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Anne Bartlett

HistoryAmerican History

The Trail of Tears: A horrific chapter in U.S. history

Review by Anne Bartlett

In the first decades of the 19th century, the Cherokees did everything possible to adapt to the white settler culture that was encroaching on their homeland. They established farms, cooperated with missionaries, developed a written language, elected a government. When they were threatened, they lobbied Congress and won a Supreme Court case.

It made no difference. Enabled by politicians like Andrew Jackson, the settlers believed they were entitled to Indian land. The federal government ignored the court ruling, reneged on every treaty and forced some 16,000 Cherokees onto the Trail of Tears, the 1838 trek west to Oklahoma from their appropriated properties in Tennessee and Georgia. At least 4,000 died.

It’s a particularly horrific chapter in the consistently shocking record of the United States’ treatment of Native Americans. Brian Hicks, a South Carolina journalist, adroitly relates this tragedy in Toward the Setting Sun through the experiences of the Cherokees’ principal chief John Ross and his fellow tribal leaders, as they struggled with their no-win choices.

Ross, elected chief at 38 in 1828, was emblematic of the tribe’s attempts to come to terms with the new order: He was only one-eighth Cherokee, the scion of Scottish traders and their part-Indian wives. He barely spoke the native language, and was indistinguishable from any successful plantation owner. But Hicks argues that Ross, though not perfect, was the statesman among his peers, always putting what he perceived as the tribe’s best interest first. Sadly, too many of the other chiefs behaved more like violent gangster bosses.

Toward the Setting Sun culminates with Ross’ desperate, and only marginally successful, efforts to alleviate suffering along the Trail. It’s a gripping story, told by Hicks with perception and sensitivity. The author rightly compares it to Gone with the Wind or The Godfather in its scope and drama. Ironically, Hicks notes, the real-life equivalents of Scarlett O’Hara’s father stole their land in Georgia from the Cherokees.

 

In the first decades of the 19th century, the Cherokees did everything possible to adapt to the white settler culture that was encroaching on their homeland. They established farms, cooperated with missionaries, developed a written language, elected a government. When they were threatened, they lobbied Congress and won a Supreme Court case. It made no […]
HistoryAmerican History

Empire built on beaver pelts

Review by Anne Bartlett

Benjamin Franklin famously mused that the turkey might be a good symbol for the United States; we opted for the eagle instead. But a compelling case could be made for the beaver. In a sense, we owe the European settlement of the North American continent to that intrepid engineer of the animal world.

Or, viewed from another angle, we owe it to the beaver hat. Spurred by the hat’s rise in popularity, beaver fur traders and trappers forged ever westward from the Atlantic seaboard, always the vanguard of European penetration. The trade had to keep moving because it wiped out the beaver population of each successive region.

Eric Jay Dolin, who explored the history of whaling in Leviathan, brings together all the exhilarating and tragic aspects of that trade through the 19th century in Fur, Fortune, and Empire. While he concentrates on the beaver, he includes strong chapters on the similarly intense quests for sea otter and buffalo. The dramatic heart of the book is its chapter on the founding of Astoria, John Jacob Astor’s trading post in what is now Oregon. Astor was the Bill Gates of his day, a dominant force in his industry. But everything went tragically wrong with his Astoria dream.

The pattern of the fur trade was often grim. The animals were hunted to near-extinction; Native American tribes that initially prospered by providing furs were severely damaged by the alcohol sold to them by contemptuous traders. Still, we might not have had an American Revolution if traders hadn’t fueled anger at the British ban on western settlement. They were the pioneers of the China Trade and the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. And the litany of American cities that started as fur trading posts is astonishing—New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit and St. Louis are just a few. Dolin pulls together all those strands, positive and negative, for an absorbing and comprehensive ride through the trade’s history.

