William Smith Map of England and Wales - History Study Group (HSG)

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Sracy Schiff

1/15/2023

Discussion led by Lucy Kennedy

January 19, 2023

ONE OF WALL STREET JOURNAL'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF LOS ANGELES TIMES TOP 5 NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
And named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The New Yorker, TIME, Oprah Daily, USA Today, New York Magazine, Air Mail, Boston Globe, and more!

"A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important.” —Ron Chernow

"A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography…Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation’s self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them." —Oprah Daily

A revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.

Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.

Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool available to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.

In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/books/review/the-revolutionary-samuel-adams-stacy-schiff.html

https://stacyschiff.com/the-revolutionary-samuel-adams.html

River of the Gods: Genius, Couirage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

10/2/2022

October 20, 2022

Read by Ben Liptzen

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy—from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe – and extend their colonial empires.

Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton’s opposite in temperament and beliefs.

From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke’s great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate,Speke shot himself.

Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan’s army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.

In River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.
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The first law of travelers’ tales is simply put: the worse, the better. No reader wants to hear of well-made plans or sunsets that paint the sky in glorious reds and purples. Give us a ship trapped in the ice or desperate wanderers sitting down to a meal of frozen boot. Better yet, give us two Victorian rivals in East Africa, supposed colleagues who were consumed with hate for each other, weak from fever, half-starved and half-blind but nonetheless obsessed with solving a mystery that had mocked the world for 2,000 years.

“River of the Gods” is a lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by those two friends turned enemies, Richard Burton and John Speke, to solve the geographic riddle of their era. The two men had set out, in 1857, to find the source of the Nile. Candice Millard, formerly a National Geographic writer and editor and the author of a gripping book about Teddy Roosevelt’s adventures in South America, has here plunged into another tale of exploration at the edge of disaster.
The search for the Nile’s headwaters was not simply a chase for fame and glory, though it was that. Filling in that tantalizing blank on the map would represent a genuine contribution to knowledge as well. It would not come easy.
Burton, six years older than Speke and more experienced, was the expedition leader. Speke was second in command. They should have worked well together. Speke was a skilled surveyor and geographer, Burton an astonishingly gifted linguist. Both were fearless and ambitious, but they had little else in common.
Burton was a scholar and an adventurer — the first Englishman to travel to the forbidden city of Mecca (disguised as a Muslim), a linguist who spoke 25 languages, and a translator who would one day bring the Kama Sutra and “Arabian Nights” to a vast audience of titillated, scandalized Victorians. Speke was a more conventional character, a soldier from an aristocratic family, a big-game hunter and, in one acquaintance’s admiring description, “a fine, manly, unaffected specimen of an Englishman.”
They quickly became fierce enemies. Yoked together in pursuit of the same goal, they devoted vast stores of energy to denouncing each other, as if “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” had been rewritten to feature a pair of mismatched Victorian explorers.
Almost from the start, Burton and Speke found themselves tormented by a host of mysterious pains and illnesses. Three months into their journey they came to a 7,000-foot-tall mountain range. “Trembling with ague, with swimming heads, ears deafened by weakness, and limbs that would hardly support us,” Burton wrote, “we contemplated with a dogged despair the apparently perpendicular path.”

Speke needed the support of three men just to keep on his feet. Then his fever boiled over and he began raving in delirium. Porters took away his weapons, for everyone’s safety. The expedition’s supply of food, which was meant to last a year, had nearly run out. There were no villages nearby to trade with and scarcely any game to hunt. Desperate for protein, the travelers took to eating ants.
This is not new ground — the most recent writer to have come this way is Tim Jeal, author of the thorough and engaging “Explorers of the Nile” — but Candice Millard has earned her legions of admirers. She is a graceful writer and a careful researcher, and she knows how to navigate a tangled tale.
Curiously, Millard provides few of the natural history vignettes that were highlights of “The River of Doubt,” her Teddy Roosevelt book. There are hardly any mentions of elephants, except as their tusks figured in the ivory trade, and only the briefest mention of lions. Leopards and giraffes and wildebeests turn up in only a single paragraph.
Millard sticks close to Burton and Speke, even dashing past such important and colorful figures as David Livingstone and Henry Stanley (of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame). But she takes pains to put her story in context. Unlike Scott and Amundsen, say, whose race to the South Pole played out on an empty continent, Burton and Speke set out into territory that, Millard notes with characteristic liveliness, “had in fact been occupied continuously by human beings for hundreds of thousands of years longer than London or Paris.”
But the Nile had never yielded its secrets, though traders had long recounted stories of towering mountains and giant lakes that might have given rise to a mighty river. The problem for locals and traders alike was scale — knowing a great deal about one region or stretch of river was far different from knowing the full course of the longest river in the world. Just how all those lakes and rivers connected, across vast watersheds, no one knew. Explorers since Roman days had tried to follow the Nile upstream to its headwaters. They had all failed. The new strategy was to make an end run instead, by marching inland from the coast.
Burton and Speke and other explorers wound their way like armies on the move, in caravans of 100 or 200 men. Most of the paths they followed had been laid down over the course of centuries by African and Arab traders in ivory and enslaved people. Even in the 1850s those trade caravans continued to thrive. Throughout East Africa, Millard writes, “the shackling and selling of human beings was still a common and daily occurrence.”
Porters staggered along with tusks that weighed up to 100 pounds, cut from slaughtered elephants. Victims of smallpox lay dead along the trail. Hordes of unfortunate souls who had been captured in raids or purchased like animals trudged their weary way along, destined for slave markets.

