A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought tor Justice in the Jim Crow South by Ben Montgomery

"With these facts I made my way home, thoroughly convinced that a Negro's life is a very cheap thing."`~from A Shot in the Moonlight

 

Several years ago I went to a local church to hear a Metro Detroit fiber artist talk about her quilt. The quilt was huge, a stark black with thousands of names embroidered on it. 

April Anue, the artist, told us how God hounded her to make this quilt, and what it cost her, the anguish and tears that accompanied every name she embroidered. She talked about the horror of making the nooses that ornament the quilt.

The 5,ooo names on the quilt are those of African Americans who had been lynched in America between 1865 and 1965. The title of the quilt is Strange Fruit.

Strange Fruit by April Anue

Five thousand human beings, beaten, tortured, and murdered. Anue researched every name, now memorialized for all to read.

In the Jim Crow South there were black Americans who were harassed, beaten, their homes and livelihoods taken from them, their families traumatized; they were denied protection under the law by the authorities and the courts. How many tens of thousands have been forgotten, their names lost?

Ben Montgomery has brought one man back to life. A freed slave whose white neighbors gathered on moonlit night to demand he leave his hard-earned, modest home and farm. Twenty-five men who claimed to be 'friends.' A man who disguised his voice and wore a handkerchief to hide his identity called to him to come out of his home. When this black man had the audacity not to comply, shots bombarded his home, wounding him. And to protect his home and family, this man shot out his window into the crowd, killing a white man.

His name was George Dinning. He fled into the fields to hide as the white men took their fallen comrade away. The next morning, Dinning's house and barn were burned to the ground. George turned himself into the authorities when he heard that he had killed a man.

The story of that night, Dinning's trial, and what happened afterwards is devastating and moving. And, it is perplexing, for the story of Dinning protecting the sanctity of his home brought a surge of support, including that of a prominent veteran of the Confederate Army who built memorials to Confederate heroes while supporting organizations to benefit freed slaves. He was "foremost in work of charity among our race," one black minister said. 

A Shot in the Moonlight  incorporates historic documents in a vivid recreation of the events of that night, the trial, and the unexpected twists of fortune afterward. Dinning stood up to power in the courtroom, asking for reparation for his loss. Everything was stacked against him, and when he was denied justice, a deluge of editorials were printed in his defense.

In his book What Unites Us, Dan Rather talks about building consensus on the shared values we all hold dear. The sanctity of home and a man's right to protect his home and family raised sympathy of for Dinning, for every American could sympathize with protecting one's home and family.   

This is an amazing story of a brave man, a horrendous tale of hate and racism, and a revelation of race relations in America that brought chills and tears. 

I received a free book from Little, Brown Spark. My review is fair and unbiased.

I previous read Montgomery's book The Man Who Walked Backwards: An American Dreamer's Search for Meaning in the Great Depression, which I reviewed here.

A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South
by Ben Montgomery

Publication January 26, 2021
ISBN-13: 9780316535540 hardcover USD: $28/CAD: $35
ISBN-13: 9780316535564 ebook USD: $14.99 /CAD: $19.99

from the publisher

The sensational true story of George Dinning, a freed slave, who in 1899 joined forces with a Confederate war hero in search of justice in the Jim Crow south. “Taut and tense. Inspiring and terrifying in its timelessness.”(Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad )

Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by O, The Oprah Magazine

Named a "must-read" by the Chicago Review of Books

One of CNN's most anticipated books of 2021 

After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family.

So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history — one that ended with Dinning becoming the first Black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic but largely forgotten story, and the unusual convergence of characters — among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky governor William O'Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself — that allowed this unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare.

About the author

Ben Montgomery is author of the New York Times-bestselling 'Grandma Gatewood's Walk,' winner of a 2014 Outdoor Book Award, 'The Leper Spy,' and 'The Man Who Walked Backward,' coming fall 2018 from Little, Brown & Co. He spent most of his 20 year newspaper career as an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He founded the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com and helped launch the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers collective.

In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called "For Their Own Good," about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school. In 2018, he won a National Headliner award for journalistic innovation for a project exploring police shootings in Florida. He was among the first fellows for Images and Voices of Hope in 2015 and was selected to be the fall 2018 T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University, where he played defensive back for the football team, the Wonder Boys. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York's Hudson River Valley and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. He lives in Tampa. 

