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Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down by Robert Fitzpatrick And Jon Land

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:05:51 +0000

The Jack Nicholson film The Departed didn’t tell half of their story. A poor kid from the slums, Robert Fitzpatrick grew up to become a stellar FBI agent and challenge the country’s deadliest gangsters. Relentless in his desire to catch, prosecute, and convict Whitey Bulger, Fitzpatrick fought the nation’s most determined cop-gangster battle since Melvin Purvis hunted, confronted, and killed John Dillinger.

In his crusade to bring Bulger to justice, Fitzpatrick faced not only Whitey but also corrupt FBI agents, along with political cronies and enablers from Boston to Washington who, in one way or another, blocked his efforts at every step. Even when Fitzpatrick discovered the very organization to which he had sworn allegiance was his biggest obstacle, the agent continued to pursue Whitey and his gang . . . knowing that they were prepared to murder anyone who got in their way.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Robert Fitzpatrick And Jon Land

ROBERT FITZPATRICK spent twenty-plus years as an FBI agent and chief in a career highlighted by his involvement in the Martin Luther King, Jr. killing and the ABSCAM investigation in Miami that resulted in the indictments of numerous public officials. He played a key role in the famed “Mississippi Burning” investigation and recovered the rifle that was used in the MLK assassination and that ultimately led to the arrest of James Earl Ray.

JON LAND is the critically acclaimed author of thirty novels, including the bestselling series featuring female Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong: Strong Enough to Die, Strong Justice, and Strong at the Break. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Editorial Reviews

“This is a stupendous read, as electrifying as Mystic River but even more horrifying for being absolutely true. Betrayal is a page-turner of the highest order. You will not be able to put this book down—guaranteed.”
—Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of Impact

“A rapid-fire tale told with a passion that is a testament to the agent with the courage to wage the decades-long battle to get to the truth.”
—Lorenzo Carcaterra, New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers

“Jon Land elegantly captures the voice of FBI chief Robert Fitzpatrick as he battles his fellow agents to get to the truth behind the blood-soaked reign of gangster Whitey Bulger. Terrifying in scope and scathing in message, Betrayal is a must-read.”
—Robert K. Tanenbaum, New York Times bestselling author of Outrage

How Whitey Bulger Corrupted The Justice System

NPR Book Review – February 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Whitey Bulger was captured last year, he’d spent close to 20 years on the run — and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Bulger was the head of an Irish gang terrorizing the streets of South Boston. The Massachusetts State Police wanted him gone, but curiously couldn’t touch him.

Why? Bulger was a confidential FBI informant, and the bureau shielded him for years.

Robert Fitzpatrick, the author of Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down, says Bulger was widely known to be an unsavory character.

“He’s a stone killer, has been known to be a hit man for the Mafia out of Providence, and he’s also known to be the head of the Winter Hill gang, a bunch of Irish guys trying to take over the rackets, extortion and the drug stuff up in Boston,” Fitzpatrick tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

Fitzpatrick was a young FBI agent with a solid track record when the bureau sent him to Boston to sniff out corruption in the office. One of his first tasks was to evaluate Bulger, who was supposedly providing information on Mafia activities in New England. [Read the full article...]

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:16:26 +0000

A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China.

The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China’s future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China’s modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure.

This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.

About Stephen R. Platt

Stephen R. Platt received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize. He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China. An undergraduate English major, he spent two years after college as a teacher in the Yale-China program in Hunan province. His research has been supported by the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. He lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

“Platt has skillfully converted his erudition into an eminently general-interest treatment of what may have been the most lethal civil war in history.”
—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist (starred review)

“Splendid . . . An upheaval that led to the deaths of 20 million, dwarfing the simultaneously fought American Civil War, deserves to be better known, and Platt accomplishes this with a superb history of a 19th-century China faced with internal disorder and predatory Western intrusions.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Stephen Platt’s history of the Taiping rebellion in mid-19th century China sheds an authoritative and comprehensive window on a major event in world history that up until now has too often been consigned to a footnote in the West. It is a critically important achievement.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

A Chinese Civil War to Dwarf All Others - ‘Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom’ by Stephen R. Platt

The New York Times Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

There should be a term in German that describes the sinking feeling you have when reading a serious book of scholarship, one whose determined author deserves praise and tenure, that no civilian reader should pick up, that will not warm in your hands, that will make you regret the 10 hours of your life lost to it, and that, once put down, will not cry out to be picked back up.

Such a book is “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War,” by Stephen R. Platt, a young academic who has a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale and is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He’s written a dense, complex work, about a war too little known in the United States, in which the narrative pilot light never ignites.

This Chinese civil war lasted from 1851 to 1864, overlapping in its end with America’s Civil War. Mr. Platt describes it as “not only the most destructive war of the 19th century, but likely the bloodiest civil war of all time.”

Some 20 million people lost their lives, many of them in grotesque ways. There are enough beheadings, flayings, rapes, suicides, disembowelments, mass killings and acts of cannibalism in “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom” — more about these things in a moment — that it can seem like a version of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” spat into being by Cormac McCarthy. [Read the full article...]

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:40:47 +0000

From the bestselling author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, this startling long-lens view shows how America is coming apart at the seams that historically have joined our classes.

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Charles Murray

CHARLES MURRAY is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention in 1984 with Losing Ground. His subsequent books include In Pursuit, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, In Our Hands, and Real Education. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

“a timely investigation into a worsening class divide no one can afford to ignore.”
–Publisher’s Weekly

“[Charles Murray] argues for the need to focus on what has made the U.S. exceptional beyond its wealth and military power…religion, marriage, industriousness, and morality.”
–Booklist (Starred Review)

“Charles Murray … has written an incisive, alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American society.”
–Roger Lowenstein, Bloomberg Businessweek

A Lightning Rod in the Storm Over America’s Class Divide

The New York Times Book Review – February 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

WASHINGTON — When Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s book “The Bell Curve” appeared in 1994, it was denounced by social scientists, liberal pundits and a little-known Chicago civil-rights lawyer named Barack Obama, who in a commentary on NPR accused the authors of calculating that “white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism as long as it’s artfully packaged.”

Anyone who remembers the firestorm over that 845-page doorstop’s dense arguments about race, class, genetics and I.Q. might be tempted to look at the cover of Mr. Murray’s latest book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” and think, “Here we go again.”

But “Coming Apart,” which depicts members of white elites as hypocrites living in a bubble and the white working class as succumbing to moral decay, is hardly a flattering portrait of white people, let alone, Mr. Murray insists, a partisan barnburner.

“It’s not a brief for the right,” Mr. Murray said in a recent interview at the American Enterprise Institute here, where he has been a scholar since 1990. “The problem I describe isn’t a conservative-versus-liberal problem. It’s a cultural problem the whole country has.”

“Coming Apart,” which shot to No. 5 at Amazon.com immediately upon publication last week, has certainly prompted much conversation, if little in the way of consensus. David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, pre-emptively declared it the most important book of the year, saying, “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.” [Read the full article...]

Is White, Working Class America ‘Coming Apart’?

NPR Book Review – February 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

According to the libertarian social scientist Charles Murray, America is “coming apart at the seams.” Class strain has cleaved society into two groups, he argues in his new bookComing Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010: an upper class, defined by educational attainment, and a new lower class, characterized by the lack of it. Murray also posits that the new “lower class” is less industrious, less likely to marry and raise children in a two-parent household, and more politically and socially disengaged

By focusing solely on whites, Murray says, he is trying to correct the assumption that these are markers of the American racial divide. The class divisions transcend race.

By Murray’s calculations, the upper class is 20 percent of the white population. The working class is 30 percent. Over the past 50 years the two groups have branched away from each other culturally and geographically. The “educated class,” Murray tells NPR’s Robert Siegel, has developed distinctive tastes and preferences in a way that is new in America, evinced in everything from the alcohol they drink and the cars they buy to how they raise their children and take care of themselves physically.

Added to that, spatial segregation has resulted in “ZIP codes that have levels of affluence and education that are so much higher than the rest of the population that they constitute a different kind of world,” he says. [Read the full article...]

The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted By Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:15:11 +0000

Movie stars establish themselves as brands–and Taylor’s brand , in its most memorable outings, has repeatedly introduced a broad audience to feminist ideas. In her breakout film, “National Velvet” (1944), Taylor’s character challenges gender discrimination,: Forbidden as a girl to ride her beloved horse in an important race, she poses as a male jockey. Her next milestone, “A Place in the Sun” (1951), can be seen as an abortion rights movie–a cautionary tale from a time before women had ready access to birth control. In “Butterfield 8″ (1960), for which she won an Oscar, Taylor isn’t censured because she’s a prostitute, but because she chooses the men: she controls her sexuality, a core tenet of the third-wave feminism that emerged in the 1990s. Even “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) depicts the anguish that befalls a woman when the only way she can express herself is through her husband’s stalled career and children.

The legendary actress has lived her life defiantly in public–undermining post-war reactionary sex roles, helping directors thwart the Hollywood Production Code, which censored film content between 1934 and 1967. Defying death threats she spearheaded fundraising for AIDS research in the first years of the epidemic, and has championed the rights of people to love whom they love, regardless of gender. Yet her powerful feminist impact has been hidden in plain sight. Drawing on unpublished letters and scripts as well as interviews with Kate Burton, Gore Vidal, Austin Pendleton, Kevin McCarthy, Liz Smith, and others, The Accidental Feminist will surprise Taylor and film fans with its originality and will add a startling dimension to the star’s enduring mystique.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About M. G. Lord

M.G. Lord is a celebrated cultural critic and investigative journalist, and the author of Forever Barbie and Astro Turf. Since 1995 she has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the Times‘s Arts & Leisure section. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, and ArtForum. Before becoming a freelance writer, Lord was a syndicated political cartoonist and a columnist for Newsday. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Review

Like those who think of actor John Wayne as a real-life He-Man, Jimmy Stewart as a sort of grown-up Scout master and Humphrey Bogart as a genuine tough guy, cultural critic Lord (Masters of Professional Writing Program/Univ. of Southern California; Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, 2005, etc.) sees a feminist in Elizabeth Taylor. The author analyzes Taylor’s portrayal of characters from the spunky little girl who rode her horse to victory in National Velvet to the strident middle-aged wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and in her stage performance as the fierce Regina in The Little Foxes. Into what is essentially a glowing mini-biography of the actress, Lord inserts detailed plot summaries of Taylor’s films, which she admits to having watched repeatedly , along with tidbits about Taylor’s several husbands and some of her fellow actors: Richard Burton, Eddie Fisher, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson and others. Besides finding material for her thesis in the scripts of Taylor’s movies, the author interviewed people who knew her, worked with her, were related to her or wrote about her, including gossip columnist Liz Smith and Burton’s daughter Kate. In Lord’s view, the actress’ work in the fight against AIDS in the 1980s demonstrates that roles played by Taylor as a young woman influenced her thinking about social justice as an older woman. Not central to the book but an informatory sidelight is the author’s account of the Hays Code, which dictated the moral content of Hollywood films from the early ’30s through most of the ’60s. It forbade nudity, adultery, sexual perversion, miscegenation, drug use and irreverence to religion and the flag. How the code shaped scripts and how directors worked around the restrictions is a story worth telling. – Kirkus Reviews

Smoldering Subversive - What Elizabeth Taylor Did For Women’s Rights

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 1012 (Excerpt)

Authors need obsessions; it’s their immoderate, uncontainable, sometimes irrational preoccupations that feed their creative energies. The best writers can lead readers to share their manias. If Melville hadn’t been overly invested in whales, no “Moby-Dick.” If Twain hadn’t been drawn to the Mississippi River, no “Huckleberry Finn.” If Tolstoy hadn’t been appalled by social hypocrisy, no “Anna Karenina.” For the journalist and cultural critic M. G. Lord, it’s curvaceous, charismatic icons of femininity that hold her imagination hostage.

