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All American History Coverage

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From the Scottsboro Nine to Black Lives Matter, Black youth have positioned themselves at the center of the battle for civil rights for the past 100 years. In Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America, award-winning Nigerian American journalist Rita Omokha makes an unwavering push to put these young Americans’ stories at the forefront of the public record. 

Omokha’s research was spurred partially by the tragic murder of George Floyd and the unprecedented wave of protests around the country. A master of storytelling with a knack for thoughtful investigative journalism, Omokha has created a shining reexamination of history through a Black lens. For example, most of us learn about the Scottsboro Nine—the nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931—by reading the outlines of their case and legal proceedings, but how many of us see the ordeal from the Nine’s perspectives, or realize how thousands of students organized for charges to be dropped? It’s here where Omokha excels, providing a ground-level look at how young people were often thrust into organizing for civil rights. “Crucially, the most illuminating insights from history were not solely defined by actions but by the fervent optimism of the young. . . . Young ones who have intentionally learned from history, cautious of its perils, ready with their folded chairs at the table.” 

Omokha draws a clear line from these young people to the Black youth activists of today, exploring how technology has helped resurrect Black liberation movements in the past 20 years. When George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder for killing Trayvon Martin, three Black women—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Ayo Tometi—“declared what seemed spiritual, a sacred psalm in three simple words preceded by a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.” Resist includes the stories of Darnella Frazier, the woman who videotaped George Floyd’s murder, and Johnetta Elzie, a co-creator of the Mapping Police Violence project, who launched into action after the shooting of Michael Brown. With the help of Omokha’s meticulous reporting, their stories go beyond the headlines and hashtags.

Ultimately, Resist is a must-read for anyone looking to dive into the collected history of Black youth activism and its immense impact on America—and perhaps learn how to take action themselves.

Rita Omokha’s Resist is a must-read for anyone looking to dive into the history of Black youth activism and its immense impact on America.

There have been other iterations of The 1619 Project, the groundbreaking reframing of American history that centers the Black experience. It was first a series of essays published in the New York Times Magazine in 2019, and it’s also been a podcast, an anthology, a children’s picture book and a documentary TV series. With The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience, the project’s original editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, presents its definitive version. This new volume combines seven powerful essays from the original series with visual elements that deepen their message and, as Hannah-Jones writes in the preface, create “an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act.” 

It’s one thing to read about the slave trade, for example, but another to see a high-resolution photograph labeled “A child’s iron shackles” with this stark explainer: “Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: they could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold.” A chapter titled “Fear” includes an essay co-written by historian Leslie Alexander and her sister, The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, that reframes police brutality as a result of the same white fear that can be traced back to the very beginnings of American history. The essay is intercut with various photographs from demonstrations, including photojournalist Robert Cohen’s shot of a Black man in a stars-and-stripes shirt throwing a container of tear gas back at the police in Ferguson, Missouri. Woven throughout the book’s 288 pages are 13 original artworks from celebrated visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems, multiple archival photographs of happy Black families and a vibrant spread of a Beyoncé concert. This visual history is an invaluable addition to a revelatory project and an essential selection for any American classroom or family library.

The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience complements the storied New York Times series with visual art and photography that deepens our understanding of how slavery has profoundly shaped American life.
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Justene Hill Edwards’ incisive Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank examines a noble idea destroyed by corruption. The idea emerged at the end of the Civil War when John Alvord, a Congregational minister and antislavery activist, realized that newly emancipated people would need a banking institution they could trust. Drawing on examples of military banks established for formerly enslaved Union soldiers, Alvord formed the Freedman’s Bank in March 1865. At its height, Edwards notes, “freed people had opened over one hundred thousand accounts and deposited over $75 million ($1.9 trillion today).” But within nine years, the bank failed.

Edwards, whose previous book, 2021’s Unfair Markets, examined the internal workings of enslaved people’s private economic activity, is a trustworthy guide through details concerning the early promise of the Freedman’s Bank, its improper transactions and the host of institutional and individual failings that led its collapse. 

She lays primary (but not sole) blame at the feet of railroad executive Henry D. Cooke (brother of 19th-century finance titan Jay Cooke) who headed the bank’s finance committee. Cooke and his committee moved the bank’s headquarters from New York City to Washington, D.C., opening it to political influences; approved illegal loans; altered its charter; and loaned Black depositors’ money without due diligence, primarily to white bank trustees and other insiders, and only infrequently to Black depositors. As the bank failed, trustees fled responsibility and brought in the great Black activist Frederick Douglass, to his eternal regret, to do damage control.

Edwards also points out that Alvord and other well-meaning supporters were ill-equipped to oversee such an institution. More tellingly, Edwards questions the underlying assumptions of the bank. It promoted the virtue of saving to the newly freed population, but it included no Black founders, advisors or early trustees. The white bankers assumed the depositors would be wage earners; but most of the Black savers wanted to own and work their own land independently and thus needed a broader, more flexible array of financial services than the bank ever offered.

The collapse of Freedman’s Bank has reverberated throughout U.S. history: “Black people’s generational distrust of financial institutions can be traced to the founding, plunder, and failure of the Freedman’s Bank,” Edwards points out. And white Americans used the failure “to fuel stereotypes about Black people’s laziness and their lack of fitness for . . . political and economic inclusion.” Savings and Trust adds materially to our understanding of the racial wealth gap and our long legacy of social injustice.

