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Edward Morris

Nonfiction

A moving tribute to the nation’s heroes

Review by Edward Morris

"In an America where the job of inflating the reputations of people with negligible larger social value has become a major growth industry," David Halberstam observes in his new book Firehouse, "firemen do what they do because they love doing it, not because they want the plaudits of outsiders. Instead, what they want most is the respect of their peers." Firehouse is the veteran reporter's quick-moving account of the lives and sudden deaths at the World Trade Center of 13 men from the Engine 40, Ladder 35 station. It also chronicles the story of the group's lone but badly injured survivor.

In their gratitude for the heroism and sacrifice displayed following the September 11 terrorist attack, Americans have made so much of the New York firefighters that one may reasonably wonder if there is anything left to be said. Halberstam shows there is. His special contribution is to anatomize the culture that incubated and nourished these remarkable public servants. After giving a brief history of the station, Halberstam takes the reader inside to see how the doomed unit functioned and how the men got along with each other personally. Although most of them were from New York's tightly knit ethnic enclaves, they were still a wonderfully diverse lot. Physically powerful, strongly opinionated Bruce Gary could be counted on to put newcomers ("probies") to the test and coin all the necessary nicknames. Steve Mercado, who did dead-on impressions of his buddies, was funny enough, they thought, to be a professional comedian. Kevin Shea, the survivor, a fireman's son, did part-time work as a children's entertainer, sometimes dressing up as Barney or Big Bird. To the degree it can be traced in the still-lingering chaos of that hellish day, Halberstam relates what each of these fireman was doing when the Towers collapsed. He explains how the wives and parents heard the news of the disaster and the ways they acclimated themselves to the fact that their husbands and sons were dead. He visits the memorial services to witness and convey the solemn sights and sounds.

Halberstam, who lives only three and a half blocks from Engine 40, Ladder 35, says he had often passed by the firehouse, admiring "however distantly" the men who worked there. In this book, he enables us to admire them up close.

 

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

"In an America where the job of inflating the reputations of people with negligible larger social value has become a major growth industry," David Halberstam observes in his new book Firehouse, "firemen do what they do because they love doing it, not because they want the plaudits of outsiders. Instead, what they want most is […]
Nonfiction

A sparkling discourse on diamonds

Review by Edward Morris

Diamonds are sublimely useless, Matthew Hart concedes. "You cannot eat them or drive them home." Yet as his book Diamond meticulously illustrates, these hard gems gather and focus human ingenuity and rapacity just as surely as their polished facets capture and direct light.

Hart's position as editor of the industry trade magazine Rapaport Diamond Report provides him both expertise in and access to the normally shrouded world of diamond discovery and trading. But it is his gift for storytelling that gives this book its movie-like pacing and appeal. He puts us on a barge with Brazilian miners as they scoop up a rough pink stone from a remote river bottom and thus set in motion worldwide market reverberations. He lets us peer over the shoulder of a legendary diamond cutter who spends three years chipping away at a single gem. He eases us painlessly into the trade's arcane customs and vocabulary and sits us down at the side of an exhausted copywriter who, in a last-minute burst of creative desperation, comes up with the slogan "Diamonds are forever." As Hart spins his irresistible stories of hustlers, adventurers and new finds, he also lays out basic lessons in diamond geology and history. Looming over virtually every aspect of the trade is the vast De Beers corporation, which has long been to diamonds what Microsoft has become to computers. He explains how De Beers has managed to control the flow of diamonds to the retail market and how the discovery of rich new fields in Canada and elsewhere has steadily loosened the company's grip.

Like other adept analysts of popular culture, Hart succeeds in showing how his subject has ramifications that reach into all aspects of society. He points out, for example, that there is a symbiotic relationship between diamonds and movies, with each lending glamour and intrigue to the other. He observes that daring, well-publicized thefts of diamonds are, in effect, advertising vehicles that increase the perceived value of the stones. In recent times, he explains, diamonds have both financed and promoted wars in Africa and, in so doing, presented the industry with a severe public relations problem.

Even those who care nothing for diamonds are likely to find Hart's book a sparkling reading experience.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based journalist and reviewer.

 

Diamonds are sublimely useless, Matthew Hart concedes. "You cannot eat them or drive them home." Yet as his book Diamond meticulously illustrates, these hard gems gather and focus human ingenuity and rapacity just as surely as their polished facets capture and direct light. Hart's position as editor of the industry trade magazine Rapaport Diamond Report […]
Fiction

Howard Fast

Interview by Edward Morris

In his new novel, Greenwich, Howard Fast lifts the picture-book cover of this posh Connecticut suburb and reveals the currents of ambition, violence, guilt, doubt, and compassion that swirl underneath. The town, however, is less a shaper of action than it is a social petri dish in which cultures and classes of all sorts germinate.

Occurring over two days in June, the narrative pivots on a small dinner party given by the rich and ruthless Richard Bush Castle and his supposed "trophy wife," Sally. In attendance are Castle’s mistress, a nun, a priest, a best-selling author, a linguistics professor, and his schoolteacher wife.

As Castle secretly confronts the consequences of his murderous past as a high government official, the best-selling author, Harold Sellig, presses his theory of collective guilt on all those who will listen. Castle’s wife knows about the mistress, but the mistress doesn’t know she knows. And so it goes, ’round the table.

It’s all fairly academic, though, until a rush of events — ranging from attempted rape to multiple murders — topples the characters’ untested assumptions of right and wrong. With the priest and the nun as his primary prisms, Fast also examines the utility of religion in reconciling people to the stresses of life and the prospect of death.

In a droll shift of perspective, Fast gives the reader intermittent glimpses of the main figures through the eyes of a celebrated African-American chef, who feeds both their stomachs and sense of self-importance, and an Italian-American plumber, who grudgingly mops up their wastes. While the characters are uniformly engaging — particularly the strangely innocent Sally — Greenwich is essentially a novel of ideas.

"I’ve lived in Connecticut on and off for 35 years," Fast says in a telephone conversation from his home. He admits that his story might just as easily have taken place in Beverly Hills. "Greenwich is a well-governed, well-run city — a pleasant place to live," he reports. "Old Greenwich, which is a village that’s part of Greenwich and where I live, is lovelier and even more desirable. It’s like a step back in time."

At the age of 85, Fast remains dauntingly productive. He has written more than 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, plus numerous screenplays, short stories, essays, and commentaries. And he still writes a weekly newspaper column on politics.

