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Edward Morris

NonfictionHistory

Cuba Libre!

Review by Edward Morris

Only the hoariest among us remember when the Cuban revolution was chic and Fidel Castro was feted as a modern-day Robin Hood. In his fast-paced and highly entertaining book Cuba Libre!, Tony Perrottet spotlights the bright hopes that propelled the revolution and the herculean effort that enabled a ragtag band to defeat a dictator’s army of 40,000 in just over two years.

President Fulgencio Batista began a reign in 1952 that was remarkable for its corruption and brutality. Castro’s career as a rebel against Batista began a year later, with a failed attack on an army barrack. After his release from prison, Castro retreated to Mexico to plan further resistance. There he met and enlisted the Argentinean doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara. With a band of 82 men, Castro returned to Cuba by sea in late 1956. A disastrous landing led to most of his troops being captured or killed. The few survivors took refuge in the rugged Sierra Maestra range and trained their eyes on distant Havana.

Perrottet relies on contemporary newspaper accounts and journals to depict the perilous living conditions in the mountains, explain the essential roles of female leaders and illustrate Castro’s genius in public relations. The victories against Batista grew slowly but inexorably and were, for the most part, chronicled sympathetically by the American media. Finally, Castro made his triumphant entry into Havana on January 8, 1959. His honeymoon with the U.S. lasted only a few months, until it became clear that he really did intend to reform the Cuban economy at the expense of those who had drained it.

 

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

Only the hoariest among us remember when the Cuban revolution was chic and Fidel Castro was feted as a modern-day Robin Hood. In his fast-paced and highly entertaining book Cuba Libre!, Tony Perrottet spotlights the bright hopes that propelled the revolution and the herculean effort that enabled a ragtag band to defeat a dictator’s army of 40,000 in just over two years.

NonfictionMusic

Wasn’t That a Time

Review by Edward Morris

So much has been written about the folk band the Weavers being blacklisted from performing in the 1950s that it obscures the far more important fact that they still became one of America’s most influential music groups. The Weavers launched in 1949 with Pete Seeger on banjo, Fred Hellerman on guitar and Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert on vocals. Each of the band members had deep political roots and regarded music as a benign form of propaganda for progressive causes. Seeger had joined the Young Communist League in 1937, when he was 18, and by the onset of World War II, he was already being shadowed by the FBI. Of all the left-leaning Weavers, he would be the most hounded.

The Weavers’ first steady gig was at the Village Vanguard in New York, where they were discovered by the noted bandleader Gordon Jenkins. Enthralled by their harmonies and exuberance, he signed them to Decca Records. From 1950 to 1952, the group scored a series of high-ranking pop singles, including “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” “Goodnight Irene,” “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Wimoweh.” These songs led to more bookings at major nightclubs around the country. However, as their fame increased, so did the hue and cry of both the conservative government and self-appointed blacklisters.

In Wasn’t That a Time, author Jesse Jarnow astutely chronicles how the Weavers lost gigs, quit working as a group, and dealt with internal dissension and government persecution. However, these musicians continued to bounce back into the spotlight at regular intervals up until the 1980s. Denied access to airtime on both radio and television, the Weavers became one of the first groups to deliver their music directly to the masses via live recordings on the then-new long-play vinyl albums. As to the many acts they influenced, Jarnow cites Harry Belafonte; the Byrds; the Beach Boys; Peter, Paul and Mary; Judy Collins; Jerry Garcia; Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. All of the members of the Weavers are gone now, but their music survives in virtually every political sing-along.

So much has been written about the Weavers being blacklisted from performing in the 1950s that it obscures the far more important fact that they still became one of America’s most influential pop music groups.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

In the Hurricane’s Eye

Review by Edward Morris

Bestselling author and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick subtitles his latest history “The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.” But it could just as accurately be, “the frustrations of George Washington.” Six years into the Revolutionary War, it was still a toss-up as to whether the American rebels or the British crown would prevail.

