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Anne Bartlett

NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

A Demon-Haunted Land

Review by Anne Bartlett

When the western part of the former Third Reich transformed itself with lightning speed into a stable democratic republic and economic powerhouse, it was the ultimate post-World War II success story. The story is true enough, but it wasn't quite that simple. In fact, the defeated German people were shattered after the war. Countless thousands were refugees, prisoners of war and rape victims, collectively blamed for the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, these conditions caused widespread tension, illness, emotional breakdown and deep denial.

They also caused a now-forgotten witch panic. Historian Monica Black surfaces this deeply buried episode in her riveting A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghost of the Past in Post-WWII Germany, which explores the connection between Germany’s trauma and an upsurge in superstitious hysteria. Included in this wave were Germans who accused their neighbors of being witches, a charismatic faith healer named Bruno Gröning who attracted thousands of followers and others who reported sightings of the Virgin Mary.

From 1947 to 1956, there were 77 “witchcraft” trials in Germany. To be clear, these were not trials of witches; they were cases brought by people accused of witchcraft against their accusers. (The word “witch” was seldom used; the accusers called them “evil people.”) The most notorious trial involved Waldemar Eberling, a lay healer and exorcist who told clients they had been bewitched by neighbors. He was called Hexenbanner, "witch banisher," and both he and his nemesis, a retired teacher who crusaded for the accused, had been anti-Nazis.

Black focuses much of the book on Gröning, a former Nazi believed by his legion of followers to possess magic healing powers against illnesses caused by evil. He eventually went to trial in a tragic case involving a teenage girl with tuberculosis who stopped medical treatment because of her faith in him.

All these cases were studied by doctors at the time they occurred, but Black perceptively points out that none of them ever publicly faced up to the heart of the matter. The terrible societal conditions that led to this outbreak, the experts said, was the fault of the Allied occupation. Guilt and shame over Nazi crimes were never mentioned. Only Eberling’s teacher-enemy pointed out—privately—that a hunt for “witches” was not unlike blaming the Jews.

Historian Monica Black’s riveting A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghost of the Past in Post-WWII Germany explores the connection between Germany’s trauma and an upsurge in superstitious hysteria.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Royal Witches

Review by Anne Bartlett

Princess Diana and Meghan Markle have both struggled with the downsides of marrying into the British royal family, but at least no one ever arrested them on accusations of treasonous witchcraft. Astoundingly, that really happened to four royal women in a 70-year period some six centuries ago, in a burst of bizarre prosecutions.

The Wars of the Roses, the dramatic 15th-century struggle over the English crown, have attracted writers from Shakespeare on. More recently they’ve inspired both "Game of Thrones" and the White Queen saga. Now author Gemma Hollman provides a new lens on this period in Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England.

The four women—Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Elizabeth Woodville—were far from the witchy stereotype of solitary village women. They were all intelligent and cultivated, the wives or widows of powerful men: two kings and two kings' brothers. It was too dangerous for these men's enemies to attack them directly, so their adversaries undermined them by targeting the women.

Hollman expertly re-creates their courtly world—the lavish clothes, jewels and palaces that inspired so much envy. Their personalities necessarily remain elusive, but all four chose unusual paths to marriage, so their sense of agency is clear.

In the 15th century, belief in magic blended easily with nascent science; even serious scholars pursued alchemy. These women may indeed have turned to “love potions” or fortunetellers—but was it treasonous conspiracy against the king? The likes of Cardinal Beaufort and Richard III did their best to make that case.

The accused women were smart and lucky enough to escape the axe. But this was not a game: Eleanor’s supposed accomplices were tortured and executed. Eleanor herself, the beloved wife of popular Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, was forced to walk unhooded across London on three separate days in “penance,” her humiliating fall visible to all.

Even readers familiar with the basic history of the Wars of the Roses will see aristocratic skulduggery in a strikingly fresh way in Royal Witches, as we continue to grapple with the treatment of women who rise to important positions even in our own time.