Justene Hill Edwards’ incisive Savings and Trust chronicles the formation and failure of the Freedman’s Bank, and reveals the deep history of the racial wealth gap.
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In 2020, a long cypress barn near the tiny town of Drew, Mississippi, captured the attention of author Wright Thompson. Here, in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped and then tortured and murdered by a gang of white men. His capital offense? Allegedly whistling at the wife of one of his killers. It’s a story that’s been told by other writers, but in the hands of native Mississippian Thompson, the crime and the troubled soil out of which it grew take on a profound new resonance.

Thompson grew up a half-hour’s drive away, yet he never knew that a nondescript structure just 23 miles south of his family’s home was the site of a savage murder. What’s more: It was still standing, without a marker or sign indicating what transpired there. Thompson learned of the barn from Patrick Weems, a local activist who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an organization that was formed to push Tallahatchie County to acknowledge its fault in Till’s murder and the obstruction of justice after the crime.

“Ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”

Interviewed from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in an unmistakably Southern-accented voice that comes rumbling from a place deep in his body, Thompson tells BookPage, “As a Mississippian, I needed to know more about this barn.”

The result is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a deeply reported history rooted in that unique and specific piece of ground.

Drew is located within a 36-square mile segment of Sunflower County that, Thompson writes, has “borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of [1960s voting rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.” The exact legal location of the barn is “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” a phrase that is repeated, occasionally in altered forms, more than 60 times in The Barn. Thompson says that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he hopes his very intentional repetition “carries the swelling power of chorus.”

The Barn was a passion project, one that propelled Thompson through hundreds of interviews, some 100 visits to the barn, and archival research in places as distant as Spain and England. However, “this was not work,” he tells BookPage. “This was something I was going to do whether anybody knew anything about it or not.” Though Thompson is best known as a writer for ESPN, his last book, 2020’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, revealed that his interests extend beyond the world of sports.

 “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one.”

After sketching out the story of Emmett Till’s murder and the predictable, yet inexcusable exoneration of the men who committed it, Thompson moves into a detailed economic and cultural history of that small patch of land the barn stands on and the territory surrounding it. Though his survey spans some 400 years, he homes in most on the period from the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 through 1933, the year Congress saved the cotton industry from collapse amid the Great Depression. In that era, he says, “cotton was oil,” and Mississippi “had a seemingly limitless supply of the world’s most important commodity.”

Thompson says that one crucial element of The Barn is its focus on people like Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who was visiting Mississippi with Till at the time of the murder; Parker’s wife, Marvel; and Drew residents like Gloria Dickerson, who integrated the town’s school system as a child and has spent her retirement working to preserve the memory of Emmett Till and give meaning to his life and death. It was important to Thompson that he honor their efforts to secure justice for Till, he says, “because ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”

Read our starred review of ‘The Barn’ by Wright Thompson. 

The work of Till’s family members and Drew residents culminated in the 2023 authorization of a national monument to commemorate Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose insistence on forcing Americans to confront the brutality of her son’s lynching by allowing photos of his corpse to be published in Jet magazine galvanized the Civil Rights movement. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the murder of George Floyd a century later, the killing of Emmett Till is one of the most heinous racial crimes in an American history that’s deeply stained with them.

Thompson also candidly interrogates his own ambivalent relationship to his home state, writing that “the story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.” In this regard, he’s unsparing of his own ignorance. Near the end of the book, for example, he recounts his experience in a boarding school as a 16-year-old, where he festooned the walls of his dorm room with Confederate flags.

Questioned about his choice of decor, he says he had buried the memory for many years, but when it suddenly surfaced as he listened to a speech at an Emmett Till commemoration, he raced home to record it. When asked why he felt he had to take ownership of that long-ago episode, he admits some initial ambivalence, but then says, “Man, if you’re not doing this, you need to give the money back. If you’re not doing this, then everything you say you want this book to be is a lie.” The Barn is an eloquent antidote to Americans’ propensity to forget, and Thompson hopes there will be some healing power flowing from this work.

“The story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.”

“I’m a very proud American,” he says. “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one. And seeing ourselves clearly doesn’t make us a lesser country, but a greater one. If the Mississippi Delta, and therefore America, has any future at all, it has to start with standing on one postage stamp of ground and saying, ‘This is what happened here.’ I certainly didn’t start off with that intention, but that became my sort of prayer for the thing. It’s not a book. It’s a map.”

Even as he expresses that ambition for his work, Thompson is notably humble in describing the product of his efforts: “I feel a profound sense of being a carrier of something, not the creator of it. There are going to be a lot of books written about this murder. There have been; there will be a lot more. So I’m very aware of being a tiny piece in a large mosaic of people still trying to understand how a 14-year-old child gets tortured for whistling.

“You can’t go back in time and stop it. But you can go back in time and understand exactly and specifically over the longest possible arc how all of these people came to be occupying the same piece of land on the same day at the same time in 1955. And I hope that answering that question adds to the mosaic, not just of that murder, but of every one like it.”

Photo of Wright Thompson by Evan France.

 

 

 

 

Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.

The savage murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till at the hands of a group of white men outside the small town of Drew, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, stained the nation and galvanized the Civil Rights movement. In The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, noted sports journalist and Mississippi native Wright Thompson brilliantly recounts the story of that lynching, while deeply exploring the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta out of whose soil it emerged.

Wright made an estimated 100 visits to the barn where Till died, a site whose location has long been shrouded in mystery. To recount the terror of Till’s final night, when he was kidnapped, tortured and shot for supposedly whistling at a white woman (a report disputed by many), Wright relies on the vivid memories of Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who accompanied Till on the fateful trip south from Chicago and was fortunate the killers did not take his life as well.