In January, the Arts and Entertainment channel aired an adaptation of the The Crossing, his novel about George Washington. According to Fast, A&E has asked him to write a followup, but he has not yet agreed to do so. The sticking point to the sequel, he says, is that he wants to focus on the period just before Washington assumed the presidency, while A&E wants a story with "more battles."

Fast knows a lot about battles. He’s fought enough of them. An open and defiant member of the Communist party until he quit in disillusionment in 1956, Fast spent three months in prison in 1950 for refusing to "name names." He was blacklisted for years afterward. Instead of stopping him, the blacklist simply made him even more inventive. He began writing under pseudonyms, and he formed his own press — Blue Heron — to publish works that other publishers feared to touch. One of his self-published books was Spartacus, his story of a Roman slave revolt, which was turned into a multiple Academy Award-winning movie.

His time as a political pariah also led Fast to write the E.V. Cunningham series of mysteries. "I wrote a novel called Sylvia when the blacklist was still on," he explains. "I wrote it just for the pleasure of writing it. My agent said, ‘We can’t do anything with your name. You know that. Let me put a name on it.’ . . . So he put ‘E.V. Cunningham’ on it, and it was immediately snapped up by Doubleday. It was so successful that I did another E.V. Cunningham. And then more and more. I finally ended up publishing 21 of them."

His place on the political spectrum has never changed, Fast asserts: "I’m a lefty. I was born one, and I’ll die one."

Fast has little affection for most contemporary fiction: "I find it absolutely ephemeral, filled with a phony mysticism and a phony spiritualism. Nobody, except an occasional writer like [Tom] Wolfe or one or two others, writes about what is happening today. They write about the future or the far past, or they write these ghost stories and vampire stories. I often think if your father or mother haven’t abused you, you have no story to tell."

Edward Morris writes on music, politics, and fiction from Nashville.

In his new novel, Greenwich, Howard Fast lifts the picture-book cover of this posh Connecticut suburb and reveals the currents of ambition, violence, guilt, doubt, and compassion that swirl underneath. The town, however, is less a shaper of action than it is a social petri dish in which cultures and classes of all sorts germinate. […]
History

Simon Winchester

Interview by Edward Morris

Simon Winchester journeys through space and time with equal aplomb. He had already earned his stripes as a travel writer when he decided to plunge into history to tell the story of the Oxford English Dictionary and two of its principal creators. No one was more astounded than he was when in 1998, that story, The Professor and the Madman, became a bestseller.

Now comes The Map That Changed the World, Winchester’s account of trailblazing English geologist William Smith. Born in 1769 and largely self-educated, Smith worked as a surveyor, a profession that took him into coal mines and canal excavations where he noticed patterns in the exposed layers of rocks and the fossils trapped within them. From his observations, he created in 1815 a huge, multicolored map of England that detailed with great accuracy the world that lay beneath the nation’s surface.

Apart from its value to commerce, the map was an implicit assault on the Christian church’s most cherished creation myths. Smith seemed on the verge of scientific celebrity and the wealth that went with it. Four years later, however, he was in debtors’ prison, and lesser men were claiming his achievements as their own. As with The Professor and the Madman, Winchester presents The Map That Changed the World as a drama of discovery, despair and redemption, one that plays out across the lifetime of its protagonist.

Speaking from his home in Dutchess County, New York (he has another in Scotland), Winchester says he first heard of Smith while an undergraduate at Oxford. "I think I became interested in him because my tutor [Harold Reading], who I dedicate the book to, told me — and I think this is what lodged in my mind for all those 30 years — that William Smith had been very much a hero of his. After this extraordinary success of The Professor and the Madman, I was wondering if there was another character whose life trajectory was similarly interesting and which also illuminated some wider field. And I thought of William Smith."

Heightening his interest in Smith, no doubt, was the fact that Winchester had studied geology in college "24 hours a day for three years" with the intention of earning his living at it. "Immediately after leaving Oxford," he recounts, "I went down to western Uganda and worked in the mountains on the Congo-Ugandan border, prospecting for copper. I had a fascinating time, but it really wasn’t what I was most suited to, I don’t think."

In Uganda, Winchester read Coronation Everest, James Morris’ 1958 account of being a Times correspondent on a Mount Everest expedition. "I was interested in mountains," he continues, "so I thought, well, instead of working in the mountains and hitting bits of rock and sending them off to be examined, I would try to get a job going to exotic places and writing about them generally. So I wrote to James and said, ‘Can I be you?’ as it were, and he wrote back and said, ‘Absolutely. If you want to leave Uganda, come back and get a job on a local paper in Britain and keep in touch.’ That’s what I did."

James Morris underwent a sex change in 1972 and emerged as Jan Morris. "We’ve remained closely in touch and have written a book together," says Winchester. "We’re the best of friends. But it’s rather odd when your mentor goes from one gender to another."

Winchester moved to America in 1972 to work as a correspondent for the Guardian, a post he held until 1976. "During that time I began getting freelance work from magazines like Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and the Smithsonian," he says. "Nowadays, I find that I have a far more sympathetic audience among editors in America than I do in Britain. There are so many more magazines that will print long and relatively serious pieces in America than there are in Britain. I’ve just done a big piece in the Atlantic about Roget’s Thesaurus. There’s no magazine in Britain that would spend 15,000 words on Roget’s Thesaurus. This is a country which really, in my view, respects writers. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to spend my time here."

As a travel writer, Winchester favored grand projects. His books took him through Korea, along the length of the Yangtze River and throughout the colonial remnants of the British Empire. What they did not do, he freely admits, was make money. "I never ever had had a book that really earned out its advance, I don’t think. And then suddenly I changed from writing about travel to writing about history, never having any experience of doing such a thing, and extraordinarily [The Professor and the Madman] took off."

Winchester has developed a pattern for his histories: "I try to cover the story in a chronological, linear sort of way, but I very deliberately go off in an exuberant way along all the tangents that seem valuable and interesting. . . . If I’m interested in the railway that was built where the canals used to be, then I’ll write about that. If I’m interested in fossil collections, then I would write about the nature of fossil-collecting generally."

There have been three book projects, Winchester says, that he decided to abandon well into the research stage: one on Manchuria ("because the Chinese have destroyed so much relating to the history of the Manchu people"), the second on Shanghai (after another "very good book" on the subject was published) and the third on Arctic explorer and National Geographic founder Adolphus Washington Greely (after Winchester found that a fellow writer was already 15 years into writing his own life of Greely).