Princess Diana and Meghan Markle have both struggled with the downsides of marrying into the British royal family, but at least no one ever arrested them on accusations of treasonous witchcraft. Astoundingly, that really happened to four royal women in a 70-year period some six centuries ago, in a burst of bizarre prosecutions. The Wars of […]
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Vapors

Review by Anne Bartlett

Those of us who are fans of gangster stories have been saturated (oversaturated, perhaps?) in the Lucky-Bugsy-Meyer saga, rooted in New York but with memorable offshoots in Havana, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Well, here’s a fresh cast and venue: the casino crowd of Hot Springs, Arkansas, arguably America’s gambling capital until it all came crashing down in the mid-1960s.

Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky do make cameos in The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice, David Hill’s true crime narrative of the spa resort town from the ’30s through the ’60s. But the big players are the less-remembered mobster Owney Madden, casino boss Dane Harris and a raft of crooked homegrown pols, judges and cops—with a fleeting appearance by Hot Springs resident Virginia Clinton and her promising son Bill.

It’s still astonishing how open Hot Springs’ vice industry was, with city leaders acting as an integral part of the criminal establishment. Madden was the mob’s guy in town, but he quickly assimilated to the local landscape. Harris, the son of a bootlegger, had aspirations of respectability; he’s the Michael Corleone of the story. He wanted the clubs, led by his gang of Vapors, to be glossy entertainment palaces. Harris did his best with payoffs and vote-buying, but internecine fighting that featured bomb explosions and pressure from Bobby Kennedy’s Department of Justice ended his dream.

The history is fascinating, but what makes The Vapors a compelling—and ultimately heartwrenching—book is the author’s account of his own family, who lived in Hot Springs during the casino heyday. His grandmother Hazel Hill landed there as a teen, drifted into casino work after leaving her violent, alcoholic husband and neglected her sons as she fell into her own sad addictions. Hill tells the hard truth of her life with compassion and context.

Amid all this mayhem, one person in the book emerges as a beacon of decency: Jimmy Hill, Hazel’s youngest son and the author’s father. Intelligence, hard work, athletic talent and loyal friends led him to a better life. Dane Harris should have been so lucky.

Those of us who are fans of gangster stories have been saturated (oversaturated, perhaps?) in the Lucky-Bugsy-Meyer saga, rooted in New York but with memorable offshoots in Havana, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Well, here’s a fresh cast and venue: the casino crowd of Hot Springs, Arkansas, arguably America’s gambling capital until it all came […]
NonfictionBlack History

Wandering in Strange Lands

Review by Anne Bartlett

When Morgan Jerkins traveled the United States in search of her roots, she didn’t just look up the official records, useful as they sometimes were. She talked to relatives and knowledgeable strangers to explore what she calls the “whisper” stories: the ones African Americans and Native Americans quietly pass on through generations, because they are afraid to speak them too loudly.

In the sensitive, insightful Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, Jerkins, an African American in her 20s raised mostly in New Jersey, recounts her journey to uncover the meaning of those stories for her own relatives, as well as for the millions of others who moved north during the Great Migration. Seemingly unimportant traditions like eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day and half-serious references to “roots” hexes turn out to be important clues to the culture of kidnapped Africans in Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana.

Jerkins finds the hard truths of racism in her research: a great-grandfather who fled a lynching threat; Gullah landowners forced off their property by whites; relatives who “passed” as white and cut family ties. But she also struggles emotionally with the discovery that her background is more diverse than she had understood. Among her ancestors are whites, free Creole people of color who owned slaves, and, possibly, Native Americans.

After her illuminating visits to Louisiana, Oklahoma and the Georgia-South Carolina low country, Jerkins ends in Los Angeles, where she spent part of her childhood. California, she says, was the last Promised Land for black people, but it turned out to be as disappointing as everywhere else. Now many African Americans are leaving in a reverse migration to the South. 