Benjamin Franklin famously mused that the turkey might be a good symbol for the United States; we opted for the eagle instead. But a compelling case could be made for the beaver. In a sense, we owe the European settlement of the North American continent to that intrepid engineer of the animal world. Or, viewed […]
Memoir

Learning with apes

Review by Anne Bartlett

Chimpanzees are loads of fun, or so movies and TV shows would have us believe. They’re charming, intelligent, affectionate—just like us. But they really are just like us: They can be violent and domineering, and they are deeply intolerant of strangers. They do, indeed, share most of our DNA.

Bonobos, another species of ape, also share more than 98 percent of our DNA, but it’s less likely you’ve heard of them. There are fewer of them, they were discovered by scientists more recently, and they haven’t been well-studied yet. But their differences from chimps are fascinating. Bonobos are female-dominated, have staggering amounts of sex of all varieties and are naturally cooperative and altruistic. They’re also in serious danger of being wiped out by hunters.

Vanessa Woods, an Australian chimp aficionado, had never heard of bonobos herself until she fell for Brian Hare, an American scientist whose dream is to compare the behavior of chimps and bonobos living in Congolese sanctuaries and figure out what the differences reveal about human evolution. Bonobo Handshake is Woods’ beguiling story of falling in love with bonobos and the Congo while her marriage to Hare matured.

Bonobos turn out to be easy to like; the Democratic Republic of Congo is more problematic. Following decades of the brutal Mobutu dictatorship, it’s been wracked by unimaginably vicious civil wars. Lola ya Bonobo, the sanctuary where Woods and Hare work, is a paradise surrounded by horror.

Woods is candid about her own emotional immaturity at the beginning of her adventures. Just as her husband learns about humans by studying apes, Woods comes to terms with herself through interaction with bonobos and their keepers. Her Congolese friends, human and animal, rise above their traumas and teach her much about courage, endurance and tolerance.

Chimpanzees are loads of fun, or so movies and TV shows would have us believe. They’re charming, intelligent, affectionate—just like us. But they really are just like us: They can be violent and domineering, and they are deeply intolerant of strangers. They do, indeed, share most of our DNA. Bonobos, another species of ape, also […]
HistoryAmerican History

Changing the face of American dining

Review by Anne Bartlett

We live in a traveling culture heavily defined by McDonald’s, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Starbucks and the like—successfully branded, distinctive national hospitality chains. For that, we can thank (or blame) a workaholic cockney immigrant named Fred Harvey.

Yes, Fred Harvey, not Howard Johnson. Johnson had his own genius, but Harvey was his forebear. Starting in 1876, Harvey created a chain of restaurants, hotels and stores at Santa Fe Railroad stations from Chicago to California that were not only ubiquitous, but really good. At a time when the gunslingers were still shooting it out at the O.K. Corral, Harvey brought high standards, interesting recipes, white tablecloths and well-trained “Harvey Girl” waitresses to what was then the back of beyond.

In Appetite for America, Harvey’s story is both a comprehensive cultural history and a fascinating family saga. Author Stephen Fried takes us from Harvey’s arrival in the U.S. in 1853 to his descendents’ sale of the by-then declining company to a conglomerate in 1968. He even includes an appendix of Harvey House recipes (of which “Bull Frogs Sauté Provencal” is perhaps the most intriguing).

Plagued with terrible health in his later years, Fred Harvey was lucky in his heir. His son, Ford Harvey, not only greatly expanded the empire, he had a lasting impact on the U.S. as an impresario for Southwestern tourism, the development of the Native American curio industry and the invention of the Santa Fe design style. (If you own turquoise earrings from Taos, you’re in Ford’s debt.) But, as is so often true, everything fell apart in the third generation; the talented heirs weren’t much interested in the business, and the untalented ones left to mind the store didn’t have the imagination to face up to interstates and airports.