Almost 20 years ago, Lord came into the public eye with her book “Forever Barbie,” an exploration of Mattel’s bodacious Barbie doll — the long-legged, narrow-hipped toy, endowed with “shocking torpedo orbs,” that has held children (and others) in thrall for half a century. Barbie, she explained, was inspired by a saucy postwar German doll called Lilli, which was sold to men as a jokey erotic knickknack. Mattel’s experts, testing an American variant in the 1950s, learned that little girls coveted the shapely doll, but their mothers were horrified by it. A shrewd ad campaign overcame maternal resistance by suggesting that daughters who dressed and groomed Barbie, with her vast collection of accessories and outfits, would learn how to become well-turned-out young ladies, rather than tomboys. It worked.

Now Lord’s idée fixe has leapt to another female American sex symbol, the violet-eyed actress Elizabeth Taylor, who died last March at 79. What Lord did for Barbie, she now does for La Liz in “The Accidental Feminist,” which argues that the lavishly proportioned actress was much more than a beautiful face and body: she was a pathbreaker for social progress and women’s rights — albeit, Lord concedes, an unwitting one. Taylor’s stepdaughter Kate Burton, who spoke with Lord for the book, demurred that while she could detect a “thread of feminism” in some of the movies, she “doubted Taylor had been conscious of it.” [Read the full article...]

Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image by Toby Lester

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:57:19 +0000

EVERYONE KNOWS THE IMAGE. NO ONE KNOWS ITS STORY.

This is the story of Vitruvian Man: Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of a man in a circle and a square. Deployed today to celebrate subjects as various as the nature of genius, the beauty of the human form, and the universality of the human spirit, the figure appears on everything from coffee cups and T-shirts to book covers and corporate logos. In short, it has become the world’s most famous cultural icon, yet almost nobody knows anything about it. Leonardo didn’t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was playing with the idea, set down by the Roman architect Vitruvius, that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was therefore to imply that the human body was the world in miniature. This idea, known as the theory of the microcosm, was the engine that had powered Western religious and scientific thought for centuries, and Leonardo hitched himself to it in no uncertain terms.

Yet starting in the 1480s he set out to do something unprecedented. If the design of the body truly did reflect that of the cosmos, he reasoned, then by studying its proportions and anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been done before—by peering deep into both body and soul—he might broaden the scope of his art to include the broadest of metaphysical horizons. He might, in other words, obtain an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world as a whole. Vitruvian Man gives that exhilarating idea visual expression. In telling its story, Toby Lester weaves together a century-spanning saga of people and ideas. Assembled here is an eclectic cast of fascinating characters: the architect Vitruvius; the emperor Caesar Augustus and his “body of empire”; early Christian and Muslim thinkers; the visionary mystic Hildegard of Bingen; the book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini; the famous dome-builder Filippo Brunelleschi; Renaissance anatomists, architects, art theorists, doctors, and military engineers; and, of course, in the starring role, Leonardo himself—whose ghost Lester resurrects in the surprisingly unfamiliar context of his own times.

Da Vinci’s Ghost is written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester’s award-winning first book, the “almost unbearably thrilling” (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World. Like Vitruvian Man itself, the book captures a pivotal time in the history of Western thought when the Middle Ages was giving way to the Renaissance, when art and science and philosophy all seemed to be converging as one, and when it seemed just possible, at least to Leonardo da Vinci, that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of everything.

About Toby Lester

Toby Lester has written extensively for The Atlantic. His work has also been featured on the radio show This American Life. His previous book, The Fourth Part of the World, was highly acclaimed worldwide and has been translated into seven languages.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Every once in a while that rare book comes along that is not only wonderfully written and utterly compelling but also alters the way you perceive the world. Toby Lester’s “Da Vinci’s Ghost” is such a book. Like a detective, Lester uncovers the secrets of an iconic drawing and pieces together a magisterial history of art and ideas and beauty.” –David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

“Marvelously imaginative, exhaustively researched. . . . Guiding the reader Virgil-like through the Age of Discovery, Lester introduces a chronologically and conceptually vast array of Great Men (Columbus, Vespucci, Polo, Copernicus, et al.), competing theories, monastic sages, forgotten poets, opportunistic merchants, unfortunate slaves, and more. That he relates it all so cleanly and cogently—via elegant prose, relaxed erudition, measured pacing, and purposeful architecture—is a feat. That he proffers plentiful visual delights, including detailed views of the legendary document, is a gift. This map, Lester writes, ‘draws you in, reveals itself in stages, and doesn’t let go.’ Nor does this splendid volume.” —The Atlantic

“Erudite, elegant, enthralling. This is a wonderful book. Toby Lester understands, and makes us understand, the unique intensity with which Leonardo saw the world. He saw it not only in its infinite diversity but also as an impression of his own self, an explanation of what it means to be human. Hence Vitruvian Man.” –Sister Wendy Beckett, author of The Story of Painting

The Measure of All Things - ‘Da Vinci’s Ghost’ Examines One of the Artist’s Most Famous Images

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Albert Einstein wrote that the mind “always has tried to form for itself a simple and synoptic image of the surrounding world.” During the Renaissance, when the ancient Greek idea of man as the measure of all things leapt to the forefront of intellectual life, the human body became a preferred object for this type of “synoptic” speculation. In a widely read treatise titled “Divina Proportione” (1509), the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli echoed fashionable opinions of the day by declaring that our body measurements express “every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature.” Pacioli’s close friend Leonardo da Vinci provided illustrations.

In the richly rewarding history “Da Vinci’s Ghost,” Toby Lester, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, shows that Leonardo had long been fascinated by the concept of man as a microcosm of the universe. Before the Pacioli collaboration, the idea had inspired what has since become one of Leonardo’s most famous images, “Vitruvian Man” (circa 1490), a careful line drawing of a nude male figure whose outstretched arms and legs fit perfectly in the bounds of a circle and a square. “Vitruvian Man” has entered popular culture as an emblem of Leonardo’s genius — redolent of secret knowledge, referred to in the initial crime scene of “The Da Vinci Code” and reproduced on the face of the Italian one-euro coin. But as Lester points out, “almost nobody knows its story.” [Read the full article...]

Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:58:17 +0000

William S. Burroughs was one of the twentieth century’s most iconoclastic literary and artistic figures, an inimitable writer whose groundbreaking work in novels such as Junky and Naked Lunch forever altered the shape of American culture. Now, in this long anticipated collection, editor Bill Morgan takes readers through Burroughs’ correspondence from the early sixties through the mid-seventies, in more than three hundred letters that document Burroughs’ steady drift away from the Beat circle and that witness an era in which he became the center of a new coterie of creative people who would establish his reputation as an influential artistic and cultural leader beyond the literary world, toward multimedia.

Written to recipients such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Burroughs’ son, Billy Burroughs Jr., these letters shed new light on the writer’s controversial artistic process and literary experimentation, as well as his complex personal life. Here are letters to new friends in North Africa and Eur-ope—partners in Burroughs’ expatriate life—including Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Michael Portman, Alex Trocchi, and the surrealist artist Brion Gysin, who became a close confidant and whose “cut-up method” would deeply influence Burroughs’ writing.

An intimate glimpse into the private life of an often misunderstood artist, Rub Out the Words is also an unforgettable portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most uncompromising literary personalities.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About William S. Burroughs

Born in 1914 to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, William S. Burroughs was one of the most significant people in twentieth-century American popular culture and literature. A novelist, poet, and essayist, he was a primary member of the Beat Generation, influential upon such writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs was the author of eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays, among them the 1959 classic Naked Lunch. After living in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, Burroughs finally returned to America in 1974. He died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1997.

Editorial Review

Beat Generation expert Morgan (The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, 2010, etc.) has assembled a representative selection from the 1,000-plus letters that Burroughs (1914–1997) wrote during the 15 years the collection comprises. Most are to three correspondents: his son, Billy; his friends and colleagues Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin. Billy, we learn through the letters, had adolescent troubles with drugs (are we surprised?), including several arrests—but by the end of these letters he was married and having some publishing success as William Burroughs Jr. Ginsberg’s role as principal confidante was soon assumed by Gysin, to whom Burroughs wrote most frankly about everything from gay porn to drugs and Timothy Leary (whom he grew to revile) to philosophies of composition to books he liked (Dune, The Godfather) or despised (In Cold Blood). Included is a vicious letter Burroughs wrote in 1970 to Truman Capote, accusing Capote of betraying, even killing, his talent. Many of the letters deal with the process first employed by Gysin and then adopted and championed by Burroughs—the “cut-up” process. For years Burroughs was enamored of this technique of snipping passages from publications and pasting them up in novel arrangements. He tried the technique with photographs, motion pictures and audio recordings as well—all discussed at length in the letters. Burroughs also followed some complex choreography with scientology and L. Ron Hubbard, whom he later accused of creating a “fascist cosmos.” Perhaps most surprising: Burroughs’ phenomenal work ethic and assiduousness. – Kirkus Reviews

After ‘Lunch’ – The Letters William S. Burroughs Wrote at the Height of His Success

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1959, as this collection begins, William S. Burroughs was living in Paris at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur, the address that would come to be known as “the Beat Hotel.” “Naked Lunch” had just been published by the Olympia Press; because of censorship it would not be published in the United States for another three years. He was collaborating with the British artist and writer Brion Gysin on a variety of experimental procedures. Gysin had just accidentally discovered the cut-up method, in which pages of different texts are cut into sections and combined and rearranged to form new meanings. The two were also making tape-recorder montages and tinkering with a stroboscopic device called the dream machine. Burroughs was then at the height of his literary activity, working on many of his most important books, from “The Soft Machine” to “The Wild Boys,” within the following few years. Consequently, “Rub Out the Words,” unlike its predecessor (“The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959,” edited by Oliver Harris, 1993), is longer on argument than on incident.