Midway through The Barn, Thompson detours from Till’s story to excavate the vivid history of the Delta’s “gumbo mud,” which includes the birth of blues music in the person of Charley Patton on a plantation some 10 miles from the barn and the activities of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Wright painstakingly traces the rise and fall of a hardscrabble agricultural economy, which produced both men like Till’s uncle Moses Wright, a sharecropper whose home the teenager was visiting at the time of his murder, and J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the two people tried (and acquitted) for Till’s murder.

Thompson was raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi, near the farm Wright’s mother’s family first owned in 1913 and that it maintains to this day, and by parents who taught him to reject the bigotry that infected his home state. And so, he is acutely sensitive to his own ambivalence about what it means to be a Mississippian. “We spend so much time in the past here and yet so little time learning the history of who we are and how we got here,” he writes. The Barn is Thompson’s brave, forthright effort to begin the process of eradicating some of that ignorance.

Wright Thompson reckons with the culture of the Mississippi Delta and the murder of Emmett Till in his brilliant, probing history, The Barn.

Though physicists get the most attention when it comes to academic contributions to war efforts, the United States’ nascent intelligence team also relied on experts of another sort. Elyse Graham’s Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, tells the thrilling story of the professors, archivists and artists who were recruited by the U.S. and British governments to become highly effective spies and intelligence agents during the Second World War. 

Graham recounts the various missions made possible by professional researchers recruited from university campuses by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. These men and women put their skills to use in unexpected ways, such as drawing strategic insights from the most mundane texts, like Moroccan phone directories that revealed munitions factory locations, and scientific journals available only in Europe, which kept the Allies abreast of nuclear developments.

A Hollywood version of Book and Dagger would feature heart-pounding scenes of disheveled scholars digging for scraps of crucial information in stacks of ancient tomes. Without falling into this mire of tropes, Graham follows some recurring characters and includes some thrilling scenes of sabotage. The book is also about how the OSS and U.S. military relied on unique, research-driven perspectives to outsmart and outmaneuver the Nazis. With a keen ear for narrative prose, Graham builds suspense and intrigue, and the book is a pulpy delight.

Graham acknowledges that spycraft is a complicated, messy business, and readers may find this tale of underdog heroism difficult to square with the CIA’s later history of surveillance and subterfuge in U.S. and international politics. Even so, a story where a passion for knowledge and appreciation for outsiders defeats a regime fueled by hatred and greed is most welcome. Book and Dagger is a necessary reminder of the value of the humanities and the importance of the freedom of information and ideas at a time when both of those things are under threat.

Elyse Graham’s thrilling history of how scholars and librarians helped the U.S. outsmart the Nazis is a pulpy delight.
STARRED REVIEW
August 12, 2024

Just the facts, ma’am

Six true crime books recount chilling stories, minus the sensationalism.

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On January 16, 1987, a vibrant, beloved Black woman, 35-year-old Lita McClinton Sullivan, opened the door of her townhouse in a wealthy Atlanta neighborhood to a man who seemed to be delivering flowers. Instead, he gunned her down, killing her with one shot to the head. Later that day, a judge had been scheduled to announce the division of assets in her divorce after 10 years of marriage to white millionaire Jim Sullivan. Nineteen years later, in 2006, Sullivan was convicted of hiring a hit man to kill Lita; his conviction was based largely on the testimony of that hit man, who in 2003 received a 20-year prison sentence for his role in the murder.

Journalist Deb Miller Landau writes a sweeping account of this crime and prolonged road to justice in A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton. Landau first covered the case for Atlanta magazine in 2004. She writes of that story, “what really climbed under my skin was the humanity and depravity of it all. What makes people become who they are? What leads us to the choices we make?” The case continued to haunt her, and after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Landau, who is white, wondered, “How clearly had I seen Lita the first time I wrote this story?”

She revisited McClinton’s parents, now in their late 80s: Her mother, the “still glamorous” Jo Ann, is a former Georgia General Assembly representative; her father, Emory, is a retired engineer who has cancer and dementia. Neither parent approved of Sullivan, a divorced father of four who was 10 years older than their debutante daughter. As one source told Landau, “He was a real sociopath. He could be charming, but he could turn on you like a cobra.”

Landau excels at laying out decades of details, deftly weaving her recent investigations, including her meeting with the hit man, into the long timeline. While she does try to focus on Lita’s perspective, the victim’s long-silenced voice is hard to capture. In contrast, Sullivan’s misdeeds and bizarre behaviors reverberate, including his womanizing and lavish spending that alternated with extreme miserliness, despite the fact that he and Lita had been living in a 17,000 square foot mansion, a historic landmark called Casa Eleda in opulent Palm Beach, Florida.

A Devil Went Down to Georgia chronicles a collision course of race, power, class and, most of all, Sullivan’s narcissism and endless greed. It’s a page-turning saga, as well as a testament to Lita, her devastated family and the determined investigators and lawyers who sought justice for them.

 

A Devil Went Down to Georgia is a page-turning true crime saga about a calculating white millionaire, the vibrant Black wife he murdered and her family’s long pursuit of justice.
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The public attacks by NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre and his nationwide legion of fans were bad enough. But Mississippi State Auditor Shad White also faced hostility close to home, even at church, from friends of the well-known family that was the focus of his investigation into the theft of millions in public welfare funds. You might think of their incredulity as the “nice lady” defense: How can you be going after Nancy New? She’s so nice at PTA meetings.

