Steve Goddard's History Wire

Out in Paperback / Denver -- Mining Camp to Metropolis

Denver -- Mining Camp to Metropolis by Stephen J. Leonard and Thomas J. Noel, UPress of Colo. '90 oversized paperback, 544 pages, ISBN #-0-87081-240-8. Index, source notes, no bibliography, two appendices, scores of b&w images sprinkled through text.

More than four decades ago, The Unsinkable Molly Brown took Broadway by storm. Its heroine, Irish Catholic Margaret "Maggie" Tobin Brown, moved to Colorado during the mining boom and desperately sought acceptance from the nouveau riche of Denver, a village just becoming a city. In her reincarnation as Molly Brown, she finally won dinner invitations by saving a lifeboat of survivors from the Titanic in 1912.

Molly would be at home (in fact, she is at home) in this engaging history of one of America's most interesting cities. The authors, both academic historians, have written an unusually engaging work in which they explore the role of women, ethnics and the working class in the growth of the city, its reliance on natural resources, and they examine how transportation played a key role in the city's development.

Out in Paperback / The Deepest South

The Deepest South -- The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade by Gerald Horne, NYU Press '07, 339 pages, ISBN #0814736890. Index, source notes, no bibliography, unillustrated.

It's an old adage that legislation can change laws but not hearts and minds. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation may have hastened slavery to its conclusion on American shores but certainly did little to curb the international slave trade. Gerald Horne, a University of Houston historian, relates the disturbing saga of U.S. nations who, even after emancipation, continued to deal in African slaves by cultivating ties with Brazil, "which today has the largest population of African origin outside of Africa itself."

Book Alert / Body of Lies

Body of Lies -- A Novel by David Ignatius, Norton '07, $24.95, 349 pages, ISBN #0393065030.

History Wire has thus far resisted the impulse to include books about post- 9/11 subjects among its reviews. But no event, perhaps in the memory of man, has had such a cataclysmic influence on society and geopolitics as the World Trade Center bombings, an event not yet six years old but which has spawned literally hundreds of books. So 9/11 is clearly part of history, no longer a mere current event, and from now on we will treat it as such.

David Ignatius, a respected Washington Post columnist, Middle Eastern specialist and author of five novels, has now released one that captures the essence of the world war in which we are now engaged, one in which, jarringly, we cannot see the enemy most of the time.

His protagonist, CIA operative Roger Ferris, nurses his wounds from Iraq as his bosses assign him to a post in Jordan. There, a newfound friendship with Hani Salaam, Jordan's intelligence chief, strains his relationship with the CIA. While Washington insists that Ferris place America's war on terrorism above any other relationships, Ferris is drawn to the Middle Eastern codes of loyalty and honor, which cannot be regained once lost. Together, Ferris and Salaam seek to capture Al-Qaeda's new mastermind, Suleiman.

Rather than drawing on technology to produce the new new thing to fight terrorism, Ignatius draws from a World War II strategem, Operation Mincemeat, in which the British relayed faulty intelligence to the German enemy through the corpse of a non-existent British agent. Around this dead body, the protagonists create a "body of lies," which propels Ignatius's narrative to a gripping denouement.

Book Alert / Privilege and Scandal

Privilege and Scandal -- The Remarkable Life of Harriet Spencer, Sister of Georgiana, Crown '07, $24.95, 419 pages, ISBN #0307381978. Index, bibliography, source notes, two groupings of full-color glossy images.

Nine years ago, in the wake of the tragic demise of Princess Diana, Amanda Foreman scored a literary smash with her book, Georgiana, Princess of Devonshire, and ancestor of Diana. Georgiana was strong-willed and outspoken and strained the marriage vow of fidelity on a number of occasions, leading us to realize that Diana came by her own lively persona naturally.

Seems Georgiana had an adored younger sister, Harriet Spencer, who followed the inclinations of big sis, particularlly in the bedchamber. Author Janet Gleeson spends much of her biography of Harriet, released near the 10th anniversary of Diana's death, detailing these dalliances with such men as the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Granville Leveson Gower, the latter an affair during which she bore two children, amazingly concealing both births from her then husband.

But Gleeson lets her readers know that Harriet was no mere sybarite; she joined her sister Georgiana in 18th century political activism, campaigning for Charles James Fox over his opponent, William Pitt the Younger. She counted among her friends Marie Antoinette and witnessed the French Revoluution and Napoleon's rise to power, living to see his defeat at Waterloo and the ascension of George IV to the British throne.