General Washington, still quartered in New York in 1781, realized that the revolutionaries’ success depended on the difficult task of coordinating with the French navy and persuading them to heed his strategies. But French intransigence wasn’t the totality of Washington’s worries. His troops were resentful at going unpaid, and the colonies were notoriously parsimonious in funding the larger war effort. Then there were the abiding distractions of the general’s inflamed gums, rotting teeth and failing eyesight.

Drawing on letters, journals and sea logs, Philbrick manages to impart the immediacy of breaking news to his descriptions of marches, skirmishes and battles. From describing crucial shifts in the wind during naval conflicts to detailing the unimaginable horror of war wounds, he places the reader in the midst of the fray. The successful three-week siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the fall of 1781 effectively won the war for Washington and humbled his tenacious adversary Lord Cornwallis.

The most tragic figures, however, were the slaves who joined the British in a bid to ensure their own liberation. As the siege tightened, Cornwallis decided that “despite having promised the former slaves their freedom, dwindling provisions required that he jettison them from the fortress” and into the hands of their former masters.

In the Hurricane’s Eye is illustrated with an array of useful maps and a section that reveals what happened to the principal American, French and British players after the war.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Bestselling author and National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick subtitles his latest history “The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.” But it could just as accurately be, “the frustrations of George Washington.” Six years into the Revolutionary War, it was still a toss-up as to whether the American rebels or the British crown would prevail.

Business & Finance

American Prison

Review by Edward Morris

Shane Bauer was one of three American hikers seized and imprisoned in 2009 after straying across the border from Iraqi Kurdistan into Iran. There he was held under harsh conditions for 26 months before being released. Thus, he was well-versed in incarceration dynamics when he went undercover for Mother Jones magazine in 2014 to work as a $9-an-hour security guard in a Louisiana lockup owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the publicly traded chain of prisons now named CoreCivic.

In the four months he spent undercover, Bauer amassed volumes of first-hand information on how prison management systematically mistreated both the prisoners and their guards to maximize profits. Understaffing was rampant, prisoners were deprived of basic psychological and medical care, promised rehabilitation programs were cancelled or abandoned, and legitimate inmate complaints were ignored or discarded.

But one of Bauer’s surprise discoveries was about himself—about how fear of being tricked, worn down or bullied inexorably drained him of sympathy for his charges, even as he realized he was drifting from his moral moorings. “My priorities change,” he reflects at one point. “Striving to treat everyone as human takes too much energy. More and more I focus on proving I won’t back down.”

In alternating chapters, Bauer details the long and shameful history of how convict labor—exacted through extreme brutality, particularly in the South—has been used to enrich private coffers and state treasuries. When prisoners can turn a profit, he notes, there’s an irresistible incentive to convict more of them and keep them longer. By the time Bauer completed this book, CoreCivic had become a major player in the housing of immigrants.

Shane Bauer was one of three American hikers seized and imprisoned in 2009 after straying across the border from Iraqi Kurdistan into Iran. There he was held under harsh conditions for 26 months before being released. Thus, he was well-versed in incarceration dynamics when he went undercover for Mother Jones magazine in 2014 to work as a $9-an-hour security guard in a Louisiana lockup owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the publicly traded chain of prisons now named CoreCivic.

Nonfiction

An uneasy look at the future of battle

Review by Edward Morris

There seems to be no scientific advancement—regardless of how pure and benign its origin—that doesn’t wind up in military use. And vice versa. That’s basically the theme that ties together Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang’s Accessory to War, an engaging and well-documented survey of the instruments and organizations that have led human civilization into its current battle for supremacy in space.

Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium and ubiquitous explainer of all things cosmic, clearly wishes that war would go away and that space would become a wellspring of common benefit. But he is far too much a rationalist to confuse wishes with reality. He concedes that, to the military mind, space is the ultimate “high ground” that confers battlefield advantage. That being said, military spending on communications, travel and weapon systems does lead routinely to peaceful civilian applications. Think of where we’d be without the constant data that flows from the same satellites that made America’s invasion of Iraq so effective and devastating.

Although space is the ultimate focus of this book, Tyson and Lang, his longtime researcher and editor, first take the reader on a tour through history with chapters on early celestial discoveries, the development of ocean navigation, refinements of the telescope and advancements in communications. These accounts are accompanied by chronicles of what was going on concurrently in the world.