White’s team plowed ahead, and New, the head of an education nonprofit, and her son Zach ultimately pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges for financing their high-spending lifestyle with money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program—including $250,000 used by Nancy to buy herself a new home in an affluent neighborhood. So much for nice. White, a Republican wunderkind (Rhodes scholar, Harvard Law) who became auditor at 32, gives us his insider perspective in Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal That Shocked America, a lively account of a case that has raised questions about Favre, former football player Marcus Dupree and White’s own mentor, former Mississippi governor Phil Bryant.

Starting with a whistleblower’s tip actually forwarded to him by Bryant, White directed his team of auditors and agents to probe odd spending of federal welfare dollars by the head of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services, which they soon discovered included treatment at a luxury drug rehab center for a personal friend of the agency director. It ballooned from there.

Readers will be engrossed by the feud that developed between Favre and White after the investigation uncovered payments of welfare money by New’s nonprofit to finance a “deluxe” volleyball facility at the university where Favre’s daughter was a volleyball player. New’s nonprofit also paid welfare funds to Favre Enterprises for speaking engagements that Favre never did. Favre adamantly denies wrongdoing, while White points to evidence in the form of text messages and other records. (Favre has not been charged with any crime; he was sued in civil court by the state over the money.) But White’s harsh critiques of fellow Republican officials, notably a U.S. Attorney who White thinks tried to undermine him out of professional rivalry, are equally fascinating.

This isn’t a book about politics, but it’s not hard to discern White’s conservative views. Some readers will disagree with them. But everyone can unite around his anger at a broken system that allowed poor people to suffer so that an elite few could spend tax dollars on luxuries.

Mississippi Swindle is the shocking true story of how public welfare funds were used to finance the extravagant lifestyles of an elite few.
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District Attorney Isidro R. Alaniz believes that when taking a case to a jury, “The most effective structure for any argument will always be a story.” The 49th Judicial District of Texas, which he serves, is home to Laredo, where Alaniz led the prosecution of Juan David Ortiz, a married father of three and a 10-year member of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency who in September 2018 murdered four sex workers. In The Devil Behind the Badge: The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Jervis delivers the tragic, headline-grabbing story with staccato precision and emotional depth. 

Jervis takes readers right into the heart of the San Bernardo Avenue district of sex workers, drug dealers and people with substance abuse disorders who live within a stone’s throw of the U.S.-Mexico border. Ortiz’s victims—Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Anne Luera, Guiselda Alicia Cantu and Janelle Ortiz—are painted vividly, thanks to Jervis’ many interviews with their families and friends. He carefully sets the stage for how each of these women’s lives intersected with one other and with Ortiz, who grew up as a Bible-toting Pentecostal Christian, served as a Navy medical corpsman in Iraq and eventually became a supervisor at the Border Patrol. Ortiz  refused Jervis’ interview requests and has given scant clues to what may have sparked his spree, but the author notes that the agency “tolerated an environment of misogyny and impunity within its ranks during Ortiz’s tenure there.”

One victim’s sister addressed Ortiz in the courtroom, saying, “You gave your word to protect the border, yet you failed. You betrayed your badge.” Jervis excels at conveying the frenzy of Ortiz’s crimes and his dramatic capture. The Devil Behind the Badge is an unsettling account of a serial killer leading a double life: one masquerading as an upright citizen, and the other mercilessly preying on society’s most vulnerable.

 

The Devil Behind the Badge is an unsettling true crime account of a U.S. Border Patrol officer who mercilessly preyed on society’s most vulnerable.
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It’s not a total mystery who killed Gauri Lankesh, a hard-charging local journalist and activist in the South Indian city of Bangalore who was assassinated in 2017.

Lankesh, the daughter of a famous Indian writer and publisher, was an aggressive critic of India’s right-wing religious groups, which have grown in power, prominence and violence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party.

While a few alternate theories are proffered about her death, I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India is not really a whodunit. Instead, it’s an obituary of a complicated woman and a portrait of a country’s descent into chaos, hatred and lawlessness. (Don’t worry: You still find out whodunit.)

The assassinated journalist’s life is both inspiring and perplexing, as her understated career in niche local tabloids blossoms into martyrdom and legend upon her death. Lankesh was fearless—some argued reckless—in her opposition to government corruption, creeping religious fervor and the subjugation of women and minority groups. She fought with her dear friends in the pages of her newspaper, and her antagonism of powerful forces had those same friends and family worrying for her safety. And for good reason. It’s a story of complex family relationships, both within the Lankesh family specifically and Indian civil society more generally.

As the story of Lankesh’s life and death unfolds, Rollo Romig, an American journalist with marital ties to Bangalore, sends the reader on several tangential journeys of varying levels of relevance: the story of Christian apostle “doubting” Thomas’ maybe-apocryphal mission to India, the history of the restaurant industry in India, a dazzling description of Bangalore’s astonishing book district. But the author’s reporting about the case has clearly been relentless; he traveled multiple times to the region and interviewed countless figures with connections to Lankesh, modern Indian politics and the case itself.

The complex ethnopolitics of the region and the country offer a disturbing but vivid backdrop for the murder. India’s retreat from pluralism and growing embrace of bigotry and oppression mean that Lankesh’s story is just one of untold many of murder, political violence and religious strife in a desperate country.