Happily, not all was lost. Several of the high-end hotels developed under Ford Harvey still exist, like the always-booked El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. And for more proof of Harvey’s legacy, be sure to track down MGM’s The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland, and join in the chorus of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

We live in a traveling culture heavily defined by McDonald’s, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Starbucks and the like—successfully branded, distinctive national hospitality chains. For that, we can thank (or blame) a workaholic cockney immigrant named Fred Harvey. Yes, Fred Harvey, not Howard Johnson. Johnson had his own genius, but Harvey was his forebear. Starting in 1876, […]
Social Science

An inside look at immigrant labor

Review by Anne Bartlett

Of all the tough jobs that Gabriel Thompson did while he was researching his book on immigrant labor, the toughest was not the most physically demanding. Picking lettuce and cutting up chickens were exhausting and dull, but not nearly as discouraging as the verbal abuse and disrespectful treatment he faced while he hauled plants at a wholesale flower business.

Luckily for him, it didn’t last long: He was fired for smiling too much. His good cheer unnerved his supervisors. Such are the indignities of low-wage work in the United States.

In Working in the Shadows, Thompson, a labor union researcher and freelance journalist, shows us what it’s really like to be an undocumented immigrant worker, employed in jobs that most Americans can’t or won’t do.

To that end, he spent two months each working undercover in the farm fields of Yuma, Arizona, a poultry plant in Russellville, Alabama, and the delivery trade in New York City. In every case, prospective employers were baffled that any non-Latino would want such awful work. He wouldn’t last long, they told him—and indeed, he struggled, even though he’s young, healthy and motivated. Although his sympathies clearly lie with the workers, Thompson recounts his experiences dispassionately, fairly and with considerable wry humor about his own failings. He never did become much of a lettuce picker.

Thompson found wage and safety rule violations, aggressive anti-union campaigns and lackadaisical government oversight. But he also encountered some decent companies and a majority of workers who regard employment in the U.S., however life-shortening and underpaid, as a vast improvement over Latin America.

In every job, he was treated with consideration by fellow workers, Latino immigrants and native-born Americans, in what he calls “a strong ethos of cooperation.” Even American workers at the poultry plant (there were none at the other workplaces) who complained in the abstract about illegal immigrants got along well with Latinos on a personal level. Thompson’s experiences were heartening about human nature, if not about what he sees as employer exploitation.

Thompson believes the solution isn’t any intellectual mystery, just immigration reform and labor organizing. He acknowledges that those goals will be hard to accomplish—but perhaps not nearly as hard as years killing chickens on the overnight shift.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Of all the tough jobs that Gabriel Thompson did while he was researching his book on immigrant labor, the toughest was not the most physically demanding. Picking lettuce and cutting up chickens were exhausting and dull, but not nearly as discouraging as the verbal abuse and disrespectful treatment he faced while he hauled plants at […]
Social Science

A waking nightmare in the jungle

Review by Anne Bartlett

During the years they were held hostage by leftist guerrillas in the Colombian jungle, American military contractors Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell would talk about selling the rights to their story to moviemaker Oliver Stone if they ever got out alive. But the chronicle of their captivity has more the feel of a John Huston movie, with its mix of tragedy, intrigue, black comedy and, ultimately, heroism.

The three men were employees of a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, assigned to flights over the jungle to spot cocaine laboratories. Their plane crashed in early 2003, and they were quickly captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (FARC) guerrilla army. In Law of the Jungle, longtime Latin America newspaper correspondent John Otis weaves their story with the misadventures of a group of Colombian soldiers sent to rescue them and the wider context of Colombia’s long struggle with political violence, corruption and drug trafficking.

Few emerge with much credit in this even-handed book: American corporations ignore warnings about aircraft problems; U.S. officials in Washington distracted by the Iraq war pay little attention to the hostages’ plight; Colombian government and military officials are alternately inept and criminal; the guerrillas are brutal and staggeringly ignorant. Through it all, the hostages endure. Some of the book’s most fascinating passages describe their lives in jungle camps, where they were held with politicians, soldiers and police officers who had also been kidnapped. The only prisoner who managed to escape was a police officer who provided information that led to a breakthrough for rescue efforts.