With a worried eye on the catastrophic consequences of space war, Tyson proposes a more pleasing alternative: “[A]strophysics, a historical handmaiden to human conflict, now offers a way to redirect our species’ urge to kill into collaborative urges to explore, to uncover alien civilizations, to link Earth to the rest of the cosmos . . . and protect our home planet until the Sun’s furnace burns itself out five billion years hence.” And why not?

There seems to be no scientific advancement—regardless of how pure and benign its origin—that doesn’t wind up in military use. And vice versa. That’s basically the theme that ties together Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang’s Accessory to War, an engaging and well-documented survey of the instruments and organizations that have led human civilization into its current battle for supremacy in space.

NonfictionTrue CrimeHistoryAmerican History

The duel for Chicago

Review by Edward Morris

The collision of celebrated mobster Al “Scarface” Capone and his larger-than-life nemesis, Prohibition agent Eliot “The Untouchable” Ness, has become an American myth. In Scarface and the Untouchable, the latest narrative of their convergence—which played out primarily on the streets of Prohibition-era Chicago—Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz go into great detail to present the day-to-day realities that made this law-versus-lawless conflict so colorful, violent and headline-grabbing.

Both Capone and Ness were the sons of immigrants, and both were equally animated by ambition. Capone showed his viciousness and enterprise early, while Ness was a late bloomer who took time out for college before drifting into law enforcement. But Ness’ childhood fascination with Sherlock Holmes foretold an enthusiasm for evidence gathering and “the chase.” After he became famous, Ness assumed Sherlockian importance of his own by serving as the model for the cartoon crime buster Dick Tracy.

In spite of creating a bootlegging empire and ordering a string of murders, Capone was finally convicted and jailed for mere tax evasion. Ness did his part to bring down Capone by relentlessly raiding his breweries, thus eroding his economic base. Although the two never had a face-to-face confrontation, Ness was on hand to help escort Capone to prison. The repeal of Prohibition did little to dismantle the criminal organizations like Capone’s that it brought into being. It did, however, coincide with the end of Capone’s career. Straight-shooter Ness would move on to clean up the Cleveland, Ohio, police department and, two years after his death, come to life again as the central figure in the television crime series “The Untouchables.”

The scholarship displayed in Scarface and the Untouchable is extraordinary, probing deeply into the activities, interrelationships and mindsets of the many principal characters. Publicity-seeking Capone is especially well-drawn. The graft-ridden but vibrant city of Chicago achieves character status as well.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The collision of celebrated mobster Al “Scarface” Capone and his larger-than-life nemesis, Prohibition agent Eliot “The Untouchable” Ness, has become an American myth. In Scarface and the Untouchable, the latest narrative of their convergence—which played out primarily on the streets of Prohibition-era Chicago—Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz go into great detail to present the day-to-day realities that made this law-versus-lawless conflict so colorful, violent and headline-grabbing.

NonfictionMemoir

Observations from the paragon of poetry

Review by Edward Morris

Poet, essayist and children’s book author Donald Hall looks back over his richly textured 89 years of life in his latest memoir, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. Most of his reflections here are blithely inconsequential, keen observations about nature, career and relationships. They expound no end-of-life wisdom, detail no significant literary trends or feuds and offer no general assessment of the state of poetry today. But it is this very lack of utility—the knowledge that we need not underline or take notes—that makes the book such a joy to read.

This is not to suggest that the book lacks weight. Whether Hall is describing the passage of the seasons or mulling over the comforts of friendship, he is always worth hearing out. He is especially moving when writing about his love affair and home life with his second wife, Jane Kenyon, a respected poet in her own right. Among his “carnival of losses”—his mobility, old friends, an ancient tree in his front yard—her death in 1995 at the age of 47 looms largest.

It is a shrinking pool, to be sure, but English majors who came of age academically in the 1960s and ’70s will especially relish Hall’s recollections of other big-name poets, among them Theodore Roethke (“exuberant, loud, and funny”), Stephen Spender (“talked well on any subject other than poetry”), James Dickey (“the best liar I ever knew”) and T.S. Eliot (“spoke like a member of Parliament”). He met them all.

