Roger Bishop

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Jonna Mendez sums up her extraordinary 25 years at the CIA thusly: “It was a career I loved. I was doing work that mattered, work that made a difference—making history in some small way. It wasn’t a path I’d ever imagined for myself. I was, after all, just a girl from Wichita, Kansas, seeking adventure, never dreaming that would translate into a life that was both covert and trailblazing.”

But it was not easy. She tells her engaging and enlightening story of service, primarily during the Cold War years, in In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked. The challenges of the work itself were great. And although against official policy, misogyny was the way of life in the agency, and Mendez’s experience with gender discrimination provides a look into that environment. CIA historian and journalist Tim Weiner wrote that “apart from the Marines, there is no branch of service in the United States government as hostile to women as the clandestine services of the CIA.” Despite the efforts of some men who went out of their way to undermine Mendez, she showed courage and fortitude, and, in time, she found male allies who were helpful and supportive.

Beginning as a secretary for her CIA agent husband, Mendez rose through the ranks of the organization. Her skills with photography and disguise eventually led to extremely important roles, including Chief of Disguise, in operations around the world. In True Face includes fascinating accounts of the wide range of her activities. She trained couples, usually married, for work as agents in Moscow; disguised a prime minister; and “match[ed] wits” with Russia’s KGB, East Germany’s Stasi, and Chinese and Cuban intelligence. Mendez, in disguise, even visited the White House to meet with President George H.W. Bush.

This consistently absorbing book is a wonderful memoir that offers more than simply a compelling life story. Mendez says discussions with other women in the early stages of the project convinced her that her experiences should be understood “in the larger context of women in the CIA and indeed, women in the American workplace.” So we have “two stories—one in the world of espionage, the other in the world of women.” And both of them are very well told.

In True Face recounts Jonna Mendez’s experience rising through the ranks of the CIA, from disguising spies and planning special operations to grappling with gender discrimination.
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Winston Churchill’s close ties with the United States began with his mother, Jennie Jerome, who at age 20 married Lord Randolph Churchill. As an author and prominent public figure, Winston developed an extraordinary relationship with the United States, and a keen interest in the Civil War. Over the years he had two basic goals related to the U.S. First, he believed it was in Britain’s national interest for the two countries, with their shared purposes and similar concerns, to stay close. The second was personal. He lived extravagantly and was always looking for ways to expand his resources. His books were published and reviewed in the U.S. and he was paid well for his lectures and magazine and newspaper work. Like his mother, who had used her influence to advance his early career, he became a world-class networker himself as he met American leaders.

How this developed is the subject of Cita Stelzer’s fascinating Churchill’s American Network: Winston Churchill and the Forging of the Special Relationship. In Churchill’s age, the public got the news from newspapers and magazines. Stelzer’s research largely is sourced from “rich and relatively underutilized” local and national press reports of Churchill’s U.S. visits—ranging from where he went and with whom, to local responses at his public lectures, his humorous quips, what he ate for lunch and how he found his accommodations. Stelzer brings to life a cast of characters Churchill brought into his network, among them media giant William Randolph Hearst, actor and director Charlie Chaplin, journalist Edward R. Murrow, steel magnate Charles M. Schwab and socialite and suffragist Daisy Harriman.

While Stelzer does not claim Churchill single-handedly influenced Roosevelt’s decision to come to Britain’s aid during World War II, she makes clear that his relationships with American politicians and leading thinkers “were a helpful offset to the noninterventionist and isolationist, even pro-German background of public opinion.” Churchill’s network “reenforced the favorable view of Britain,” Stelzer writes, “and enlisted others in support of his view that the Anglo-American alliance . . . was key to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world.”

Stelzer’s scholarship on Churchill has been highly praised: 2019’s Working With Winston explores the world of Churchill’s secretaries, and 2013’s Dinner With Churchill focuses on the prime minister’s dinner table diplomacy. Churchill’s American Network is another enlightening look at the statesman, one with an even broader scope.