Although the book includes roughly two dozen letters to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs had by then shifted his focus away from his erstwhile Beat comrades. He made only a handful of brief, mostly business-related visits to the United States during this period (the collection ends with his move back to New York in 1974, after 25 years abroad). He became famous in the 1960s, although the letters only obliquely reflect this. He certainly did not become rich; feuds with and complaints to and about his various publishers, generally on the subject of money, form a recurring subtheme. He was now at least temporarily free of his heroin addiction, apparently thanks to the apomorphine treatment devised by Dr. John Yerby Dent of London, and there are a great many repetitive proselytizing letters on that subject addressed to people around the world. (Apomorphine, which is not an opiate, has never been proved effective as a cure for addiction, although it is used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.) [Read the full article...]

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:31:49 +0000

These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.

The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.

Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander’s short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, which earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

“Englander’s new collection of stories tells the tangled truth of life in prose that, as ever, surprises the reader with its gnarled beauty . . . Certifiable masterpieces of contemporary short-story art.”
—Michael Chabon

“A resounding testament to the power of the short story from a master of the form. Englander’s latest hooks you with the same irresistible intimacy, immediacy and deliciousness of stumbling in on a heated altercation that is absolutely none of your business; it’s what great fiction is all about.”
—Téa Obreht

“It takes an exceptional combination of moral humility and moral assurance to integrate fine-grained comedy and large-scale tragedy as daringly as Nathan Englander does.”
—Jonathan Franzen

Book review: ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank’ by Nathan Englander

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

Give Nathan Englander credit for chutzpah. The title of his new book of short fiction, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” draws on two iconic antecedents: the young diarist killed at Bergen-Belsen and the Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Each, in its way, informs the collection; each, in its way, helps to set the terms. And what are those terms? The tension between the religious and the secular, between the American setting of much of this work and the more elusive textures of Jewish life.

For Englander — a self-proclaimed “apostate,” raised in an Orthodox community in Long Island, now living in Brooklyn by way of Jerusalem — this is a defining issue. “But what do you do,” he (or a character very much like him) asks in a story called “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side,” “if you’re American and have no family history and all your most vivid childhood memories are only the plots of sitcoms, if even your dreams, when pieced together, are the snippets of movies that played in your ear while you slept?”

The triumph of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” is Englander’s ability to balance one against the other, to find, even as he’s calling it unfindable, the deeper story, the more nuanced narrative. “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is a perfect case in point: Broken into 63 numbered sections, it is a story about the search for a viable story, in which the disconnected pieces come together to make a kind of sense. “What you do is tell the stories you have, as best you can,” the protagonist’s girlfriend tells him although, almost immediately, she backtracks: “I don’t mean that. … You find better stories than that.” [Read the full article...]

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:23:13 +0000

In the years following World War II, a small group of gay writers established themselves as literary power players, fueling cultural changes that would resonate for decades to come, and transforming the American literary landscape forever.

In EMINENT OUTLAWS, novelist Christopher Bram brilliantly chronicles the rise of gay consciousness in American writing. Beginning with a first wave of major gay literary figures-Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, and James Baldwin-he shows how (despite criticism and occasional setbacks) these pioneers set the stage for new generations of gay writers to build on what they had begun: Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Tony Kushner, and Edward Albee among them.

Weaving together the crosscurrents, feuds, and subversive energies that provoked these writers to greatness, EMINENT OUTLAWS is a rich and essential work. With keen insights, it takes readers through fifty years of momentous change: from a time when being a homosexual was a crime in forty-nine states and into an age of same-sex marriage and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Christopher Bram

Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including Gods and Monsters (originally titled Father of Frankenstein), which was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Bram was a 2001 Guggenheim Fellow and received the 2003 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Review

The author, gay himself, does not say much about his own career here—just a couple of modest asides—but he does pay homage to those he considers the godfathers of gay writing, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and the “fairy godfather,” Gore Vidal, to whom Bram returns continually throughout. The author also slams those critics who could not see the literary merit of stories with gay characters and behavior—principally Stanley Kauffmann, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Midge Decter, though Bram points out that writers from Norman Mailer to Andrew Sullivan have at times had “issues.” Bram follows the careers of the godfathers, but he also looks at other important novelists, poets and playwrights, including Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Mark Doty, David Leavitt, Michael Cunningham and many others. Often he pauses for plot summary, analysis and judgment. The author also points out writers he believes have not received sufficient attention, among them Paul Russell, Mark Merlis and Henry Rios. Bram pauses occasionally to rehearse key events in gay cultural history—the Howl obscenity trial, the Stonewall riots, the televised 1968 clash between William F. Buckley Jr., and Vidal, Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade, the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and beyond. Bram also flashes some attitude here and there, and not just toward the enemies of gay writers. He sometimes chides Vidal, shines a harsh light on Capote and calls Edmund White’s novel Caracole “a complete dud.” – Kirkus Reviews

Writers at the Ramparts in a Gay Revolution

The New York Times Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater, first read “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s sprawling 1985 play about the early days of the AIDS crisis, he thought it was a mess. “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read,” Papp said. But the play so moved him that he added, “and I’m crying.”

Papp’s language echoes some of my feelings about Christopher Bram’s new book, “Eminent Outlaws,” a critical and biographical survey of America’s gay writers in the second half of the 20th century.

This book is not a mess, exactly. It’s argumentative and often resonant, and lit from below by a gossipy wit. But its power is less sentence by sentence than cumulative. You don’t realize how much the details of these writers’ books and difficult lives have touched you until the book’s final chapters.

Mr. Bram is a novelist, best known for “Father of Frankenstein” (1995), which became the film “Gods and Monsters.” With “Eminent Outlaws” he has filled a gap in our critical literature. [Read the full article...]

Thinking the Twentieth Century – Essays by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:30:23 +0000

The final book of the brilliant historian and indomitable public critic Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century maps the issues and concerns of a turbulent age on to a life of intellectual conflict and engagement.

The twentieth century comes to life as an age of ideas–a time when, for good and for ill, the thoughts of the few reigned over the lives of the many. Judt presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explaining both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments. Spanning an era with unprecedented clarity and insight, Thinking the Twentieth Century is a tour-de-force, a classic engagement of modern thought by one of the century’s most incisive thinkers.

The exceptional nature of this work is evident in its very structure–a series of intimate conversations between Judt and his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder, grounded in the texts of the time and focused by the intensity of their vision. Judt’s astounding eloquence and range are here on display as never before. Traversing the complexities of modern life with ease, he and Snyder revive both thoughts and thinkers, guiding us through the debates that made our world. As forgotten ideas are revisited and fashionable trends scrutinized, the shape of a century emerges. Judt and Snyder draw us deep into their analysis, making us feel that we too are part of the conversation. We become aware of the obligations of the present to the past, and the force of historical perspective and moral considerations in the critique and reform of society, then and now.

In restoring and indeed exemplifying the best of intellectual life in the twentieth century, Thinking the Twentieth Century opens pathways to a moral life for the twenty-first. This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for: Thinking the Twentieth Century is about the life of the mind–and the mindful life.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Tony Judt

Tony Judt was educated at King’s College, Cambridge and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, in addition to being the Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995.

The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the United States. Professor Judt is the author of Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2005, winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.

Editorial Review

That could be a dry task, but for the quiet passion of Judt (The Memory Chalet, 2010, etc.) and Snyder (History/Yale Univ.; Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010, etc.), who spent most of 2009 talking about, in Snyder’s summary, “the limitations (and capacity for renewal) of political ideas, and the moral failures (and duties) of intellectuals in politics.” The authors consider these questions within the framework of 20th-century history and the biography of Judt, who died in 2010. Born in London in 1948, the son of immigrant Jews, Judt grew up with the modern welfare state, benefiting from its meritocratic educational system to attend Cambridge and pursue academic studies focused first on French history, then Eastern Europe after World War II. He was an ardent youthful Zionist who later severely criticized Israeli policies, creating a furor in 2003 with an essay arguing for a one-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Judt reluctantly took on the role of public intellectual because of a sense—clearly shared by Snyder, their conversations reveal—that the problems currently plaguing America in particular and the advanced industrial economies in general cannot be meaningfully addressed without understanding their deep roots in a history that stretches back to World War I. This history includes the ravages inflicted by unrestrained capitalism, the appeal and very similar failings of communism and fascism, the misguided uses to which the Holocaust has been put and the post-WWII social bargain that unraveled in the ’70s. Judt and Snyder analyze these and many other historical issues with lofty erudition matched by unabashed polemicism—Judt skewers David Brooks as a know-nothing and characterizes Thomas Friedman’s support of the Iraq war as “contemptible”). Social democracy has rarely had better-informed, more ethically rigorous advocates than these two distinguished men. – Kirkus Reviews

Things Fell Apart: Tony Judt’s ‘Twentieth Century’

NPR Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Without history, memory is open to abuse,” writes Tony Judt in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Perhaps more than anything else the late British-American historian wrote, that could have been his credo — his work, especially toward the end of his career, was marked by an almost activist concern for morality, what he called an “explicit ethical engagement.”

That approach made Judt, author of the critically acclaimedPostwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, one of the world’s most controversial historians — but also one of its most admired. After he died in 2010 of Lou Gehrig’s disease, his obituaries made note of both his intellect and his unflagging advocacy. Historians, he wrote, are “also participants in our own time and place and cannot retreat from it,” and he never did.

Thinking the Twentieth Century is Judt’s final work, and it’s fitting that it is just as complex as the historian himself. The book — essentially an edited transcription of conversations between Judt and Yale history professor Timothy Snyder — combines elements of memoir, history and philosophy. Each chapter begins with an autobiographical passage by Judt, tracing his life from his childhood in London, the son of Jewish immigrants, to the months before his death in New York. Following these are discussions with Snyder about European history and political philosophy, covering everything from Marxism and Zionism (both of which Judt once embraced) to the social democracy he advocated in his final years. [Read the full article...]

One Man’s History - Tony Judt Reviews His Life’s Journey

The New York Times Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Tony Judt was known to many people as the public intellectual who aroused a firestorm of criticism for an article he wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2003, calling for Israel to become a binational state and to lose its specifically Jewish character. That essay, as well as biting critiques of the Iraq war and the Israel lobby, earned him considerable enmity in some quarters, mitigated perhaps by the subsequent news that he had developed Lou Gehrig’s disease, to which he succumbed in August 2010.