Book Alert / MacArthur -- A Biography

MacArthur -- A Biography by Richard B. Frank, forward by Gen. Wesley K. Clark, Palgrave/MacMillan '07, $21.95, 198 pages, ISBN #1403976589. Index, source notes, no bibliography, grouping of b&w images.

A student of military history who asserts either that General Douglas MacArthur had few failures or had few successes perhaps ought not to be believed. His career was decidedly a mixed bag, and as Australian commander Thomas Blaney has said of MacArthur, "The best and worst things you hear about him are both true."

Perhaps MacArthur's biggest success was outside the military sphere -- his captaining of the American occupation of Japan. But his greatest failure may have been his failure to understand the constitutional responsibilities of the U.S. president as commander in chief. MacArthur had no compunction about formulating a foreign policy vision and then carrying it out as he tried to do in North Korea before President Harry Truman rightfully cut him off at the knees.

Richard B. Frank, the author, is a veteran military writer, who has won the Gen. William Greene Award and Harry S. Truman Book Award. His book is part of Palgrave/MacMillan's "Great Generals Series," which to date has chronicled the lives of such military greats as George Patton, Ulysses S. Grant and Omar Bradley.

Book Alert / The Father of All Things

The Father of All Things -- A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Tom Bissell, Pantheon '07, $25, 407 pages, ISBN #037542265X. Index, bibliography, no notes, b&w images sprinkled sparsely through text.

This highly-personal Vietnam retrospective ultimately transcends America's first military defeat. A concluding observation perhaps ought to be stamped indelibly on each soldier's pre-enlistment papers like the Surgeon General's warning on each pack of cigarettes:

"What any war's igniters rarely admit are the small, terrible truths that have held firm for every war ever fought, no matter how necessary or avoidable: This will be horrible, and whatever happens will scar us for decades for come...War is appetitive. It devours goodwill, landscape, cultures, mothers, and fathers -- before finally forcing us, the orphans, to pick up the pieces."

Against this background, author Tom Bissell accompanies his father, John Bissell, back to the scene of his horrific shrapnel injuries and manages to find humor in the ending chapters of the Vietnam War and the life of his father back in Michigan, where his postwar casualties included his sobriety and his marriage.

Each new generation has to discover war anew, as we learn each time the World War I epic All Quiet On The Western Front has a surge in popularity. Future generations seeking to understand what happens when personal relationships break down could do worse than to pick up this account of the human fallout of military conflict.

Book Alert / Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux '07, $27.50, 481 pages, ISBN #0374161623. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w images.

In the days of Lawrence of Arabia, the accomplishments of women outside the home were barely acknowledged. Yet, according to Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell was his equal and more. Born to wealth, she could have lived a life of luxury, but an adventurous spirit put all that behind her and drove her to study history at Oxford, then embark on a multi-faceted career as an archaeologist and linguist, even a spy, and one who climbed mountains in her underclothes.

Howell gives her biography a first person feel by including generous excerpts from Bell's diaries and letters. She describes the process by which Bell actually helped create Iraq and place Faisal on the throne, something of particular interest in the contemporary world. Hers was a life in full, and Howell fleshes it out in all its aspects from family history to her prodigious travels to her love life.

Howell, a veteran magazine journalist based in Britain, describes how Bell's fluency in Arabic languages gave her an entree to the culture of the desert, which was her passion. Bell's ties to Iraq were so deep that she is buried in the Anglican Church cemetery in Baghdad.

Book Alert / The French and Indian War

The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America by Walter Borneman, HarperCollins '06, $27.95, 360 pages, ISBN #0060761849. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The legend of George Washington has been so airbrushed over time as to make him seem invincible. But as historian Walter Borneman argues in his new book, Washington's first military defeat in 1754 may have led directly to the American Revolution.

Washington's defeat in the wilds of Pennsylvania, Borneman says, revived a fued between Britain and France that had been simmering from time immemorial.  But it also drew Spain and Native Americans into the fray as all parties pursued their own agendas in a way that led to a colliision that the author characterizes as "the first world war," fought from Nova Scotia to the Ohio River.

Among the colorful characters Borneman profiles in his lively work are Lord Jeffrey Amherst of Britain, Canada's Marquis de Montcalm, Britain's William Pitt and Major Robert Rogers, as well as those familiar American figures Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Gates. He revisits old imponderables of the war, such as whether Brigadier James Wolfe waved his hat to urge his troops on to victory or to call for a retreat and suggests his own interpretation of such events.

