Past Selections

Freedom from Fear:
The American People in Depression and War 1929 – 45

by David Kennedy

from Amazon.com review

You can think of Freedom from Fear as the academic’s version of The Greatest Generation: like Tom Brokaw, Stanford history professor David M. Kennedy focuses on the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War and how the American people coped with those events. But there the similarities end–and, in terms of the differences, one might begin by noting that the historian’s account is over twice the size of the journalist’s.

Whereas Brokaw made use of extensive interviews, Kennedy relies on published accounts and primary sources, all meticulously footnoted. This academic rigor, however, does not render the book dull–far from it. Certainly the subject matter is interesting enough in its own right, but Kennedy offers attention-grabbing turns of phrase on nearly every page. He also unleashes some convention-shattering theses, such as his revelation that “the most responsible students of the events of 1929 have been unable to demonstrate an appreciable cause-and-effect linkage between the Crash and the Depression” and his subsequent argument that, although it made order out of chaos, the New Deal did not reverse the Depression–that, he says, was the war’s doing. All in all, Freedom from Fear compares favorably to its companions in the multivolume Oxford History of the United States in both its comprehensive heft and its vivid readability. –Ron Hogan

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The End of the Age of Innocence:
Edith Wharton and the First World War

by Alan Price

from Amazon.com review

While America as a nation stayed out of the early years of World War I, with many Americans judging it to be strictly a European affair, the American writer Edith Wharton believed nothing less than that civilization hung in the balance in the allied battle against the Germans. Driven by a passion to save Europe from German domination, Wharton went to France and Belgium and involved herself with a number of war relief and charity activities. She raised funds, distributed medicine to the troops, and organized work projects for women. Most interestingly, she wrote a series of influential essays that sought to influence American opinion on the war and hasten U.S. involvement. She also edited an anthology of writings about and illustrations of the war by prominent writers and artists, the profits of which benefited war charities. Alan Price’s book chronicles Wharton’s wartime involvements and considers her wartime writings in an interesting view of an overlooked piece of literary history.

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The Worst Hard Time:
The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

by Timothy Egan

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America’s great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of “black blizzards” that were like a biblical plague: “Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains” in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren’t suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan’s interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of “dust pneumonia” when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan’s powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers’ minds. (Dec. 14)

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The Arc of Justice:
A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

by Kevin Boyle

From Publishers Weekly
History professor Boyle (The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968) has brilliantly rescued from obscurity a fascinating chapter in American history that had profound implications for the rise of the Civil Rights movement. With a novelist’s craft, Boyle opens with a compelling prologue portraying the migration of African-Americans in the 1920s to the industrial cities of the North, where they sought a better life and economic opportunity. This stirring section, with echoes of Dickens’s Hard Times, sets the stage for the ordeal of Dr. Ossian Sweet, who moves with his young family to a previously all-white Detroit neighborhood. When the local block association incites a mob to drive Sweet back to the ghetto, he gathers friends and acquaintances to defend his new home with a deadly arsenal. The resulting shooting death of a white man leads to a sensational murder trial, featuring the legendary Clarence Darrow, fresh from the Scopes Monkey trial, defending Sweet, his family and their associates. This popular history, which explores the politics of racism and the internecine battles within the nascent Civil Rights movement, grips right up to the stunning jaw-dropper of an ending. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.

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The Big Burn by Timothy Egan

Q&A with Timothy Egan

Q: Tell us something about that great fire.

A: Well, it was the largest wildfire in American history, based on size. In less than two days, it torched more than three million acres, burned five towns to the ground, and killed nearly one hundred people.

Q: Wow. How big is three million acres?

A: Imagine if the entire state of Connecticut burned in a weekend–that’s what you have here.

Q: And yet in your subtitle you call this the fire that saved America.

A: That’s right. This happened in August 1910–next year will be the one hundredth anniversary. It came just after Teddy Roosevelt had left office, and left a legacy of public land nearly the size of France. But after Roosevelt was gone from Washington, in 1909, the Forest Service, the stewards of his legacy, came under attack. Gilded Age money wanted the rangers gone, the land placed in private hands. Enemies in Congress were constantly sniping at the young agency. And people out west were suspicious of the value of “Teddy’s green rangers,” as they called them. They thought they were all college boys, softies, city kids.

from the Amazon web-site, read more here:
BIG BURN

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American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century

By Howard Blum

“An unforgettable tale of murder, deceit, celebrity, media manipulation, and film as propaganda, when the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building exposed the deadly ‘national dynamite plot’ by trade unionists to terrorize America with one-hundred bombings in a doomed attempt to force capitalism to its knees. The relentless pursuit, capture, trial, and punishment of the bombers made a national hero of America’s Sherlock Holmes, master detective Billy Burns, and entangled crusading defense lawyer Clarence Darrow in a reckless, nearly career-ending scheme to bribe witnesses and jurors and throttle justice. Gripping, surprising, often thrilling, AMERICAN LIGHTNING ranks among the most riveting works of narrative history.”
—James L. Swanson, author of the Edgar Award-winning New York Times bestseller MANHUNT: THE 12-DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN’S KILLER

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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by David Okrent

From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing.

