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Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

NonfictionBiographyArts & Culture

Mike Nichols

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

With his peripatetic creativity, knack for comic improvisation and canny ability to draw out an actor’s best performances, Mike Nichols became one of the most acclaimed theater and film directors of our time. In the sprawling yet intimate Mike Nichols: A Life, Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution) captures the ups and downs, the enthralling highs and ragged despair, of the man whom Harris calls “the last of a certain kind of cultural celebrity—someone who could travel between film and theater, who understood art and politics and fashion and history and money, a man of the world and of his century.”

Drawing on 250 interviews with Nichols' friends and family, Harris traces Nichols’ rag-to-riches story, beginning with the immigration of 7-year-old Igor Michael Peschkowsky (Nichols' birth name) to New York from Berlin. From there the tale follows his father’s death when Nichols was 12, an allergic reaction that resulted in his hairlessness and his eventual move to Chicago, where he took the first steps toward his eventual success. Although he had enrolled as a student at the University of Chicago—where he met and developed lifelong friendships with Susan Sontag and Ed Asner, among others—he ultimately fell in with Paul Sills, who directed Nichols in the improvisation group the Compass Players, the forerunner of Second City. In Chicago, Nichols worked as a DJ at the famed program "The Midnight Special" on WFMT, and he also met Elaine May, with whom he developed a popular comedic partnership.

Eventually Nichols left Chicago for New York City, where he would direct in quick succession the plays Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple and Little Foxes to great acclaim. He then moved into film as the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Harris artfully tracks Nichols' deep desire to work and to inspire others to embrace the power of theater and film. “Movies give us a chance to live other lives," Nichols said, "and we walk on the set every morning thinking, Anything can happen.”

Candid, colorful and chock-full of detail, Mike Nichols: A Life is the biography that Nichols well deserves.

Candid, colorful and chock-full of detail, Mike Nichols: A Life is the biography that Nichols well deserves.

NonfictionMusic

Dolly Parton, Songteller

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

’Tis the season to be Dolly! In Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, the lovable, candid, tell-it-like-it-is singer shares her own story through the lyrics of her songs. While fans love Parton for her crystal-clear vocals and her charming, witty stage presence, she’s always thought of herself as a songwriter first, and this book illustrates her deep devotion to music that captures a moment or tells a heart-rending tale. As she reveals, “I write a lot from my own heart. But I also just have a big imagination. When I was young, we didn’t go to the movies, so I just created my own stories. It’s kind of embedded in me to make up songs and stories.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Don't miss Sarah Smarsh's incisive investigation into Dolly Parton's influence on the women who grew up with her music, She Come by It Natural.

Chock-full of never-before-seen photographs and memorabilia from Parton’s archives, every chapter tells a portion of her biography. Using lyrics from 175 of her songs—including “Coat of Many Colors,” “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene”—she traces the journey from her Tennessee mountain childhood to her role on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” her 9 to 5 days and her bluegrass albums. As she provides a glimpse into the origins of each song, Parton notes that she has “never shied away from any topic, whether it was suicide or prostitution or women’s rights or whatever. . . . Whatever it is, I can say it in a song, in my own way.”

Parton tells her stories with a grin and a twinkle in her eye. Her book invites us to sit a spell as she weaves her enchanting storytelling web around us, wrapping us in the warm, silky threads of her voice and comforting us with her presence.

In Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, the lovable, candid, tell-it-like- it-is singer shares her own story through the lyrics of her songs.

Nonfiction

The Mutant Project

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Advances in medicine often outrun advances in ethics. Scientists are constantly discovering new techniques, procedures and treatments that can alter certain conditions or, in some case, eradicate disease—yet, does the potential of the discovery outweigh its inherent risks? Asked another way, just because we can prolong human life, should we? What, for example, are the long-term risks of the way chemotherapy changes human cellular structure? What are the consequences of genetic editing (cloning, genome mapping) to create and shape human life? With scalpel-like precision, anthropologist Eben Kirksey carves away at these questions in The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans.