This public persona is unfortunate because it obscures a much more interesting figure. As a historian of 20th-century Europe, Judt both chronicled and himself represented the huge ideological transformations that occurred between the beginning and end of that century. This life has now been documented in the quasi-autobiographical “Thinking the Twentieth Century.” Conceived after Judt’s illness had already been diagnosed, the book consists of transcriptions of his conversations with Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian who is the distinguished author of a number of well-regarded books on Eastern and Central Europe. Snyder, highly erudite and opinionated himself, is not your typical journalistic interviewer; the book is more a dialogue than an autobiography. [Read the full article...]

I Lay My Stitches Down: Poems of American Slavery by Cynthia Grady

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:09:41 +0000

This rich and intricate collection of poems chronicles the various experiences of American slaves. Drawn together through imagery drawn from quilting and fiber arts, each poem is spoken from a different perspective: a house slave, a mother losing her daughter to the auction block, a blacksmith, a slave fleeing on the Underground Railroad.

This moving and eloquent set of poems, brought to life by vivid and colorful artwork from Michele Wood, offers a timeless witness to the hardship endured by America’s slaves. Each poem is supplemented by a historical note.

About Cynthia Grady And Michele Wood

Cynthia Grady is a poet and a librarian at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. I Lay My Stiches Down will be her first published book. In her spare time, Cynthia quilts. Visit her website at www.cynthiagrady.com.

Michele Wood is a painter, illustrator, designer, and writer. She received the American Book Award for her first book, Going Back Home, and the Coretta Scott King Award for the illustration in her book I See the Rhythm. Michele lives in Georgia. Visit her website at www.michelewood.com.

Editorial Review

In her debut title, Grady structures free verse to mirror the patterns of traditional American quilt blocks, variations on a square. In the poems, each 10 lines with 10 syllables per line, the words and thoughts read seamlessly and build to heart-rending finales. They speak of daily lives made bearable by the words of a preacher, the joys of singing and the quiet rhythms of stitching. A woman bent over her basket of scraps can see her “troubles fall / away.” A man calming a horse can find a “patchwork field of freedom.” Children outside a school building scratch out the alphabet because “[i]t gives us hope; it sings us home.” Each poem is accompanied by brief background information on slavery and on the quilt-block pattern that inspired it. Full-page paintings by Wood, a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner, pulsate with vibrant colors and intensity. Each incorporates the quilt pattern that served as Grady’s inspiration into a collage-styled portrait. Readers will find themselves poring over the many details in the art and connecting them with the verses. – Kirkus Reviews

‘I Lay My Stitches Down: Poems of American Slavery,’ by Cynthia Grady

The Washington Post Book Review – January 31, 2012

The role of quilts in slavery, particularly as signals in the Underground Railroad, is an ongoing debate in historical circles, but in the exceptional “I Lay My Stitches Down,” quilts become an affecting metaphor for the patchwork lives endured by American slaves. Using a structure of 10 lines of 10 syllables to reflect square patches of cloth, D.C. author Cynthia Grady presents 14 poems touching on aspects of slavery, including moments of peace, a terrible lashing and an escape attempt. Grady incorporates references to needlework into every poem: “I wait — then thread my way to freedomland”; “That overseer cut from the same cloth/as the devil hisself, the very warp/and weft.” Michele Wood’s vibrant paintings are likewise wrapped up in quilts, each one a gorgeous hodgepodge of images, colors and patterns. In one illustration, showing an escaped slave crossing a river, the blue-green night sky is made of squares and ornamented by the North Star and the moon; the water’s rings seem part of another quilt with a circular pattern embellished by small animals and lily pads. Throughout the book, the interplay between pictures and words, including the poems and succinct historical background, is deeply impressive, as seamless as it is stirring. — Abby McGanney Nolan

Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana – Newly Translated

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:25:57 +0000

A gorgeous deluxe edition of the world’s most celebrated guide to life, love, relationships and pleasure.

Little is known about Vatsyayana, who is reputed to have composed the Kama Sutra ”while observing a celibate’s life in full meditation.” In Sanskrit the word “kama” means desire, especially for sensual pleasure, and its proper pursuit was considered an essential part of a young, urbane gentleman’s well-rounded education.

Untold numbers of readers are curious about the Kama Sutra but put off by its clichéd image as an erotic Oriental curiosity. This elegant edition offers a compelling modern translation of a classic Indian masterpiece-and a wry and entertaining account of human desire and foibles.

About Vatsyayana

Vatsyayana‘s given name was Mallanaga and he was most likely from the Madhya Desha, once India’s cultural heartland. He lives sometime between the first and third centuries.

When to Quote Poetry or Moan Like a Moorhen

The New York Times Book Review – January 31, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Genitals,” Malcolm Bradbury, the British novelist and academic, wrote, “are a great distraction to scholarship.” They’ve been a distraction, too, to our understanding of the Kama Sutra, the classic study of society and sexuality written in India nearly 2,000 years ago.

The book resides in the popular imagination as kitsch, as if it were a series of aroused and arousing Pilates poses for two. In bookstores you will find inanities like “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Supercharged Kama Sutra Illustrated” sooner than a faithful translation of the original manuscript, which contained no drawings whatsoever.

This clear and elegant new translation is the work of A. N. D. Haksar, a former Indian diplomat and a well-known translator of Sanskrit classics. It’s worth attending to, and not merely because Valentine’s Day is nearly here, and your partner might find this sleek new Penguin Classics edition an intellectual aphrodisiac, though it contains no erotic illustrations, except several sublime ones on its cover. (For a certain audience, all Penguin Classics are trance-inducing objects of lust.)

Mr. Haksar reminds us how little of this book is a sex tutorial and how much of it is an intricate and surprisingly modern guide to the art of living. It is addressed to women as well as men. It is about decorating, about spouse wooing and about intellectual pastimes, among other things. That it also has chapter titles like “Scratching,” “Kissing,” “Biting,” “Oral Sex,” “Hitting and Moaning” and “Reversing Roles” only adds to its epicurean foxiness.

The Kama Sutra — “kama” roughly means desire, while “sutra” means thread — is an old book but a relatively new one to Western eyes. About its author, Vatsyayana, we know little, except that he — the author of the world’s Ur-dirty book — was said to be celibate. The Kama Sutra was first translated into English in 1883 by the explorer and linguist Sir Richard Burton who, given censorship laws, helped get it published privately. The book was formally issued in the United States only in 1962, one year after Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and a decade before Alex Comfort’s “Joy of Sex.” [Read the full article...]

A Tribute to William Brockedon, Man Of Many Talents

Peter Carroll — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:22:57 +0000

Peter Carroll is the author of Queen of Misfortune – A Lady Jane Grey Novel. For more information, see his website.

When I first looked at William Brockedon who was born in Totnes, Devon in 1787- in the light of his worthiness of my writing a piece about him - I almost let it go, the first mention of him being the son of a popular watchmaker in Totnes who’s family owned a local mill and other property since the reign of Henry IV-who carried on his father’s business there for five years after his death, did not seem to accrue a lot of interest, but then reading on: how fascinating it was to learn that not only was he a painter, and an inventor, but also he became an author describing in text accompanied by his own drawings. the route Hannibal took across the alps, which he took almost step by step himself and which, remarkably he repeated no less than sixty times, culminating in the publication of his first book published in 1827 entitled Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps followed by two more ongoing publications containing beautiful drawings by the author

He studied drawing and the fine arts at the Royal Academy and during 1809-1815 exhibited there and at the British Institution and quickly became an elected member of Academy of Rome and Florence where he was greatly admired.

That in itself was an achievement to behold but his active mind was forever sparking his inventiveness until he died in 1854 – coming up with among other things, something we all take for granted when we pick up our prescriptions from the chemist – the pre-dosed medical compound having been compressed into capsule, lozenge and tablet form following the patent of his tablet press in 1843. This followed his invention for the conversion of lead dust for pencil making along with a new form of bottle corks, and several new applications concerning the making and application of vulcanized India rubber, used by firearms manufacturers who were greatly impressed, and it is he who coined the word “vulcanization.”

Since the early beginning of medicine there had been a dire need for convenient dosage forms – to enable the safe taking of fluids, whether solutions, suspensions or emulsions – Brockedon came up with the perfect remedy, so simple and so easy and thus avoiding overdose sometimes resulting in fatalities.

It is all the more fascinating to think the watchmakers’ son had no connection whatsoever with medicine. We surely owe him much and I wonder how long it would have taken for someone else to come up with the idea. He certainly revolutionized medical and pharmaceutical practices

His travel writings and such also brought him to the attention of Charles Dickens with whom he became acquainted and who said of him “he knows a good deal about some curious places – is very ingenious – and may be very useful.”

In his later years he would fill his study with countless scientific books and his tool shed with implements then used in everyday life, and consider a new scientific approach, some inevitably failed but others succeeded and much of his attention to minute detail could arguably be attributed to the influence of his father being a watchmaker and who supplemented his son’s education and instilled in him an early leaning for scientific and mechanical matters.

His father prematurely died when William was fifteen and he found himself taking charge of the clock making business with the backing of his mother but his need to eventually move on became apparent but he had the backing of his mother who became very proud of him.

He married in 1821 Elizabeth Graham, who tragically died in childbirth when she was forty on 23 July 1829, leaving two children, Philip North, born at Florence on 27 April 1822, and Mary, married to Joseph H. Baxendale, the head of the removal firm of Pickford & Co. The son, who was educated as a civil engineer, became the favourite pupil of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but died of consumption at the age of 28, on 13 November 1849. On 8 May 1839 Brockedon married for the second time the widow of Captain Farwell of Totnes, who survived him, and by whom he had no children.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity by Katherine Boo

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:18:48 +0000

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.

In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India. This is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

“A riveting, fearlessly reported portrait of a poverty so obliterating that it amounts to a slow-motion genocide. Right now the book is sitting on my shelf making all the other books feel stupid. … Beautiful Forevers will be one of the year’s big books — a conversation starter, an award winner. … The book plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That’s partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it’s also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A.”—Entertainment Weekly

“A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction … narrative with a cinematic intensity … Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you’ll not soon forget.”—Elle

“A shocking—and riveting—portrait of life in modern India. … This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction … Boo’s prose is electric.”—O Magazine

All They Hope for Is Survival

The New York Times Book Review – January 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Zehrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief ways of starting conversations,” Katherine Boo writes in “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” her exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter.

Half an acre. 335 huts. 3,000 people. And a concrete wall that is supposed to hide them from view: this is Annawadi, the Mumbai slum that comes vibrantly to life in this book’s pages. Ms. Boo says that she chose Annawadi because the scale of this “sumpy plug of slum” bordering a lake of sewage was small, and its location was fraught with possibilities. Annawadi sits beside the road to the Mumbai airport, on “a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late.” In 2008, at the time the events in the book unfolded, scavenging and trash sorting were the children of Annawadi’s most promising career choices.