"The next book I’m doing," Winchester reveals, "is a big study of the 27th of August, 1883, which is the day that the volcano at Krakatoa exploded. I want to take a look at that extraordinary day [and] the immediate aftermath. It had a great global effect." As a part of the book, Winchester says he will also weave in how the telegraph quickly carried news of the eruption around the world.

"My big dream is a book I’ve been planning to do for years," he says. "It’s to write a sort of a hymn to the joys of tramp steamers. I want to buy an 800-ton tramp steamer with a crew of six, sail it around the world for two years, picking up and discharging cargo and running it as an actual business. And I want to chronicle all this in a very romantic way. But for some funny reason, publishers don’t seem terribly keen. I wonder why that might be?"

Edward Morris reviews and interviews from Nashville.

Author photo by Marion Ettinger.

Simon Winchester journeys through space and time with equal aplomb. He had already earned his stripes as a travel writer when he decided to plunge into history to tell the story of the Oxford English Dictionary and two of its principal creators. No one was more astounded than he was when in 1998, that story, […]
NonfictionTrue Crime

Ann Rule

Interview by Edward Morris

True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we’ll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice.

Early in her career, the author got a close-up glimpse of one such frightening character. When Rule was just getting started as a crime writer in the early ’70s, she worked at a Seattle crisis clinic with the soon-to-be-revealed serial killer Ted Bundy. In the decades since that coincidental meeting, Rule has become America’s top true crime writer, with 16 best-selling books to her credit.

In her latest study, Every Breath You Take, she descends into the twisted mind of Allen Blackthorne, the handsome, brilliant and self-made (right down to renaming himself) multimillionaire who instigated the 1997 killing of his former wife, Sheila Bellush. After years of threats and terror, Sheila was shot and slashed to death in front of her two-year-old quadruplets. Blackthorne was convicted of her murder in July 2000 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

"I’m always looking for the protagonist who appears to have everything in the world," Rule said recently from her home in Washington state. "The rest of us think, boy, if I were handsome or pretty and smart and charming and wealthy and popular and had love, why wouldn’t I be happy? But these people never get enough. And, in the end, many of them will kill to get what they want. If I find the right person who looks good, but under that façade is basically evil, the book’s very easy to write. I just kind of follow along with the action."

But Rule doesn’t rely on action alone to propel her stories. She also delves into the family histories of her principal characters, trying to discover why they act as they do. "When I was a little kid and my grandpa was a sheriff in Michigan," Rule says, "I was allowed to go up in the cells and visit with the women prisoners. They just looked so nice. I was always asking my grandfather, ‘Why would they want to grow up and be a criminal?’ The why of murder always fascinates me so much more than the how. I wanted to understand the psychopathology, why some people would grow up to be criminals. I found that if you can follow the family pathology back, often there are clues."

With a degree of foreboding that is chilling to contemplate, the victim in Every Breath You Take chose Rule to be her voice from the grave long before she was murdered. "Kerry Bladhorn, who is Sheila Bellush’s sister, sent me an e-mail [in February 2000] and said, ‘I’m going to try one more time to find you.’ She told me that her sister, when she got divorced 10 years earlier from Allen, had said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, please have it investigated.’ And then she said, ‘Promise you’ll find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story.’"

Rule concedes that her book would have been derailed had Blackthorne been found not guilty. "It’s always a gamble for me," she explains, "because if someone is acquitted at trial — and I try to be at every session of the trial — I really could not write about it. They could say that I was invading their privacy."

Beyond the common trait of guilt, Rule says the criminals she writes about share other similarities: "I think the lack of empathy is the first thing. . . . All of them, I would say, have deeply entrenched personality disorders. In their minds, the world revolves around them, and the rest of us are one-dimensional paper-doll figures who are put on earth to make them happy. I don’t think they attribute the feelings to us that they have themselves. It doesn’t really matter who they hurt. Yet they’re all chameleons. They fool us. They give us back whatever we might want from them, if it suits their purposes."

Rule says her authoring chores have evolved into a fairly predictable pattern: "I’m always working on three

in a sense. I’m publicizing the book that’s done. I’m writing the book that’s in the hopper, and I’m doing a little advance research on the book to come. I don’t write on two books at a time. I may stop to do an article or two in the midst of a book, but I get so immersed with the characters involved that it’s awfully hard to pull me away."

Her next book will be about Anthony Pignataro, the plastic surgeon from Buffalo, New York, who poisoned his "faithful wife of 20 years," albeit not fatally. "It took her a very long time to even believe that this man she’d always stood beside would do that to her," Rule says. "I’m going to tell the story from her viewpoint."

Beyond telling good and true stories, Rule has a more basic agenda. "The thing I hope to do, although I know it’s impossible, is put myself out of business," she says. "I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It’s a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I’ve written are about wives who just couldn’t get away. But I’ve heard from probably a dozen or more women who’ve said, ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for something I read in one of your books.’ That makes me feel so good."

Thanks to the public nature of trials and the media interest in them, even the most heinous killers get to tell their story. Rule believes their victims should be heard, too. "I always want to give the victim a voice," she concludes. "One of my main tasks is to let the reader know the extent of the loss and what might have been if this person had been allowed to live."

Edward Morris writes on books and music from Nashville.

True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we’ll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice. Early in her career, the author got a close-up glimpse of one such frightening character. […]
NonfictionPolitics

Bob Kerrey

Interview by Edward Morris

Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey says there is a very practical reason for ending his new autobiography, When I Was a Young Man in 1970, when he is only 26 years old and a fresh (and reluctant) recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“When I finished the longer version, it was almost 300,000 words,” he explains by phone from his office at New School University in New York. His whole life “was too big for one book. So I had to cut it down to size.” After being critically wounded in Vietnam in 1969, Kerrey returned to his native Nebraska and gradually immersed himself in business and politics. He served as governor of Nebraska and then moved on to two terms in the U.S. Senate. In 2001, he was appointed to his current post as president of the New School.

While Kerrey doesn’t regard himself as having been a “lone wolf” in his youth, the stories he tells reveal a personality which, while not indifferent to family and friends, seems extraordinarily self-contained. “If you ask me what’s the most important thing in my lifetime,” he reflects, “it’s the friends that I have and the love they give me male and female. And if you ask me what’s at the top of the list in terms of relationships, it’s the love of my wife and my children. I don’t know why I didn’t put more emphasis on that in my book.” Kerrey recalls his boyhood years in Lincoln, Nebraska, as idyllic. He worked in his father’s prosperous lumber and coal yard, had a newspaper route, became fascinated with his church, glued himself to the emerging medium of television, strove at high school football and developed a taste for politics via his participation in his YMCA’s model legislature program.

