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Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age by Debby Applegate

4/9/2022

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July 21, 2022
Led by Karen O'Connell


Pearl to Polly, shtetl child to savvy New Yorker, Brooklyn corset factory girl to Manhattan’s most notorious brothel owner: “Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate, tells a fast-paced tale of radical, willful transformation.


Pearl Adler, gifted with neither height nor looks, grew up in the Russian Pale not far from Pinsk to a peripatetic tailor who considered himself a bit of a dandy. Years later, after Pearl’s birth records were lost to fire and war, her parents would guess that she had been born in 1900, making her, in her father’s words, a child of the 20th century. With pogroms mounting, he packed her off at 13 for the golden land of the United States, accompanied by a cousin already heading there. Mid-journey, the cousin begged off, but Pearl had the wherewithal to continue on alone.

Her father had arranged for her to live with a family in Massachusetts, but once acclimatized, she made her escape to relatives in Brownsville, N.Y. Already attracted to the seediness and pleasures of Coney Island, she was easily lured by the underworld, and by 1920 was living with a showgirl as her roommate on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive (“Allrightnik’s Row” in the city’s Yiddish slang, indicating you had made it). That same year Prohibition went into effect, and the party was on.

Within a few months, Pearl, now renamed Polly by her new friends, had opened her first brothel, conveniently located across from Columbia University. Speakeasies sprouted “like mushrooms”: “Manic, uninhibited revelry echoed everywhere, from the Bronx to Greenwich Village.” Predictably, everyone was trying to get a piece of the action, including the vice squad, which ran a shakedown business that had Polly’s bank account rising and falling like out-of-control blood pressure. (Although one might say her family, who would soon be arriving in America, did much the same; they were all too happy to take her money even as they barred her from their Seder.)The more successful Polly became, the more hounded she was — by the police, by Tammany Hall, by the Broadway mob. Her brothel was distinguished by good hygiene and well-selected “girls.” (When the Depression hit, Polly was able to turn away up to 40 young women for every one she hired — an acceptance rate analogous to that of the Ivy League these days.) But as the business evolved, her brothel also offered less tangible services: It took on the appearance of a literary salon, with drink from the best bootleggers, food from her private cooks and good company from Polly. It became the after-hours place not only for gangsters, lowlifes and politicians, but also for the Algonquin Round Table and for writers at The New Yorker. (Dorothy Parker and Polly would chat while the men availed themselves of the services.) Here, an often unexplored exploitation haunts Applegate’s narrative: Polly, who has claimed the American dream and sits sipping drinks with the celebrated Parker, is also the one who procured these young, mostly working-class women.
Having famous friends also meant that Polly became the subject of gossip columns, jokes and banter, which added to her renown. But not everything was so peachy; her gangster friends were just as likely to fleece or beat her as they were to trade laughs and cook up schemes with her. Of course, misogyny was hardly the sole purview of the underworld; the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who used Polly’s services extensively, balked when an up-and-coming bandleader fell in love with her. Winchell objected that the bandleader, who could have had any woman he desired, was dating a “broken-down old whore and an ugly one at that.”

Replete with accounts of Polly’s many court battles, newspaper headlines, mobster dealings and society gossip, “Madam” is a breathless tale told through extraordinary research. Indeed, the galloping pace of Applegate’s book sometimes makes the reader want to pull out a white flag and wave in surrender — begging for her to slow down. The mob violence, political corruption, social approbation and multitude of johns that Polly confronts at her ever-changing brothel locations are both impressive and unrelenting. And while Polly seems to be in the thick of the action, those who surround her often also outshine her. In the book’s last pages, Applegate makes a forthright case for why Polly is worthy of a biography by noting this injustice: It was not Polly but “her male criminal colleagues who became 20th-century cultural icons.” “Sex workers in general … are dealers in illusion,” she writes, and Americans do not like to see the curtain pulled back to reveal the mechanisms, let alone the banality, of their dreams.

Now, Applegate suggests, with the advent of social movements around sex and power, we might finally be ready. But elsewhere, she stakes Polly’s claim for fame on her proximity to men who made history (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), wittily narrated it (Robert Benchley), created its soundtrack (Duke Ellington) or violently upended it (Dutch Schultz and Legs Diamond). Yet the takeaway for this reader at least is that Polly deserves our attention because her life shows how women who wish to transcend their status must become expert practitioners of chameleonism. That is also what makes Polly on some level a frustrating subject for a biography. As Applegate concedes, Polly “hid far more of her story than she shared, even from herself.” In other words, the very trait that made Polly Adler survive and succeed is also what makes her defiantly elusive. Applegate, armed with formidable skills, may be the biographer who can come closest to revealing her.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/madam-the-biography-of-polly-adler-icon-of-the-jazz-age_debby-applegate/28154247/#edition=58877945&idiq=51612175
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Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosaland Rosenberg

4/4/2022

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April 21, 2022
Led by Mal Wassermann
Throughout her prodigious life, activist and lawyer Pauli Murray systematically fought against all arbitrary distinctions in society, channeling the discrimination she faced to make America a more democratic country. In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements.