Book Alert / Henry James Goes to Paris

Henry James Goes to Paris by Peter Brooks, Princeton UP '07, $24.95, 255 pages, ISBN #0-691-12954-1. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

The Henry James with whom most of us are familiar is surefooted and wise as well as a superb writer. But perhaps the lesson of Brooks's new book is that we all have to start somewhere. To write with insight about Paris of the 1870s, it was necessary for James to learn about it first.

So it is a naive, vulnerable young Henry James to whom Brooks introduces us in this volume. Helpfully, he uses biographical and other sources to tell the story from James's own perspective. Brooks is free with his criticism of the young James, who was disenchanted with the writers to whom he had earlier admired -- such legends as Zola, Flaubert and Turgenev. And, Brooks finds, he really didn't get the art at the crucial moment impressionism was evolving. It was only by writing later and from across the English Channel that James would truly do justice to what he had seen.

Book Alert / New England White

New England White -- A Novel by Stephen L. Carter, Knopf '07, $26.95, 356 pages, ISBN #0375413626.

Several years ago, the publisher Knopf took a bold gamble in offering a seven-figure advance to a non-fiction writer largely unknown outside academic circles, asking him to write two novels about black America. Not just black America really but the small and growing class of African American intellectuals and readers of serious fiction. Good publishers succeed because they skate not to where the puck is but where the puck will be. Knopf knew that the number of black college graduates had been growing by leaps and bounds and would continue to grow.

So it annointed Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter as an African American John Updike or Philip Roth, if you will. Carter, then in his mid-40s, had written about law and religion, most notably his The Culture of Disbelief, which Bill Clinton discovered on a summer vacation and held aloft at Washington's national prayer breakfast as a book every American should read. But as facile a writer as Carter is, the fact that he can craft an admirable non-fiction narrative says little about his ability to write a good novel.

As it turned out, Knopf's was a smart gamble. Carter's first work was The Emperor of Ocean Park, referring to the tiny seaside park in the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard and the black aristocracy who live there. The book did well not only in critical acclaim but in sales. Now Carter is back to finish his bargain with Knopf with New England White.

Blacks, having been on the outside looking in for so long, would tend to be compassionate and inclusive once their time had come, wouldn't you think? No, what they'd be is human, with the inbred need to create pecking orders and by-invitation-only clubs, not to keep out whites but the less worthy of their own race.

Race, in fact, suffuses every page of New England White. We meet such women's clubs as the Ladybugs and the mysterious Empyreals, a men's society with Knights of Columbus-like secrecy and driven by power to advance the "darker nation" that exists within the "paler nation." Not that the African American protagonists don't have cordial and productive relations with their white brothers and sisters, but they've learned that when the chips are down, whites will follow human instinct and protect their own.

Carter has taught law in New Haven for a quarter-century, so reviewers see the college he depicts as a lightly-disguised Yale, a characterization Carter denies. It doesn't help his case that the book cover is a close-up of what looks for all the world like Yale's ghastly Harkness Tower, a building architect Frank Lloyd Wright said he'd choose to live in if he went to Yale since then he wouldn't have to look at its jagged spires.

Carter's protagonists are Lemaster Carlyle, who made a cameo appearance in his first book. The driven Barbadian academic heads the university in the seaside town of Elm Harbor and is married to Julia, who is associate dean of the university's divinity school. Around them swirl a convoluted conspiracy to cover up a murder three decades earlier, which has led to a recent murder of an economics professor, Kellen Zant, who was formerly Julia's lover. Before his death, Zant creates an intellectual scavenger hunt in pursuit of a theoretical economic construct, a conceit by which Carter helps to advance his reputation as a thinking person's novelist.

Into the vortex is drawn the Carlyle's daughter, Vanessa, as well. Not having the head for mysteries, I won't even characterize Carter's plot development, only to say that it grew too complex for me to keep in touch with.

Far more interesting, from my point of view, is his dramatization of what drives the black upper class. Books in which a member of an ethnic group characterizes that group are too often filled with self hatred or viewed through rose colored glasses. Carter's is neither, which makes his characters believable. They have been deeply scarred by not daunted by their heritage and are clawing their way determinedly up the ladder, using all the talent, guile, resourcefulness and mendacity present in their human gene pool.

Stephen L. Carter has staked out a claim as chronicler of his race and as an ambassador to white America. We should look ahead with interest to his future books in this genre.