In national politics, Kerrey became known as a liberal on social matters. But in his youth he voted for conservatives Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. He says his political outlook has grown mostly from personal discoveries. “I went to Eastern Europe to Berlin and Prague and Russia in 1989 and 1990, when the revolutions were still going on [and] right after the [Berlin] Wall came down. Those experiences were shocking to me [seeing] the destructiveness of Communism. I saw how it destroyed the will of human beings and their potential and reduced their capability.” In his book, Kerrey confesses that he remained basically a provincial during his years as a pharmacy major at the University of Nebraska. He says he knew and cared little about art, literature or the grand social and political issues of the day. When he graduated in 1965, the war in Vietnam was intensifying, and he realized he was a prime candidate for the draft. Instead of seeking a deferment from military service, he bowed to the inevitable and, in 1966, enlisted in the Navy, enrolling in Officers Candidate School. His descriptions of his training at Newport, Rhode Island, and later at Coronado, California, crystallize those strange and dissonant times when America discovered it was at war not only with a foreign enemy but also with itself.

Last year, one of the soldiers he commanded the night he was wounded accused Kerrey of deliberately killing old men, women and children in the battle. Kerrey addresses that accusation only obliquely in his memoir, noting, “I would not swear that my memory [of the event] is 100% accurate. It is merely the best I can remember today.” In his interview, though, he admits he was “quite surprised” at the venom directed toward him because of this charge. “My guess is that it would be a different reaction if the story were to be told today, or if it had been told on October 1, 2001 rather than on May 1, 2001.” As a college president, Kerrey says one of his missions is to make sure the New School has an impact on the “great public debates of the day.” Is his passion for those great debates strong enough to lure him back into politics? “I don’t consider that I’ve left politics,” he snaps. “I love politics. I think democracy is very hard. It’s fun and enormously important. I’m not sure I’ll ever come back in as a candidate. I think it’s unlikely. But you never know.”

Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey says there is a very practical reason for ending his new autobiography, When I Was a Young Man in 1970, when he is only 26 years old and a fresh (and reluctant) recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. “When I finished the longer version, it was almost 300,000 words,” […]
LiteratureArts & Culture

Shelley Stewart

Interview by Edward Morris

Think your life has been hard? Imagine growing up black in the legally segregated South and, at the age of five, seeing your father kill your mother with an ax. Imagine a relative with whom you’ve sought refuge stripping you naked, hanging you from the ceiling and whipping you until the blood runs then rubbing salt into the cuts. Imagine having to set out on your own into a terror-filled world when you’re six years old. For Shelley Stewart, these were just the opening blows in a life that is all the more inspiring because of the horrors that set it in motion. He shares his experiences in a new memoir, The Road South, which he co-wrote with Nathan Hale Turner Jr.

Born in the Rosedale section of Birmingham, Alabama, Stewart had little going for him at first beyond the ability to read well and a sense of compassion that kept him from turning mean and bitter. Living where he could including a brief but idyllic residence with a white family Stewart managed to stay in school, reunite with the brothers from whom he had been separated following his mother’s death and lay the foundation for a successful career in radio. In the pursuit of that career, Stewart became a vocal champion for civil rights and a friend of such musical up-and-comers as Otis Redding, Gladys Knight and Isaac Hayes. Now the owner of Birmingham radio station WATV and vice chairman of one of the largest marketing and public relations companies in the South, Stewart recently retired from half a century of being on the air. Except for a few eye-opening weeks in New York City after high school, a disheartening stint in the Air Force and brief professional forays into St. Louis and Nashville, Stewart has remained a resident in the city of his birth.

"I don’t have any psychological residues from the past,"  Stewart says, speaking by phone from his office in Birmingham. But then he amends this assertion by admitting that he has developed an aversion to certain fashionable excuses for failure. "Abuse, race, homelessness,"  he says, ticking them off one by one. "I realized I had gone through every darn one of those categories."  While he speaks with quiet confidence, his voice has none of that unctuous, overbearing tone that so often afflicts the self-made. In fact, there are moments when he seems truly astounded that his life has turned out so well.

Stewart says he began talking openly about his background in the early ’90s after he was invited to speak at a Birmingham high school. On his way to the auditorium, he overheard a student remark, "Look at him. He’s from a bigshot family, and he’s come here to tell us something."  Instead of giving his prepared speech, Stewart looked out at the skeptical faces and began talking about his past.

"I didn’t write The Road South for anything more than to help and inspire others,"  he says. "If just sharing my experiences matters that you don’t have to hate, that you don’t have to give up, that you have to respect and love yourself, that you must be educated in order to communicate with others then maybe [the book] won’t be in vain."

Stewart credits his first grade teacher, Mamie Foster, with endowing him with the self-worth that kept him going through the darkest times. "She pulled me to the side,"  he recalls,  "and said, ‘There’s something different about you. You can do anything you want. Just continue learning.’ " Despite doggedly following her advice, Stewart was heartbroken when his high school principal failed to recommend him for a college scholarship, even though he had top grades. Many years later, though, Miles College corrected this injustice by awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Even when the worst abuses were behind him, Stewart’s road remained bumpy. Becoming a popular disc jockey with both white and black fan clubs did not shield him from the racism institutionalized in the radio stations where he worked. His marriages never lived up to his hopes. His brothers never put into practice the examples of thrift, hard work and self-improvement he set for them. Most disappointing, he confesses in the book, was his inability to create the kind of warm and close-knit family he longed for as a boy.

"I still drive back into Rosedale now and then,"  Stewart says.  "As a matter of fact, I’ll be doing a book signing in a store that’s located 200 yards from where my mother was killed."  Sixty-three years past that awful event, the author says he remains upbeat and committed to the benefits of interdependence.  "I can’t help myself without helping someone else,"  he insists. "That will be my belief as long as I live."