Much of the focus is on Zehrunisa and her oldest son, Abdul. One of Abdul’s brothers dreams of having a “clean job” at one of the nearby hotels. (“He’d heard of waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks on tables.”) But Abdul is more of a pragmatist and has made himself an expert at trading in refuse. [Read the full article...]

Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:46:07 +0000

By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America – and much of the West – into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America’s status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. This book seeks to answer four major questions:

1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from West to East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity?
2. Why is America’s global appeal waning, how ominous are the symptoms of America’s domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War?
3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America did decline by 2025, and could China then assume America’s central role in world affairs?
4. What ought to be a resurgent America’s major long-term geopolitical goals in order to shape a more vital and larger West and to engage cooperatively the emerging and dynamic new East?

America, Brzezinski argues, must define and pursue a comprehensive and long-term a geopolitical vision, a vision that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. This book seeks to provide the strategic blueprint for that vision.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski, formerly President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, is a counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor of American foreign policy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His many books include the New York Times bestseller Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower; The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership; and The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States of America
“Brzezinski’s latest book reflects his talent for unraveling complex historical issues and his strength in advocating long-term solutions for them.”

Senator John Kerry
“Strategic Vision is a clear, vivid look at America’s place in the world today. Rather than surrender to defeatist speculation about the perceived end to the American Century, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s reality-based insights explore how the United States can move forward over the next two decades. This is a must-read for a straightforward assessment of the challenges of today and tomorrow and the unique strengths America brings to the global stage.”

Senator Richard G. Lugar, State of Indiana; Ranking Member of and Former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
“Informed by a lifetime of comprehensive scholarship and many years of responsibility on the front lines of our diplomacy and national security, Zbigniew Brzezinski provides in Strategic Vision a comprehensive blueprint for successful planning and action. His challenge to the U.S. to be a sophisticated leader of a vital democratic-enlarged zone in the West and a promoter of stability in the East is timely and persuasive.”

Surveying a Global Power Shift

The New York Times Book Review – January 29, 2012 (Excerpt)

The 2008 crash and America and Europe’s continuing economic woes; the rise of China and worries about the decline of the West; and technology-fueled uprisings around the world from the Arab Spring protests to anti-Putin demonstrations in Russia — such developments underscore just how prescient Zbigniew Brzezinski has been in his earlier writings.

In the early 1990s, when some scholars were arguing that the end of the cold war and the implosion of the Soviet Union signified the advent of a new era in which liberal democracy would triumph around the planet, Mr. Brzezinski was warning about the forces of upheaval rumbling through the developing world and the weaknesses of the West that could undermine its global clout.

In his 1993 book “Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century” Mr. Brzezinski argued that the acceleration of communication made possible by technology set contemporary history apart from the past, that China was more likely than Russia to assume a leadership role on the world stage, and that America’s emphasis on “material wealth, on consumption and on the propagation of self-indulgence as the definition of the good life” could endanger its pre-eminence as a global power.

Now, in his provocative new book, “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power,” Mr. Brzezinski — the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter — surveys the current state of world affairs. He provides a clear-eyed, sharp-tongued assessment of this hinge moment in time, when the world’s center of gravity is shifting “from the West to the East.” [Read the full article...]

Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power by Susan Hertog

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:18:17 +0000

Born in the 1890s on opposite sides of the Atlantic, friends for more than forty years, Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West lived strikingly parallel lives that placed them at the center of the social and historical upheavals of the twentieth century. In Dangerous Ambition, Susan Hertog chronicles the separate but intertwined journeys of these two remarkable women writers, who achieved unprecedented fame and influence at tremendous personal cost.

American Dorothy Thompson was the first female head of a European news bureau, a columnist and commentator with a tremendous following whom Time magazine once ranked alongside Eleanor Roosevelt as the most influential woman in America. Rebecca West, an Englishwoman at home wherever genius was spoken, blazed a trail for herself as a journalist, literary critic, novelist, and historian. In a prefeminist era when speaking truth to power could get anyone—of either gender—ostracized, blacklisted, or worse, these two smart, self-made women were among the first to warn the world about the dangers posed by fascism, communism, and appeasement.

But there was a price to be paid, Hertog shows, for any woman aspiring to such greatness. As much as they sought voice and power in the public forum of opinion and ideas, and the independence of mind and money that came with them, Thompson and West craved the comforts of marriage and home. Torn between convention and the opportunities of the new postwar global world, they were drawn to men who were as ambitious and hungry for love as themselves: Thompson to the brilliant, volatile, and alcoholic Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis; West to her longtime lover H. G. Wells, the lusty literary eminence whose sexual and emotional demands doomed any chance they may have had at love. Tragically, both arrangements produced troubled sons, whose anger and jealousy at their mothers’ iconic fame eroded their sense of personal success.

Brimming with fresh insights obtained from previously sealed archives, this penetrating dual biography is a story of twinned lives caught up in the crosscurrents of world events and affairs of the heart—and of the unique trans-Atlantic friendship forged by two of the most creative and complex women of their time.

About Susan Hertog

Susan Hertog was born in New York City and graduated from Hunter College. After earning her M.F.A. from Columbia University, she became a freelance journalist and photographer. She is the author of one previous book, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life. She lives in Manhattan with her family.

Editorial Reviews

“With grace and insight, Susan Hertog has written a masterly dual biography of two of the most formidable women of their age. This is a deeply researched, carefully wrought book, at once illuminating and entertaining, and it brings Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson back to vivid life. As readers, we owe Hertog a great debt.”—Jon Meacham, author of American Lion

“Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson were brave, driven, ferociously intelligent, and magnificently right about the thing that mattered more than anything else in their era: the Nazi threat. In this well-researched, fluent, and groundbreaking work, Susan Hertog successfully connects their personal and professional lives, drawing profound moral conclusions from the friendship between these two ambitious, high-achieving, and admirable women.”—Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War

“Susan Hertog brilliantly captures these two women as they lived, loved, and marshaled their power to fight for Western civilization in the hour of its greatest challenge. We know what Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West did; Hertog shows us how they did it.”—Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man

Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power by Susan Hertog

The Washington Post Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Rebecca West (1892-1983) and Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) were transatlantic friends for more than 40 years, and it’s not hard to see why. They were two of the foremost journalists of their day: West covered the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker; Thompson became the first female head of a European bureau for an American newspaper (the New York Post). Each had been involved with a great writer: West had an affair with, and a son by, H.G. Wells, and Thompson married Sinclair Lewis, author of “Babbitt” and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.

And both, Susan Hertog argues in this dual portrait, wrestled with society’s expectations for women of intelligence and ambition. “Ironically,” Hertog writes, “they invented new female prototypes while appearing to conform to prevailing convention. . . . They hungered to be loved and cherished according to Victorian myth, even as they rejected the myth, and the men who embraced it rejected them.” [Read the full article...]

All In: The Education of General David Petraeus by Paula Broadwell And Vernon Loeb

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:29:12 +0000

General David Petraeus is the most transformative leader the American military has seen since the generation of Marshall. In All In, military expert Paula Broadwell examines Petraeus’s career, his intellectual development as a military officer, and his impact on the U.S. military.

Afforded extensive access by General Petraeus, his mentors, his subordinates, and his longtime friends, Broadwell embedded with the general, his headquarters staff, and his soldiers on the front lines of fighting and at the strategic command in Afghanistan to chronicle the experiences of this American general as they were brought to bear in the terrible crucible of war. All In draws on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with Petraeus and his top officers and soldiers to tell the inside story of this commander’s development and leadership in war form every vantage point.

When Petraeus assumed command in Afghanistan in July 2010, the conflict looked as bleak as at any moment in America’s nine years on the ground there. Petraeus’s defining idea-counterinsurgency-was immediate put to its most difficult test: the hard lessons learned during the surge in Iraq were to be applied in a radically different theater. All In examines the impact in Afghanistan of new counterinsurgency as well as counterterrorism strategies through the commands of several Petraeus protégés.

To inform this unprecedented reporting of Petraeus’s command in Afghanistan, Broadwell examines his evolution as a solider from his education at West Point in the wake of Vietnam to his earlier service in Central America, Haiti, Kuwait, Bosnia, and Iraq. All In also documents the general’s role in the war in Washington, going behind the scenes of negotiations during policy reviews of the war in Afghanistan in Congress, the Pentagon, and the White House.

Broadwell ultimately appraises Petraeus’s impact on the entire U.S. military: Thanks to this man’s influence, the military is better prepared to fight using a comprehensive blend of civil-military activities. As America surveys a decade of untraditional warfare, this much is clear: The career of General David Petraeus profoundly shaped our military and left an indelible mark on its rising leaders.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Paula Broadwell And Vernon Loeb

Paula Broadwell has more than a decade of military service and nearly two decades of work in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. She is a PhD candidate at the University of London. Broadwell received an MPA degree from Harvard. She graduated with honors from the United States Military Academy. She lives with her husband and their two children in North Carolina.

Vernon Loeb is the Metro editor at The Washington Post. In 2003, he embedded with the 101st Airborne Division under Petraeus’s command.

Editorial Reviews

“General Petraeus is one of the most important Americans of our time, in or out of uniform. This riveting, insider”s account of his life and education is at once instructive and inspiring.” -Tom Brokaw, Anchor and Managing Editor, NBC Nightly News; author of The Greatest Generation

“There have been several books written about parts of the career of David Petraeus, but this is the first one that could be called a biography of the most prominent American general since World War II. It is written with an insider”s lively understanding of the workings of today”s Army. I”ve known David Petraeus since he was a colonel and written two books in which he appeared, but I still learned a lot about him from this book. All In feels at times like we are sitting at his side in Afghanistan, reading his e-mails over his shoulder.” -Thomas E. Ricks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fiasco and The Gamble

“This is the best book yet on General David Petraeus, written by a remarkable former Army officer who spent months on the ground in Afghanistan herself. Paula Broadwell captures his basic tenets of counterinsurgency and basic approach to leadership-as well as Petraeus”s personal qualities and character-in a highly readable and pithy fashion. No one gives a truer picture of the war, or of the finest general of this era and one of the greatest in modern American history.” -Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow, the Brookings Institution

“All In: The Education of General David Petraeus,” by Paula Broadwell with Vernon Loeb

The Washington Post Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Popular generals in unpopular wars attract attention. Gen. David Petraeus has already inspired two biographical accounts of his successful leadership of the Bush troop surge in Iraq. Paula Broadwell and her collaborator, Washington Post metro editor Vernon Loeb, employ a similar format to examine his implementation of the Obama surge in Afghanistan.