Despite years of neglect and setbacks, the outcome was a triumph. The hostages were rescued in mid-2008 by a bold Colombian intelligence trick, carried out almost flawlessly and recounted by Otis with verve. By then, Oliver Stone had publicly called the FARC “heroic,” though he said the kidnappings went “too far.”

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

During the years they were held hostage by leftist guerrillas in the Colombian jungle, American military contractors Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell would talk about selling the rights to their story to moviemaker Oliver Stone if they ever got out alive. But the chronicle of their captivity has more the feel of a […]
Arts & Culture

Tracing the stories of structures

Review by Anne Bartlett

The Parthenon in Athens is inarguably one of the most famous buildings in the world. We think of it as the epitome of classical Greek culture. But the Parthenon was a Christian church for nearly as many centuries as it was a pagan temple. And for centuries after that, it was a mosque, complete with minaret. Yet we have chosen to restore the Parthenon as it was for only a portion of its history, largely because the men who made the decision in the 19th century had been educated to be Hellenophiles. As first-time author Edward Hollis, an architect specializing in altering historic buildings, demonstrates with much charm in The Secret Lives of Buildings, any structure is a cultural product. As the culture changes, so does the structure’s meaning, appearance and use.

The Parthenon’s shape-shifts are a leitmotif for Hollis as he takes the reader through the lively stories of a dozen other structures—not buildings per se, because he includes two walls (Berlin and Western) and a sculpture (the Four Horses in Venice). Each chapter illustrates a particular theme, from the “evolution” of Gloucester Cathedral through the work of masons riffing on their teachers’ legacies, to the “misunderstanding” that caused Charles V to build an unlovable Renaissance palace next to his beloved Moorish Alhambra.

This is not “just the facts” history. Hollis begins most of his chapters with “Once upon a time,” and deliberately gives them a fairy tale feel. The fascinating chapter on the “Santa Casa” of Loreto does not scientifically challenge the religious belief that it was miraculously transported from the Middle East to Italy, via Croatia. In fact, he uses such legends to help make his case.

A couple of interesting stories stray into more offbeat locales. The ghastly Hulme Crescents project in Manchester, England, was a 1970s public housing complex, a catastrophe from day one. It was eventually demolished, but not before becoming a birthplace of punk rock and rave parties. As the innumerable chunks of the Berlin Wall sitting on coffee tables around the world show, even bad structures can have interesting afterlives. 

The Parthenon in Athens is inarguably one of the most famous buildings in the world. We think of it as the epitome of classical Greek culture. But the Parthenon was a Christian church for nearly as many centuries as it was a pagan temple. And for centuries after that, it was a mosque, complete with […]
HistoryAmerican History

Fire on the mountain

Review by Anne Bartlett

The recent “Station Fire” in California’s Angeles National Forest, the worst in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 160,000 acres and killed two firefighters. In comparison, the 1910 Northern Rockies forest fire remembered in The Big Burn covered nearly 3.2 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. At least 85 people were killed, most of them members of ill-trained firefighting crews.

That blowout, the biggest wildfire in American history, devastated the economy of a booming timber and mining region. It traumatized the survivors—and as New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows in The Big Burn, it set the course for U.S. forest conservation for the next hundred years, for good and ill.

The national forests that burned were brand new, the product of President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade. Spurred on by fellow aristocrat Gifford Pinchot, the founding head of the National Forest Service, Roosevelt had worked at breakneck pace to protect millions of acres from logging, railroad and mine companies. But when Roosevelt left office, the land barons’ allies in his own party starved the Forest Service of resources, and forced out Pinchot.

The scope of the disaster and the heroism of so many forest rangers turned public opinion in favor of conservation at a crucial moment. National forests were subsequently created throughout the country, and the Forest Service became a thriving agency.