Cita Stelzer’s enlightening Churchill’s American Network explores the statesman’s nexus of influencers in a country he loved.
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Dissent has played a defining role in the history of the United States. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution established guides to governance, but it is often dissent, sometimes over many years of struggle, that has brought the principles of those writings into concrete fruition. Temple University historian Ralph Young gives us a meticulously researched and beautifully written overview of the many kinds of dissent in American Patriots: A Short History of Dissent.

Following a meaty exploration of early examples—such as the development of the colonial era’s principles of freedom of the press and the separation of church and state, and Henry David Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government”—Young focuses on the last 100 years or so. During that time, new technologies increasingly enabled dissenters to advance their causes more efficiently and to more people. Women’s rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, antiwar movements and more are highlighted in some detail.

Young discusses the difference between genuine dissent and synthetic dissent. Of the January 6 insurrection, when supporters of Donald Trump invaded the U.S. Capitol claiming that the presidential election had been stolen, he writes, “Dissenters have legitimate grievances against the dominant power structure. True dissent is based upon expressing truth and exposing injustice.” The members of the mob, he posits, were “pawns of a charismatic demagogue who were short-circuited by conspiracy theories and disinformation.” True dissenters want to bring reform from within the system—not to crush it, as terrorists and revolutionaries do, Young argues. True dissent is a deeply patriotic effort to get the country to live up to its highest ideals. In the book’s conclusion, Young quotes Dwight D. Eisenhower: “We must never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

Dissent can be complex, whether the category is political, economic, religious, social or cultural, or an overlapping of causes. World War II is a good example of the last. As Young writes, “Although most Americans supported the ‘Good War,’ many thousands protested against the war, against the draft, and against infringements on civil liberties and civil rights.”

Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” This wide-ranging and enlightening book illustrates the crucial truth of that statement.

In the meticulously researched and enlightening American Patriots, Ralph Young illustrates the crucial role of dissent in our democracy.
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Historian Elizabeth R. Varon’s authoritative and fascinating biography Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South illuminates the man she calls “one of the Civil War era’s best-known—but least understood—figures.”

James Longstreet first owned enslaved people when he was just 11 years old. Influenced by his uncle, a prominent pro-slavery ideologue, he attended West Point, and soon after distinguished himself in the Mexican War. Though he would later paint a picture of his younger self as a reluctant secessionist pressured by his family, Varon points out another biographer, Jeffry Wert, revealed that Longstreet “acted with surprising haste” in embracing the cause. As a Confederate general, Longstreet “tried to preempt and to punish the many forms of Black resistance” and “worked to forestall and undermine emancipation.” His outstanding record in the Civil War led Robert E. Lee to refer to Longstreet as his “old war-horse.”

Following the Confederacy’s defeat, Longstreet and his family moved to New Orleans, where the city’s “cosmopolitan culture, entrepreneurial energy, and democratic diversity seemed fertile ground for political transformations to take root.” It was in this atmosphere that Longstreet published four public letters expressing his support for Congress’ Reconstruction Acts, changing his life forever and turning friends into political enemies. He became a leader in the state’s Republican Party, supporting Black enfranchisement and school integration. His advocacy for Black soldiers, Varon writes, was “his boldest, most radical contribution to Reconstruction.”

Longstreet’s “political journey from ardent Confederate to ardent Republican was an exceedingly unlikely one,” writes Varon. “In time, as he experienced the transformations of Reconstruction, he would come to accept fully an influential Unionist interpretation of emancipation.” Though he was celebrated as a Confederate, supporters of the Lost Cause retroactively blamed the Gettysburg defeat on Longstreet, and some blamed him for the Confederacy losing the war.