The book opens in Hong Kong in November 2018 at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Mapping, where Chinese researcher Jiankui He breaks the news that he has manipulated the genes of freshly fertilized eggs, creating the world’s first “edited” babies. At the conference, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer in the use of a new genetic engineering tool called CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), comments that she knew this day would come but imagined it to be far into the future. Drawing on conversations with Doudna and other scientists, as well as with medical doctors, corporate lobbyists and biotechnology entrepreneurs, Kirksey follows CRISPR around the world, seeking to discover the ways that genetic engineering will transform humanity.

Various questions fuel his search. Who is gaining access to cutting-edge genetic medicine? Are there creative ways to democratize the field? Should parents be allowed to choose the genetic makeup of their children? How much can we actually change about the human condition by tinkering with DNA? In the end, Kirksey concedes that human bodies are ongoing mutant projects, evolving over time in response to various diseases and treatments. We can control our biological destiny to some extent, but he urges caution, prudence and care as we make “new personal and political choices about the future of human biology.”

The Mutant Project might provoke and disturb as it raises unsettling questions about the nature of human life, technology and corporate and personal greed, but Kirksey’s entertaining and fascinating combination of detective story, medical history and ethics is a must-read.

Scientists are constantly discovering new techniques, procedures and treatments that can alter certain conditions or, in some case, eradicate disease—yet, does the potential of the discovery outweigh its inherent risks? Asked another way, just because we can prolong human life, should we?
NonfictionBlack HistoryBiography

The Dead Are Arising

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The Autobiography of Malcom X remains one of the most captivating and essential books of the 20th century. In it, the iconic activist offered glimpses of his probing self-awareness and his piercing and astute examinations of racial issues in the United States. It provided the outlines of his childhood, his life in prison, his religious conversion and his commitment to and eventual disaffection from the Nation of Islam. Now Pulitzer Prize winner Les Payne’s monumental and absorbing The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X peers into the gaps left by Malcolm X’s autobiography, taking us more deeply into the intimate details of his life, work and death.

In 1990, investigative reporter Payne began conducting hundreds of interviews with Malcolm X’s family members, childhood friends, classmates and bodyguards, as well as with FBI agents, photographers, U.N. representatives, African revolutionaries and presidents and the two men falsely imprisoned for killing him. Drawing on these conversations, Payne traces Malcom X’s story from his childhood in Omaha, Nebraska, through his teenage years in Lansing, Michigan, where Malcolm learned to resist the racial provocations of his white classmates. Payne chronicles Malcolm X’s time in prison, where fellow inmate John E. Bembry challenged Malcolm X by telling the young prisoner, “If I had some brains, I’d use them.” This encouraged Malcolm X to read all he could and to not only engage others with words but also support those words with facts from experts. Payne documents Malcolm X’s meeting with the KKK in 1961 and shows how that meeting sowed the seeds of his disenchantment with the Nation of Islam. In vivid detail, Payne retells the events leading up to Malcolm X’s assassination, offering fresh information about those involved.

The Dead Are Arising is essential reading. Completed after the author’s death by Tamara Payne, Les’ daughter and the book’s primary researcher, it illustrates the forces that shaped Malcolm X and captures the vibrant voice of a revolutionary whose words resonate powerfully in our own times.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out The Dead Are Arising and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

The Autobiography of Malcom X remains one of the most captivating and essential books of the 20th century. In it, the iconic activist offered glimpses of his probing self-awareness and his piercing and astute examinations of racial issues in the United States. It provided the outlines of his childhood, his life in prison, his religious […]
NonfictionBiography

Mad at the World

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

John Steinbeck just might be the novelist for our time. In his sprawling epic The Grapes of Wrath, he captured Americans’ peculiar yearning for a life not their own, the promise of wealth beyond the veil of desolation and the wretched impossibility of such a promise. Steinbeck’s other epic, East of Eden, illustrates the ragged desperation of human nature, wreaking destruction rather than carrying hope. William Souder’s bracing Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck vividly portrays the brooding and moody writer who could never stop writing and who never fit comfortably in the society in which he lived.