For his National Book Award-winning account of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, Egan was able to interview survivors. For The Big Burn, he had to comb through Forest Service reports, memoirs and old newspapers. But he’s equally effective here in telling the story through individuals—the homesteaders, the fire crews of immigrants and drifters, the idealistic Ivy League grads who followed Pinchot’s siren call to the Forest Service.

Egan is a gorgeous writer. His chapters on the “blowup,” when thousands fled burning towns and desperate fire crews burrowed in mine shafts or submerged in streams to escape the inferno, should become a classic account of an American Pompeii.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

The recent “Station Fire” in California’s Angeles National Forest, the worst in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 160,000 acres and killed two firefighters. In comparison, the 1910 Northern Rockies forest fire remembered in The Big Burn covered nearly 3.2 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. At least 85 people were killed, most […]
Memoir

Journalist faces her past in China

Review by Anne Bartlett

Few among us can look back without regret at some silly youthful decision that had unforeseen consequences. Canadian journalist Jan Wong has had an even bigger burden to bear than most: A Chinese Canadian, Wong was one of the first Westerners allowed to study at Beijing University in the early 1970s. The Cultural Revolution was under way, and Wong, an inexperienced enthusiast of 20, was a Maoist. When a Chinese student acquaintance named Yin Luoyi asked Wong to help her get to the U.S., Wong promptly reported Yin to her Communist professors. Years later, as a foreign correspondent with few illusions, she covered the Tiananmen Square massacre for the Toronto Globe and Mail. When she ultimately remembered her casual betrayal, she realized she had “thoughtlessly destroyed a young woman I didn’t even know.”

A Comrade Lost and Found, Wong’s second book on China, is about her quest to make amends to Yin—and to tell the story of Beijing’s evolution from its grim, xenophobic Maoist past to its recent pre-crash incarnation as flamboyant boomtown. Wong is known for the amusing but ruthless candor of her celebrity interviews, and she brings that quality to her own tale. She structures the book as a search for Yin, as she travels back to Beijing with her husband Norman, himself an old China hand, and their very Canadian teenage sons. With little to go on, she pesters old friends and professors for information.

She learns through them how many Chinese have failed to come to terms with the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, even as they return to a pre-revolutionary culture of entrepreneurism and conspicuous consumption. Old Beijing is disappearing; the new city lacks distinction. Her university Red Guard pals now vie for the biggest homes and sneer at rural migrants, while remaining silent about their own tragedies and betrayals.

As the book’s title indicates, Wong does eventually find Yin, with unexpected results. It turns out to have been worth the trouble, for Wong and for readers of this honest, funny, illuminating book.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Few among us can look back without regret at some silly youthful decision that had unforeseen consequences. Canadian journalist Jan Wong has had an even bigger burden to bear than most: A Chinese Canadian, Wong was one of the first Westerners allowed to study at Beijing University in the early 1970s. The Cultural Revolution was […]
NonfictionPolitics

Sadat’s widow contemplates peace

Review by Anne Bartlett

Since the 1981 assassination of her husband, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Jehan Sadat has created a new identity as a university professor, lecturer and activist for peace and women’s rights. Dividing her time between Egypt and the United States, she has a valuable perspective on both countries—and she is dismayed by what she believes are the damaging misperceptions held by many Americans about her culture and religion.

Sadat’s first book, the best-selling A Woman of Egypt, was the story of her life. Her new one, My Hope for Peace, timed for the 30th anniversary of the Egypt-Israel peace accord, is also personal in tone, but has a more varied mission. Writing for ordinary Americans not familiar with Islam and the Middle East, Sadat focuses on three themes: the imperative for a just, negotiated peace between Arabs and Israelis; the distinction between Islam as a worldwide faith and the horrific behavior of relatively few violent fundamentalists; and the search for peace within ourselves.

Mixing the personal and the political, Sadat uses simple, direct language to explain the basic history and beliefs of Islam. She makes a particular argument that Islam does not oppress women and can be the framework for their education and economic self-reliance. And she drives home the point that the forces behind the 9/11 terror attacks also killed her husband, whom she describes as a believing Muslim devoted to peace and progress. He remains a hero to his widow, who deplores the failure of both Arab and Israeli leaders to follow his example.