One of the heroes of Millard’s story had once marched in one of those slavers’ caravans, in ropes and chains. Sidi Mubarak Bombay would play an indispensable role as a guide to Burton and Speke — he was, Burton said, “the gem of the party” — and he had endured a lifetime of hardships that surpassed anything that befell his employers.
Bombay was born in a village near the present-day border of Tanzania and Mozambique. Kidnapped by raiders, he was dragged hundreds of miles to the coast and then flung into a crammed boat for the 200-mile crossing to Zanzibar. Those who died at sea were tossed overboard. Bombay survived. In Zanzibar’s notorious slave market, he was exchanged for a few lengths of cloth and shipped to India, where he lived in slavery for 20 years.
Bombay was freed on his master’s death and made his way back to Africa. By the end of his life, Millard writes, the man who had been stripped of his name and family had become “not only one of the most accomplished guides in the history of African exploration but likely the most widely traveled man in Africa.”
History buffs know the names of Burton and Speke and their fellow explorers. Millard reminds us of the role of men like Bombay, who guided them, and the anonymous porters and laborers, who marched alongside them or struggled to carry their frail, feverish bodies in hammocks, mile after endless mile over hills and across rivers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/river-of-the-gods-book-review-in-search-of-the-source-of-the-nile-11651849253

Indian World of George Washington by Colin Calloway

7/28/2022

August 18, 2022

Red by John Dickson

As the author highlights, biographies of George Washington do not effectively cover his interfaces with the American Indians. In fact, George Washington spent a lot of time interfacing with the Indians, in war and in peace through negotiations on peace treaties. This book covers all of it in a lot of detail. What comes through is that although George Washington tried to treat the Indian fairly, in fact the his ultimate goal was to take their land and turn them into farmers. Of course, this did not work, resulting in wars and movement of the Indians from their lands to the west of the Mississippi. Why? Settlers and land grabbers would move into the Indians land. This would cause conflict resulting in deaths on both sides, resulting in war with the US Government resulting in taking the Indians land. And, the cycle would continue. It is a sad part of history. And, this book lays it out from 1753, when Washington first interfaced with the Indians in war until his death in 1799. My only criticism of this book is that can get a little dense at times, and difficult to read. I found myself reading it and falling asleep. But, I finished it and it is worth the read. Telling this history is important to understanding our country.

Professor Calloway’s book is exceptionally well researched and a corrective to the long ingrained and overly sympathetic image of George Washington most Americans have held since childhood. Calloway convincingly confirms that Washington’s early military exploits were debacles, and that he was a land speculator with few compunctions over prevailing treatment of the various Native Americans who had long claimed dominion over such territory. The book however would have benefited from a more rigorous editing, as Calloway’s full, and near full, page paragraphs suggest a prolixity in need of curbing. Calloway repeatedly recounts certain themes in the book, such as (I) Washington’s dual postures of promising peace with the Indians while at the same time threatening extirpation of the Indians if peaceful methods failed, and (I) the ambivalent attitude Washington held toward Native Americans, i.e., that he like many of the English and Colonists didn’t trust them and thought little of their honesty and trustworthiness. Not that this was a hindrance to the colonists and the British in their recruitment of friendly or neutral tribes to assist in ousting the French from lands claimed by the British colonists, and of course the Native Americans.

Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration by Ronnie Greene

6/13/2022

June 16, 2022

Read by Ronnie Greene

The Heart of Atlanta Supreme Court decision stands among the court's most significant civil rights rulings.

In Atlanta, Georgia, two arch segregationists vowed to flout the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the sweeping slate of civil rights reforms just signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Pickrick restaurant was run by Lester Maddox, soon to be governor of Georgia. The other, the Heart of Atlanta motel, was operated by lawyer Moreton Rolleston Jr.