Sergeant Salinger by Jerome Charyn

The inimitable Jerome Charyn has turned his pen to probe the transformative war experiences of one of America's most famous writers, J.D. Salinger. Like so many of his generation, WWII left its indelible footprints on Salinger, as manifested in his stories and his troubled life. 

Charyn begins with Sonny Salinger as a love-struck Park Avenue boy with a few stories under his belt. Sonny was smitten with teenage vamp Oona O’Neill (daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill), but Oona had big plans; he was merely a pleasant diversion. 

The army decided to overlook Sonny's heart murmur and called him to duty. Sonny went overseas, a secret counterintelligence agent whose job was to seek out and interrogate Nazi collaborators. 

Oona went to Hollywood where her life plans were altered by Charlie Chaplin. In England, the heartbroken Sonny frequented a local pub, scribbling a story about Holden Caulfield at war.

Sonny experienced the most atrocious killing fields of WWII.

There was Devon's Slapton Sands where 1700 GIs rehearsing for Utah Beach were killed by friendly fire. He was at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge, and he saw the first liberation of a concentration camp.

Sonny was tasked with sniffing out Nazis and Nazi collaborators in every hamlet. He knew that the people he interrogated were as broken by the war as he was.

The depravity and waste of war was overwhelming. Sonny became a ghost. Frayed, he secretly checked into a German civilian hospital.

Back at work as 'the grand inquisitor,' one of the doctors who had nursed Sonny was brought before him for interrogation. He married her, and with fake papers, brought his German Nazi bride home to America to meet his Jewish family.

The marriage failed.

Charyn includes images from Salinger's fiction, especially the Nine Stories--an Eisenhower coat, Sonny at the beach making sand castles with children and remembering Bananafish, hanging in British pubs to write. Salinger's Glass family are referenced, and the carousel in Central Park. Guest appearances are made by Hemingway and Teddy's son General Roosevelt.

In 2018 I reviewed Eberhard Alsen's book J.D.Salinger and the Nazis. When I last read The Catcher in the Rye for book club in 2016, I considered how PTSD influenced the novel. 

Charyn  draws readers on a journey into the darkness of monstrous carnage. As I read, joy was sucked from my world, colors faded, I felt cheerless. Sonny's disillusion and trauma leaves him a tin man, and we understand, because we feel it, too.

A glimmer of hope comes at the end."Whatever music he had lost in the carnage at Slapton Sands, at Hurtgen, and among the smoldering corpses at Kaufering IV had come back."

We know the books that Salinger would write and their impact. Instead of Holden Caulfield's war death, he wrote a novel about a teenage Holden who dreams of protecting children from the adult world. He had seen the devaluation of human lives sacrificed to false gods. And we know how damaged he was, how he became an unsettling, mysterious hermit. Charyn's novel leads us to understand the forces that shaped Salinger and inform his writing.

I was given an ARC by the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read Charyn's article J. D. Salinger The Lost Bar Mitzvah Boy here.

Sergeant Salinger
by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication January 5, 2021
Trade Paper US $16.99 ISBN: 9781942658740
Trade Cloth US $28.99 ISBN: 9781942658825
Ebook ISBN: 9781942658757

from the publisher

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war—from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.

After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.

Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams by David S. Brown

 

Henry Adams was born in 1838, the year the telegraph was first demonstrated. Native Americans were  forced to relocate and the Underground Railroad was being established. Meanwhile in Britain, slavery was abolished, Victoria was newly on the throne, and Dickens published Oliver Twist. Adams died in 1918 during WWI, the year of the Spanish Influenza and the first time airplanes were used by the USPS. 

Henry was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, 'the Governor' of Henry's childhood, and the great-grandson of founding father President John Adams. His own father Charles Francis had served as ambassador to England, as had generations of Adams men.

Unlike his predecessors, Adams did not committ his life to public service. He never had children and his wife committed suicide when he was in his late 40s. He spent some time teaching at Harvard, and was popular with the students, but it did not suit him.