Certainly, Sadat sees the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes of an Egyptian committed to Palestinian rights. The reader will not find any criticism of the current Egyptian government, nor any friendly words for Ariel Sharon. Her approach is moderate and even-handed, always seeking a peaceful outcome for both sides. Sadat does not provide specific proscriptions, arguing instead that the most vital precursor for any real solution is the genuine intention of peace: “Lack of ideas is not the overwhelming hurdle, but rather the lack of political will and personal courage.”

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Since the 1981 assassination of her husband, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Jehan Sadat has created a new identity as a university professor, lecturer and activist for peace and women’s rights. Dividing her time between Egypt and the United States, she has a valuable perspective on both countries—and she is dismayed by what she believes are […]
Business & Finance

Michael Lewis follows the money

Review by Anne Bartlett

Be very wary when you start reading a flood of stories in the papers about how ordinary folks are getting rich because all the fusty old economic rules no longer apply. A few months before the Black Monday crash of Oct. 19, 1987, Time reported on the rise of the individual stock investor. In 1996, the New York Times had a story on how all the smart money was flooding into Asia – not long before the Asian currency collapse. That same paper had already told us in 1995 about how easy it was becoming for technology companies to go public even if they weren't profitable. Hence the dotcom bust a few years later. And just before the subprime mortgage meltdown – well, you remember that one.

All those accurate-at-the-time stories have a home in Michael Lewis' timely anthology, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, a readable guide to how we got into our current mess. For our rueful edification, Lewis collects and explains contemporary accounts of the four most recent panics, in 1987, 1997-1998, 2000-2001 and the one we're in now.

The writers range from economist/columnist Paul Krugman (already gloomy in 1998) to humorist Dave Barry (boy, was he right about the real estate insanity). It's easy to make fun of the optimists in retrospect, but there were also plenty of warnings in each case. John Cassidy predicted the mortgage meltdown in the New Yorker as long ago as 2002.

Lewis' own writings are among the best, both at the time and in the introductory chapters to the anthology's sections. He calls our era the "Age of Financial Unreason," when traders take complex risks they fail to understand, are briefly apologetic – then go right back to doing the same thing in some slightly different arena, still disconnected to the human misery they can cause. The difference now, Lewis points out, is the sheer scale of the catastrophe. No true reforms took place after the first three panics considered in this book. Maybe the time has come.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Be very wary when you start reading a flood of stories in the papers about how ordinary folks are getting rich because all the fusty old economic rules no longer apply. A few months before the Black Monday crash of Oct. 19, 1987, Time reported on the rise of the individual stock investor. In 1996, […]
History

The dizzying pace of life at the start of a new century

Review by Anne Bartlett

Vertigo is the profoundly unsettling sensation that either you or your surroundings are spinning. It's also possible to suffer a kind of psychic vertigo, if your world changes too fast for comfort. Take, for instance, this year's Wall Street financial crisis, which left most Americans at least temporarily dazed. Author Philipp Blom makes a strong case that the period of 1900 to 1914 in Europe, just before World War I, was, as the title of his new book has it, "The Vertigo Years." From the perspective of the 1920s, when the memories of war, revolution and influenza epidemic were raw, it seemed in retrospect like a golden time, of ice cream socials and porch swings. But the reality could be far different. Something, after all, led to the war and revolutions.

Blom argues convincingly that the trends of modernism that played themselves out in the 20th century, and even into our own time, accelerated remarkably during those dizzying years. Among them: scientific and technological revolution, politicized racism and anti – Semitism, feminism, human rights abuses, globalized commerce, the mass media explosion, abstract art – and the reactions to every one of them, from peace campaigns and folkloric nostalgia to the cult of masculinity. That's a huge amount of territory to cover, so Blom takes it year by year, with each chapter highlighting a particular theme. The 1903 chapter, for example, focuses on pioneering scientists, such as Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, and the influence of their discoveries on philosophy and art. Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903. The 1911 chapter is about such culturally democratizing developments as the cinema, the comic strip, the Brownie camera and the gramophone. In that year, the 3,400 – seat Gaumont Palace movie theatre opened in Paris.