Many contemporary poets make their living as teachers, but Hall has made his mostly as a freelance writer, packaging and selling his verbal wares wherever he could. This collection of well-crafted bric-a-brac demonstrates that he’s still not inclined to let any of his words go to waste.

Editor’s Note: Donald Hall died on June 23, 2018.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Poet, essayist and children’s book author Donald Hall looks back over his richly textured 89 years of life in his latest memoir, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. Most of his reflections here are blithely inconsequential, keen observations about nature, career and relationships. They expound no end-of-life wisdom, detail no significant literary trends or feuds and offer no general assessment of the state of poetry today. But it is this very lack of utility—the knowledge that we need not underline or take notes—that makes the book such a joy to read.

NonfictionHistoryBlack History

The unfairly forgotten story of African-American pioneers

Review by Edward Morris

The role free black settlers played in opening up the Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War remains virtually unmentioned—and certainly unexamined—in most general American histories. To show the extent of this migration toward supposed freedom, Anna-Lisa Cox, a fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, begins this study by citing the locales of 338 black farming settlements that were established between 1800 and 1860 in the territory that would ultimately become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Cox then follows the story of how the ideals of racial equality enunciated in the Northwest Territorial Ordinance of 1787 were ever-so-slowly eroded by the same greed and assertions of white supremacy that were then prevalent in America’s slave-holding South.

There are three main strands in Cox’s narrative—a running account of attitudes and actions toward slavery at the Federal level throughout this period; a sampling of local and statewide laws restricting black voting, occupancy and land ownership in the frontier Northwest; and sketches of specific black families that focus on the harsh work they did to carve out their farms from the forests while simultaneously confronting thickets of prejudices.

Even though slavery itself was illegal is this area, enterprising whites asserted their control by chaining their black workers to indentured servitude (for spans as long as 90 years) and requiring even land-owning blacks to carry identity papers. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 made things even worse, enabling whites to seize and sell free blacks on the pretense that they were escaped slaves.

Conditions didn’t get measurably better in the region after the Civil War and the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed blacks the right to vote. Racial prejudice, envy and state-ignored violence continued. Today, evidence of the pioneering African-American presence exists only here and there in place names, still-functioning churches and local lore. The Bone and Sinew of the Land takes a step toward remembering it.

The role free black settlers played in opening up the Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War remains virtually unmentioned—and certainly unexamined—in most general American histories. To show the extent of this migration toward supposed freedom, Anna-Lisa Cox, a fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, begins this study by citing the locales of 338 black farming settlements that were established between 1800 and 1860 in the territory that would ultimately become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

NonfictionHistory

Cold war secrets exposed

Review by Edward Morris

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, May 2018

The Cold War between the U.S. and Russia was at its iciest from the early 1950s until well into the 1960s. Neither side knew a great deal about the other’s military capabilities and even less about any grand designs for world supremacy. The information the two superpowers did possess came mostly from spies, diplomats, gossip and news reports. Although securing reliable intelligence was clearly in the Pentagon’s interest, its chief focus was on improving its weaponry. However, the nascent Central Intelligence Agency was interested in experimental aerial reconnaissance projects.

Into this jurisdictional minefield entered four inordinately talented civilians who took it upon themselves to build and test technology that might reveal what was actually happening in Russia: Edwin Land, the inventor of the first Polaroid camera and a genius in the field of optics; Kelly Johnson, an engineer who zeroed in on designing lightweight, high-flying aircraft that could photograph the Russian landscape while, ideally, evading radar detection; Richard Bissell, a Connecticut blue blood the CIA assigned to oversee and facilitate the hush-hush project; and Francis Gary Powers, one of the daredevil pilots selected to test the new spy plane, which they called the U-2. Powers would later be shot down over the Soviet Union in the U-2, sparking even more saber-rattling.

Among the more colorful characters traipsing through this wide-ranging narrative are the bulldoggish General Curtis LeMay, J. Edgar Hoover, the influential and socially well-connected columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, the surprisingly restrained and canny Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who regarded Powers as a coward and traitor because he didn’t kill himself before being captured by the KGB.