Varon relies on Longstreet’s frequent interviews with the press, his essays and his 1896 memoir published, in which, Varon says, he “succeeded . . . in refashioning himself as a prophet of sectional reconciliation between the North and South.” The transformation of his outlook was strongly influenced by Ulysses S. Grant, his close friend from when both were cadets at West Point. As newly elected president, Grant insisted on appointing Longstreet to his first political office, as surveyor of the port of New Orleans. After Grant’s death in 1885, Longstreet said the former president was the “highest type of manhood America has produced.”

This engaging narrative brings a complex figure to light. The author is, on the whole, sympathetic of the once-rebel general. “Longstreet,” writes Varon, “saw his stance on Reconstruction as an extension of his Southern identity, not a repudiation of it.” But Varon is also honest about Longstreet’s flaws and contradictions. Longstreet should enlighten many readers of American history.

Elizabeth R. Varon’s commanding biography of James Longstreet charts the Confederate general’s reinvention as a passionate advocate of Reconstruction.
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Albert Einstein is the best known scientist of the 20th century. As Samuel Graydon explains in his insightful Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particles, “Einstein’s fame can get in the way of an objective assessment of his life . . . so it’s easy to fail to see what an astounding life Einstein did actually live.” The author describes his book as “a mosaic biography.” Through it, we see Einstein’s complex personal life and intense public life within the context of his times.

Graydon writes that “Einstein’s finest work was all produced before he was famous, and for much of his early life he was a reasonably obscure figure. It took him nine years to secure an assistant professorship, and even then he wasn’t first choice for the job.” In 1905, while working six days a week at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, and with family responsibilities, he “wrote twenty-one reviews for an academic journal” and “managed to produce five scientific papers in six months, three of which would eventually transform physics.” For reasons both of differences of opinion about scientific approaches and anti-Semitic prejudice against him, Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize until 1922, and not for his work on the general theory of relativity, on which his fame was based, but for his discovery of the modern understanding of light as a particle.

Einstein was a nonconformist, not a joiner of groups, indifferent to the opinions of others about him and awards he received. A lifelong pacifist, he was passionate about opposing social injustice and taking moral responsibility for events in the world. But he was also realistic. As Hitler gained power in Germany, Einstein understood the necessity of opposing him with military force. Einstein’s social activism led to accusations that he was a communist, frequently taking on the tone of “gossipy slander.” The FBI kept tabs on him for 20 years, and his file runs to 1,400 pages. The agency accused him of being a “personal courier from Communist Party Headquarters.” Despite these rumors, Einstein lent his name to various causes that worked for a fairer and more peaceful world.

Einstein once wrote that he understood Judaism as a “community of tradition,” rather than as a religion. He became a strong supporter of the Zionist cause and against anti-Semitism and was most helpful in helping many Jewish people emigrate from Europe. When asked if he believed in God, Einstein replied: “I believe in [17th-century philosopher Baruch] Spinoza’s God, who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

Graydon is the science editor of England’s Times Literary Supplement, and his discussion of Einstein’s work is approachable for those of us who have limited scientific literacy. This engaging account of a legendary figure should be of interest to many.

Samuel Graydon’s new biography of Albert Einstein is an approachable portrayal of the legendary figure’s life and times.
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On February 28, 2003, as President George W. Bush prepared to authorize military action, he turned to his advisers and asked if they had thought enough about “what they hoped to achieve in Iraq.” Plans were made and carried out, but in a short time, the Iraq policy went awry. Historian Melvyn P. Leffler explores the many reasons why in his enlightening, detailed Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq.

After 9/11, the president felt some responsibility for the attacks (there had been warnings not heeded), along with guilt, anger, fear, a sense of political expediency and a need for revenge, the mixture of which led him to declare war on terrorism. After the decision to invade Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was based, other potential dangers were considered. The president said repeatedly “that his most compelling fear was the prospect of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction from rogue regimes,” Leffler writes. Eventually the Bush administration turned its focus to Saddam Hussein, a ruthless tyrant in Iraq thought by some to have weapons of mass destruction. 