After the law was signed, a group of ministry students showed up for a plate of skillet-fried chicken at Maddox's diner. At the Heart of Atlanta, the ministers reserved rooms and walked to the front desk.

Lester Maddox greeted them with a pistol, axe handles, and a mob of White supporters. Moreton Rolleston refused to accept the Black patrons. These confrontations became the centerpiece of the nation's first two legal challenges to the Civil Rights Act.

In gripping detail built from exclusive interviews and original documents, Heart of Atlanta reveals the saga of the case's rise to the US Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the segregationists.

Heart of Atlanta restores the legal cases and their heroes to their proper place in history.

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Summary: A journalistic account of two Atlanta legal cases in response to the 1964 Civil Rights act, joined by the Supreme Court to uphold public accommodations (Title 2 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act).I do not think I would have picked up Heart of Atlanta if my book club had not decided to go to a book talk with the author at the Atlanta History Center. But Heart of Atlanta is the type of narrow history that I think is exactly what we often miss in our too-quick presentation of the Civil Rights Era. The Civil Rights Era was so transformational because the movement was broad-based. Literally, hundreds of thousands of people participated, at least in minor roles. But even the often significant characters of the era have been forgotten. And the more minor characters were often never really known. One of the best examples of this is that frequently throughout the book, Ronnie Greene will cite a video or picture or newspaper story about these events, and the five main characters of the story were either unnamed or listed as “unknown.” In fact, the men often did not know that there was photographic or video documentation of their protests until Ronnie Greene showed it to them.
All five pastors in the subtitle were students at the Interdenominational Theological Center seminaries (ITC). Two of the five pastors are still living, Albert Sampson (involved in the earlier sit-in movement in North Carolina) and Woodrow Lewis (involved in the earlier Atlanta Student Protest movement). Unfortunately, the other three, Albert Dunn (also involved in the Freedom Rides), Charles Well, and George Willis (both having been in the military before returning to attend college and seminary), have passed away. All five continued their activism after their involvement in these cases, but like many pastors organizing in their communities, they did not obtain national recognition.
The manager and part-owner of the Heart of Atlanta Hotel, Moreton Rolleston, was a lawyer. He filed suit against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the day it went into effect. His suit was a barrage of arguments, that Congress didn’t have the right to regulate local businesses, that the 14th amendment did not prohibit individual discrimination, that the 13th amendment prohibited slavery and this regulation was a type of enslavement, that the regulation was a type of seizure and therefore a violation of his fifth amendment rights.
The five pastors attempted to eat at Lester Maddox‘s Pickrick Restaurant. Maddox took out a weekly ad in the local paper to promote the restaurant and rail against integration, and promote his brand of segregation. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a rotating group of the five pastoral students attempted to eat at the restaurant. They were turned away, at times with guns pointed at them, and threatened with a beating by the ax handles that Maddox sold to customers for the purpose. Civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley took up the case and quickly filed suit against Maddox and the restaurant. The two cases were heard by a federal court panel together and were very quickly combined into a Supreme Court Case, Heart of Atlanta Motel vs. the United States. (Baker Motley, just two years later, was the first Black woman appointed as a judge in the federal court system.)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed on July 2, 1964. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Oct 5 and released the decision on Dec 14. The decision was unanimous with two concurring opinions, but it is a case that most do not know about. The court upheld Congress’s authority to use the Commerce Clause to regulate local businesses and dismissed the idea that the 13th or 5th amendment could be used to prevent regulation.
I appreciated the book talk and hearing the author present an overview and respond to questions. Greene is a journalist, and I think this reads like it was written by a journalist and not a lawyer or academic historian. That is not meant to be negative, but a lawyer likely would have spent more time on the legal case and less on the context of the case. And a historian likely would have written with a different tone and contextualized the story differently. This isn’t quite right, but this feels like it was written as a thriller. Greene keeps building tension and then moving back to the context before moving on with the story. It felt a lot like the biography of Robert Smalls that I recently read, which was written by Cate Lineberry, also with a journalistic background.
One of the points that I think came out in the book well was that despite the very different backgrounds of Maddox and Rolleston, they both were driven not just by personal racism but by a libertarian understanding of government that believed that the government had no right to regulate private businesses. Kevin Kruse’s main thesis of White Flight, also about Atlanta, was that the libertarian wing of the GOP was empowered by the rise of integration and attempted to create more private spaces to minimize the reach of government regulations toward integration. But that libertarian impulse was clearly already present in 1964, not just in 1984.

https://www.overdrive.com/media/7675121/heart-of-atlanta

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

4/9/2022

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

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosaland Rosenberg

4/4/2022

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

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

1/1/2022

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/

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe – by Mark Mazower

12/31/2021

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

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

12/13/2021

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/

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

11/20/2021

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/