Henry became a historian, a world traveler, and an insider Washingtonian socialite. 

"What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the games of the twentieth? " he wrote in the first chapter, continuing, "As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it."~ from The Education of Henry Adams

It was his book The Education of Henry Adams that introduced me to him. It is a strange book, self-published and shared with his friends. He writes about his childhood in Quincy and his later life, skipping the death of his wife and his most regarded histories. He writes about the changes in society, the rise of capitalists and industry and the power of money.

Like his predecessors, Henry was intellectual, high-minded, and could be contrary. Like his predecessors, he believed one should be called to public duty, not seek it, an 18th c concept dated by his time. Unlike his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he was not called to serve as an ambassador, although he was his father's private secretary in London. 

Instead, he wrote. He wrote an eight-volume history of Jeffersonian America, he wrote political commentary, he wrote travel pieces and about architecture and medieval history.

John Adams and John Quincy Adams were men of  their time, men of action, called upon to serve their country. Henry was an observer and an outsider, out of sync, never at home.

John Adams was against slavery and John Quincy Adams fought Congress over the ban to discuss abolition.  His father Charles Francis was involved with the anti-slavery Whig party. Henry was uninterested and unengaged with the problems of African Americans. 

As capitalism and business men rose to power, Anti-Semitism became mainstream, and Henry was not immune. He despaired to see that the big money of the 'northern plutocracy" was the rising power in Washington. He railed against corruption and the patronage system, and despaired that too many 'good men' avoided politics as a dirty business. He railed against the rise of the Boston Irish. 

He married a cerebral woman overly attached to her father, a woman liked by few.  After her early death, Adams built her a enigmatic memorial, the details of which he left up to the famed sculpture Saint-Gaudens while he went on a world tour while claiming he died to the world with her. 

The arc of Adam's life crossed a part of American history and politics I was not well versed on, and I found this aspect of the biography to be very interesting. The problems we see today in American politics have deep roots.

Some trivia tidbits from Adams life:

• Henry James wrote in a letter to Edith Wharton that Adams read Jane Austen's Persuasion aloud in the evenings.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's character Thornton Hancock was inspired by Adams; he had met him when a boy.
• Adams studied under geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard, saying his class was "the only teaching that appealed to [my] imagination."
• Adams wrote two novels, including Democracy about Gilded Age Washington DC politics; Teddy Roosevelt found it "essentially mean and base."
• Adams fell in love with an unhappily married, beautiful and intelligent socialite who counted on his friendship but rejected him as a lover. She did not find him physically attractive.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
by David S. Brown
Scribner
Pub Date: November 24,  2020
ISBN: 9781982128234
hardcover $30.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A revelatory biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals of his era, who witnessed and contributed to America’s dramatic transition from “colonial” to “modern.”

Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist.

Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted powerful figures, including Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era.

The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence.

Presenting intimate and insightful details of a fascinating and unusual American life and a new window on nineteenth century US history, The Last American Aristocrat shows us a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before.

Book Club Reads: Dream When You're Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg and The Bear by Andrew Krivak

The local library book clubs are meeting using Zoom during the pandemic. Turnout is greatly reduced, from 12-14 members to five.

Our August read with the Clawson library book club was Elizabeth Berg's Dream When You're Feeling Blue, historical fiction about the home front during WWII.

My husband said it reminded him of Little Women, Louise May Alcott's novel about the March sisters during the Civil War.

Three sisters from a large Catholic Irish Boston family are at the heart of the story. The men they love go to war.

Berg embellishes the novel with details of the girl's lives, bringing alive the deprivations and challenges of the home front. One sister takes work at a factory to earn more money where the women are subjected to harassment. Their patriotic duty extends to writing letters to a dozen or more soldiers and attending dances so the soldiers have happy memories before they are shipped abroad. Tough work, dancing the night away. But it is, since these girls spent all day on their feet working!

Berg's story includes a 'dear John' letter and losing a fiance, an underage boy trying to enlist, and a child who makes a bargain with God to protect the boys.