The Bush national security team was often regarded as unified and militant, Leffler explains. But in reality, the members were pragmatists with different approaches and interests who feuded with one another. Leffler shows that there was not a careful assessment of their proposed strategy for dealing with Hussein and Iraq. Hubris was a major factor, and no one person can be blamed. The president acted with the best of intentions, but his advisers who urged caution did so too hesitantly and ineffectively. Contrary to other accounts, Leffler claims that the president was not manipulated by others but was in charge at all times. He merely delegated too much authority and was indifferent to acrimony among his advisers, which adversely affected his policies.

As Leffler writes, President Bush “failed because his information was flawed, his assumptions inaccurate, his priorities imprecise, and his means incommensurate with his evolving ends.” Based on prodigious research, this superb account helps readers understand the many complexities of America’s attempts to keep our citizens safe in the face of very real dangers after 9/11.

President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy quickly went awry, and historian Melvyn P. Leffler’s enlightening, detailed book explores why.
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Four individuals served at the very top of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration from the spring of 1933 until his death in April 1945. They were originally outsiders but became invaluable leaders behind New Deal programs that were crucial to fighting the Depression and bringing victory in World War II. Author Derek Leebaert tells their stories in Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made

These four people came to Washington with fully formed, practical policy ideas. Frances Perkins, the new secretary of labor, was the first woman to be named to a presidential cabinet. She had worked with FDR when he was the governor of New York, so they had already discussed her plans, including doing away with child labor, before she agreed to join his staff in Washington. Harold Ickes was the secretary of the interior, and he had plans for protecting America’s mountains and forests. Henry Wallace, secretary of agriculture, believed he could achieve parity between farmers’ and industrial workers’ wages. Harry Hopkins wasn’t named to a cabinet position until later, but his extensive professional connections—and his impressive recall of the right people’s names—gave him an ability to get things done as the secretary of commerce. Much later, as World War II was nearing its end, these four continued to be the only top officials who were putting sensible plans for the postwar world into motion.

Perkins turned out to be a particularly effective administrator, making many decisions that were “dynamizing a generation,” Leebaert writes. With a combination of “private persuasion and public advocacy,” she helped open entire work sectors to women and urged women to step into jobs that were vacant while men were away at war. Meanwhile, her child services staff worked with the Army and Navy to provide services for spouses and children of enlisted men. She broke down barriers against employing women over 45, and she did not agree with those who felt the U.S. could trust Josef Stalin.

This well-researched, absorbing narrative reveals what it was like during the FDR administration from four unique perspectives. Unlikely Heroes should be of interest to a wide range of history and biography readers.

Derek Leebaert’s absorbing narrative goes behind the scenes of the FDR administration via the revealing perspectives of four cabinet members.
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John Randolph, a wealthy enslaver from Virginia, member of Congress for almost 30 years, strong defender of states’ rights and prominent public speaker, died in 1833. In the will that he created in 1821, he stipulated the freeing of every enslaved person on his plantation, which would amount to one of the largest manumissions in American history: 383 people. Before this could happen, however, the court system had to deal with the legality of a will Randolph created in 1832 that did not grant those people freedom. To determine the legality of the latter will, the courts had to consider Randolph’s mental state—whether he was “mad” or sane when he prepared it. Meanwhile, the enslaved people whose freedom was on the line waited anxiously for 13 years for a final decision. When that moment finally came, their resettlement and “freedom” in Ohio turned to disappointment and tragedy. Historian and lawyer Gregory May brilliantly captures these extraordinary events with his compelling, meticulously documented and beautifully written A Madman’s Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom.

Randolph was not only “a political celebrity, but a colorful character of the first order,” May writes—someone who “always craved public attention” and who, over the course of his political career, both defended and denounced slavery. Two of his early wills, prepared in 1819 and 1821, “freed all of Randolph’s slaves and provided funds to resettle them outside Virginia,” May writes. However, Randolph’s final will did not offer anyone freedom but instead indicated that most of the people enslaved on his plantation would be sold.