 

 

Think your life has been hard? Imagine growing up black in the legally segregated South and, at the age of five, seeing your father kill your mother with an ax. Imagine a relative with whom you’ve sought refuge stripping you naked, hanging you from the ceiling and whipping you until the blood runs then rubbing […]
History

H.W. Brands

Interview by Edward Morris

Gold had been found at various places in California before James Marshall made his now-fabled discovery in January 1848 near the sawmill he was building for businessman John Sutter. But coming as it did in the same year that America took California from Mexico, Marshall's far richer find was pivotal in changing the course of national history. Fueled by the ambitions and needs of hordes of fortune-seekers, the territory would, within the next two years, be admitted into the Union as a "free" state, thereby heating up the political pot that ultimately exploded into the Civil War.

In The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, historian H.W. Brands examines these whirlwind developments through accounts left by those who took part in them. After setting the scene of the discovery and explaining how word of it spread around the world, Brands follows the individual progress of a handful of pilgrims as they travel overland or by ship to this 19th century El Dorado. He then demonstrates how the bustling region proceeded to cast its shadow over the rest of the country.

Chronicling an entire epoch was a new experience for Brands, a Pulitzer Prize nominee who teaches American history at Texas A&M University. "I had recently done a couple of biographies," he says, "and when you do a biography, especially the way I do it as a life and times you get a long but rather narrow slice of history. For example, I did a biography of Benjamin Franklin [The First American]. His life spanned almost the entire 18th century, with the result that, in tracing his life, I could trace the course of American history over nearly a century. But because I focused on one person, I tended to get a rather narrow view of that history. What I wanted was a different approach. In choosing the California gold rush, what I did was turn that window of history on its side, so that instead of being long and narrow, it was very wide but rather short. Instead of looking at 84 years the term of Franklin's life through one person, I looked at eight or 10 years through the eyes of the dozen or so people I focused on. This is the way of getting at an event as opposed to getting at a life."

Brands, whose other biography is T.R., a life of Theodore Roosevelt, says he spent about five years researching and writing The Age of Gold. "My interest in the gold rush began when I was in college," he explains. "I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and went to college in California. I had occasion then to travel around in the gold country of the Sierra Mountains. I was intrigued by it, and I've always had this notion to come back to that area and that subject."

Among the figures Brands accompanies on their arduous treks to the gold fields are Jessie Fremont, daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton and wife of California settler John Fremont, and Sarah Royce, who would become the mother of philosopher Josiah Royce.

Brands' descriptions of the parched landscape and daily privations that nearly took Mrs. Royce's life are especially vivid. "Before I was a historian," Brands says, "I spent a while as a traveling salesman. My territory was from the West Coast to Denver. So I drove along all the Humboldt River and over Immigrant Pass, east of Salt Lake City, across the Great Salt Desert and along large stretches of the Oregon and California Trails. Of course, you don't see it exactly as it looked in 1849, although I will say this, there are big sections of that part of the West where, if you just turn your back to the interstate or whatever paved road you're on, it looks a lot like it did 150 years ago." Because the gold attracted such an array of talents, energies and egos, it fostered a can-do attitude and an impatience with the status quo that, Brands argues, remains a part of the California character to this day. In his estimation, the gold rush was not a manifestation of greed. "Greed is what you call it if you think it's not deserved or it's excessive," he contends. "People who went to California didn't consider themselves greedy. They saw that this was an opportunity to improve their lives. Most of the people didn't think they were going to make $10 million. They would have been quite happy to make $500 or $1,000 enough so they could buy a farm, for example, rather than rent a farm, so that they would have enough money to marry their childhood sweetheart, so that they could start the business they wanted to start. For most of them, it was this opportunity to make a shortcut toward their vision of happiness."

Brands admits that his study of history has shaped his own political outlook: "I think it gives me greater tolerance for the fact that we always seem to muddle through, one way or another. There have been dozens of moments in American history where it looked as though we were in a crisis that the country might not survive and that some big decision had to be made and if it wasn't made right, then the entire American republican experiment would come tumbling down. Despite all of those grim warnings, the Republic still carries on. . . . There are these things [like the September 11 terrorist attacks] that pop up, and at the moment they seem to be the most important things one could imagine. It's easy to think and sometimes it's attractive to think that we live at this turning point in history, because it confers a certain kind of importance on us."

Brands' manuscript for his new book was already in the hands of his publisher when the stories broke about the alleged plagiarisms by fellow historians Stephen E. Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Even in light of this news, he says his publisher did not ask him to re-check his own work. "It's had a lot of reverberations in the historical community," he notes. "It comes down to a question of whether these were matters of simple oversight, or sloppiness or intent to deceive, and professional historians have taken different views. It's hard to say where the truth lies, but I think we all try to do the best job we can." Next up for Brands will be a book on the Texas Revolution of the 1830s.

 

Gold had been found at various places in California before James Marshall made his now-fabled discovery in January 1848 near the sawmill he was building for businessman John Sutter. But coming as it did in the same year that America took California from Mexico, Marshall's far richer find was pivotal in changing the course of […]
Nonfiction

Judge Leslie Shachtman

Interview by Edward Morris

She can be tough in court, but in conversation, Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder is light-hearted, quick to laugh and more inclined to explain her views of the law than proclaim them as absolutes. In her nearly 20 years on the bench, the Manhattan Supreme Court justice has clashed with some of New York City's wiliest and most menacing desperadoes. Death threats have become a routine part of her job.

While Snyder's 25 To Life, co-written with Tom Shachtman, is essentially autobiographical, it's also a lucid and example-filled study of how the criminal court system works. Snyder tells of overwhelming case loads, judges more interested in efficiency than justice, good cops and bad cops and an endless procession of defendants rapists, murderers and drug lords who are, in her estimation, pure evil." In her determination to combat such evil, Snyder has earned a fearsome reputation, principally for levying long prison sentences.

The daughter of a distinguished professor of French literature and philosophy, Snyder grew up in Baltimore. She graduated from Radcliffe College (which she entered at 16) and went on to study law at Case Western Reserve at a time when women lawyers were still comparatively rare. After a false start at a white shoe" firm in New York (which she found boring), she joined the Manhattan district attorney's office (which she found infuriatingly sexist). Even so, it was still a bastion from which to bust the bad guys. Snyder worked her way steadily up the prosecutorial ladder, before becoming a criminal court judge in 1983.