As Jerkins finishes her moving chronicle, she says she is “exhausted” by the constant racial violence she finds, most recently in the massacres in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, where a high proportion of the victims were people of color. One way forward, she writes, is for black people to “regain their narrative and contextualize the shame.” The answer, Jerkins says, is not flight but true community informed by deep knowledge of the past.

When Morgan Jerkins traveled the United States in search of her roots, she didn’t just look up the official records, useful as they sometimes were. She talked to relatives and knowledgeable strangers to explore what she calls the “whisper” stories: the ones African Americans and Native Americans quietly pass on through generations, because they are […]
NonfictionTrue Crime

American Sherlock

Review by Anne Bartlett

We live in an era that feels awash in crime case forensic evidence. Every day, news comes of DNA tests that have exonerated long-imprisoned innocents or nabbed villains in cold cases. An entire generation has grown up watching the CSI franchise on television, and jurors tend to expect some Gil Grissom-like savant to testify, even when that’s not realistic.

That was hardly the case a century ago. Police relied on third-degree interrogations, and science just wasn’t in the picture. But slowly, a handful of forensic pioneers changed the criminal justice landscape. One of the most prominent was Edward Oscar Heinrich, a largely forgotten figure whose riveting story is revived in Kate Winkler Dawson’s American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI.

After finishing her well-regarded Death in the Air, Dawson was looking for a follow-up project when she stumbled on the voluminous Heinrich papers at the University of California at Berkeley. She literally had to persuade the university to catalog the neglected collection so she could do her research. It produced archival gold.

Heinrich was a headline name in the 1920s and ’30s as a key criminologist in high-profile murder cases. Dawson structures her book around his most mysterious and sensational cases—among them, a bloody train robbery that netted almost no money, the killing of a priest solved in part through handwriting analysis and the multiple trials of a Stanford University employee who may or may not have bludgeoned his wife in her bathtub.

Heinrich forged the way in blood pattern analysis, ballistics, forensic photography, polygraphs and criminal profiling. Yet he was often frustrated by juries who were baffled by his work, and importantly, he wasn’t always right. He trusted forensic science too much; as Dawson reminds us, we now know that handwriting, blood and gun evidence is far from flawless. Like Heinrich himself, she argues, we need to continue pushing forward in the never-ending quest for true justice.

We live in an era that feels awash in crime case forensic evidence. Every day, news comes of DNA tests that have exonerated long-imprisoned innocents or nabbed villains in cold cases. An entire generation has grown up watching the CSI franchise on television, and jurors tend to expect some Gil Grissom-like savant to testify, even […]
NonfictionLatin American History

Fifth Sun

Review by Anne Bartlett

For generations, historians have gleaned their understanding of the conquest of Mexico from Spanish accounts—whether from the conquistadors, who stressed Aztec human sacrifice, or Catholic missionaries, who were sometimes more sympathetic to the indigenous Nahua people. If you’d asked why the approach was so one-sided, the scholars would have said: Because nothing else is available. 

That’s simply not true. The people Americans call Aztecs, who called themselves Mexica, had a strong tradition of historical annals that didn’t stop with the conquest. For years afterward, the descendants of Nahua nobles, both Mexica and others, continued to write Nahuatl-language chronicles.

Happily, the long neglect of those documents has now ended. Historian Camilla Townsend continues her groundbreaking work in the field in the marvelous Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, a dramatic and accessible narrative that tells the story as the Nahuas saw it.

Yes, the Mexica sacrificed humans and were unpopular enough that some of the regions they had conquered allied with the Spanish. But they were also pragmatic, funny, clever, artistic and enmeshed in a civilization as sophisticated as Spain, if not as technologically advanced. Fifth Sun helps explode denigrating myths: Moctezuma was not a coward, just a realist. He did not think Hernán Cortés was a “god.” The translator known to posterity as Malinche (really Malintzin) was not a “traitor.”