May includes a fascinating look at the legal and medical framework the courts used to examine Randolph’s sanity after his death. There were many stories about his “peculiarities,” including “fluctuations between excitement and dejection, enthusiasm and gloom,” especially during the last 10 years of his life. A Madman’s Will also includes other interesting descriptions of testimony, scandal and greed, including entertaining depictions of disappointed relatives who had hoped to be heirs.

In the end, May writes, neither Randolph nor the people he enslaved “could escape the underlying pull of prevailing white assumptions about race and social order.” Many white people could not comprehend the plight of people who were enslaved and were indifferent about their predicament. And so when those 383 formerly enslaved Black people arrived in Mercer County in the “free” state of Ohio, they were met by a white mob—and white residents’ violent objections to their settlement continued from there.

May’s account shows that “freedom” of any kind was virtually impossible for Black people in the United States in the early 1800s, no matter how carefully planned. This important book should be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in American history.

In the compelling and beautifully written A Madman’s Will, Gregory May captures the story of 383 enslaved people who waited 13 years to find out whether or not they were free.
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“I was twenty-eight years old when my mother first told me that her father had been imprisoned as a war criminal,” writes longtime New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger. His mother was born in 1935 and grew up in Germany during World War II. She immigrated to the United States, along with Bilger’s father, in 1962, and Bilger heard little talk about his mother’s father while growing up in Oklahoma. But after his mother received a collection of letters from an aunt in Germany in 2005, Bilger decided to find out as much of the truth as he could about his grandfather, Karl Gönner. 

Bilger shares his long journey of historical investigation in his exceptionally well-written and compulsively readable Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets. Official documents, letters, diaries and personal interviews with those who knew Gönner helped Bilger piece together this puzzle.

In 1940, Gönner became a school principal in the village of Bartenheim in occupied Alsace, “the land of three borders: France, Germany, and Switzerland all within a ten-mile radius.” In 1942, he also became the village’s Nazi Party chief, though Gönner would later claim that he refused the position at first. At the heart of Bilger’s book is the question of whether Gönner was a basically good person doing what he had to do to get by during wartime or if he was a committed Nazi monster. Former students and other villagers spoke well of how he had helped them during the war. At the same time, Gönner had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1933 and never seriously challenged the Party’s reign. Bilger did not find any antisemitic remarks in Gönner’s personal writings, but Bilger’s mother said Gönner made such comments at home. As Bilger writes, “There were no little errors in wartime Germany. The choices you made put you on one side of history or the other. Yet the more I learned about my grandfather, the harder he was to categorize.”

After the Germans were defeated, “more than three hundred thousand people [were] charged as war criminals and collaborators in France,” Bilger writes, including Gönner. It took a lot of hard work to convince the court that Gönner was not guilty of certain crimes, including murder. But what of Bilger’s ultimate judgment of Gönner? All of us would like to believe that we would have been strong enough to stand up against barbaric behavior and evil regimes. But as Bilger reflects, life is usually more complicated than we want it to be. Gönner’s life and times, as revealed through Bilger’s elegant and discerningly observed memoir, will challenge and enlighten many thoughtful readers.

In his exceptionally well-written memoir, Burkhard Bilger shares his long journey of historical investigation into his grandfather, who was a Nazi Party chief.
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The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not immediately bring World War II to an end. Bestselling author Evan Thomas (Ike’s Bluff) explains why in his superbly crafted military and diplomatic history Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II. “This book is a narrative of how the most destructive war in history ended—and very nearly did not,” he writes. “It asks what it was like to be one of the decent, imperfect people who made the decision to use a frighteningly powerful new weapon.” 