Yet we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent’s dazzling explanation of why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives of Americans changed the country forever.

Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women’s suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax.

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Not for Ourselves Alone:
The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

by Geoffrey Ward

February Selection

Anthony and Stanton had worked together for over half a century for women’s rights and were instrumental in keeping the movement alive despite repeated defeats. Sadly, Anthony is best remembered as “the woman on that funny dollar” and Stanton has been largely forgotten. PBS favorites Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward have joined forces again to change all that, in their respectful dual biography of the great suffragettes, Not for Ourselves Alone. The authors trace Anthony and Stanton’s very different lives–Anthony was a Quaker who remained single all her life; Stanton was born to a wealthy family and later married and raised several children–from girlhood on through their hard work, frequent disagreements on policy, and unflagging devotion to the cause of women’s rights. In this era when fewer than half the eligible voters go to the polls, many have forgotten the struggles of Anthony and Stanton, the sacrifices they made, and the hardships they endured. Anthony, for one, was frequently vilified in the press, cruelly caricatured, and shouted down at lectures. What shines most brightly throughout the volume, however, is the love and respect these women felt for one another.

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John Hay: The Gentleman as Diplomat

by Kenton J. Clymer

John (Milton) Hay (1838-1905), secretary to President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State of the United States, was born on October 8, 1838 in a small brick house in Salem, Indiana. He was the third son of Dr. Charles Hay, who was born in Kentucky, and Helen Leonard from Middleboro, Massachusetts, who had come to Salem to live with her sister. The oldest son died in 1840. The second, Augustus Leonard Hay, became a hero to young John. When Augustus died in 1904, John Hay wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, “My brother was my first friend and my best. I owe him everything. … He was the chief of my tribe, in birth as well as in mind and in character. We were not a handsome family, the rest of us – but he was unusually good-looking, tall and straight and brave.” The Hay boys studied at the private school of the Reverend Stephen Childs, an Episcopal clergyman, and in 1851 John went to an academy at Pittsfield in Pike County, where he met an older student, John G. Nicolay, who would influence his later career.

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Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life

By Kathleen Dalton

Biographers have often treated Theodore Roosevelt as “a larger-than-life monument carved in stone, unchanging, far from being flesh and blood, and quite imperturbable.” So writes Kathleen Dalton, who gives us a fully fleshed, quite down-to-earth TR in this vigorous, sometimes critical biography of the 26th president.

Roosevelt carefully crafted an image of himself as a self-made man. Fair enough, Dalton suggests, though he had a big head start in coming from one of New York’s wealthiest and best-connected families. More than shaping his body to overcome weakness, his spirit to overcome fear, he had to overcome the prejudices of his time and class in order to be truly fit for leadership, and even as president he wrestled with a few contradictions (opposing, for instance, a woman’s right to divorce, but endorsing public flogging of spousal abusers). He was not always successful, Dalton writes, but he emerged in the end as a great champion of civil rights and of the middle and working classes, very much ahead of his time.

Biographers have often treated Theodore Roosevelt as “a larger-than-life monument carved in stone, unchanging, far from being flesh and blood, and quite imperturbable.” So writes Kathleen Dalton, who gives us a fully fleshed, quite down-to-earth TR in this vigorous, sometimes critical biography of the 26th president.

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The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book’s categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White City is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair’s construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham’s challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous “White City” around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair’s incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison.

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Mornings on Horseback:
The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt

Mornings on Horseback

by David McCullough

Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised.

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A Fierce Discontent:
The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920

by Michael McGeer

A Fierce Discontent

With America’s current and ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor and the constant threat of the disappearance of the middle class, the Progressive Era stands out as a time when the middle class had enough influence on the country to start its own revolution. Before the Progressive Era most Americans lived on farms, working from before sunrise to after sundown every day except Sunday with tools that had changed very little for centuries. Just three decades later, America was utterly transformed into a diverse, urban, affluent, leisure-obsessed, teeming multitude. This explosive change was accompanied by extraordinary public-spiritedness as reformers—frightened by class conflict and the breakdown of gender relations—abandoned their traditional faith in individualism and embarked on a crusade to remake other Americans in their own image.