Embedded in Petraeus’s Kabul headquarters, Broadwell was uniquely positioned to describe its byzantine political and military environment. While her book is long on detail, it is short on unexpected insights or unvarnished opinions. It is as if Petraeus could instantly visualize how whatever he said would appear in print and self-censor accordingly. Personal interviews run in lock step with the general’s public policy statements, congressional testimony and news releases, which are also quoted at length. We learn nothing of Petraeus’s political views, his relationship with George W. Bush or his candid assessment of the war. We do, however, learn about the complexity of the Afghan situation and are introduced to a not-easily-categorized strategy that attempted to adapt to Afghan realities.

Petraeus did not expect to command American troops in Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was to run that campaign, but he was abruptly sacked in June 2010 after making published statements that the White House deemed insubordinate. President Obama then turned to Petraeus, who immediately decamped for Kabul after his appointment was confirmed. Petraeus made it clear that he had not come to lose, and his confidence quickly permeated the entire command staff. His arrival also reassured the Afghans. Certainly the Americans would not have sent their best general if they intended to desert the country. [Read the full article...]

All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity) by David Scheffer

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:05:15 +0000

Within days of Madeleine Albright’s confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, she instructed David Scheffer to spearhead the historic mission to create a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As senior adviser to Albright and then as President Clinton’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and that resulted in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. All the Missing Souls is Scheffer’s gripping insider’s account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time.

Scheffer reveals the truth behind Washington’s failures during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the anemic hunt for notorious war criminals, how American exceptionalism undercut his diplomacy, and the perilous quests for accountability in Kosovo and Cambodia. He takes readers from the killing fields of Sierra Leone to the political back rooms of the U.N. Security Council, providing candid portraits of major figures such as Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Richard Goldstone, Louise Arbour, Samuel “Sandy” Berger, Richard Holbrooke, and Wesley Clark, among others.

A stirring personal account of an important historical chapter, All the Missing Souls provides new insights into the continuing struggle for international justice.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About David Scheffer

David Scheffer is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law. He served as the first U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues (1997-2001) and led American initiatives on war crimes tribunals during the 1990s. He has published widely on international law and politics.

Editorial Reviews

Pioneering. . . . From the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo to the trial of Charles Taylor in Sierra Leone, Scheffer recounts the highlights of this ‘truly international counterattack on impunity for the worst possible crimes.’ Reflecting after nearly a decade of battles, the author writes that international justice is the art of the possible and requires endless patience and persistence. . . . An important resource for scholars and specialists in international law. — Kirkus Reviews

Scheffer recounts the effort to extend the reach of international justice to war zones and collapsing societies. . . . This impeccably documented work stands as a condemnation not just of such Bush-era expediency but also of moral compromise at the expense of the powerless. It’s also the story of an attempt to attain the most strenuous of goals: upholding civilization in the face of monstrous evil. Scheffer is one of the very few people who can tell it. — Douglas Gillison, Time

Scheffer provides a fascinating insider’s account of the formation of the war crimes tribunals following atrocities in the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia. . . . Scheffer chronicles in captivating detail the diplomatic and political minefields that he and his colleagues navigated to help establish the International Criminal Court. . . . A superb account and unique perspective on the subject, complementing works such as Carla Del Ponte’s Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity. — Lynne F. Maxwell, Library Journal

“All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals,” by David Scheffer

The Washington Post Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

The years from 1993 to 2001, when Bill Clinton occupied the White House, were the formative period in the contemporary development of international justice. Before then, there had been no international war crimes tribunals since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in the aftermath of World War II. By the end of this time, international courts were hearing cases on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, negotiations on tribunals for Sierra Leone and Cambodia were far advanced, and the International Criminal Court was nearing its launch.

Throughout this time, David Scheffer was the Clinton administration’s point man on international justice. His book “All the Missing Souls” is a revealing and valuable record of the U.S. role in the effort to entrench accountability for mass atrocities as a central principle in international affairs.

During Clinton’s first term, Scheffer was senior adviser and counsel to Madeleine Albright, who was then ambassador to the United Nations. After Albright became secretary of state in 1997, Scheffer was appointed as the first U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues. The creation of this position testifies to the growing profile that the prevention and punishment of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes came to assume in U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s. But, as Scheffer shows in his detailed account, the process of getting the world’s great powers to make a real effort to enforce accountability for international crimes was anything but smooth. [Read the full article...]

City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas by Roger Crowley

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:21:29 +0000

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The rise and fall of the Venetian empire stands unrivaled for drama, intrigue, and sheer opulent majesty. In City of Fortune, Roger Crowley, acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author of Empires of the Sea, applies his narrative skill to chronicling the astounding five-hundred-year voyage of Venice to the pinnacle of power.

Tracing the full arc of the Venetian imperial saga for the first time, City of Fortune is framed around two of the great collisions of world history: the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, which culminated in the sacking of Constantinople and the carve-up of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, and the Ottoman-Venetian War of 1499–1503, which saw the Ottoman Turks supplant the Venetians as the preeminent naval power in the Mediterranean. In between were three centuries of Venetian maritime dominance—years of plunder and plague, conquest and piracy—during which a tiny city of “lagoon dwellers” grew into the richest place on earth.

Drawing on firsthand accounts of pitched sea battles, skillful negotiations, and diplomatic maneuvers, Crowley paints a vivid picture of this avaricious, enterprising people and the bountiful lands that came under their dominion. Defiant of emperors, indifferent to popes, the Venetians saw themselves as reluctant freebooters, compelled to take to the open seas “because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade.” From the opening of the spice routes to the clash between Christianity and Islam, Venice played a leading role in the defining conflicts of its time—the reverberations of which are still being felt today. Only an author with Roger Crowley’s deep knowledge of post-Crusade history could put these iconic events into their proper context.

Epic in scope, magisterial in its understanding of the period, City of Fortune is narrative history at its most engrossing.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Roger Crowley

Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and spent part of his childhood in Malta. He read English at Cambridge University and taught English in Istanbul, where he developed a strong interest in the history of Turkey. He has traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean basin over many years and has a wide-ranging knowledge of its history and culture. He lives in Gloucestershire, England. He is also the author of 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and The Clash of Islam and the West and Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World.

Editorial Review

The only seas Venice ruled were the Mediterranean and Black, but it dominated European trade from 1000 to 1500, an achievement that owes much to its citizens’ energy and freedom but mostly to their willingness to fight.

While mildly neglected compared to Britain and France, Venice receives a stirring account from British historian Crowley (Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World, 2008, etc.). The author concentrates on its golden years and the wars that made them possible, passing over its great but less-pugnacious cultural accomplishments. Isolated by Adriatic’s lagoons, Venice escaped barbarian invasions that ended the Western Roman Empire. One of the few areas of Italy still ruled from Constantinople by the Byzantine Empire, it prospered throughout the Middle Ages. Despite its nominal subservience, Venice eagerly accepted an immense fee to build an massive fleet and transport the Crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204, after which it added many formerly Byzantine cities and islands to its growing trading empire. It continued to flourish despite competition from other Italian cities and encroachment from the steadily expanding Ottoman Empire. Between brutal naval wars with the Turks, it was happy to trade, a policy that outraged the Vatican and other Christian nations. After 1500, ships from Portugal, Spain, Britain and Holland began sailing across the Atlantic to America and around Africa to Asia, beginning Venice’s decline. – Kirkus Reviews

The Reign of Venice

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Medieval travelers were overwhelmed by Venice’s affluence — the sacks of spices! the bales of brocades! — and driven to distraction by its seeming paradoxes. The city was surrounded by sand and mud, yet its markets dazzled with variety. Since there was no land to speak of, it had no feudal system, yet its councils handed down orders like holy writ. Its people reveled in their republican freedom, yet bowed undemurringly to the collective good. Even the physical city defied logic: a wooden settlement perched on piles in a swampy lagoon had turned into the densest urban area in Europe, its brick bell towers jostling for airspace, its stone palaces squatting on reclaimed land.

How, the rubberneckers wondered, to make sense of it all? The answer, as Roger Crowley persuasively recounts in “City of Fortune,” lay in the Venetians’ remorseless determination to build and enforce a monopoly over their maritime trade routes, at any cost.

The cost to Venice, in lives lost and reputations ruined, was high. The republic fought hard for its ascendancy, not least during an intermittent 150-year war with Genoa, its rival in ambition and seamanship across the Italian peninsula. Galley oarsmen, confined and sometimes chained to their benches, died of frostbite during winter skirmishes of cat-and-mouse with enemy fleets. Defeated commanders were slung in jail, exiled or beheaded in St. Mark’s Square. Venetian justice, if brutal, was at least consistent. [Read the full article...]

Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition by Marni Davis

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:21:00 +0000

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At the turn of the century, American Jews and prohibitionists viewed one another with growing suspicion. Jews believed that all Americans had the right to sell and consume alcohol, while prohibitionists insisted that alcohol commerce and consumption posed a threat to the nation’s morality and security. The two groups possessed incompatible visions of what it meant to be a productive and patriotic American–and in 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made alcohol commerce illegal, Jews discovered that anti-Semitic sentiments had mixed with anti-alcohol ideology, threatening their reputation and their standing in American society.

In Jews and Booze, Marni Davis examines American Jews’ long and complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement’s rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity–the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer–and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition’s triumph cast a pall on American Jews’ history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.

About Marni Davis

Marni Davis is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University.

Editorial Reviews

“A pioneering study of Jews and the American trade in alcohol from entrepreneurial 19th century immigrants through 20th century battles over prohibition. Lively, well-researched, and comprehensive, this will long stand as the definitive study of Jews, booze, and evolving American taboos.” – Jonathan D. Sarna,author of American Judaism: A History

“Imaginatively conceived, fiercely researched, beautifully written, Jews and Booze is welcome news indeed. A very talented and promising historian has shown how a contentious slice of the American Jewish past can remain important to today’s readers–and has made a particular conflict between Protestant moralism and ethnic habits her own.” – Stephen J. Whitfield,author of In Search of American Jewish Culture

“In this groundbreaking study, Davis deftly blends social and cultural history to uncover the important role American Jews played in the liquor trade, and the hostilities they elicited. In recovering this nearly forgotten past, Jews and Booze provides a prism through which to view the difficulties of Americanization.” – Tony Michels,author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York

How the Jews Handled Prohibition

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Even in New York Times headlines, they were known as “Izzy and Moe.” Their very presence could make bartenders faint. They possessed a keen sense of smell and a theatrical flair that included disguises as fruit peddlers and football players. Stumpy Izzy, who had rejected a career as a rabbi, and his partner were credited with 4,392 arrests in five years, including one in a Manhattan meatpacking district club where Izzy posed as a turkey salesman and found bottles of booze concealed in a huge stuffed bear.

Unfortunately, these two Prohibition agents make only brief appearances in Marni Davis’s “Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition.” In real life, they were heavily outnumbered by Americans of all religions who cheerfully flouted the 18th Amendment during the Roaring Twenties. In this book, they are outgunned by sociologists and other detached observers whose sober reflections on a bombastic chapter in American history are sufficient to drive a frustrated reader to drink.