The three main figures, two American and one Japanese, were quite different from one another. The only thing they had in common was a desire to end the war. Henry L. Stimson, a Republican lawyer from New York, had been the secretary of state for Herbert Hoover and the secretary of war for William Howard Taft, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. His responsibilities included making decisions about the use of the atomic bomb. Thomas writes that Stimson “embodied and preached a philosophy that would make the United States, for all its flaws, the world’s essential nation: the belief that American foreign policy . . . should balance humanitarian and ethical values with cold-eyed power used in the national interest.”

The other American was General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, a West Point graduate who had been commander of strategic bombing in Europe before he was assigned the same responsibility in the Pacific. He was initially opposed to using the atomic bomb, but when the Japanese military continued to resist surrendering, he recommended dropping a third atomic bomb on Tokyo. Throughout his career, he remained deeply disturbed about the devastation and loss of life caused by these dreadful bombs.

The third man, career diplomat Shigenori Togo, became Japan’s foreign minister in 1941 and was very much against going to war with the United States. He left office for several years but returned in 1945 to take on a virtually impossible task: to push his military-led government toward surrender. As Thomas describes Japan’s predicament in 1945, “Some of the men now running the Japanese government want to bring the war to an end, but in a society where even the word surrender is forbidden, they cannot admit it.”

Whether the A-bomb should have been used at all remains a controversial subject. Thomas effectively shows, with meticulous scholarship, that even after two atomic bombs had been dropped, the most influential military leaders in Japan insisted on continuing to fight. “Had Japan fought on,” he writes, “likely many more people would have died, possibly millions more, in Asia as well as Japan.”

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the primary figures’ diaries, Thomas makes the period come vividly alive. This moving account of three men of peace who had to make life or death decisions will interest history lovers everywhere.

Contrary to popular belief, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not immediately bring World War II to an end. In his new book, Evan Thomas explains why.
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Historian Blair LM Kelley writes, “Our national mythos leaves little room for Black workers, or to glean any lessons from their histories. . . . Never mind that from slavery to the present, Black workers have been essential to the nation’s productivity, and indeed . . . to its basic functioning.” The director of the Center for the Study of the American South and co-director of the Southern Futures initiative at the University of North Carolina, Kelley gives a sweeping narrative of 200 years of American history in her engaging and well-documented Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class

Kelley also uses events in the lives of some of her ancestors to tell parts of the larger story. The overwhelming impression throughout is of great tragedy combined with an amazing abundance of courage and resourcefulness in the face of impossible barriers. The author gives primary attention to “a critical era, after southern Emancipation and into the early twentieth century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves.”

Readers will especially learn about Black workers who united to gain political influence. For example, “Washerwomen, or laundresses, occupied a central place in Black life, history, and culture,” Kelley writes. Their work was hard and required great skill. After the Civil War, many laundresses had the independence to work alone and were able to spend more time with their children. They were also able to use their earnings to help support their families and communities by buying houses, building churches and opening businesses—and some were able to organize to improve their situations. In 1881, for example, laundresses in Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, went on strike for better pay and working conditions. Some washerwomen even joined labor protests for other industries, such as the successful streetcar boycott in Richmond, Virginia, in 1904.

Kelley also traces the development and importance of the Pullman porters, Black men who performed a variety of services for railway passengers beginning in 1867. The author writes of their significance, “Easily the most well-traveled Black folks in America, the Pullman porters provided assistance to people seeking opportunity in the North and West, connecting porters’ home folks with jobs, and offering their knowledge about the cities where migrants planned to settle. . . . They bore witness to the violence of lynchings and racial massacres, and also carried copies of Northern Black newspapers to sell to Black residents in the South.”

There is so much more here to interest history lovers. This fine book illuminates the intelligence, sense of community, hard work (often done under deplorable conditions) and resilience of Black workers, who have made crucial contributions to American history.