 

I Am on the Hit List pairs relentless reporting and historical context in a vivid exploration of a fearless Indian journalist’s assassination.
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Peter Houlahan’s Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the Story of Sagon Penn recounts a historic 1985 crime that would irrevocably change Southern California. At its swirling center is Sagon Penn, a 23-year-old Black Buddhist, martial artist and community mentor who had never been in any legal trouble until two white patrol cops, Donovan Jacobs and Tom Riggs, followed a pickup truck carrying seven young Black men, some of them teenagers, up a dirt road.

The setting is a growing San Diego in flux. A progressive new police chief hoped to calm the city’s simmering racial tensions and address the disproportionate number of cops killed in the line of duty. Both crises came to a head when Jacobs incorrectly fingered the young men in the truck to be gang members—including the driver, Penn. An argument escalated into a brutal physical altercation, during which the cops reportedly used racial slurs. Within three minutes, Penn grabbed Riggs’ service weapon and fatally shot him. Then Penn shot both Jacobs and a civilian who was riding along with him, and fled the scene in a squad car.

Reap the Whirlwind’s novelistic narrative style delivers emotional weight as Houlahan, a master storyteller, plots out the cataclysmic event and its aftermath. Houlahan covers all angles, from skewed news reporting on the shooting to the inner workings of the judicial system to the messy interpersonal drama that followed Penn, whose psyche suffered devastating consequences. Though Penn is undoubtedly the focus of the book, Houlahan offers textured characterizations of significant players, like Penn’s lawyer, Milton Silverman Jr.; defense investigator Bob McDaniel; and Sara Pina-Ruiz, the only credible witness. When the story develops into a full-fledged courtroom drama, Houlahan remains an impartial, careful observer and rarely offers his own opinion, which allows readers to form their own conclusions and develop a personal investment in the case and those closest to it.

A topical, piercing story about how perspectives on law enforcement and innocence shift depending on who you are, Reap the Whirlwind shows how police brutality and racial profiling impact Black victims far beyond the actual incident—even when they make it out alive.

The piercing Reap the Whirlwind chronicles a historic 1985 homicide, and shows how perspectives on law enforcement and innocence shift depending on who you are.
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New York City’s East Side at the turn of the 20th century comes vibrantly alive in The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld. In the late 1800s, Eastern European Jews began fleeing Germany’s pogroms and Russia’s Pale of Settlement, the largest ghetto in history. The East Side became their American ghetto, soon in the grip of an underworld of gamblers, grifters and pimps, and an upper world of titans of manufacturing and politics. Then along came Abe Shoenfeld and his vice squad, the Incorruptibles.

Dan Slater (Love in the Time of Algorithms) stumbled upon Shoenfield’s “reams of reportage and intelligence about the Jewish underworld of pre-World-War-I New York.” Combined with reporting from newspapers of the day, as well court cases, sales receipts, government findings and memoirs of those involved, Slater provides rich context for the setting the Incorruptibles hoped to reform. In a city plagued by abominable labor conditions in factories, the political machine of Tammany Hall and corruption blocking the path to justice, Shoenfeld’s homegrown vice squad was determined, against all odds, to be incorruptible.

Slater recreates the notorious stars of this underworld—the likes of dapper Arnold Rothstein, ruthless Big Jack Zelig and comically clueless gangster Louie Rosenberg—and the women in their shadows, some of whom, like Louie’s widow, Lily Rosenberg, kept their own notes. He also weaves in the critical impact of fomenting antisemitism throughout the country. The vices plaguing the East Side were being attributed to Jewish immigrants at large, rather than the small cabal of wealthy schemers and corrupt politicians. Slater shows how this metastasizing hatred of Jews foreshadowed Nazi Germany.

While the need for reform was an easy message to sell to the public, actually prohibiting popular illegal activities like gambling and prostitution proved hard. Working with a scrupulous lawyer named Harry Newburger and detective Joseph Faurot, whose technical acumen, like bridging telephone wires to listen in to private conversations, revolutionized criminal investigations, the Incorruptibles prompted The World to print on the front page: “BIGGEST GAMBLERS QUIT; BROADWAY SECTION CLEAN.”

If this was the sole substance of Slater’s book, it would be a singularly worthy read. Yet it is so much more. The Incorruptibles is a compelling crime story, colorful history and an ominous warning about antisemitism.

Dan Slater’s vibrant The Incorruptibles chronicles the homegrown vice squad that took down New York City’s most notorious turn-of-the-century gangsters.

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Recent Features

6 new true crime books recount chilling stories, minus the sensationalism.
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In 18th-century England, women and men had no setting where it was acceptable to converse as equals on intellectual subjects like literature, fine art, foreign affairs, history, philosophy and science. That is, until women began hosting lively gatherings that defied sexist gender norms.

When Elizabeth Montagu began hosting her salons in her house in London, she started a trend that historian Susannah Gibson calls “the centerpiece of the first women’s liberation movement.” Gibson’s meticulously researched and beautifully written The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement tells how this groundbreaking development changed the lives of women who achieved prestige as novelists, poets, translators and advocates of education.

Gibson spotlights salon hosts Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Thrale alongside prominent intellectual figures of the period: novelists Frances Burney and Sarah Scott, poets Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, author and advocate Mary Wollstonecraft and historian Catharine Macaulay. “Whatever magic Montagu weaved within the walls of her salon,” writes Gibson, “the old spell was broken and the learned lady—so despised elsewhere—suddenly became a desirable person to know . . . even an aspirational figure.” Macaulay is of particular interest because her experience is emblematic of the existent societal tension. Her multivolume history of England was widely praised, yet she dealt with “an enormous amount of male prejudice.”