It’s not the author’s fault. Blame the beguiling title, which sets the reader up for a fall. With rhyme and reason, “Jews and Booze” ought to evoke “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Untouchables” and the recent Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition. Instead, this book by Davis, an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, is, proverbially, what it is: a thoughtful, instructive and often insightful dissertation that is much drier than it needs to be — even drier than the nation as a whole (including Jews) was during America’s failed “noble experiment.” [Read the full article...]

Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer” by Frederick Turner

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:02:33 +0000

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Though branded as pornography for its graphic language and explicit sexuality, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is far more than a work that tested American censorship laws. In this riveting book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tropic of Cancer‘s initial U.S. release, Frederick Turner investigates Miller’s unconventional novel, its tumultuous publishing history, and its unique place in American letters.

Written in the slums of a foreign city by a man who was an utter literary failure in his homeland, Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934 by a pornographer in Paris, but soon banned in the United States. Not until 1961, when Grove Press triumphed over the censors, did Miller’s book appear in American bookstores. Turner argues that Tropic of Cancer is “lawless, violent, colorful, misogynistic, anarchical, bigoted, and shaped by the same forces that shaped the nation.” Further, the novel draws on more than two centuries of New World history, folklore, and popular culture in ways never attempted before. How Henry Miller, outcast and renegade, came to understand what literary dynamite he had within him, how he learned to sound his “war whoop” over the roofs of the world, is the subject of Turner’s revelatory study.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About the Author

Frederick Turner is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Into the Heart of Life: Henry Miller at One Hundred. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Editorial Review

“Turner provides a great deal of background to show how deeply autobiographical [Tropic of Cancer] is in its gritty details and its in-your-face ethos.”—Ron Antonucci, Booklist

The Male Mystique of Henry Miller

The New York Times Book Review – January 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

What happens when the unreliable narrator turns out to be the cultural critic?

What we write about fiction is never an objective response to a text; it is always part of a bigger mythmaking — the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves. That story changes. George Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millet writing about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesn’t notice that Miller-women are semihuman sex objects. In fact, his long essay “Inside the Whale” barely mentions women at all. Millet does notice that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.

Norman Mailer needed Miller to be like Shakespeare (this is plain wrong, but the need is interesting); Erica Jong wanted to be Athena to Miller’s Zeus — born straight out of his head and saving him from the Feminist Furies in her book “The Devil at Large” (1993).

And now? It is some 50 years since “Tropic of Cancer” was published in the United States by Grove Press. First published in Paris in 1934 by Obelisk, a soft-porn imprint, it had been banned as obscene in America until a landmark legal victory overturned the ban, allowing Grove to print it legally in 1961. The book became an instant best seller, and Henry Miller stood as the priapic prophet of sexual freedom.

Frederick Turner’s aim in “Renegade” is to explain how “Tropic of Cancer” came to be written, came to be banned and came to be an American Classic. [Read the full article...]

Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains by Keith Heyer Meldahl

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:20:46 +0000

“Unfold a map of North America,” Keith Heyer Meldahl writes, “and the first thing to grab your eye is the bold shift between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.” In this absorbing book, Meldahl takes readers on a 1000-mile-long field trip back through more than 100 million years of deep time to explore America’s most spectacular and scientifically intriguing landscapes. He places us on the outcrops, rock hammer in hand, to examine the evidence for how these rough-hewn lands came to be. We see California and its gold assembled from pieces of old ocean floor and the relentless movements of the Earth’s tectonic plates. We witness the birth of the Rockies. And we investigate the violent earthquakes that continue to shape the region today. Into the West’s geologic story, Meldahl also weaves its human history. As we follow the adventures of John C. Frémont, Mark Twain, the Donner party, and other historic characters, we learn how geologic forces have shaped human experience in the past and how they direct the fate of the West today.

About Keith Heyer Meldahl

Keith Heyer Meldahl is Professor of Geology at Mira Costa College in southern California. He is the author of Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail.

Editorial Reviews

“A virtual road trip through geologic time that opens ancient windows on how the West was made. Meldahl is the ideal tour guide, blending history and geology to explain the rocks and topography of the American West and how geology shaped its settlement”–David Montgomery, author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

“The geology of the western United States is as fascinating, yet as enigmatic, as that of any region in the world. Keith Meldahl not only makes it comprehensible, he makes us want to hit the road to see it for ourselves. If you are curious about how our unique American West got to be the way it is, read this engaging book.”–James Lawrence Powell, author of Dead Pool and Grand Canyon

“This book is far and away the most readable and geologically informative about the West. A real tour-de-force.”–William R. Dickinson, University of Arizona

‘Rough-Hewn Land’ by Keith Heyer Meldahl: Book review

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – January 29, 2012 (Excerpt)

Think of the West and what comes to mind are vertiginous peaks, sculpted tablelands and the infinite vistas of basin and range country. In other words, geology.

Westerners live in the shadow of mountains that are still rising, on the edge of a continent on the move, over fault systems that can unleash the power of nuclear bombs. More so than any other region of the country, we are defined by geology.

In “Rough-Hewn Land,” Keith Heyer Meldahl takes us on a field trip from San Francisco to the Rocky Mountains, tracing the genealogy of the landscape. He seasons the story with historical accounts and a synthesis of evolving geologic theory, providing a fascinating guide to the formation of the West.

“Geology,” Meldahl writes, “is stranger than fiction.” How did material that was once buried miles beneath the Pacific seabed in the deep ocean wind up a rock in the Sierra Nevada with a pine tree poking out of it? How did the Rockies, far from the classic mountain-building forces of the continental edge, get tall enough to leave hikers gasping for oxygen?

The answers lie in the ancient forces of plate tectonics, volcanism and upheaval that birthed the West and continue to shape it. If there is an overarching theme of the book, it is that the region remains geologically alive. [Read the full article...]

The Watsons Go to Birmingham -1963: A Children’s Novel by Christopher Paul Curtis

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:53:09 +0000

A wonderful middle-grade novel narrated by Kenny, 9, about his middle-class black family, the Weird Watsons of Flint, Michigan. When Kenny’s 13-year-old brother, Byron, gets to be too much trouble, they head South to Birmingham to visit Grandma, the one person who can shape him up. And they happen to be in Birmingham when Grandma’s church is blown up.

About Christopher Paul Curtis

Christopher Paul Curtis was born in Flint, Michigan, and grew up there. Bud, Not Buddy, his second novel, winner of the 2000 Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Author Award, is available in a Delacorte hardcover edition.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

The year is 1963, and self-important Byron Watson is the bane of his younger brother Kenny’s existence. Constantly in trouble for one thing or another, from straightening his hair into a “conk” to lighting fires to freezing his lips to the mirror of the new family car, Byron finally pushes his family too far. Before this “official juvenile delinquent” can cut school or steal change one more time, Momma and Dad finally make good on their threat to send him to the deep south to spend the summer with his tiny, strict grandmother. Soon the whole family is packed up, ready to make the drive from Flint, Michigan, straight into one of the most chilling moments in America’s history: the burning of the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church with four little girls inside.

Christopher Paul Curtis’s alternately hilarious and deeply moving novel, winner of the Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Honor, blends the fictional account of an African American family with the factual events of the violent summer of 1963. Fourth grader Kenny is an innocent and sincere narrator; his ingenuousness lends authenticity to the story and invites readers of all ages into his world, even as it changes before his eyes. Curtis is also the acclaimed author of Bud, Not Buddy, winner of the Newbery Medal. (Ages 9 to 12) –Emilie Coulter, Amazon.Com Review

Grade 5-8-In the only Newbery Honor book to make my list, the weighty issues and historical perspectives don’t get in the way of a very funny family. Byron plays some awful tricks on his younger brother Kenny, but readers can’t help but laugh at some of his less harmful teasing. He tells a convincing story to little sister Joey about how garbage trucks scoop up frozen Southern folks who don’t dress warmly enough, and half-fools Kenny with his tall tale. While the boys supply many of the laughs, it’s clear that they get their sense of humor from their dad. His gentle teasing and tongue-in-cheek exaggerations can be hilarious. Laughter and Tears Award: More than any other book on my list, the humor in The Watsons shifts to near tragedy and many thought-provoking developments. The serious stuff succeeds in part because readers grow so close to this family through the humor that comes earlier in the book. – Library Journal

‘Birmingham’: A Family Tale In The Civil Rights Era

NPR Book Review – January 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

Welcome to the fourth installment of NPR’s Backseat Book Club, where we select a book for young readers — and invite them to read along with us and share their thoughts and questions with the author.

Our selection for January — The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis — describes the civil rights era from the perspective of a young (and extremely mischievous) boy and his family.

When young Byron Watson becomes too much to handle, his family decides to send him from Flint, Mich. to his legendarily tough Grandma Sands in Birmingham, Ala. — that incendiary year of 1963 when tensions over school desegregation were roiling.

Daphne Kunin from Lancaster, Pa. wanted to know if Curtis based any of the scenes from the book on his own life — like the episode with the “Nazi flame thrower of death” — when Byron lights toilet paper parachutes on fire over the toilet and flushes them away.

Curtis says that the particular scene is actually the most autobiographical moment in the book.

“It was based on me,” says Curtis tells NPR’s Michele Norris. “I just threw matches in the toilet. I liked the sound they made when they hit the water.” When Curtis tried to get away with burning the matches by locking the bathroom door, his mother kicked the door down and lifted him in the air by the collar, much as it happens in the book. [Read the full article...]

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Economic Historian Louis Hyman

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:28:40 +0000

In this lively history of consumer debt in America, economic historian Louis Hyman demonstrates that today’s problems are not as new as we think.

Borrow examines how the rise of consumer borrowing—virtually unknown before the twentieth century—has altered our culture and economy. Starting in the years before the Great Depression, increased access to money raised living standards but also introduced unforeseen risks. As lending grew more and more profitable, it displaced funds available for business borrowing, setting our economy on an unsustainable course. Told through the vivid stories of individuals and institutions affected by these changes, Borrow charts the collision of commerce and culture in twentieth-century America, giving an historical perspective on what is new—and what is not—in today’s economic turmoil.