Black Folk illuminates the intelligence, sense of community, hard work, resilience and courage of the Black working class, whose members have made crucial contributions to American history.
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Four extraordinary women, with quite different and often controversial ideas, are the subjects of Wolfram Eilenberger’s masterfully researched and beautifully written The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times. Eilenberger’s much praised Time of the Magicians (2020) covered the lives of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin. Like that work, The Visionaries is a superb combination of biography, history and philosophy for general readers, this time covering the period from 1933 to 1943 and the impact of World War II on four writers’ lives. Each of these women recognized that “there was something fundamentally wrong with [the] world—and with the people in it,” Wilenberger writes. “But what exactly could it be? And how, in the early 1930s, was it possible for an individual to heal that increasingly oppressive malaise?”

Hannah Arendt left her native Germany in 1933 for France, where she helped others immigrate to Palestine, before coming to the U.S. to write and publish. Arendt wrote that she would like to identify with “the tradition of German-language writing and thought,” but she was denied the chance because she was Jewish. “Certain people are so exposed in their own lives that they become junction points and concrete objectifications of life,” she wrote, and indeed she became one such person. As a result, Arendt had a lifelong concern for human rights, and her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is considered a classic.

Ayn Rand immigrated from Russia to the United States in 1926 and experienced ups and downs as a writer, including a hit Broadway play. “From her earliest youth she had known exactly why she was in the world: to forge her own happiness in life and to create stories that showed the world as it should be—and not as it unfortunately was,” Wilenberger writes. Rand became a cultural icon with novels like The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and other works.

Simone Weil left France to work as a journalist and social activist. Weil felt that the only definite way out of the crisis of their time was to return to the “great source texts of humanity,” Wilenberger writes. Throughout her lifetime, Weil engaged with the works of Homer and Plato, the Bhagavad Gita, the Stoics and Christian writers, and her 1949 book, The Need for Roots, continues to be read today.

Simone de Beauvoir remained in France as a teacher, novelist and essayist. Within a year after the German occupation of Paris, Beauvoir wrote, “I was at last prepared to admit that my life was not a story of my own telling, but a compromise between myself and the world at large.” With the publication in 1949 of The Second Sex, a founding document of modern feminism, Beauvoir became an international celebrity.

Wilenberger’s engaging book will enlighten and entertain—in the best sense—many thoughtful readers.

The Visionaries delves into the controversial ideas of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil with a superb combination of biography, history and philosophy.
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Harvard historian Jill Lepore says that she “never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write. The history I read bugged me.” Now she pursues both history and writing with great intelligence, boundless curiosity, a relentless pursuit of facts and concern about very important subjects. Her books include the bestselling These Truths: A History of the United States and Bancroft Prize-winning The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Since 2005, she has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker where most of the essays in her dazzling new collection The Deadline originally appeared.

Many of these essays concern the relationship between what has happened in the past and how it relates to the present. In “Battleground America,” Lepore discusses the complicated history of the Second Amendment while in “The Riot Report,” she focuses on the numerous special commission reports that have been published over the years and how little has come from them.

In “Drafted,” an essay published last year, Lepore writes: “Beginning in the summer of 2022, women in about half of the United States may be breaking the law if they decide to end a pregnancy. This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito appears to have been surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. . . . There is nothing in that document about women at all. Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community.” Of course, “Legally, most women did not exist as persons.”

Lepore considers this while also spending time in other essays investigating such varied topics as why King John affixed his seal to what became known as the Magna Carta, whether mission statements for organizations are just “baloney” and the history of the term “burnout.” Lepore went to both Republican and Democratic conventions in 2016 and shares her impressions. There are perceptive discussions of the lives and ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Rachel Carson, Eugene Debs and Herman Melville. Whether the subject is technology, law, culture, bicycling or children, her insights hold our attention. Overall, this is an outstanding collection, sure to be enjoyed by a wide range of readers.

Whether the subject is technology, law, culture, bicycling or children, historian Jill Lepore’s first essay collection holds our attention.

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