The first time she decided to pronounce a 25-to-life sentence, Snyder recalls in her book, she retreated to the privacy of a bathroom to mull over the gravity of what she was about to do. Soon, however, she was past the agonizing. It never got easy," she says, but it got a lot easier, and I'll tell you why. Most of the cases in which I've given out these high sentences were for people who had been involved in multiple murders or murder and rape or multiple sex crimes, or they were the heads of drug gangs who'd delegated other people to kill or torture. So as the cases became more and more serious, it did become easier to hand out time of that kind. If someone is involved in killing 40 people, I really don't lose any sleep." Near the end of the book, Snyder reveals a more contemplative, less punitive side as she argues for alternative sentencing, that is, coming up with custom-tailored plans of punishments and rewards to help steer youthful offenders away from committing additional crimes.

Her many years on the bench, Snyder says, have generally reinforced her respect for the wisdom of juries. I have a lot of faith in the jury system. Every once in a while, frankly, it's dashed, like in the O. J. Simpson case, which I thought was a travesty of justice, I don't mind saying. But in most cases, I think juries reach just results. In [all my time as a judge], only once can I think of a verdict that I thought was absolutely ludicrous." Snyder swears that her book's truculent title has only one purpose. It's just meant to be catchy," she says. The maximum sentence for an A-1 felony in New York is 25 to life, and [the publisher] always wants you to come up with something dramatic. One day I'm sitting around early on in the book process and I'm with one of my kids and my husband, and I'm saying, ÔGee, you know, I need a dramatic title.' So my son pipes up and says, ÔHow about 25 to Life.' My husband and I look at each other and, suddenly, we go, ÔThat's great!' " In spite of being obliged to deal with human viciousness and misery day in and day out, Snyder voices no regrets. It's been a very exciting, interesting career," she concludes. I feel that it's been a constructive career, that every day when I get up I'm doing something worthwhile."

She can be tough in court, but in conversation, Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder is light-hearted, quick to laugh and more inclined to explain her views of the law than proclaim them as absolutes. In her nearly 20 years on the bench, the Manhattan Supreme Court justice has clashed with some of New York City's wiliest […]
Travel

Tony Horwitz

Interview by Edward Morris

On the three scientific voyages he led between 1768 and his violent death in 1779, English Navy Captain James Cook explored and mapped vast regions of the previously uncharted world, filling in with astounding accuracy fully a third of the globe. Blue Latitudes is Tony Horwitz’s island-by-island account of those great discoveries and of the man whose infinite resourcefulness ensured their success.

"When I got into the story," Horwitz says, " I found out it was about cannibalism and sex and violence and adventure. Then I became fascinated with Cook, the man. He’s almost an Abe Lincoln story. He grew up in a mud hut in rural Yorkshire, the son of a day laborer, really at the very bottom of British society. Yet through natural talent and a lot of hard work, he rose to the top. He’s one of those astonishing, once-in-a-generation figures who come out of nowhere to transform the world." By poetic coincidence, Horwitz spoke to BookPage about the seafaring adventurer from another storied port, Nantucket, where he was resting up before embarking on his own perilous voyage the book tour.

Although the book is meticulously detailed about Cook and his travels, Horwitz has not written a conventional history. He tells more about following Cook’s trail than he does about the original voyages, although he does weave the two strands of narrative tightly together. Not only does the author seek to see and imagine what the captain encountered, he also hopes to find out what Cook still means to the modern world. In these politically correct times, is he perceived as a discoverer or a despoiler? The resurgence of indigenous cultures is both clarifying and distorting his legacy, Horwitz concludes. "For too long, Cook was viewed in the West only in heroic terms, as this great navigator who set off to discover the world. We know what’s happened since in terms of exploitation and the devastation of native cultures. The exact same thing happened here in America. Lewis and Clark are heroes to many of us. Yet, at the same time, we have to recognize the damage that happened in their wake. . . . So I think it’s important to recognize all that. On the other hand, I don’t think we should swing to the opposite extreme, where we assume that these men were monsters." To his evident dismay, Horwitz finds that in Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii (where the disenchanted locals killed and butchered Cook) and elsewhere he anchored, the explorer is either fading in stature or has been forgotten altogether. Even in his own country, he is a much-diminished presence.

Horwitz first became interested in Cook in the early 1980s when he moved to Sydney after his marriage to native Australian and fellow writer Geraldine Brooks. "I arrived there really knowing very little about the place and in a state of some bewilderment," he says. "I guess, as a history buff, I started boning up on the local history. And the white history of Australia effectively begins with Captain Cook." Horwitz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter whose earlier books include Confederates In the Attic and Baghdad Without a Map, estimates he spent 18 months following Cook’s transoceanic routes and another year writing the book.

Sometimes Horwitz traveled alone, but he was often accompanied and upstaged on his journeys by his friend, the hilarious Roger Williamson, an Englishman transplanted to Australia. Where Horwitz is open and earnest in approaching new experiences, Williamson simply wants to know where the liquor and women are. His are the blunt opinions Horwitz dare not utter. In Yorkshire, after a particularly strenuous evening, Williamson awakens to greet the gray dawn thusly, "Still leaden. Like my stomach. All the forces of nature are focused on my gut. . . . It’s absolutely woeful here. Can we pack up and go now? Head for Costa del Sol for a week? Cook probably sailed near there."

"He’s a foil for me," Horwitz explains, "and I think, honestly, I hide behind him a bit in the book. He’s so quotable that I couldn’t resist the urge to let him do most of the talking. Traveling can get very lonely, and at least I had a mate along for much of the trip."

In trailing Cook, Horwitz shipped out on every available conveyance from rental cars and jet planes to an Alaskan ferry and a replica of the explorer’s most famous vessel, the Endeavour. It was not his intent, he says, to replicate Cook’s actual hardships or to simulate his interminable separations from home and family. Horwitz was rarely away for more than six weeks and makes little mention of his own feelings. "I guess one thing I find annoying sometimes with travel books," he says, "is that they’re all about self-discovery. In Cook’s day, it was about discovery, pure and simple."

As Horwitz sees it, Cook still has something to teach us. "When we talk about the global village’ that we live in today," he says, "it began to a great extent with Cook’s voyages. The part I found most compelling was the drama of first contact between Cook and his men and foreign cultures. He stepped off his ship dozens of times into a complete unknown. I became struck by how open and curious they were and how closed and suspicious we’ve become by comparison. We’re living in a moment when we’re scared of ‘the other.’ Many of us are scared even to fly, yet [Cook] wasn’t afraid of climbing onto a wooden boat and sailing off the edge of the known world, over and over again. He remained open to the cultures he encountered, and, for the most part, he did find a way to communicate and get along. It’s striking to me that here we are over two centuries later and not doing very well at that job."