The readers found this to be a light, quick, enjoyable read. All were confused by the added final section set in near the end of the character's lives.

from Berg's website

What's it About?The time is 1943; the place is Chicago, Illinois. Three Irish-Catholic sisters, the Heaney girls, spend part of every evening sitting at the kitchen table in their pincurls, writing to their boyfriends and to other men fighting in World War 2. Observing the daily life of these girls as well as their parents and three brothers, we get a glimpse of what life was like on the homefront; in the letters the women receive from the men, we get an idea of it was like "over there." This novel is an evocation of a time gone by, a purposefully nostalgic and sentimental — and fun!-- look at the forties: the clothes, the music, the language, the meals, the sentiments. It is a dramatic example of how a certain period in time can shape a person. Most of all, it demonstrates how much we are willing to give in the name of love.

What was the inspiration?There are a lot of books written about World War 2, but not so many about the home front. I'm always interested in the details of ordinary life, and particularly the lives of women leading those ordinary lives. I wanted to write about the women who did so much to support the soldiers. I wanted to write about rationing and USO dances and drawing seams on the back of your legs with eyebrow pencil because silk stockings were no longer available. A bigger reason for writing this book, though, was to pay tribute to a generation of people who are slowly leaving us. There is so much to learn from and admire about them. On a more personal note, this is one I wanted to "give" to my Dad. You can see a photo of him and my Mom in the front of the book. My Dad's wearing his Army uniform; my Mom’s wearing the yellow dress she was married in.

When I heard that another local library book club was reading The Bear by Andrew Krivak, which I reviewed earlier this year, I signed up to be included.

Two of my Clawson book clubbers are also members of the Royal Oak Library book club. While they were tepid about Berg's novel, everyone raved about The Bear. They found it moving, profound, and deep.

 One reader said she read it in one sitting. Beautiful nature writing was a plus. We discussed the magical realism in the second half when the bear helps the girl survive after her father's death. Although it ends with the death of the last human, it was not found to be a sad book.

from the publisher

In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen.

A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion.

What was the inspiration for The Bear

What if, in the twilight of human experience, one were to see that what we lay claim to and cling to as quintessentially human is actually quite limited compared to a wider, more transcendental experience of Nature itself? What if, in fact, an entire world of activity — an entire story, if you will — has always been present in Nature, but we (most of us, at least) have not been attuned to it? What if human consciousness has crowded out the understanding of an entire natural consciousness waiting, in all of its ancientness, to return not to a past but to a present wherein it lives out its own struggle of beginning, middle, and end? And if so, would the last human actors, by virtue of their aloneness, be initiated into this mystery, not a loss to be mourned but a passing to be revered? What would that story be like, and who or what would tell it? I pulled in my line, rowed to shore, and went up to the house where I sat down and wrote the first line of the novel that would become The Bear: “The last two were a girl and her father who lived along the old eastern range on the side of a mountain they called the mountain that stands alone.” 

read more at https://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/if-nature-told-the-story-andrew-krivak-on-writing-the-bear

It was decided that even during a pandemic and contentious election, we did not want escapism, but books that made us think.

What are other book clubs doing during Covid-19? Are you looking for books with depth, or summer beach reads? Books that affirm, escapism, thrillers, romance, or literary fiction that offers something to 'sink your teeth into'?

COVID-19 Life: TBR, Quilts, News

I finished my embroidered cat quilt by machine quilting it on my new Bernina 570 QE! I am working on some surprise projects next.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for batting to arrive so I can hand quilt my Great Gatsby quilt.

Almost all the fabrics have arrived for my Mountain Mist Water Lily quilt. I saw this image online and it's my color inspiration.

I have read 88 books this year!

New books on my TBR shelf include two Goodreads wins:

• The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness by Emily Anthes
• The Restaurant by Pamela M. Kelley, woman's fiction about sisters in Nantucket

And from NetGalley:

• Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars by Kate Greene about her experience in a Martian-like environment
• Nick in which Michael Farris Smith imagines Nick Carraway's war experience before going to NY and meeting Gatsby
• His Truth is Marching On by Jon Meacham about John Lewis

I had to share some great photos from family members.

Below is our grandpuppy Sunny in her backyard paradise. Melissa is using her furlough to spiff up the landscaping. 

Our niece's son's Bar Mitzvah was all virtual and shared online.