The term “bluestocking” “caught on as a way of valuing intellectual endeavors above fashion.”  While Gibson acknowledges the diversity of opinions among the Bluestockings, she writes that, on the whole, they “were advocating for the most fundamental woman’s right: the right to be acknowledged as an independent individual of inherent worth.” Laying the groundwork of a whole new worldview, the movement influenced the suffragists of the next century. Consistently enlightening and insightful, The Bluestockings should be widely read by both women and men.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Bluestockings recounts the lives of 18th-century women who forged a path for feminist movements to come.
STARRED REVIEW

June 12, 2024

5 books that dads will love

Dads are notoriously difficult to shop for. For Father’s Day, we recommend five dad-worthy history books, including the latest from Erik Larson, a biography of John Lewis, the story of the space shuttle Challenger and more.

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Adam Higginbotham’s international bestseller, Midnight in Chernobyl, chronicled the disastrous 1986 nuclear reactor explosion in Ukraine that was caused by a Soviet program plagued with a toxic combination of unrealistic timelines and dangerous cost cutting. His new book, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, describes a surprisingly similar catastrophe that very same year, this time at the hands of NASA: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger that killed all seven people aboard. Hefty, compelling and propulsive, Challenger overflows with revelatory details.

Reading this book is like watching a train wreck unfold in slow motion. One can’t help but hear a drumbeat of dread while getting to know the astronauts—Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Dick Scobee and Michael Smith—and their families. Details will stay with readers long after they close the book: McAuliffe’s appearance on The Tonight Show, her husband’s increasing anxiety at launch time, the horror and disbelief of the families as they watch their loved ones die, the grim details of the recovery efforts and the attempts of professionals both to warn against the mission and to bring to light why it failed.

Among the latter is engineer Roger Boisjoly, who, over a year before the explosion, wrote a memo voicing fears to senior management, stating, “It is my honest and very real fear that if we do not take immediate action . . . we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight along with all the launch facilities.” Unbelievably, in the hours just before the mission commenced, Boisjoly and a team of 13 other engineers unanimously advised against the launch, yet their concerns were not even voiced up the command chain. After the explosion, physicist Richard Feynman sought to bring clarity to the commission tasked with investigating the tragedy. The scientist noted that “the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product to the point of fantasy.”

Higginbotham excels at delineating not only the science, technology and history of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, but also the bureaucratic snafus and mismanagement that led to the catastrophe, including economic pressures and a nonstop race to get people into space. As with Midnight in Chernobyl, Challenger proves Higginbotham is a master chronicler of disasters, demonstrating an unflinching ability to pierce through politics, power and bureaucracies with laser-sharp focus.

Challenger proves Adam Higginbotham is a master chronicler of disasters, piercing through politics, power and bureaucracies with laser-sharp focus.
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There’s no such thing as a spoiler alert when a story’s subject is taught in most every American history class across the country. Injecting hold-your-breath suspense into a narrative history, particularly one in which we already know the story’s ending, is a task that Erik Larson has mastered. In the Garden of the Beasts took on Nazi Germany on the cusp of war; The Splendid and the Vile explored Winston Churchill’s stewardship of under-siege England. In his new book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, Larson turns his attention to the immediate aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the unlanced boil where the war began: Fort Sumter.

Larson covers just a few months of American history—but perhaps the most consequential few months. Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and other well-known figures from the period play key roles, but so too do a British journalist on assignment, a young private stuck in the besieged fort and a Southern society woman watching the events unfold. They aren’t key characters in the grand arc of the Civil War or the country’s history, but they did write a lot down. Their accounts help Larson propel the narrative without relying entirely on the stories of people who have already been the subject of hundreds or thousands of other books.

There are obvious parallels to the current moment: a refusal to accept the results of a presidential election, threats to march on the Capitol, a tendency toward civility and appeasement in the face of existential threat and other more subtle links to the present. Some of the connections are unavoidable and necessary; others, Larson perhaps injects as a result of recency bias.

Even after a century and a half of books about the subject, it remains remarkably unclear what course of action key figures should or could have taken to avoid America’s bloodiest war. Maybe we’ll never figure that out, but The Demon of Unrest is a damn good read.

In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson crafts a tale of hold-your-breath suspense about the crucial three months leading up to the Civil War.
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June 1939: British naval sub HMS Thetis sinks in sea trials. Ninety-nine people die. August 1942: Allied forces raid the coastal town of Dieppe in German-occupied France. Thousands are killed, captured or wounded, in part because coastal scouting was minimal. September 1942: British-manned torpedoes attack German battleship Tirpitz. All crewmen are captured or killed. Catastrophes have a way of concentrating the mind: Do it right next time. Luckily for the Allies in World War II, a group of scientists in London risked their lives in secret pressure chamber “dives” to give future underwater and amphibious missions better odds.

Author Rachel Lance is a biomedical engineer and blast injury specialist who has worked on underwater equipment for the U.S. Navy, making her unusually suited to unveil the forgotten story of these scientists in Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever.

Their project at University College London was led by J.B.S. Haldane, a brilliant, annoying eccentric who hired scientists shunned by others, among them Jewish refugees, women and Communist sympathizers. As the bombs in the Blitz exploded around them, these scientists subjected themselves again and again to dangerous pressure in chambers that simulated deep underwater dives in order to design more effective breathing equipment for submarine crews, frogmen and torpedo riders.

