My Favorite Books of 2016: American History

One of my reading themes in 2016 concerned American history. Events from places I have lived and the times I have lived in, presidential history, Native American history, African American history, and the American Revolution continue to be interest areas I am drawn to.The books were galley ebooks, Arcs, or books provided by the publisher. All were my choices to read.

Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression Era Detroit by Tom Stanton brought to life a city thrilled by its team's sport wins while The Black Legion, a hate group spawned from the KKK, pressed unsuspecting people into membership at gunpoint then sent them out to kill.

The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair by Margaret Creighton peels back the tinted postcard memories of the Pan-American Exposition to reveal the seamy side of American society a hundred years ago. 


67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means was a moving, important, and disturbing book, particularly for my generation.

Of Arms and Artists by Paul Staiti shows how artists of the American Revolution created a national identity.  

The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe by Elaine Showalter reveals the complicated life of the woman who penned our national anthem.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink reveals how the lack of preparation by a for-profit hospital resulted in avoidable deaths.

Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital by Joan Quigley is the story of 90 year old Terrell's fight to end segregation in Washington D.C. in 1950. It is the inspiring story of how age has nothing to do with standing up for what is right.

The Parker Sisters: A Border Kidnapping by Lucy Maddox is a historian's study of the Fugitive Slave Law through the kidnapping of two African American teenagers.

Truevine: Two Bothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy concerns Albino African Americans enslaved by a circus and their mother's endeavor to protect them.


Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy by Gary Roberts was commissioned by the United Methodist Church. Leaders in this attack on 'friendly' Native American women and children were Methodist. It is a warning of how 'good people' can be led by cultural norms to commit crimes against humanity.

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, The Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History by Paul Andrew Hutton is a dense and comprehensive history, another revelation of treaties broken and genocidal military leaders.

The Thunder Before the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt is a raw, honest, and moving relating of his journey from juvenile delinquent to the leader of the American Indian Movement.

John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery by David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason draws from Adams diaries to trace his evolving understanding, personally and legally, of slavery, culminating in his eight year battle to end the Gag Rule that forbade the House from accepting petitions to end slavery.

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye is a fascinating biography focusing on Bobby's evolution from McCarthy staffer to Civil Rights spokesperson.

Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency by Charles Rappleye is a great study on how the Great Humanitarian, a successful business man, failed as president.

The Gatekeeper:Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Partnership that Defined a Presidency by Kathryn Smith is the first biography of President Roosevelt's constant companion for twenty years in the office and out, the first female 'chief of staff'.

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn considers the friendship, and possibly love affair, that supported the First Lady to blossom into leadership.

Valient Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick shows that our country's founding was pretty messy and the ramifications of leaders obsessed with image, personal power, and monetary success.

Washington's Spys: The Story of America's First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose is the book behind the series Turn, the real story of the Culpepper spy ring.

Love Canal: A Toxic History From Colonial Times to the Present by Richard S. Newman was another upsetting read of how industry used Niagara Falls for profit, leaving a legacy of chemical waste, Activist Lois Gibbs work helped establish the Superfund, which almost immediately was defunded. We are all affected by industrial toxic waste.

A History of New York in 101 Objects by Sam Roberts is a more lighthearted look at our past, considering the things that made New York, and America and the world, what it is today.

Dead Wake by Eric Larson is the moving tale of the Lusitania.

I hope you found something here to put on your 2017 reading list!

A Coromandel Sea Change into Something Rich and Strange

Many people are bewitched on their first encounter with India. Bewitched or repelled.

Blaise hated the bazaars, the smell of human excrement in the gutters, the cooking smells of mustard oil and ghee, the over ripe fruit with their cloud of flies, the starving children, the cheap, man made goods. But his eighteen-year-old, newly wed wife had spent a lifetime sheltered in school. "I want to see it whole," she insisted. She was tired of club people and westernized Indians.

Blaise and Mary's marriage was perhaps doomed from the beginning. After they had made love, Blaise asked her father for her hand in marriage--because her father was his boss and it was the right thing to do. She had thought she was in love. Their unsuitability is brought into deep relief at the Patna Inn on the beautiful and dangerous Coromandel Coast.

The hotel and city was buzzing with campaigning before the local election, the hotel rooms full. The young couple are given a romantic, open beach house. Mary loves it. Blaise complains about the lack of running water and privacy. When they are visited by a donkey, Mary wants to give it sugar; Blaise wants the dirty beast away.

Wandering alone at night, Mary meets the charming Krishnan, a Western educated candidate posing as Krishna to draw voters to him. He is taking a vow of silence, and dressed in a loin cloth, his lips painted blue, he will parade through the streets, his hand held in blessing.

Remember all is fair in love and war. Politics now are a war, a bitter, greedy war and I have to fight Padmina Retty in every way I can...Indian politics are corrupt, venal..."

Krishnan's idealism and personal charm draw Mary to assist him in his campaign. He sends a message inviting her to be on his lorry dressed as the goddess Radha, a Hindu goddess. The plain Mary is dressed in a gauze and gold tissue sari, her face is painted, and she decked with beads and flowers and bracelets of gold.

"It's this Kirshnan. You're under a spell...Lots of girls go in at the deep end when they first meet Indians....He's using you."

Mary will not behave appropriately as the wife to a man in Blaise's position as a rising young diplomat. In the meantime, the provocative and treacherous dark skinned beauty Kuku has fallen in love with the handsome Nordic Blaise. Things spin out of control, and no one can stop it. But in the end Mary learns how to love--everyone, anyone.

Mary doesn't know, doesn't dream...This isn't England or even Europe. It's such a violent place.

Rumer Godden's dramatic novel is filled with memorable characters with interesting side stories and vivid descriptions of Godden's beloved India.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Cromandel Sea Change
Rumer Godden
Open Road Media
ebook
Publication Dec. 20, 2016
ISBN: 9781504042055

All Between the Lines: The Eastern Shore by Ward Just

"A properly edited page was a thing of beauty," thinks Ned Ayre, the protaganast of Ward Just's new novel The Eastern Shore. Contemplating his life dedicated to the news, trying to write his memoirs, Ned feels like an archaelogist 'assembing fragments of a dead civilization." The man who worked magic with his blue pencil, editing other's stories, could not create order from the threads of his life, his 'Rosebud' moment eluding him.

Ned's love of the news is an obsession that divides him from his parents and his lovers, a love affair that ends badly as the newspapers decline and close, no longer valued or profitable.

In this introspective novel, Just probes the stories of our life: the fictions we weave, like Ned's Uncle Ralph and his WWI stories that never happened, but which he believes happened; the untold truth buried because it does not make good press; the stories that should never have been told and ruin lives.

I was left feeling mournful and contemplative by this novel. I understood Ned's longing to break out of his small town, a place of changeless comfort and sureity. And I mourned his inability to make sense of his life.

Some will say there is no plot action, too much of the story is shared through story telling. But I was compelled by the novel; it recalled to mind many who dedicate their lives to something they believe in only to find after 40 years that what they loved has become meaningless and unvalued. How could anyone live without the news, young Ned thinks in amazement. Yet he lives into a world where the news and the great stories are left behind. Change betrays us all.

Between the lines we come to understand what Ned learned the hard way: the paper-thin line between all the news we need to know and all the news; how factual reporting can cross the line into the sacred and the private.

I requested this book through Edelweiss because several years ago I read Ward Just's novel An Unfinished Season and it left a lasting impression on me. I am even more impressed with Just after reading this book.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbaised review.


The Eastern Shore
Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication October 18, 2016
ISBN-10 0544836588
ISBN-13 9780544836587