Our dear friend Shirley Williams passed away last week. Here she is as a young woman with her husband. She often told me about their meeting.

During WWII, Shirley was engaged when she went to a local dance and saw a dashing young pilot. She removed her engagement ring and announced, that is the man I am going to marry. He taught her how to fly and she also had a pilot's licence.

We will dearly miss Shirley.

The Clawson library staff is back from furlough and we are working on restarting the book club as a virtual meeting!

My brother is camping on Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula on Lake Superior, on the Sunset side, and has been sharing awesome photos!

We went to the local garden center. Everyone was wearing masks, even outside. We bought some basil and pots to repot some indoor plants and some gifts.

Otherwise, we are walking in the neighborhood early in the day and staying home.

Stay safe!

The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson

I have enjoyed Erik Larson's books ever since reading The Devil in the White City. I previously read and reviewed Dead Wake and also have read Isaac's Storm. (I have In The Garden of Beasts on Kindle.)

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz is his best book ever! And the timing is perfect. The world needs to be reminded of what true leadership is and the importance of cohesive single-minded resistance in facing catastrophe.

Larson presents the cold, hard numbers of losses but concentrates on the human side of Churchill's personal family and closest aides and the experience of the common people of England.

Citizens trudged through the rubble to work after sleepless nights in air raid shelters. They planted gardens and kept farm animals to grow their own food. The volunteered their service. They lost everything and carried on.

Churchill was idiosyncratic, the Nazis delighting in making fun of his penchant for pink silk underwear and habitual clenching of a cigar between his teeth. Arriving in Washington, D.C. and staying in the White House, the president opened the door to a naked Prime Minister who quipped, I have nothing to hide, and went on to converse clad in a towel.

Churchill was fearless, watching the Blitz from rooftops, touring the devastated cities in an open car, never concerned for his personal safety. His example and his words inspired the people to find courage.

Churchill showed compassion and sorrow, he truly felt for the people he represented.

Churchill knew that Britain could not win a war against Germany. He kept up morale while desperately working to secure the American assistance that would save his country.

Drawing from her diary, Larson includes the personal life and romantic interests of the prime minister's daughter Mary Churchill. And we read of the doomed marriage of Randolph Churchill, a gambling addict and womanizer, his wife Pamela falling for the American Averell Harriman who was negotiating the Lend-Lease program.

Readers also follow Nazi leaders, whose idiosyncrasies outpaced even Churchill's. Goring liked to dress in costumes and makeup and amassed a huge collection of stolen art. Hesse traveled with a collection of pills on his clandestine flight to Britain, hoping to forge a peace agreement.

The book is everything you have heard it is.

I received an ARC from the publisher through Goodreads. My review is fair and unbiased.

from the publisher

The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when–in the face of unrelenting horror–Churchill’s eloquence, strategic brilliance, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
by Erik Larson
Crown
ISBN-10: 0385348711
ISBN-13: 978-0385348713

Father of Lions by Louise Callaghan

Ordinary people in extraordinary times can accomplish the heroic. 

Father of Lions: One Man's Remarkable Quest to Save the Mosul Zoo by Louise Callaghan tells the story of the people who worked to save the Mosul Zoo animals under unimaginable circumstances. The privations of wartime, the societal and political shifts under ISIS, and the extraordinary measures taken to extract the animals are vividly rendered. 

Abu Laith loved animals. As a boy, he brought home two dogs who became his constant companions, which set him apart in a society that condemned dogs as unclean. He learned everything he could about wildlife from National Geographic and dreamed of creating his own zoo where the animals had open spaces instead of cages. 

Upset by the neglect of the zoo animals across the street from his Mosul home, he contacted the distant zoo owner and became the zookeeper. He hand-raised a baby lion he called Zombie. He loved the lions and bears and monkeys and took great pride in their care.

When ISIS took over Mosul and set up camp in the zoo, Abu Laith went into hiding with his family. He fretted over his beloved animals' neglect, but under threat from ISIS was unable to leave his home. He hired a man out of his own pocket to care for the zoo. 

And then the Iraq war came.