Edward Morris works out of Nashville and satisfies all his nautical urges at the beach near his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.

 

 

On the three scientific voyages he led between 1768 and his violent death in 1779, English Navy Captain James Cook explored and mapped vast regions of the previously uncharted world, filling in with astounding accuracy fully a third of the globe. Blue Latitudes is Tony Horwitz’s island-by-island account of those great discoveries and of the […]
History

Margaret MacMillan

Interview by Edward Morris

Coming on the heels of the slaughter of millions, the Paris Peace Conference that convened after World War I was a surprisingly civilized gathering of the era’s top statesmen. In the first full-length look at the conference in more than 25 years, a descendant of one of those larger-than life political figures offers a fascinating portrait of the times, the personalities involved and the lasting consequences of their actions.

By redrawing national boundaries and stirring up ancient hatreds, the peace conference for all its good effects set in motion hostilities that still rage today. The complex story is sorted out and eloquently told by Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World. First published in England as The Peacemakers, the book has already won several awards and critical acclaim on the other side of the Atlantic.

Animating MacMillan’s narrative are the key participants: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Among the supporting cast of diplomats, aides, advocates and hangers-on swirling in and around the conference were future U.S. President Herbert Hoover; Lawrence of Arabia; Polish pianist/politician Ignace Paderewski; Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh (then a kitchen assistant at the Ritz Hotel); future secretary of state John Foster Dulles; and the delightfully adulterous Queen Marie of Rumania. MacMillan spoke to BookPage about Paris 1919 from Toronto, where she is professor of history and provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. The first topic of conversation is her personal connection to the historic event Lloyd George was her great-grandfather. She never met him, she says, and was only an infant when he died. Nor did this relationship provide her access to heretofore-unseen documents. “All his papers are pretty well public,” she explains. “Where [being related] helped, I guess, was that I talked to my grandmother a bit about [the conference] before she died. She’d been over there, so she had some funny stories for me.” MacMillan began researching the book about 10 years ago and spent three years writing it. She says she’s still not sure what prompted the massive undertaking. “It wasn’t my great-grandfather, really. In a way, that would have put me off more than anything else, because I didn’t want to look as though I was doing an act of piety. I was always interested in the period. What really got me started was that I was struck by how many interesting people were there. I think historians are great gossips.” This was the first major peace conference, MacMillan says, in which public opinion in different countries helped shape the negotiations. Approximately 700 reporters from newspapers around the world covered the event.

Of the “Big Three” leaders, MacMillan depicts Wilson as the one most damaged personally by the emotionally charged negotiations. Entering them as the uncompromising idealist with his noble but ambiguous 14-point proposal of how the conflict should be resolved he emerged battered by the tenacious forces of realpolitik. “I was very impressed by Wilson,” says MacMillan. “I think he had the right ideas, and I think he was very brave in pushing them. Where he really fell down and I think it was a character flaw was in not getting Congressional opinion behind him in the United States. In my view, he unnecessarily alienated the Republicans. . . . He tended to treat his Republican critics as if they were traitors and fools which is no way to win people over.” While the French, who had been devastated by the war, clamored for harsh penalties against Germany and while the Germans felt the penalties levied were excessively harsh MacMillan sides with a growing list of historians who argue that the conditions imposed did not, as popularly supposed, cause World War II.

“What’s happened in the past 15 years or so,” MacMillan explains, “is that a number of very, very good historians have started looking at the reparations issue, at German foreign policy and at the motivation of Hitler and the Nazis. Collectively, I think what they have said is, to begin with, that Germany never actually paid that much, that the terms were not unduly harsh, and that Hitler and the Nazis had expansionist plans right from the word go. I don’t think they went out and conquered half of Europe because of the First World War. That is something they would have wanted to do anyway.”

Coming on the heels of the slaughter of millions, the Paris Peace Conference that convened after World War I was a surprisingly civilized gathering of the era’s top statesmen. In the first full-length look at the conference in more than 25 years, a descendant of one of those larger-than life political figures offers a fascinating […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

James Patterson

Interview by Edward Morris

With his new book, The Jester, the creator of detective Alex Cross, the Women's Murder Club and a veritable metropolis of other characters, peers into the turbulent village and castle life of 11th-century France. In a dramatic change of pace, James Patterson best known for his contemporary suspense thrillers brings readers the story of Hugh De Luc, who leaves his young wife to enlist in what will come to be known as the First Crusade. When Hugh returns more than two years later, sickened by the cruelty and carnage he's encountered, he finds his home has been burned and his wife kidnapped by a local warlord. Hugh's mission henceforth is to right these wrongs by invading the courts of his enemies in the guise of a jester.

"I've had that story in my head for a dozen years," says Patterson, speaking from his home in Florida. "Most history has been written from the point-of-view of nobles or the people they've commissioned. The notion of a common person particularly a common person with a sense of humor was a story that really appealed to me. What we have here is a hero who's part Braveheart and part Jerry Seinfeld and Sherlock Holmes. That's kind of a fun combination." "Fun" is not the first word that snaps to mind as heads roll and blood spurts in the wake of Hugh's grimly determined quest. But the story does have its comic-book elements. The action is fast and unceasing; character development is minimal; the language is conversational; and the delineation between good and evil is broadly marked. Patterson and co-author Andrew Gross also endow their protagonist with some decidedly modern notions of social equality.

The period during which the Crusades took place, Patterson notes, "is an interesting time to read about. It's unbelievable what went on then. It's kind of interesting right now because we're right at the crossroads of another possible encounter between Christianity and [Islam] another holy war. . . . Back in those times, Hannibal Lecter would have been just another foot soldier. But beyond the violence, there's a black humor. When things get that bad, the only refuge we have is humor." So much has been written about Patterson's incessant output of books and his involvement in making them sell that he's become a bit weary of discussing it. How does he choose his co-authors? "I go to the phone book," he deadpans. And the division of writing chores? "We alternate words." Pressed for a straighter answer, he responds, "I don't really get into the process [of how I co-write], because every time I sort of lay out what I do, the next thing you know, somebody else is doing the same thing." Patterson says he met Gross through his publisher. "He had submitted a novel at one point, and it didn't get bought. But they thought it was an interesting book, and I read it and thought it was pretty good. We just started shooting the breeze, and we got along very well." Their first book together was the 2002 Women's Murder Club mystery, 2nd Chance.