Souder, whose biography of John James Audobon was a Pulitzer finalist, traces Steinbeck’s love of story and storytelling to his childhood. As a teenager, Steinbeck immersed himself in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which he translated later in life, and in adventure tales and classics such as Treasure Island, Madame Bovary and Crime and Punishment. This early reading gave him glimpses into the shadowy corners of the human heart and provided him with models for telling tales of people engaged in heroic struggles against the injustices of their eras.

Steinbeck was a born storyteller, a writer who was not happy unless he was working, a novelist a bit out of step with his times (many of his social realist novels appeared during the innovations of modernism) and a reticent man who would rather write than talk publicly about his writing. Steinbeck’s greatest virtue, according to Souder, was his “ability to live inside other cultures, other races; he brought people to life who were otherwise invisible and voiceless.” The first Steinbeck biography since Jay Parini’s more psychological John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995), Mad at the World vibrantly illuminates the life and work of a writer who is still widely read and relevant today.

John Steinbeck just might be the novelist for our time. In his sprawling epic The Grapes of Wrath, he captured Americans’ peculiar yearning for a life not their own, the promise of wealth beyond the veil of desolation and the wretched impossibility of such a promise. Steinbeck’s other epic, East of Eden, illustrates the ragged […]
NonfictionAnimals

Tales from the Ant World

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Whether he’s writing about island biogeography, sociobiology, human nature or biodiversity, naturalist Edward O. Wilson tells a cracking good story. He’s a raconteur who compels us to stop for a moment and listen in rapt wonder to his captivating tales of forays into forests, where he uncovers rotted logs or overturns mounds in search of the great variety of species in the ant world. With characteristic passion and humor, Wilson regales us with Tales From the Ant World, combining memoir and scientific discovery into a spellbinding narrative of his lifelong devotion to myrmecology, the study of ants.

Most of us are familiar with the ants that track across our kitchen counters on warm spring days, but few of us take the time to consider those creatures’ lives. Wilson unveils the ant fauna, revealing the astonishing number of ants in the world (more than 15,000 species, and some have estimated that the number is closer to 25,000 or 30,000), their social quirks (pouring out of their “hidden bivouac,” uncoiling like a rope and moving “hard and fast” from “one stronghold to the next”) and their ways of communicating (of all the social insects that communicate by pheromones, ants are the virtuosos of chemical communication). 

Wilson’s absorbing and delightful book shows how extraordinary (and populous!) this common creature really is. As he puts it, “If Homo sapiens had not arisen as an accidental primate species on the grasslands of Africa, and spread worldwide, visitors from other star systems, when they come (and mark my word, they will eventually come), should be inclined to call Earth ‘planet of the ants.’ ” In his enchanting Tales From the Ant World, Wilson encourages readers to feed those ants in your kitchen and observe them. In doing so, you’ll discover a great deal about the social world of insects and, perhaps, about yourselves.

Whether he’s writing about island biogeography, sociobiology, human nature or biodiversity, naturalist Edward O. Wilson tells a cracking good story. He’s a raconteur who compels us to stop for a moment and listen in rapt wonder to his captivating tales of forays into forests, where he uncovers rotted logs or overturns mounds in search of […]
NonfictionLiteratureEssays

The Unreality of Memory

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The novelist Walker Percy once asked, “Why do people driving around on beautiful Sunday afternoons like to see bloody automobile wrecks?” With this simple question, Percy reveals the depth of human malaise. We seek the bloody in the beautiful and savor the gratifying and self-satisfied thrill of knowing we ourselves have momentarily escaped the suffering of the accident. In her absolutely stunning collection of essays, The Unreality of Memory, which is part medical and psychological sleuthing and part memoir, Elisa Gabbert takes up Percy’s question and places it in our current cultural context.

Gabbert’s opening essay, “Magnificent Desolation,” explores the human loss of three catastrophic events: the sinking of the Titanic, the collapse of the World Trade Center and the Challenger disaster. She ends the essay by admitting she has a “strange instinctual desire for things to get even worse” when bad things happen, and she knows she isn't alone in feeling this way. “I fear this part of me, the small but undeniable pull of disaster," she writes. "It’s something we all must have inside of us. Who can say it doesn’t have influence? This secret wish for the blowout ending?”