For over two and a half years, Abu Laith endeavored to keep his beloved animals alive. At the end of the ISIS occupation of the zoo, there were only a few starving animals left. A former government scientist became involved and contacted an Austrian charity that rescued animals. Egyptian veterinarian Dr. Amir risked everything to bring the remaining animals out of Mosul.

Life in Mosul before and during ISIS occupation is central to the story. One of the most difficult scenes involved Abu Laith's wife giving birth--unable to even raise the veil covering her face! 

During the war, families squeezed into one room while under bombardment, enduring long hours of boredom and isolation. It was a struggle to find food and dangerous to even prepare it.

After the war, women lifted their unveiled, pale faces to the sun for the first time in years. The streets once again were filled with people. Zombie was repatriated to his native element. And readers rejoice with their reclaimed freedom.

I received an ARC through Bookish First in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Father of Lions
by Louise Callahan
Forge Books
On Sale: 01/14/2020
$27.99 hardcover; $14.99 ebook
ISBN: 9781250248947

Last Books of the Year

My last books of the year were not review books, but personal choices from my TBR shelf.

When I bought my first Kindle I went wild with 99 cent book sales. It was unbelievable that I could own a book for under a dollar! I discovered some of my favorite books this way, like John William's Stoner. Another was Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, a coming-of-age story about politics and journalism. Later I reviewed Just's last novel, The Eastern Shore, a retired journalist reviews the uses and abuses of journalists and the news.

Learning of Just's passing I pulled his Rodin's Debutante off my physical TBR shelf.

"Tell me this, she said. Has your life worked out the way you thought it would?"~from Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just

A small town is shocked by the violent attack of a teenage girl in the local school and the leaders of society convince the local newspaper editor to bury the story.

Teenage Lee's mother convinces his father to leave the town of his ancestors for a safer neighborhood.

Odgen Hall School of Boys is Lee's chosen school, housed in the private home of Tommy Odgen whose wealth allowed him the luxury of pursuing his love of shooting--and his love of the local cathouse. One of the most chilling scenes I have ever read occurs when a young Tommy, hunting on his father's grounds, sees an interloper hunting. He gets the man in his sights, justifying his intended action. Tommy establishes the school to spite his wife. His lawyer Bert Marks handles the business for him.

Lee helps the school team to have a winning season and is noticed by Tommy, who upon meeting the boy warns that "you don't learn a damned thing by defeat." Tommy then goes on a rage about newspapermen, "They'll take everything if you let them," he growls.

In the house remained a sculpture by Rodin of a Chicago debutante. Lee was enchanted by the sculpture and it impels him to pursue the art of working in stone.

Lee goes to university, renting a South Chicago room for his studio. Resisting a knife attack leaves him with a scar. Lee meets a girl, he becomes successful.

The victim of the attack that drove Lee's family from their home returns, seeking answers. She has no memory of what happened and hopes Lee will prompt her memory.

You mean a thing's better not known than known. 
It depends on what you fear most, the known or the unknown. 
She offered a ghost of a smile. Do you have to choose? I imagine it's chosen for you, Lee said.~from Rodin's Debutante

I love Ward's writing.

When I read the beginning pages of The Secrets We Kept on the First Look Book Club I was enchanted by the narrative voice. I put in a hold on Overdrive and waited patiently. The audiobook was the first available copy.

I wanted to read the book for several reasons: First, because I had read Cold Warriors by Duncan White this year in which I learned how books and ideas were weapons in the Cold War. Second, because I had read Doctor Zhivago in 1968 and was interested in how the novel was secreted out of the Soviet Union.

my 1968 copy of Doctor Zhivago

Preston divides the novel into two fronts--East and West. In the West, female secretaries working for the government face sexism even when some become spies; one helps to clandestinely disseminate Pasternack's novel to Russian readers at the World's Fair in Belgium. In the East sections, we learn the story of Boris Pasternack and his lover Olga who was sent to Siberia for not informing on Pasternack when the government feared what Pasternack's novel contained.

The secrets kept are multiple on both fronts.

I enjoyed the audiobook and the story, but I still prefer to read a book. I could have read the novel in half the time it took to listen to it!

Helen Korngold Diary: December 15-21, 1919

It was Helen's last week of teaching at Wellston school before her trip to New York City to visit Herbert and Ruth Pawling! She went shopping to prepare.