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina, before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected on account of her race. Deciding to become a lawyer, she graduated first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study at Harvard University on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law. In the 1950s, her legal scholarship helped Thurgood Marshall challenge segregation frontally in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. When appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt to the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1962, she advanced the idea of Jane Crow, arguing that the same reasons used to condemn race discrimination could be used to battle gender discrimination. In 1965, she became the first African American to earn a JSD from Yale Law School and the following year persuaded Betty Friedan to found an NAACP for women, which became NOW. In the early 1970s, Murray provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women--and potentially other minority groups--from discrimination. By that time, Murray was a tenured history professor at Brandeis, a position she left to become the first woman ordained a priest by the Episcopal Church in 1976.

Murray accomplished all this while struggling with issues of identity. She believed from childhood she was male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone. While she would today be identified as transgender, during her lifetime no social movement existed to support this identity. She ultimately used her private feelings of being "in-between" to publicly contend that identities are not fixed, an idea that has powered campaigns for equal rights in the United States for the past half-century.


https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/jane-crow-story-pauli-murray


The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
by Patricia Bell Scott


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Facing the Mountain: The True Story of Japanese Americans Heros in World War II  by Daniel James Brown

1/1/2022

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May 19, 2022
Led by Kate Kidd
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2021
 
“Masterly. An epic story of four Japanese-American families and their sons who volunteered for military service and displayed uncommon heroism… Propulsive and gripping, in part because of Mr. Brown’s ability to make us care deeply about the fates of these individual soldiers...a page-turner.” – Wall Street Journal

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism and resistance, focusing on four Japanese American men and their families, and the contributions and sacrifices that they made for the sake of the nation.

In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of Gordon Hirabayashi, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best—striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-james-brown/facing-the-mountain/
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The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe –  by Mark Mazower

12/31/2021

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Chosen as one of the top history book of the year by The Economist

From one of our leading historians, an important new history of the Greek War of Independence—the ultimate worldwide liberal cause célèbre of the age of Byron, Europe’s first nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of the Ottoman Empire—published two hundred years after its outbreak

As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece to fight and die—along with many more who followed events passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans.

Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory for a completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-08-24/greek-revolution-1821-and-making-modern-europe

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-greek-revolution-book-review-history-independence-ottoman-empire-hellenism-and-heroism-11639154604

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31460913-an-historical-outline-of-the-greek-revolution

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There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

12/13/2021

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February 17, 2022

Led by Alan Rubin
The arresting title of Fiona Hill’s new book, “There Is Nothing for You Here,” is what her father told her when she was growing up in Bishop Auckland, a decaying coal-mining town in North East England. He loved her, and so he insisted that she had to leave.

Hill took his advice to heart — studying Russian and history at St. Andrews in Scotland, sojourning in Moscow, getting a Ph.D. at Harvard and eventually serving in the administrations of three American presidents, most recently as President Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe. “I take great pride in the fact that I’m a nonpartisan foreign policy expert,” she said before the House in November 2019, when she delivered her plain-spoken testimony at the hearings for the (first) impeachment of President Trump. But for her, “nonpartisan” doesn’t mean she’s in thrall to bloodless, anodyne ideas totally disconnected from her personal experience. She wrote this book because she was “acutely aware,” she says, “of how my own early life laid the path for everything I did subsequently.”
Sure enough, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century” weaves together these two selves, slipping back and forth between the unsentimental memoir reflected in its melancholy title and the wonkish guide promised in its inspirational subtitle. The combination, however unlikely, mostly works — though by the end, the litany of policy prescriptions comes to sound a bit too much like a paper issued by the Brookings Institution, where Hill is currently a fellow. When recounting her life, Hill is a lucid writer, delivering her reminiscences in a vivid and wry style. As much as I wanted more of Hill the memoirist and less of Hill the expert, I began to sense that giving voice to both was the only way she could feel comfortable writing a book about herself.