Townsend, a first-rate writer, explores each era through the lives of real Nahuas who lived through or wrote about it. Among them are a captive daughter of Moctezuma, who bore one of Cortés’ many illegitimate children; a local ruler who learned to work in a Spanish-governed world and sponsored an important chronicle; and an indigenous Catholic priest, proud of both his ancestry and his Christian faith. 

The Mexica were smart and effective, but they couldn’t overcome Spanish horses, steel and guns. Even so, they didn’t give up. As is often true after a conquest, the defeated generation’s children rebelled a few decades later, and the grandchildren pushed to preserve their history. Fifth Sun continues that crucial task. 

For generations, historians have gleaned their understanding of the conquest of Mexico from Spanish accounts—whether from the conquistadors, who stressed Aztec human sacrifice, or Catholic missionaries, who were sometimes more sympathetic to the indigenous Nahua people. If you’d asked why the approach was so one-sided, the scholars would have said: Because nothing else is available.  […]
NonfictionBiography

Poisoner in Chief

Review by Anne Bartlett

Sidney Gottlieb was an odd fit for the CIA in 1951. Among the Company’s aristocratic Ivy Leaguers, he was a left-wing scientist and the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants. But he and CIA chief Allen Dulles had at least one thing in common: Each had been born with deformed feet, though Dulles’ condition was less serious. Did that shared remembrance of early physical struggle form a bond? Whatever the reason, Dulles hired Gottlieb, and so began his astonishing career of killing, torture and lies.

The outlines of Gottlieb’s CIA tenure, as head of the MK-ULTRA mind-control research project and director of the spy-tools department, are well known. But renowned journalist Stephen Kinzer’s new biography of Gottlieb, Poisoner in Chief, is still shocking in its vivid detail.

Throughout the 1950s, under Gottlieb’s imaginative leadership, MK-ULTRA experimented with LSD and other dangerous drugs on unwitting or coerced subjects—mental patients, prisoners and just plain old everyday folks. Many were left mentally disabled for life; some were even killed. One fellow CIA scientist was likely thrown out of a window when he was deemed unreliable. And it was all done in a completely fruitless search for the ability to “brainwash” human minds. Nothing worked—ever.

In this masterful book, Kinzer demonstrates that the “research” done by Gottlieb’s team was as horrifically unethical as anything done by Nazi doctors later tried for war crimes. And yet, as Kinzer carefully documents, Gottlieb was a “nice guy” who loved his family and lived a proto-hippie lifestyle in rural Virginia. He spent his post-CIA years quietly, as a speech therapist who treated children—when he wasn’t destroying documents or stonewalling congressional committees.

During the years of investigations and lawsuits that began in the 1970s, Gottlieb never publicly repented; indeed, he believed himself to be a true patriot who had fought a justified war against communism. Kinzer’s chilling book reveals what can happen when morality is jettisoned in the name of national security—then and now.

Sidney Gottlieb was an odd fit for the CIA in 1951. Among the Company’s aristocratic Ivy Leaguers, he was a left-wing scientist and the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants. But he and CIA chief Allen Dulles had at least one thing in common: Each had been born with deformed feet, though Dulles’ condition was less […]
Nonfiction

Alexander the Great

Review by Anne Bartlett

Greece. Bulgaria. Turkey. Syria. Lebanon. Israel. Egypt. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Pakistan.

In only a dozen years, Alexander the Great created an empire that encompassed large parts of what are now these 11 countries. It still seems a staggering feat—even more so now, when the United States has been fighting a war in just one of those countries for 18 years and counting.

Every age since the young Macedonian king’s death at age 33 in 323 B.C.E. has come with its own interpretation of his exploits. As author Anthony Everitt notes, to one respected historian in the 20th century, Alexander was the perfect English gentleman; to another, he was the prototype of a totalitarian dictator. Of course, he was neither: He was a man of his own time and place. In Alexander the Great: His Life and His Mysterious Death, Everitt, an expert storyteller, has written a riveting narrative that restores Alexander to his own context—and takes a whack at solving the remaining mysteries.