Patterson's own tastes in fiction developed slowly and eclectically. "I went to a Catholic high school in upstate New York, and I didn't like to read at all. I still hate Silas Marner. However, my family moved to Massachusetts right after my senior year. I had to pay my way through college [by] working at a mental hospital. I had a lot of free time at night. I started reading everything I could get my hands on, and I found a lot of stuff that was terrific. In those days, I preferred the more outlandish

[Jean Genet's] Our Lady of the Flowers and John Rechy [City of Night], stuff that was dark but interesting." Prompted by such literary discoveries, he went on to earn a master's degree in English at Vanderbilt University.

For the interviewer's benefit, Patterson looks around his admittedly "messy" office and counts out 19 separate "piles" of paper, each a book in embryo. Nearing birth, he says, are an Alex Cross novel, another in the Women's Murder Club series, "a kind of Suzanne's Diary [For Nicholas]" and an "offbeat mystery." NBC-TV, he continues, is ready to air a three-hour production of 1st To Die. A script has been written for another Alex Cross movie Roses Are Red and work has started on a movie treatment of Suzanne's Diary. Coming this summer, he adds, is Lake House, a follow-up to When The Wind Blows. The Cross novel, entitled The Big Bad Wolf, is due out this fall.

Not surprisingly, Patterson writes every day. What is surprising, though, is that he uses a pencil instead of a word processor. "I am not on the computer," he asserts. "My wife is. My 5-year-old is. I'm not. I'm sitting here right now, and I have the new Cross, triple-spaced, and I write between the lines. Then off it goes again and gets retyped, and back it'll come again. It just goes like that." Once his manuscript has been sent to the publisher, Patterson says he involves himself "a fair amount" in preparing to take the ensuing book to the public. "We kind of like to sit in a room and go, Do we like the book? Do we like the cover? Do we like the [proposed] tour? I think that's a healthy thing to do."

Patterson is proud of the diversity of his fiction, ranging as it does from historical to detective to love stories. "I'm not aware of anybody else who has done that," he observes. Would he ever write a western? "Yeah, I might. I'm doing one now that's set around the time of Teddy Roosevelt. So we're almost back to the West." Besides the variety of his books, Patterson points to another quality worth noting: "On a pure readership level, a pure, spellbinding, can't-put-it-down level, they're pretty successful. Forget about sales. They just move along real well."

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based music and entertainment writer.

With his new book, The Jester, the creator of detective Alex Cross, the Women's Murder Club and a veritable metropolis of other characters, peers into the turbulent village and castle life of 11th-century France. In a dramatic change of pace, James Patterson best known for his contemporary suspense thrillers brings readers the story of Hugh […]
History

James Bradley

Interview by Edward Morris

In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley chronicled the lives of the six soldiers his father among them who famously raised the flag on Iwo Jima. With his new book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, he returns to the same war and the same region of the South Pacific to tell how a group of desperate, formidable Japanese troops defending a communications center on the island of Chichi Jima exacted a bloody toll on eight captured American fighter pilots. A ninth flyer, who was shot down but escaped, was future president George Bush.

To give these atrocities a context, Bradley sketches in America’s often high-handed dealings with Japan from 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry’s warships entered Tokyo Bay, to the outbreak of the war. He also presents an account of how the airplane rose rapidly from being a novelty to become the biggest gun in the U.S. arsenal. Along the way, he outlines the character and military importance of the far-sighted Billy Mitchell, the flamboyant Jimmy Doolittle and the ruthlessly pragmatic Curtis LeMay.

But surely the most unsettling part of his story and a thread that runs throughout is the gratuitous cruelty that war unleashes: rapes, mutilations, exquisitely imaginative forms of torture, even cannibalism. In this regard, Bradley points out, America has not been blameless.

Bradley tells BookPage that the idea for Flyboys basically fell into his lap. "I’m home just sitting around," he says, "still reading about World War II, wanting to do another book about it but not having any idea. Then in February 2001, Iris Chang [author of The Rape of Nanking] says, ‘Call Bill Doran.’" Doran, as it turns out, is a World War II veteran and retired lawyer who witnessed secret war-crime trials against Japanese officers on Guam in 1946. Testimony given at these trials told in gruesome detail how the eight downed flyers actually died. When the transcripts were declassified in 1977, Doran obtained a copy. The secret had been so well kept that not only did the flyers’ families not know what happened, neither did former President Bush.

"My dad was a funeral director, and I’ve seen a lot of deaths," Bradley says. "But these guys got their heads cut off, and they got their livers eaten. And I thought, You know what? Everyone wants to turn away from that. It’s too icky. I want to memorialize these guys, and I want to give them the funeral they never had.’ They got thrown in the pit, and most of them are just names. They don’t even have any body parts. I wanted to reconstruct these guys. They were handsome, good, American boys."

To fathom the actions of the Japanese, Bradley says, he first had to understand the warrior culture they sprang from and how they must have felt in a battle they knew they were losing.

"It occurred to me," he observes, "[that they were] isolated, doomed, knowing they were going to die. One atrocity out on an island, people would take out of context."

During his research, Bradley fortuitously encountered former flyboy George Bush, who soon involved himself in the project. "I met him at a speaking engagement," Bradley explains. "We were both down in Texas and, along with a lot of other people, I got to stand and shake his hand. I knew he was a flyboy, and I said, I’ve got the story on these guys. My dad raised the flag. I’m not full of baloney.’ I thought that was the last time I’d ever see George Bush. Two weeks later he called me. We chatted a couple of times. And then I arranged a trip for him to go back to Chichi Jima [with me] and remember his boys." Bush’s trip with Bradley will be covered in a CNN documentary to air on October 18.

Bradley says that all the survivors he spoke to still had vivid memories of the brothers or friends they had lost in the war. It became his lot to reveal to them the disturbing facts that their government had for so long concealed. "I’m talking to people from 75 years on up," he relates. "They have known for 60 years how their brother died. ‘He was lost.’ ‘He died in a crash.’ And a guy calls them up that they’ve never heard of, ‘I’m James Bradley. My dad raised the flag on Iwo Jima.’ They should have hung up right there. It sounds like a looney, right? I would tell them: I know how he died in detail. You don’t have to listen. It’s horrible. I’m just telling you I’m going to write it in a book. You can hang up right now, or I can tell you. It’s your choice." Everyone, he says, wanted to know.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

 

In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley chronicled the lives of the six soldiers his father among them who famously raised the flag on Iwo Jima. With his new book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, he returns to the same war and the same region of the South Pacific to tell how a group […]

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