Gabbert doesn't only probe into our fascination with the pull of death and disaster. She also peers behind the curtains of mortality and time to explore the ways that memory and story either lull us into complacency about moral evil or allow us to embrace impending death. In “The Great Mortality,” about being faced with overwhelming facts about a natural disasters that could extinguish a massive number of human lives, she reflects, “In this age of horrible news all the time, we understand it instantly: ironic suicidal ideation . . . there’s something real behind it—the fantasy of the swift death, the instinct just to get it over with.” In her essay “I’m So Tired,” Gabbert concludes, with some relief, that humans don’t simply wish to witness a catastrophe and stand aside but that “compassion fatigue stems from a desire to help.”

Gabbert candidly asks startling and unsettling questions about our view of human nature and the ways we are often complicit in the suffering of others. With the world teetering on the brink of the political, social, environmental and medical abyss, The Unreality of Memory is a book for our times.

The novelist Walker Percy once asked, “Why do people driving around on beautiful Sunday afternoons like to see bloody automobile wrecks?” With this simple question, Percy reveals the depth of human malaise. We seek the bloody in the beautiful and savor the gratifying and self-satisfied thrill of knowing we ourselves have momentarily escaped the suffering of the accident. In her absolutely […]
NonfictionSocial ScienceMiddle Eastern History

Sex and Lies

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

When bestselling author Leila Slimani published her debut novel, Adéle, in 2014, she spent two weeks on a book tour around Morocco. After her events at bookshops, universities and libraries, numerous women were hungry to discuss their own personal and political struggles to express their sexuality in a country that represses women’s sexual natures. Slimani collects many of these testimonies, woven together with her own reflections on Morocco’s social attitudes toward sex, in Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World.

Soraya, an attractive woman, perhaps in her 40s, locates Slimani in the hotel bar one evening after an event and, reticently at first, opens up to Slimani about her mother’s marital counsel: “Don’t forget to stay a virgin.” Soraya shares that she never experienced sexual pleasure in her marriage but that, after her divorce, she wants to discover pleasure and freedom. Slimani uses Soraya’s story as an illustration of the many ways women in Morocco face humiliation—humiliations that men never face. They must be good girls, and if they lose their virginity, they are “spoiled.”

Malika is a 40-year-old doctor who’s single and has never been married. Although she feels freer than many women who lack her income and social status, she still must live a life of subterfuge when she wants to sleep with her partner, checking into French hotels where no one will ask them for an ID. As Malika puts it, “Hypocrisy is growing here, and conservatism, too.” Slimani reflects on Malika’s story by pointing out that the more freedom women gain in Moroccan society, the more they take up public space, which leaves men feeling unmoored.

Provocative and disturbing, fervent and moving, Sex and Lies offers a glimpse into a world often hidden from view, allowing Moroccan women to express in their own words their desires and hopes for a sexual revolution in their society.

When bestselling author Leila Slimani published her debut novel, Adéle, in 2014, she spent two weeks on a book tour around Morocco. After her events at bookshops, universities and libraries, numerous women were hungry to discuss their own personal and political struggles to express their sexuality in a country that represses women’s sexual natures. Slimani […]
NonfictionMemoir

Rockaway

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

There are few things in life more exhilarating than catching the just-right wave—watching the wall of water form and waiting for the perfect moment to push up on the board, shoot the curl and be transported. Rockaway, Diane Cardwell’s bracing memoir of the ways that surfing launched her into a new life, is as invigorating as waxing up your board and getting in the water.

In 2010, following her divorce, Cardwell finds herself shuffling listlessly through her life and work as a New York Times reporter. Casting about for an assignment, she heads out to Montauk, Long Island, and spies a group of surfers out in the shimmering surf. Although she’s never been athletic, she’s transfixed by this group of men and women, and soon she’s trekking out to Rockaway Beach from her apartment in Brooklyn to take lessons and join her newfound troop. As she rides the train home after one of her first lessons, she embraces the “righteous soreness from going all-out chasing after something that I’d decided, entirely on my own, I wanted to do. I was proud of myself for not chickening out, for not, as usual, letting the fear of failure stop me.”