About Louis Hyman

Louis Hyman attended Columbia University, where he received a BA in history and mathematics. A former Fulbright scholar and a consultant at McKinsey & Co., he received his PhD in American history in 2007 from Harvard University. He is currently an assistant professor in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where he teaches history.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“The story of how Americans learned to love debt—and became dangerously addicted to it. Anyone who has ever wondered how we got into the mess we are now in must read this powerful book.”
—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic

“The author traces consumer debt beginning in the 1910s and through the 1920s, when personal loans became legal and mortgages were in demand. After WWII, consumption continued to be financed by debt, particularly television sets. . . . As the century progressed, we learn about the rise of discount stores over department stores, loans financed by issuing corporate debt, securitization, and credit cards. Hyman indicates that although policymakers declare the worst of our current financial crisis ended in mid-2009, important causes continue, and he concludes, ‘Debt, along with every other aspect of capitalism, is something that we have created and have the capacity to master.’ This is an excellent book.”
—Booklist

“Stocked with colorful personalities and trenchant insights, Hyman’s lucid, entertaining, and timely treatise illuminates the murky processes by which debt became the troubled center of economic life.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An evenhanded account aimed at the general reader baffled by today’s economic crisis. From Model-Ts to TVs to McMansions, Hyman uncovers the credit story behind all the glittering prizes and offers a prescription to prevent the American Dream from turning into the American Nightmare.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Mary Wesley: A Different Kind Of Author – An Essay by Peter Carroll

Peter Carroll — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:14:47 +0000

Peter Carroll is the author of Queen of Misfortune – A Lady Jane Grey Novel. For more information, see his website.

It is recorded that famous English author, Mary Wesley who lived out her last days in a small cottage in Totnes, Devon, was once reputed to be a wild woman. In her autobiography she has no qualms about being very promiscuous in her early life – which is more in keeping with numerous modern lifestyle’s -given the freedom of the sexes. Arguably she was ahead of her time saying she often waked wondering who was sleeping on the pillow next to her. “Let’s see who it is this time!”

She hailed from Englefield Green in Surrey but like so many of her contemporaries ended up in beautiful South Devon. A very attractive woman, she drew many admirers in her lifetime.

When I read of her rampant lifestyle during the second world war I was truly taken back – knowing how in my generation, such going’s on would have been frowned upon and regarded as highly dreadful. I can remember my Grandmother using phases like ‘Free Love’ and ‘Living in sin’ when she dismissed one of my aunt’s from the family circle because she went to live ‘unlawfully’ with a man.

Mary was one of the upper classes, being a descendent of the Duke of Wellington , her parents decided not to send her to school because she was not expected to work, perhaps in fact, such ‘depravity’ was rampant only in the upper classes and the poorer rarely indulged in such goings on. Well not openly anyway.

But I find myself relating to her, not so much to her avid lifestyle -because I was only an 11 years old when the second war broke out – and she was 28! But like so many others of my generation, we were brought up given strict Victorian values, and in many ways we were repressed in the days when the adage: ‘children should be seen and not heard’ still rings in my ears and the swish of the cane coming down on my knuckles simply for muttering during lessons in school.

Mary’s point was that during those uncertain times, when nobody knew when their time would be up, then why not make the best of it and enjoy life to the full, with no holds barred. She loved parties and drinking and playing the field – but eventually realizing her wartime lifestyle had become too excessive, in her words; “too many lovers, too much drink” she knew she was turning into a nasty person, so she settled down into a steady going sort of woman and got herself married.

When she agreed to her biography being written by Patrick Marnham , an English writer, journalist and biographer, she made him promise that he would not publish until after her death. When her son, Toby Eady read the book, he was flabbergasted, and commented that he never really knew his mother – and he didn’t speak to anyone for a week.

It is incredible; Mary Wesley’s first novel wasn’t published until she was 70 and even then it was just by chance, being persuaded by her best friend Antonia White to send it to a publisher. And then, in common with many great writers, several publishers rejected it, until eventually she found an agent, Tessa Sale who was convinced her works were good enough for publication and at last, else we may never had heard of ‘Jumping the Queue’ or her most famous book, The Camomile Lawn, James Hale of Macmillan publishers took it on and the rest is history.

Mary had found a niche that so many writers since have tried to emulate concentrating her viewpoint in a mindful and imaginative way rather than the physical descriptive narrative, she was a different sort 0f writer – and it paid off. Soon she was rich beyond her dreams but it didn’t make any difference to her simple lifestyle.

What did make a difference is the loss of her second husband, playwright and journalist Eric Siepmann in1970, she’d lived happily with him in Cullaford Bridge on the edge of Dartmoor but moved to Totnes after his death where she spent the rest of her days.

Her autobiography is certainly well worth a good read. One can see in her stories how she drew so much from her life working in intelligence in MI5 during the war helping to break German enigma codes.. She felt she could have done much more with her life when she read the obituaries of friends who had died younger than she, who’s lives had been crammed with ‘doing’ – saying she had spent too much time dreaming

Her family didn’t approve of her books. But she paid no attention and continued to write them regardless, Her brother called what she wrote “filth” and her sister, with whom she was no longer on speaking terms, strongly objected to The Camomile Lawn, claiming that some of the characters were based on their parents.

Her biographer spent many days with her during the last six months of her life and has given good account of her. She said in so many words; it was a great pleasure to converse with such an intelligent man and wished she was young enough to take him into her bed.

She certainly made her mark having achieved writing 13 novels in all and had the pleasure of seeing The Camomile Lawn made into a movie and three others filmed for TV.

Proudly she received a CBE in 1995

She was known to be an eccentric and kept her religious beliefs mainly to herself, had a coffin made especially for ‘the day whence it came’ painted red apparently and placed in her sitting room for good keeping. Her late beloved Eric converted to Catholicism only when being reassured that dogs could enter heaven. But is doesn’t stop there because there were pointers that Mary also believed the next world would be frequented by all manner of animals not to mention past lovers, friends and husbands.

Mary Wesley (Mary Aline Mynars Siepmann ) born 24 June 1912 died on December 30 2002 aged 90.

I wonder just how much more novels she would have written if she’d been discovered earlier, it is sacrilege to think that so much of her work ended up in her dustbin.

The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith by Matthew Bowman

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:52:50 +0000

With Mormonism on the verge of an unprecedented cultural and political breakthrough, an eminent scholar of American evangelicalism explores the history and reflects on the future of this native-born American faith and its connection to the life of the nation.

In 1830, a young seer and sometime treasure hunter named Joseph Smith began organizing adherents into a new religious community that would come to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and known informally as the Mormons). One of the nascent faith’s early initiates was a twenty-three-year-old Ohio farmer named Parley Pratt, the distant grandfather of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In The Mormon People, religious historian Matthew Bowman peels back the curtain on more than 180 years of Mormon history and doctrine. He recounts the church’s origin and development, explains how Mormonism came to be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world by the turn of twenty-first-century, and ably sets the scene for a 2012 presidential election that has the potential to mark a major turning point in the way this “all-American” faith is perceived by the wider American public—and internationally.

Mormonism started as a radical movement, with a profoundly transformative vision of American society that was rooted in a form of Christian socialism. Over the ensuing centuries, Bowman demonstrates, that vision has evolved—and with it the esteem in which Mormons have been held in the eyes of their countrymen. Admired on the one hand as hardworking paragons of family values, Mormons have also been derided as oddballs and persecuted as polygamists, heretics, and zealots clad in “magic underwear.” Even today, the place of Mormonism in public life continues to generate heated debate on both sides of the political divide. Polls show widespread unease at the prospect of a Mormon president. Yet the faith has never been more popular. Today there are about 14 million Mormons in the world, fewer than half of whom live inside the United States. It is a church with a powerful sense of its own identity and an uneasy sense of its relationship with the main line of American culture.

Mormons will surely play an even greater role in American civic life in the years ahead. In such a time, The Mormon People comes as a vital addition to the corpus of American religious history—a frank and fair-minded demystification of a faith that remains a mystery for many.

About Matthew Bowman

Matthew Bowman received his Ph.D. in American religious history from Georgetown University in May 2011, and a master’s in American history from the University of Utah. His dissertation, “The Urban Pulpit: Evangelicals and the City in New York, 1880–1930,” was funded by the prestigious Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. His work on American evangelicism and Mormonism has appeared in, among other places, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Journal of the Early Republic, and The New Republic. The associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Matthew Bowman teaches at Hampden-Sydney College.

Editorial Review

Timed for release just as the cogs in the 2012 presidential election start turning, Bowman’s (Religion/Hampden-Sydney Coll.) study of Mormonism shows how this brand of Christianity has always sported a strong relationship with American politics and values, whether in sync or at odds with them. Founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith Jr., the “mercurial” upstate New Yorker and “seducer of biographers” who received visions and translated the “golden plates” on which were written the religious tenets revealed to him, the Mormon faith, according to Bowman, combines a “sacramentalism and priesthood reminiscent of Catholicism with a decidedly Protestant devotion to scripture and suspicion of trained clergy.” Writing to educate a readership unfamiliar with Mormon beliefs, the author claims that “Americans have admired Mormons for their diligence, their rectitude, their faith, and their honesty; they have feared them for their zealotry, their polygamy, and their heresy.” While many—including Mark Twain, who famously dubbed Smith’s Book of Mormon “‘chloroform in print’ ”—were skeptical of its apocalyptic dogmatism and determinism in building a new Zion, others quickly took to the values that somewhat mirrored the expansionist society and followed Smith west. Some of Smith’s ideas, such as abstinence from tobacco and “strong drink,” were right in keeping with those of the 1830s American temperance movement; others, such as the notions that God had a corporeal body and sanctioned polygamy, proved less acceptable to society at large. Bowman paints a multidimensional portrait of a separatist movement riddled with fascinating dichotomies: a patriarchal religion at once embracing community and committed to worldwide missionary service yet sanctioning at various times in its history gross discrimination against women, those of African descent and homosexuals. The author also includes informative appendices of the church hierarchy, lists of Mormon scripture, past presidents of the church and other significant figures, and a bibliographic essay. – Kirkus Reviews

All-American Religion or Reason to Worry?

The New York Times Book Review – January 24, 2012 (Excerpt)

The best musical number in “The Book of Mormon,” the Tony Award-winning play from the holy fools who created “South Park,” is a fantasia that features Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, Johnnie Cochran, Genghis Khan and dancing cups of Starbucks coffee. Its title is “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream.”

This political season, a Mormon hell dream might also feature a grinning Newt Gingrich, who is thus far preventing Mitt Romney, the most prominent Mormon on earth, from a straight shot at the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. As the chorus of “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” intones, “It’s super spooky-wooky!”

Mr. Romney’s political ascendency is forcing Americans to confront their complicated feelings about members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, informally known as Mormons. Matthew Bowman’s timely book, “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith,” will no doubt be of service during this debate. Speaking prophetically, I can see bulk sales to book groups in its future.

The question you most want answered about the Mormon Church, put simply, is this: Is this religious institution a cult — “Scientology plus 125 years,” as Jacob Weisberg memorably put it in Slate — or a welcome and recognizably American band of hard-working, cheerful, morally upright citizens? Or is it somehow both? Mr. Bowman, a Mormon with a doctorate in American religious history from Georgetown, weighs the evidence and scampers safely up the middle. [Read the full article...]