Looked at from afar, Hill’s story seems like a triumphant tale of striving and accomplishment. Born in 1965, she grew up in a “blighted world.” Her father followed the men in his family into the mines when he was 14; as the industry started to collapse in the 1960s, he found a job as a hospital porter. Hill’s mother worked as a midwife. As late as the 1970s, Hill’s grandparents lived in a subsidized rowhouse without “mod cons,” or modern conveniences, including indoor plumbing. Her grandfather had been pierced by the “windy pick” — the pneumatic drill — and had to wear a brace around his pelvis “to keep his battered insides in” for the rest of his life.

Hill recounts all of this with immediacy, tenderness and a good bit of gallows humor. She recalls how the people of Bishop Auckland started calling the crumbling town “Bish Vegas” — finding scraps of comedy in their depleted circumstances was how they reconciled a degraded present with a once-bustling past. She describes working a string of part-time jobs to help her family, including one at a medieval banquet hall, where she had to wear a ruffled costume that kept falling down her skinny frame. Her mother crafted a bosom for her from pantyhose stuffed with tissue — “this worked well enough,” Hill writes, until she slipped on a patch of “wayward mashed potato” and fell to the floor, thereby “dislodging the boobs.”
Costumes are a recurring motif in the book, as are self-deprecating glances at previous humiliations. Growing up, Hill wanted her clothes to disguise her family’s financial need, but they were more likely to give it away. Her mother sewed her a pair of trousers from heavy fabric left over after making window treatments — earning Hill the school nickname of “Curtain Legs.” Hill interviewed for a university spot wearing a homemade skirt with a heraldic pattern and a cardigan that was “nice,” she writes, “if you were 80.” Later, she had the resources to fashion the kind of self-presentation she wanted. She recalls being in a shop in 2019 with her mother, who yelled out: “Hey, Fiona, there are some suits on sale over here — might you need one for that impeachment thingy you’re doing?”
As for that “impeachment thingy,” Hill doesn’t say much about the actual hearings, though she has plenty to say about Trump. Instead of making the usual insider-memoir move of fixating on all the brazenly outrageous behavior — the bizarre comments, the outlandish tweets — Hill notices his insecurities, the soft spots that, she says, made him “exquisitely vulnerable” to manipulation. Yes, she writes, the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election — but unlike the #Resistance crowd, which insists that such meddling was decisive, Hill is more circumspect, pointing out that Vladimir Putin wasn’t the force that tore the country apart; he was simply exploiting fissures that were already there.
Just as concerning to her was the way that people around Trump would wreak havoc on one another by playing to his “fragile ego” — spreading rumors that their rivals in the administration had said something negative about Trump was often enough to land those rivals on what the president called his “nasty list.” Hill says that watching Trump fulminate made her feel like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen of Hearts, with her constant shouts of “Off with their heads!” In Hill’s telling, Trump’s norm-breaking was so flagrant and incessant that she compares him, in her matter-of-fact way, to a flasher. “Trump revealed himself,” she writes, “and people just got used to it.”
But neither Trump nor Putin — who was the subject of one of Hill’s previous books — is what she really wants to talk about. What she sees happening in the United States worries her. Economic collapse, structural racism, unrelieved suffering: Even without Trump, she says, none of the country’s enormous problems will go away without enormous efforts to address them. Hill the expert points to heartening examples of benevolent capitalism at work. But Hill the memoirist knows in her bones that the neoliberal approach, left to its own devices, simply won’t do.
The 1980s were a pivotal decade — for Hill, and for the world she knew. Her own career was on the rise, but the people around her were losing hope. “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of 20th-century industry,” she writes, combining her memories and expertise, “while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off.”

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-12-14/there-nothing-you-here-finding-opportunity-twenty-first-century

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2021/12/21/review-of-there-is-nothing-for-you-here-finding-opportunity-in-the-21st-century-by-fiona-hill-mariner-books-2021/

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Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray" by Rosalind Rosenberg

11/20/2021

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April 21, 2022
Read by Mal Wasserman
Without question, the subject of this amazing book, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray, is the most influential woman of the 20th century, whom we know the least about!

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was a lawyer who worked on the most powerful civil rights legislation of her day, was affiliated with the ACLU, the EEOC, National Organization for Women (as a founder), the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and was deeply involved in discussions about the ERA vs. expansion of the 14th amendment.

Names of Pauli Murray’s colleagues in these endeavors include Eleanor Holmes Norton, Betty Friedan, Ruth Bader Ginzburg, Dorothy Height, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson – and the list goes on.

But what brought me to her was that she was the first African American woman priest, ordained in the Episcopal church.  (I should confess that this first ordination was so key to me; one of the women in the group visited a church in Chicago.  I drove a long way to be part of her congregation the Sunday she visited, and was completely overwhelmed at the sight of a woman’s form in vestments.