Relying on their experiment notes, Lance takes us inside the metal tubes where scientists suffered life-threatening injuries. She explores their backgrounds and relationships, which included a love affair between Haldane and research colleague Helen Spurway. And she ranges throughout combat zones to show us the dangers of underwater action, from the perspective of individual combatants on both sides. But Lance’s singular strength is her lucid explanations of the complex science behind the experiments, making it accessible to untrained readers. Lance also uncovers the combination of official secrecy, prejudice against outsiders and bureaucratic skullduggery that obscured this story until now.

Lance begins her book with the Dieppe disaster and ends with D-Day—an Allied triumph that might have gone badly wrong without the chamber divers’ dedication and resilience. Chamber Divers is a necessary reminder that not all war heroes were on the front lines.

In Chamber Divers, Rachel Lance uncovers the Navy scientists who risked their lives to improve the odds of underwater and amphibious missions in World War II.
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With its near 500-page count and robust endnotes, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq might at first glance scare off readers who haven’t sniffed a textbook in years. But thanks to Steve Coll’s crisp and dynamic prose, what’s between the covers feels little like an academic tome.

Despite appearances, The Achilles Trap is not really an Iraq War book (just as Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is not really a 9/11 book). Yes, you get there eventually, but Coll, like Wright, has more to say about the years leading up to that cataclysm. The narrative details Saddam’s upbringing, rise to power and entrenchment as a key strongman in the Middle East, sometimes allied with the United States and sometimes its biggest pain in the ass—and sometimes both at the same time.

In the two decades since the American invasion of Iraq began, Saddam Hussein has become a sort of caricature. Here, Coll reintroduces the dictator to an audience that has either forgotten his nuances or never knew them. There is unimaginable cruelty, family drama and even comedy—like when Saddam sets out on a career as a historical romance novelist just a few years before his death.

Coll, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and a longtime journalist for The New Yorker and The Washington Post, has a special combination of mostly unrelated skill sets that eludes so many narrative nonfiction writers: He’s a groundbreaking reporter and researcher who is able to uncover new information in a tightly wound arena, but also a deft stylist with a natural gift for both narrative structure and fluent yet surprising writing. Like a baseball player who can both pitch and hit with the best, the rare union places Coll at or near the apex of the craft.

Detailing Saddam’s own cruelty does not mean Coll lets the U.S. off the hook, though. Sprinkled among what is at times a tense political thriller are scenes of astounding myopia, hubris, miscommunication, dark hypocrisy, betrayal, stupidity, cruelty and violence of our own. Though the events of The Achilles Trap concluded 20 years ago, there are few better roadmaps to where American foreign policy in the Middle East has ended up today.

With agile prose, groundbreaking reporting and narrative splendor, The Achilles Trap is a gripping history of the Iraq War.

Like his mentor Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis had a dream. Amid the turmoil and violence of a segregated South and a nation embroiled in the struggle for racial reconciliation, Lewis envisioned and championed what he called a “Beloved Community” in America, “a society based on simple justice that values the dignity and the worth of every human being.” In his captivating John Lewis: In Search of Beloved Community, Raymond Arsenault narrates the mesmerizing story of Lewis’ evolution from a Civil Rights activist to an eminent congressman who never lost sight of his vision for a just and equitable society.

Drawing on archival materials and interviews with Lewis and his friends, family and associates, Arsenault traces Lewis from his childhood in Troy, Alabama, where he daily witnessed the indignities and violence of racial segregation. Steeled and inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he entered American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and began his storied activism in earnest. Lewis and his contemporaries incorporated the principles of rightness and righteousness—what their teacher James Lawson called “soul force”—with methods of nonviolent resistance. Arsenault documents Lewis’ participation in the Freedom Rides, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Selma to Montgomery marches and his advocacy for the Voting Rights Act. After King’s 1968 assassination, Lewis’ optimism turned to despair; he had a feeling, Arsenault writes, that “maybe, just maybe, we would not overcome.”

But that didn’t last. Elected to Congress in 1986, Lewis went to Washington with a legacy to uphold and a commitment to carry on the spirit, goals and principles of nonviolence and social action. He was always disillusioned by self-serving politicians and their infighting, and he devoted his career to building coalitions among opponents. In a 2020 speech, Lewis uttered the remarks that cemented his legacy: “We cannot give up now. We cannot give in. . . . Go out there, speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

With John Lewis Arsenault offers the first comprehensive biography of the icon and serves as a fitting bookend to Lewis’ own autobiography, Walking With the Wind. The work provides an inspiring portrait of a man whose vision and moral courage propelled him to share his belief in the Beloved Community and inspire generations.

Raymond Arsenault’s mesmerizing biography of John Lewis chronicles the life of the Civil Rights icon and congressman whose vision of a just and equitable society has inspired generations.

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Dads are notoriously hard to shop for. For Father’s Day, we recommend five dad-worthy history books, including the latest from Erik Larson, a biography of John Lewis, the story of the space shuttle Challenger and more.
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Since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, Americans have spent much time interpreting its meaning. As Corey Brettschneider, a professor at Brown University who teaches constitutional law and politics, points out in his informative and stimulating The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, “two ingredients—popular sovereignty and a powerful executive—are an odd pair for the same constitutional system.” For many reasons, presidents can be tempted to overreach, but in our democracy, the legitimacy of the government comes from the preamble to the Constitution: “We the people.” The author reminds us that “The Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of constitutional meaning” and “constitutional rights throughout American history are won by citizens prevailing upon the political branches, not by courts proclaiming them out of thin air.”