Did he kill his father? Was he straight or gay? Visionary or winging it? Genius or lucky? Big-hearted or a violent drunk? And the ultimate question: What—or who—killed him? Everitt marshals the facts and makes his case. Along the way, he takes us on a spirited passage through the ancient world, from the Balkans to South Asia, with effective explanations of battles and sieges and a useful description of the ordinary Greek soldier’s experience. 

One conclusion is incontrovertible: Alexander was a military strategist of rare talent, defeating larger armies by brilliantly analyzing their deployments and seizing the initiative with aggression and deceptive tactics. He was helped enormously by the disciplined army that his late father (and victim?), Philip, left him. Everitt is particularly perceptive about the impact of Alexander’s charismatic parents, as well as the snake-pit royal court where he was raised.

Alexander left no dynasty, but he did change the Middle East for centuries. And we still remember him more than 2,000 years later. That would have pleased him.

Greece. Bulgaria. Turkey. Syria. Lebanon. Israel. Egypt. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Pakistan. In only a dozen years, Alexander the Great created an empire that encompassed large parts of what are now these 11 countries. It still seems a staggering feat—even more so now, when the United States has been fighting a war in just one of […]
NonfictionNatureAnimals

Down From the Mountain

Review by Anne Bartlett

In a one-on-one fight between an unarmed person and a grizzly bear, you’d have to give odds to the bear. Guns obviously change that equation. But there are also many less obvious human threats to grizzlies—like corn.

Take farmer Greg Schock’s cornfield in western Montana. His ripening corn entices grizzlies down from the mountains in the summer, which disrupts their traditional feeding and migratory patterns. As more homes and farms fill up the area, the chances of an unhappy interaction between human and grizzly soar. Author Bryce Andrews, who works with the People and Carnivores conservation group, saw the impact of such an encounter when he was installing a new type of fencing at the cornfield. His Down from the Mountain: The Life and Death of a Grizzly Bear is a beautifully written account of the episode, which left a mother grizzly shot dead and her cubs unprotected.

The book toggles between the mother bear’s journey toward her fate and Andrews’ own effort to find a new way of living in harmony with the natural world following his disenchantment with cattle ranching. The movements of the bear, dubbed Millie by wildlife officials, could be tracked retrospectively because she wore a radio tag. The mystery of her death is never completely solved, but Andrews is able to explain the context.

Andrews conveys his passion for the West’s landscape and inhabitants through his sensitive writing, which avoids either anthropomorphizing the wildlife or villainizing ordinary people. These bears kill fawns to eat; these Montanans, many of them Native Americans, love the bears even as they recognize the need to control and sometimes kill them.

Andrews’ sympathy is broad, but he is certain that the outcome is tragic. He is angry about Millie’s tortured death and about its effect on her cubs. Still, hope remains at the end, as Andrews finds his own calling on a small farm that he believes will allow space for the bears to thrive. His book is a testament to his compassion.

Bryce Andrews’ Down from the Mountain is a beautifully written account of one grizzly bear’s tragic encounter with the human world.
NonfictionBiography

L.E.L.

Review by Anne Bartlett

The Brontë sisters and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were among her fangirls. George Eliot and Charles Dickens knew her work well enough to make fun of it in their novels. Her contemporaries thought of her as a female Byron, but later generations dismissed her as an “insipid virgin” whose verse was repellently sentimental.

Most readers today have never heard of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an English writer whose pen name was “L.E.L.” But in the 1820s and ’30s, she was an internationally admired “poetess.” As Lucasta Miller writes in her enjoyable biography-mystery tale, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”, she is “a poet who disappeared.”

