Stevens represented slaves and sometimes personally bought their freedom; his home had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Stevens’ legacy includes the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as well as Reconstruction legislation. After two failed attempts to steer presidential impeachment through the House of Representatives, Stevens was successful on a third try. Although he was the logical choice to lead opposition to the president, he was frail and in poor health. He did serve on the Impeachment Committee and co-authored Article XI, the catchall article that had more support in the Senate than the other 10 Articles of Impeachment against the president. Six weeks after Johnson was acquitted, Stevens introduced five more articles of impeachment against the chief executive.

Historians and writers have drawn very different lessons from this episode in history. In an excellent overview–in which he discusses myths about the trial and disagrees with Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, who were more sympathetic than he is to Johnson–Stewart concludes that Johnson’s presidency can only be seen as a tragedy. Although Johnson’s personal rise from poverty to the White House is inspiring, his refusal to compromise with Congress on crucial aspects of Lincoln’s legacy was unfortunate. Lincoln was too good a politician to alienate Congress and too strong and compassionate a leader to accept violence and oppression toward the freedmen and the Southern Republicans.

Stewart’s book splendidly illuminates an important chapter in American history.

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

 

Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, was chosen by the 1864 Union Party convention (a coalition of Republicans and so-called "War Democrats" opposed to the Civil War) as Abraham Lincoln's vice-presidential running mate because he was a Southerner and a Democrat. A steadfast defender…

Never Simple

Liz Scheier’s memoir of growing up with her loving, controlling, raging mother writhes with the sorrow and guilt only a deep, complicated love can arouse.
NonfictionSocial Science

Off the Edge

Review by Deborah Mason

We all have one. That friend or relative who cannot hold a conversation without bringing up their pet conspiracy theory. The one who believes COVID-19 is a hoax or that a certain former secretary of state actually wore a mask made from the face of a dead child. The one who frightens and confuses you in equal measure, leaving you to wonder what happened to your dear friend or favorite uncle. The one you might be thinking about cutting off, because the mere thought of listening to one more lecture about the faked moon landing sends you around the bend.

Before you do, however, you really should read Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill. Since starting at The Daily Beast in 2016, Weill has focused on how conspiracy theories flourish on social media. In Off the Edge, Weill uses flat-eartherism as a case study, documenting its surprising roots in a 19th-century socialist utopian commune, its truly astonishing endurance and popularity, and its links to other conspiracy theories, including QAnon. In addition to conducting meticulous research for her debut book, Weill had searching and substantive conversations with flat-earth believers that informed her understanding of how conspiracy theories evolve, grow and converge. She is especially critical of the role YouTube and Facebook have played in this history, but she is equally clear that the mainstream media, including some of her own articles, are also at fault.

Weill’s investigation of flat-eartherism makes clear that adherence to a conspiracy theory is not intellectual but emotional. Fear and uncertainty about the world and one’s place in it fuel a desperate desire for clarity—even if that clarity is rooted in a nonsensical worldview that drives a wedge between the believer and their loved ones. But there’s still hope for these broken relationships. Weill shows that people can and do recover from their fever dreams, but not through intellectual argumentation alone. If the exploitation of fear can divide us, only compassion and openheartedness can lay the groundwork to draw us together again.

Before you cut off a loved one who won’t shut up about their pet conspiracy theory, you really should read Kelly Weill’s extraordinary debut book, Off the Edge.

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