This carefully researched book explores in detail how presidents in different eras abused their power. The Presidents and the People presents a litany of their misdeeds. When John Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798, he targeted editors of newspapers owned by his political opponents, and at least 126 defendants were prosecuted as a result. The policies of James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson advanced slavery, guaranteed white supremacy after the Civil War and nationalized Jim Crow, respectively. And then there’s Richard Nixon, who ordered his aides to abscond with potentially damning evidence that proved he undermined democracy in the wake of the discovery of the Pentagon Papers. 

But concerned individuals who responded to these presidents’ anti-democratic approaches are, Brettschneider writes, “a testament to the power of citizens to push past authoritarian moments toward democratic ones.” No one of them is more important than Frederick Douglass, who is featured prominently in four separate chapters. His influence on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant was crucial, as was his decision to support the Constitution rather than abandon it as other abolitionists advocated. Others who fought against abuse include journalists William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. 

These Americans stand as beacons of decency and hope, who sought to see the Constitution’s promise of “We the people” secured. Anyone interested in the ups and downs of American history should be inspired by reading about the courageous citizens who challenged powerful leaders and changed the direction of the nation.  

Corey Brettschneider’s carefully researched The Presidents and the People chronicles American heads of state who abused their power, and people who stood up to them.
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National Book Award-winning author Tiya Miles has tackled a variety of tough, intriguing subjects in books like Wild Girls and All That She Carried. She felt stymied, however, as she approached the life of the legendary Harriett Tubman. As one friend told her, “No one could catch her then. It’s going to be hard to catch her now.” 

And yet that is exactly what Miles so beautifully achieves in Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. One of the biggest hurdles Miles faced was Tubman’s illiteracy, which meant her life experiences were all documented by others—“typically white, middle-class, antislavery women who recorded her speech and told her story.” Despite the roadblock of such “swamped sources,” often “submerged in the perspectives and biases of others,” Miles applauds a number of existing traditional biographies. As she explains, her goal was not to replicate these, but rather to explore Tubman’s eco-spiritual worldview. 

In her trademark deeply researched, thoughtful and exquisite prose, Miles successfully avoids popular depictions of Tubman as a superwoman “prepackaged in a box of stock stories and folksy sayings” among other “abolitionist avengers.” Instead, she places her firmly within the realm of Black female faith culture, noting that she was “one of a kind—singularly special and part of a cultural collective.” To illuminate Tubman’s spiritual purview, Miles delves into several memoirs written or dictated by Black women evangelists of Tubman’s time, writing that their relationships with the divine mandated “challenging entrenched social systems of racial and gender subjugation at the risk of [their] own safety, health, and social acceptance”

Calling her “arguably the most famous Black woman ecologist in U.S. history,” Miles also brings to life the haunting sights, sounds and dark, bewildering moments that Tubman experienced as she led herself and others to safety through the night wilderness. Tubman studied the plants, animals and stars as a matter of necessity for survival, believing that these god-given guides were proof of the need for spiritual and political liberation. 

Often, when Tubman told her story to biographers, she touched the writer, as if “by laying her hand on this person, her feelings may be transmitted.” With Night Flyer, Tiya Miles seems to transmit the weight of her subject’s hand and heart.

With the exquisite Night Flyer, Tiya Miles looks at Harriet Tubman from an entirely new perspective: her spirituality.
STARRED REVIEW

Cool off this summer with 5 splashy books

These books starring bodies of water include Morgan Talty’s latest and everything you never needed to know about sea turtles.
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These books starring bodies of water include Morgan Talty’s latest and everything you never needed to know about sea turtles.
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The difficult task of establishing a government for the United States required the development of a stable national economy that could deal effectively with a huge debt and other critical concerns. William Hogeland chronicles the twists and turns of the early years of the new republic in his drama-filled and insightful The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding. The nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, welcomed the challenge and had an approach he thought could not only save the country from catastrophe but also move it to become an imperial power. Hamilton’s plan, however, favored the elite, and failed to benefit the broader population that sacrificed much in the war. A scheme, Hogeland notes, “can mean simply a plan or design. But it can also mean a secret plan or design for nefarious ends.”

Hogeland writes of Hamilton’s biggest boosters and adversaries. Readers will not be surprised to see George Washington, who was “first and foremost a politically well-connected businessman,” among Hamilton’s supporters. On the other hand, the “flamboyant war profiteer” Robert Morris may be new to many readers. Coining the term “money connection,” Morris believed that the key to national greatness was “a consolidation of wealth and government.” His influence on the young treasury secretary was so strong that Hogeland contends that “without him the United States probably wouldn’t exist.”

Among those who disagreed with Hamilton was Albert Gallatin, “a brilliant, abstemious Genevan émigré” and treasury secretary to Jefferson and Madison who “[wore] himself down to the nub in the fetid summers of barely built Washington, D.C., trying to discover the antidote to Hamiltonianism.” Another was Herman Husband, an idealist, abolitionist and objector to the conquest of Indigenous North Americans’ land who was “so highly regarded by ordinary people in the remote western regions where he lived that he was . . . ranked by Hamilton as a danger above all others.” These finely drawn characters bring The Hamilton Scheme to life and show the divisions in postwar economic philosophy that are still at play today.

The Hamilton Scheme covers a lot of ground, sometimes at too fast a pace. However, it should be of special interest to readers who want to know about the beginnings of America’s economic history.

Drama-filled and insightful, The Hamilton Scheme chronicles the beginnings of America’s economic history.

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