It’s particularly ironic that the likes of the Bloomsbury Set disparaged Landon as an exemplar of Victorian sentimentality. Her real life was high melodrama, filled with illegitimacy, adultery, extortion, drugs and corruption. Landon’s cover-up was too good—after her death at 36 under ambiguous circumstances (murder? suicide?), her friends’ pretence that she was unblemished contributed to her later obscurity. Her new biographer had to dig deep to find the truth.

Early in the book, Miller reveals the secret uncovered by researchers only this century: Far from being a virgin, the unmarried Landon bore three children out of wedlock to her married editor/mentor. At a time of rigid public morality and ineffective birth control, an entire industry existed to hide illegitimate children. Much of Landon’s energy was spent combatting allegations of adultery, both real and spurious. Desperate for domestic respectability, she ultimately cajoled a semicrooked colonial governor to the altar. It didn’t end well.

Her sex life aside, Landon was a hardworking, prolific writer of real talent, cheated and undervalued by London’s male publishing establishment. In a sensitive analysis of her work, Miller sees her as a sophisticated pioneer. Landon’s poetry seems unlikely to come back into style, but her life—at turns funny and sad, but always spirited—has enduring relevance.

Most readers today have never heard of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an English writer whose pen name was “L.E.L.” But in the 1820s and ’30s, she was an internationally admired “poetess.” As Lucasta Miller writes in her enjoyable biography-mystery tale, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”, she is “a poet who disappeared.”

NonfictionBiography

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

Review by Anne Bartlett

Despite the dark legacy of colonialism, it’s unquestionable that Christopher Columbus was a master mariner, explorer and promoter. He also had apocalyptic beliefs about the end of days that were either visionary or bizarre, depending on your point of view. His admiring son Hernando Colón, educated in Renaissance humanism, downplayed his father’s millenarian ideas when he wrote his biography of Columbus. But Colón had the same wide-ranging imagination as his father, no matter how different their beliefs.

Born out of wedlock in 1488 but acknowledged by Columbus, Colón was a brilliant man whose intellectual ambitions directly provided the seed for modern libraries and whose sorting system indirectly anticipated internet search engines. Edward Wilson-Lee’s engaging new biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library, is at once an adventure tale and a history of ideas that continue to resonate.

As a teenager, Colón accompanied Columbus on his fourth voyage to the Caribbean. But as an adult, his own ambitions led him to the great European book marts, where he conceived his dream of a universal library that would include every book ever printed. He collected thousands of books, pamphlets and prints—the “shipwrecked books” of Wilson-Lee’s title were some 1,700 from Venice lost on a voyage back to Spain.

As he assembled his vast library in Seville, Colón led a project to describe all of Spain in a gazetteer, created a pioneering botanical garden and was the top Spanish negotiator (and probably spy) in a dispute with Portugal. But his greatest legacy was his series of book catalogs that attempted to categorize all human knowledge, a pre-digital Google.

After Colón’s death in 1539, his library ended up at Seville Cathedral, where it remains, sadly reduced in size by theft, mold and the Inquisition. Happily, Wilson-Lee’s insightful and entertaining work refreshes the memory of Colón’s sweeping vision. 

Despite the dark legacy of colonialism, it’s unquestionable that Christopher Columbus was a master mariner, explorer and promoter. He also had apocalyptic beliefs about the end of days that were either visionary or bizarre, depending on your point of view. His admiring son Hernando Colón, educated in Renaissance humanism, downplayed his father’s millenarian ideas when he wrote his biography of Columbus. But Colón had the same wide-ranging imagination as his father, no matter how different their beliefs.

NonfictionBiography

Hollywood’s Eve

Review by Anne Bartlett

When Joan Didion’s iconic novel Play It as It Lays came out in 1970, it was widely hailed as the ultimate Los Angeles story. But Didion’s friend Eve Babitz didn’t see it that way: Didion was from Sacramento via New York; Babitz was the real LA woman. So she wrote her own book.