Cardwell dives into surfing, alternating between fear of failure and dogged determination. As she gains more confidence and develops her own style, she eventually moves to Rockaway Beach, buys a little cottage and a board and thrives in her new neighborhood, mostly made up of surfers. When Hurricane Sandy hits in 2012, she rides it out in Rockaway with some of her friends, and they emerge as an even more tightknit community.

Cardwell’s moving story washes over the reader with its emotionally rich portrayal of the ragged ways we can embrace our vulnerabilities in order to overcome them.

There are few things in life more exhilarating than catching the just-right wave—watching the wall of water form and waiting for the perfect moment to push up on the board, shoot the curl and be transported. Rockaway, Diane Cardwell’s bracing memoir of the ways that surfing launched her into a new life, is as invigorating […]
NonfictionBiography

Philosopher of the Heart

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Books by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard aren’t likely on many readers’ nightstands these days. After all, titles such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Repetition and The Concept of Anxiety don’t exactly inspire a desire to dig deeper into their contents (even though the latter title sounds at least like it might be fitting for our unsettling times.) Yet, as Clare Carlisle demonstrates in the absorbing and captivating Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, reading Kierkegaard is much like reading a good novel or a thoughtful poem. Above all, his work struggles artistically with what it means to be human and what it means to love, expressing these concerns in rhetorical styles that seduce the reader into complex philosophical sketches about aesthetics, ethics and religion.

Carlisle, Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London, eschews the contours of traditional biography, focusing instead on Kierkegaard’s growth and development as a writer through a careful look at his publications. Writing became the fabric of Kierkegaard’s existence, says Carlisle—the “most vibrant love of his life.” (“All his other loves flowed into it, and it swelled like the ocean that crashed against his native land.”) Among these other loves, Carlisle deftly illustrates the ways that Kierkegaard’s breakup with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, haunted him through all his life, weaving itself in some fashion or another through all of his writings. Carlisle points out that Kierkegaard’s work of “soul-searching, exploring his own anxiety and suffering,” deepens “his understanding of being human, and [gives] his philosophy a power to affect others.”

Philosopher of the Heart does what the best biographies do: It sends us back to Kierkegaard’s time so we can see for ourselves the beauty, intricacy and literary artistry of what he accomplished. Carlisle’s meticulous reading of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre reveals that his work deserves a wider audience for its insights into what it means to be human. This penetrating introduction will encourage us to put Fear and Trembling or Stages on Life’s Way on our nightstands.

Books by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard aren’t likely on many readers’ nightstands these days. After all, titles such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Repetition and The Concept of Anxiety don’t exactly inspire a desire to dig deeper into their contents (even though the latter title sounds at least like it might be fitting for our unsettling […]
NonfictionEssays

I’ve Been Wrong Before

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The best personal essays allow a momentary glimpse of the writer’s vulnerability and reveal facets of the writer’s personality that they otherwise shroud in secrecy. Yet, for these essays to work, their words and phrases must dance with a lithesome rhythm that carries readers along to a climactic revelatory moment. The essays collected in Evan James’ I’ve Been Wrong Before dazzle with such moments and language.

The ragged ways we fall in and out of relationships are at the center of these mostly already published essays, as James ponders the complexities of love, lust, sexuality and the permanence of longing against the backdrop of his world travels. Along the way, he often acts indecisively as he moves into a one-night stand or tentatively as he enters relationships that might last a little longer. Standing outside a bar in Chicago and looking for the Texan he has just met but who seems to have vanished into the night, James declares, “My mind was a church window through which someone had thrown a jagged rock, a broken scene of worship,” after being shattered by the possibility of love. In Barcelona, James meets Sergio, falling into a passionate relationship with him. Entranced by the possibilities of a future with Sergio and a life in Spain, he decides to drop out of college and remain; his resolve wavers, however, and on the flight home he “calls himself names all the way back.”

As he’s raking the soil in the family garden, he thinks about everything he’s missing out on while making a life for himself mopping up tiles in a bathhouse. James describes his coming out to his mother in a reflection on the movie Class Act in the essay “One Hell of a Homie” and realizes gleefully, “I felt giddy and villainous; now that I knew I could make people cry by coming out, I couldn’t wait to do it again.”