A story as well told as Monte Reel’s A Brotherhood of Spies is an irresistible call to binge-reading.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A story as well told as Monte Reel’s A Brotherhood of Spies is an irresistible call to binge-reading.

NonfictionBiography

A family torn apart

Review by Edward Morris

Drawing on copious interviews and verbatim excerpts from the subjects’ social media, Åsne Seierstad offers us an over-the-shoulder look at a Somali family in Norway being torn apart by the religious fanaticism of the family’s two teenage daughters. Two Sisters is a harrowing read, as it lays bare the most barbaric aspects of humanity, taking us into the ISIS camps in Syria where young children are brutalized and made to participate in beheadings, stonings and crucifixions all in the name of pleasing God.

Ayan and Leila migrated with their family from Somalia to Norway in 2000. Initially, they acclimated well to their new surroundings. They adopted local customs and clothing, generally shone academically and took to social media with the expertise and enthusiasm of their native-born peers. Gradually, though, they embraced fundamentalist goals and values, calling for a caliphate in Syria and the imposition of sharia, demanding special accommodations from the school system, preaching death for nonbelievers, applauding the killing of Norwegian soldiers in Afghanistan and smugly asserting they were spiritually infallible. They encountered no significant pushback from the state.

To help finance their flight from Norway, Ayan, by then 19, ran up huge credit card bills and signed up for numerous phone services and then sold the phones. They fooled their parents, who didn’t know anything was amiss until they disappeared. Attempting to bring his daughters back, the father spent all he could borrow on trips to Syria and was nearly killed more than once. The heartbroken mother retreated to Somalia for a period with the two younger sons. Disgusted by his sisters’ cruel indifference, the oldest brother announced he had become an atheist.

This is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a society moves from simply tolerating antisocial religious beliefs to actually incubating and enabling them.

Drawing on copious interviews and verbatim excerpts from the subjects’ social media, Åsne Seierstad offers us an over-the-shoulder look at a Somali family in Norway being torn apart by the religious fanaticism of the family’s two teenage daughters. Two Sisters is a harrowing read, as it lays bare the most barbaric aspects of humanity, taking us into the ISIS camps in Syria where young children are brutalized and made to participate in beheadings, stonings and crucifixions all in the name of pleasing God.

NonfictionBiography

All that money can buy

Review by Edward Morris

“Dangerous” is probably not the first adjective that comes to mind when perusing Susan Ronald’s minutely detailed biography of Florence Gould, A Dangerous Woman. “Determined” and “devious” would be more apt descriptors, since this professional enchantress pursued her life of pleasures less by brute force than by working harder and smarter than anyone who stood in her way.

Born in San Francisco to French-immigrant parents, Florence, her sister and her mother decamped to Paris just months after the catastrophic earthquake of 1906 laid waste to the city by the bay. Except for occasional returns to the U.S., principally for business and philanthropy, Florence remained a Parisian. Her mother’s preferred child, Florence was blessed by remarkable beauty and animated by an iron determination to marry well. This she did via her marriage in 1923 to multimillionaire Frank Gould, son of the eminent robber baron Jay Gould.

The marriage vaulted Florence into the upper layers of Parisian society and insulated her from the discomforts the general population of Paris suffered as a consequence of the Great War, the Depression and the German occupation of the city during World War II. Among the many notables who enjoyed Florence’s friendship and largesse were Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Estée Lauder, Maurice Chevalier, Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel. Although Florence was clearly a Nazi collaborator and trader in stolen art, she remained essentially untouched after the war and ended her life as an honored contributor to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The one element missing here is the sound of Florence’s own voice. That’s because her estate denied the author access to its archives, including Florence’s letters. So while we’re told virtually everything she did and everyone she slept with (a long list), we know precious little of how she felt as she moved full sail through her momentous life.

“Dangerous” is probably not the first adjective that comes to mind when perusing Susan Ronald’s minutely detailed biography of Florence Gould, A Dangerous Woman. “Determined” and “devious” would be more apt descriptors, since this professional enchantress pursued her life of pleasures less by brute force than by working harder and smarter than anyone who stood in her way.

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