Her book of lightly fictionalized autobiographical sketches published in 1974, Eve’s Hollywood, didn’t get the notice that Didion’s work did, but it was fresh, witty and buzzy. More books followed—some great, some not. But then Babitz became a drug addict. And after she got clean, she suffered a life-changing accident. The books stopped coming.

Babitz is still very much alive at 75 and is enjoying being rediscovered, thanks largely to Lili Anolik’s 2014 Vanity Fair article about her. Anolik has now written a smart, fast-paced meditation on Babitz in Hollywood’s Eve. Unsurprisingly, Babitz remains a complicated subject. Here’s a fractional list of Babitz’s lovers, back in the day: Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, Jackson Browne, Ahmet Ertegun, Annie Leibovitz, Warren Zevon—and so on. She appears nude in a photo with Duchamp, playing chess. Igor Stravinsky was her godfather. For a while, her best friend was the guy who inspired BZ in Play It as It Lays.

But Anolik argues that Babitz’s va-va-voom looks and sexual adventurism belied brains and talent. All those men weren’t exploiting her; she was exploiting them for writing fodder, like Proust and his duchesses.

Anolik’s own writing is jazzy and insightful, and her quest to find Babitz—both physically and psychologically—is an integral part of the book. Anolik notes that many of Babitz’s contemporaries misread her as a 1960s Carrie Bradshaw, yet Anolik sees her as ruthless, unencumbered, unapologetic. In other words, an artist.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Joan Didion’s iconic novel Play It as It Lays came out in 1970, it was widely hailed as the ultimate Los Angeles story. But Didion’s friend Eve Babitz didn’t see it that way: Didion was from Sacramento via New York; Babitz was the real LA woman. So she wrote her own book.

NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistoryBiography

Bringing Down the Colonel

Review by Anne Bartlett

Madeline Pollard’s breach-of-promise lawsuit against famous Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge was the talk of Washington, D.C., in 1894. When close to 20 women arrived at the courtroom as spectators to the buzzy trial, the judge politely threw them out—the testimony was far too indelicate for ladies to hear. But women had the last laugh: Representative Breckinridge, an eloquent political superstar, couldn’t escape the women who testified against him, the wealthy female activists who publicly backed Pollard and the ordinary women of central Kentucky who campaigned against his re-election, decades before they obtained suffrage.

Patricia Miller’s marvelous Bringing Down the Colonel recounts Pollard’s sensational claim that Breckinridge had seduced her when she was 17, engaged in a years-long adulterous affair with her, then reneged on his marriage pledge when his wife died. Miller also tells a riveting broader story of the changing social mores in late 19th-century America, driven by the mass entry of women into the office workplace and a female-led movement to eliminate the “double standard” that penalized women for their sexuality.

Miller illustrates this time in America through the lives of three women key to the case: Pollard, who had a more complicated backstory than she revealed; Jennie Turner, a working woman recruited by Breckinridge’s backers to spy on Pollard; and Nisba Breckinridge, the congressman’s daughter. All were intelligent, educated, ambitious women, held back (at least initially) by sexism and straitened finances. All ultimately built independent lives; Nisba became a prominent social scientist.

This book comes at the perfect moment, as the #MeToo movement highlights sexual harassment and assault. Women in the 19th century faced the same challenges and more. Through cases like Pollard’s, Gilded Age social reformers advanced women’s rights in the voting booth, office and bedroom. Their example continues to resonate.

Madeline Pollard’s breach-of-promise lawsuit against famous Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge was the talk of Washington, D.C., in 1894. When close to 20 women arrived at the courtroom as spectators to the buzzy trial, the judge politely threw them out—the testimony was far too indelicate for ladies to hear. But women had the last laugh: Representative Breckinridge, an eloquent political superstar, couldn’t escape the women who testified against him, the wealthy female activists who publicly backed Pollard and the ordinary women of central Kentucky who campaigned against his re-election, decades before they obtained suffrage.

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