And what a thing to hear a woman preach!  Some time later, my sister joined the Episcopal church in Massachusetts, and was welcomed by Barbara Harris, the first black woman bishop in the Episcopal church.)

Here are a couple of articles which cover the career of Pauli Murray totally worth the read.
  • The Civil-Rights Luminary You’ve Never Heard Of (The New Yorker)
  • The Church Awakens: African Americans and the Struggle for Justice (Episcopal Archives)

  • What both of them miss are two points:
1. As a black woman in the 40’s through the ’60’s, she was making HUGE contributions to several fields, including civil rights and rights for women, but struggled to get and keep income-producing jobs, and was always paid less than white, male colleagues.  A reflection of her peripatetic existence is that the application for the NY bar had to list every place she’d ever lived, and every job she had, with contact information for each.  Her application was 230 pages long!
2. From early adulthood, she firmly felt that she was not, biologically, a typical woman.  She tried for most of her life to find medical folks who would help her understand and live the way she thought she should be living.
Despite these huge impediments, her contributions are enormous.  I can think of no better example of persistence and grit.

Finally, let me offer the words of Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, recently installed as the first black woman in the Episcopal church to lead a diocese:

Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows
“She was such an important sign for black women in a number of fields – but especially the church – about what is possible.  She was a quiet warrior in many ways – breaking barriers and seeking equality and parity.  I know that I stand on her shoulders.”




https://www.womensordination.org/blog/2017/08/10/jane-crow-the-life-of-pauli-murray-book-review/
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China's Grand Strategy: Weaving a New Silk Road to Global Primacy by Sarwar A. Kashmeri

10/24/2021

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November 18, 2021

Read by Alan Metzger

In this first book to use China's Belt and Road Initiative, previously known as China's New Silk Road, as a point of departure to explain why and how China is about to supersede America with regard to influence in Asia, Sarwar Kashmeri argues that the United States has a narrow window of opportunity to find a way to fit into a world in which the rules of the game are increasingly set by China. U.S. opposition to the Belt and Road Initiative is doomed to failure, so America must find creative ways to engage China strategically, and he warns that the window to do so is closing fast.

The Belt and Road Initiative is China's ambitious project to connect itself to more than 70 countries in Central Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East through new roads, rails, ports, sea lanes, and air links. This cornerstone of Chinese foreign policy under President Xi Jinping is positioning China at the center of over half of world trade, and the loss of American influence and power could well lead to the end of the postwar liberal world order.


Far more than merely an infrastructure investment, the Belt and Road Initiative is a masterful grand strategy to create nothing less than a new world order based on the Chinese model of government and its financial institutions. Yet, as the passing of the baton of world leadership takes place, the United States seems curiously incapable or uninterested in devising a counter strategy. Even though the United States will no longer have the largest economy in the world, it will still be a powerful and rich country with global alliances.

Book Review: As 'new China' surges, big decisions face US | Business Vt News | timesargus.com
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The Rothchilds: The Dynasty And The Legacy by Michael W. Simmons

8/30/2021

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January 20, 2022

Led by Bob Rosen

ho are the Rothchilds?  Still making headlines today, their fascinating history stretches back to the Jewish ghetto in Frankfort Germany, where the first Rothchild ancestors lived in the House of the Red Shield. There one man and his five brilliant sons made their fortune as court agents to a prince.

It would take Napoleon's earth-shattering quest to conquer Europe to scatter the five brothers to the four winds, but when the dust settled, there was a Rothschild brother and a Rothchild bank in five cities: London, Paris, Frankfort, Naples, and Vikenna.  The era of haute finance had begun, and the legond of a banking empire mor epowerful than any royal family in history was established.

In this book, you will follow the progress of the Rochchild family through the centuries.  Their ranks included not only bankers and financiers but doctors, scientists, bomb experts, and collector who amassed not only some of the finest art collections in Europe, but also one of the finest bug collections.

Find out for yourself how the Rothschilds prevented wars, crowned and uncrowned kings, helped win the Battle of Waterloo, looked down their noses at the Nazis, and established a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33943515-the-rothschilds

https://www.amazon.com/Rothschild-Dynasty-Dr-John-Coleman/dp/096340198X

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The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain's Wars for America by Julie Flavell

8/6/2021

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October 21, 2021
Led by Alan Rubin
Finally revealing the family’s indefatigable women among its legendary military figures, The Howe Dynasty recasts the British side of the American Revolution.
 