With spellbinding radiance, I’ve Been Wrong Before illumines the corners of James’ life and loves and captures a man in search of, and discovering, words that describe the jagged, sometimes ineffable paths he’s traversed in his life.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Evan James and seven other new and emerging memoirists.

The best personal essays allow a momentary glimpse of the writer’s vulnerability and reveal facets of the writer’s personality that they otherwise shroud in secrecy. Yet, for these essays to work, their words and phrases must dance with a lithesome rhythm that carries readers along to a climactic revelatory moment. The essays collected in Evan James’ […]
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistory

Seduction

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

We’ve all been seduced before. We’ve allowed politicians to lure us away from our reason to follow our passions for an issue or a candidate; we’ve let television commercials sing a siren song to us about our absolute need for a product—a car, a bottle of beer, a chicken sandwich—that will send us into ecstasy once we possess it. We’re surrounded by seduction narratives, and Clement Knox’s Seduction: A History from the Enlightenment to the Present provides an alluring and breathtaking history of enticement in the modern age.

A painstakingly close reader of literary texts, Knox teases out various seduction narratives in novels from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa—the original modern seduction narratives—to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Neil Strauss’ The Game. Enthralled by these and other texts and cultural artefacts, Knox draws the contours of two forms of seduction narratives that have evolved and now coexist in our culture. He calls the classic seduction narrative the “Villainous” kind, because the seducer uses guile or deception to overcome the resistance of their target. Such narratives play on the psychological vulnerability of the target so that the seducer can lead the target away from what the target really prefers or wants. The other narrative focuses on the power of reason and an individual’s ability to act in their own interest in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

These seduction narratives are captivating, and most of us are characters in one or the other in our own lives. Knox’s fascinating book illustrates the magnetism of these narratives as they draw us into their orbits and as we use them to offer explanations of individual and social behavior.

We’ve all been seduced before. We’ve allowed politicians to lure us away from our reason to follow our passions for an issue or a candidate; we’ve let television commercials sing a siren song to us about our absolute need for a product—a car, a bottle of beer, a chicken sandwich—that will send us into ecstasy […]
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Wilmington’s Lie

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In 1898, the American Baptist Publication Society called Wilmington, North Carolina, “the freest town for a negro in the country.” By November 10 of that same year, Wilmington had devolved into perhaps the most dangerous place for black people in North Carolina, if not in America. David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy explores in gripping detail the efforts of white supremacists to overturn black political and social power in Wilmington and to eliminate black citizens by any means necessary.

One long-held view of the November 1898 events in Wilmington is that they were race riots. Zucchino digs deep into archival records, interviews locals’ descendants about their relatives’ involvement in the events and discovers that there’s simply no evidence that race riots fomented by black people against white people occurred. Instead, he uncovers evidence that on that November day, white men had been buying guns, vowing to remove Wilmington’s “interracial government and black officials by the ballot or the bullet.”

Zucchino carefully outlines the roles that black people held in Wilmington’s government and explores why white people were bothered by what they called “Negro rule” when black people held only a small portion of elected positions in the city. With dramatic opening sentences (“The killers came by streetcar. Their boots struck the packed clay like muffled drumbeats as they bounded from the cars and began to patrol the wide dirt roads.”), Zucchino creates a suspenseful atmosphere as he unfolds the stories of white supremacist Democrats who would stop at nothing to, as they saw it, take back Wilmington. The results of these events “inspired white supremacists across the South. . . . Wilmington’s whites had mounted America’s first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government. They had murdered blacks with impunity. . . . They had turned a black-majority city into a white citadel.”

Wilmington’s Lie is a riveting and mesmerizing page turner, with lessons about racial violence that echo loudly today.

In 1898, the American Baptist Publication Society called Wilmington, North Carolina, “the freest town for a negro in the country.” By November 10 of that same year, Wilmington had devolved into perhaps the most dangerous place for black people in North Carolina, if not in America. David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 […]

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