Blom is particularly good on the high level of anxiety, sexual and otherwise, that accompanied rapid change. It was the era of a disease known as "neurasthenia," which we would likely classify as extreme stress. From 1900 to 1910, the number of patients in German mental hospitals rose from about 116,000 to more than 220,000.

It's that kind of detail that stays with the reader. We learn, for example, that there was a craze for X – rays at the time. (See Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain for a literary depiction.) And that the respect for uniforms was so strong in Germany that a petty crook masquerading as an army captain in 1906 was able to commandeer a platoon, use it to arrest a small – town mayor, and steal the town's cash register. These trends did vary from country to country. The women's suffrage movement, forexample, reached its height in England, but had much less traction on the Continent. In contrast, the English had little use for New Age – style bohemianism that was most notable in Germany and Austria – Hungary. It's impossible to read this book without being struck by parallels to our own society. We feel about the Internet the way our great – grandparents felt about the airplane – how amazing, and how frightening it all seems. Blom doesn't take us beyond 1914, but we know how the ideological movements of "The Vertigo Years" turned out in Germany and Russia. We can only hope for a better outcome.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Vertigo is the profoundly unsettling sensation that either you or your surroundings are spinning. It's also possible to suffer a kind of psychic vertigo, if your world changes too fast for comfort. Take, for instance, this year's Wall Street financial crisis, which left most Americans at least temporarily dazed. Author Philipp Blom makes a strong […]
History

New details about the women in Roosevelt’s life

Review by Anne Bartlett

The public record shows that Franklin D. Roosevelt had one wife. But from a purely emotional perspective, he had three: the Official Wife, the Work Wife and the Hidden Wife. And that's not counting the casual flings. The legal wife, of course, was Eleanor. Admirable though she was, she drove him nuts. The work wife, equally predictably, was his longtime secretary Missy LeHand, who spent much more time with him than Eleanor did, day and night, before her untimely death at 46. The backdoor wife was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.

FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer during World War I, when she was Eleanor's social secretary, nearly broke up his marriage. More than 25 years later, Lucy, by then the widowed Mrs. Rutherfurd, was staying with him in Warm Springs, Georgia, until just before his death. In Franklin and Lucy, historian Joseph E. Persico, the author of a previous book on FDR and World War II espionage (Roosevelt's Secret War), is able to highlight their close friendship with the help of letters from FDR found in 2005 by Rutherfurd's grandchildren. The letters and other evidence, including phone logs, show that loving contact between the two was continuous through much of the 1920s and 1930s, even as Lucy enjoyed a good marriage to an older millionaire and Roosevelt carried on semi-publicly with Missy.

Persico effectively argues that Lucy was the enduring true love of Franklin's life. But this psychologically perceptive book is as much an emotional biography of Franklin and Eleanor as it is about the somewhat elusive Lucy, the "intelligent listener." It shows how much Franklin was influenced by all the strong women in his life – his overwhelming mother, his conflicted daughter, his several likely mistresses. It poignantly describes Eleanor's probable love affair with journalist Lorena Hickok and midlife crushes on younger men. It documents FDR's questionable treatment of Missy.

They were complicated people, Franklin and Eleanor and Lucy. Luckily for FDR and his wife, they lived at a time when friends and journalists largely kept quiet about the private lives of public figures. One wonders how they would fare today.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

The public record shows that Franklin D. Roosevelt had one wife. But from a purely emotional perspective, he had three: the Official Wife, the Work Wife and the Hidden Wife. And that's not counting the casual flings. The legal wife, of course, was Eleanor. Admirable though she was, she drove him nuts. The work wife, […]

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