In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe, the sister of British General Sir William Howe and Richard Admiral Lord Howe, in a London drawing room for “half a dozen Games of Chess.” But as historian Julie Flavell reveals, these meetings were about much more than board games: they were cover for a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of the American War of Independence.
 
Aware that the distinguished Howe family, both the men and the women, have been known solely for the military exploits of the brothers, Flavell investigated the letters of Caroline Howe, which have been blatantly overlooked since the nineteenth century. Using revelatory documents and this correspondence, The Howe Dynasty provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of one of England’s most famous military families across four wars.
 
Contemporaries considered the Howes impenetrable and intensely private—or, as Horace Walpole called them, “brave and silent.” Flavell traces their roots to modest beginnings at Langar Hall in rural Nottinghamshire and highlights the Georgian phenomenon of the politically involved aristocratic woman. In fact, the early careers of the brothers—George, Richard, and William—can be credited not to the maneuverings of their father, Scrope Lord Howe, but to those of their aunt, the savvy Mary Herbert Countess Pembroke. When eldest sister Caroline came of age during the reign of King George III, she too used her intimacy with the royal inner circle to promote her brothers, moving smoothly between a straitlaced court and an increasingly scandalous London high life.
 
With genuine suspense, Flavell skillfully recounts the most notable episodes of the brothers’ military campaigns: how Richard, commanding the HMS Dunkirk in 1755, fired the first shot signaling the beginning of the Seven Years’ War at sea; how George won the devotion of the American fighters he commanded at Fort Ticonderoga just three years later; and how youngest brother General William Howe, his sympathies torn, nonetheless commanded his troops to a bitter Pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Bunker Hill, only to be vilified for his failure as British commander-in-chief to subdue Washington’s Continental Army.

Britain’s desperate battles to guard its most vaunted colonial possession are here told in tandem with London parlor-room intrigues, where Caroline bravely fought to protect the Howe reputation in a gossipy aristocratic milieu. A riveting narrative and long overdue reassessment of the entire family, The Howe Dynasty forces us to reimagine the Revolutionary War in ways that would have been previously inconceivable.

https://julieflavell.com/the-howe-dynasty
Reviews:
https://julieflavell.com/reviews

Another Julie Favell book:
https://julieflavell.com/when-london-was-capital-of-america-reviews

 

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The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past by Meave Leakey and Samira

7/20/2021

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August 15, 2021

Led by Stacy Wallach

"Extraordinary . . . This inspirational autobiography stands among the finest scientist memoirs."
--New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

Meave Leakey’s thrilling, high-stakes memoir—written with her daughter Samira—encapsulates her distinguished life and career on the front lines of the hunt for our human origins, a quest made all the more notable by her stature as a woman in a highly competitive, male-dominated field.

In The Sediments of Time, preeminent paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey brings us along on her remarkable journey to reveal the diversity of our early pre-human ancestors and how past climate change drove their evolution. She offers a fresh account of our past, as recent breakthroughs have allowed new analysis of her team’s fossil findings and vastly expanded our understanding of our ancestors.
 
Meave’s own personal story is replete with drama, from thrilling discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana to run-ins with armed herders and every manner of wildlife, to raising her children and supporting her renowned paleoanthropologist husband Richard Leakey’s ambitions amidst social and political strife in Kenya. When Richard needs a kidney, Meave provides him with hers, and when he asks her to assume the reins of their field expeditions after he loses both legs in a plane crash, the result of likely sabotage, Meave steps in. 
 
The Sediments of Time is the summation of a lifetime of Meave Leakey’s efforts; it is a compelling picture of our human origins and climate change, as well as a high-stakes story of ambition, struggle, and hope.

"A fascinating glimpse into our origins. Meave Leakey is a great storyteller, and she presents new information about the far off time when we emerged from our ape-like ancestors to start the long journey that has led to our becoming the dominant species on Earth. That story, woven into her own journey of research and discovery, gives us a book that is informative and captivating, one that you will not forget."
—Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute
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    Stalin: Waiting For Hitler
    Strangers In Their Own Land
    Thank You For Being Late
    The Back Channel
    The Code
    The French Blue
    The Great Flu Influenza
    The Half Has Never Been Told
    The Howe Dynasty
    The Kerner Report
    The Lives Of The Constitution
    The Moralist
    Theodore Roosevelt For The Defense
    The President Is Dead
    There Is Nothing For You Here
    The Rothchild's
    The Sediments Of Time
    The Seventies
    The Woman Who Smashed The Codes
    The Women's Hour
    The Wright Brothers
    Walking With Destiny
    War Is A Racket
    Warriors Dont Cry
    What Has God Wrought?

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