December
Monday 15
School – I do love Mondays. Rushed downtown. Got a beautiful dark blue beaded camisole. Also getting a darling peach-blow evening dress. Have some wonderful suede pumps.

Tuesday 16
School seems a nuisance these days. Downtown, bought a dear black jersey silk petticoat & silk stockings. Bought a green silk dress – silver lace & cloth – gorgeous. Have a cute blue hat to match my new fur-trimmed blue coat.

Wednesday 17
This was a good day. Children were angelic. Milton Breschel came over.

Thursday 18
Bought a blue suit trimmed in nutria fur. It’s real cute. I have some beautiful handkerchiefs, combs, etc. Also have a pretty white georgette plainly embroidered.

Friday 19
Expect to leave for N.Y. tomorrow. Thrilling. I’m almost thru shopping. Gave my children a Xmas party – a piece of candy for each & a John Hancock pencil. Had a program for everything. Beck bought my bag and packed my trunk.

Saturday 20
Went to Wellston, got my check – said good-bye to Grammie, Grandpa & the rest of the family – bought a pair of shoes & left St Louis at 1:10 p.m. Spent a pleasant afternoon with a girl on the train.

Sunday 21
No breakfast. Felt rotten. The train was cold & hot by degrees. Went around horseshoe bend & really enjoyed the trip – but the train lost 4 hrs time & I arrived in Penn Station N.Y. 10 p.m. Met by Ruth & Herbert.

Notes:

Dec 14

El Dance was held at B’nai El in St. Louis, a founding member of the Union for Reform Judaism. 

Milton D. Breschel, according to The War Record of American Jews, was on born July 8, 1892, in Milwaukee, MN. He was a commissioned officer in WWI. He was a student living in St. Louis at 5001 Gates Ave. when he entered the war. His mother was born in New York and his father was Czechoslovakian/Russian/Polish. On January 18, 1915, he was promoted to 2 Lt. working with heavy tanks. He appears in the 1914 Scranton, PA City Directory. In the 1920s and 1930s Milton D. Breschel appears in Jacksonville, FL city directories, working as a salesman and married to Fay.

Dec. 20

Perhaps Helen took the Baltimore & Ohio's St. Louis-Cincinnati-New York City Special passenger train. Two trains left St. Louis daily.

The St. Louis Limited traveled over 1000 miles in "scarcely a day" from St. Louis to New York City, passing through Indianapolis, IN, Dayton and Columbus, OH, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia, PA. "This is the only train composed of Pullman cars exclusively. A library-smoking car, buffet, bath and barber appliances, a Pennsylvania Lines diner, a compartment-observation car, and three drawing-room sleeping cars made up the equipment."(found in Goggle Books Railway World.)

*****

1919 Fashion and Helen

Helen's choices reflected popular styles being sold in 1919. The Dry Good Economist of 1919 noted color trends including 'National' blue, or drapeau blue,  the color of the flag as a new fashion-forward color. 'Blue Devil' blue and navy blue was popular.

Favorite dress materials included tricolette and silk jersey. Fur was a fashionable trim, especially seal, but fur was in short supply because of a fur strike. Sealion and Nurtria were used instead. Nutria fur was from the coypu or swamp rat, originally imported from South America, somewhat like beaver fur.

Chemise models of dresses were the narrow skirted dresses that fell straight from shoulder to knee.

Wool and silk and georgette dresses were embellished with colored embroidery, jet and steel beading, and soutache braid.

Camisoles were undergarments worn over the brassiere, now coming into their own as an outer garment.

The suits below show the narrow profile that would define the 1920s. Not the hemlines are above the ankle.

These dresses show the fuller silhouette that was becoming passe.



Perhaps Helen's green silk dress embellished with silver lace looked like this dress:

1919 fashion illustration shows the simple white dress still popular. Helen's was made of georgette and simply embroidered.

Dec 1919 fashion illustration includes the trendy 'national' blue along with the capuchine yellow that was the other new in color.

These petticoats are quite full.


Trendy colors from Paris for evening apparel include a 'peachblow' dress on the right.

As ankles were being shown, stockings featured designs on the ankles and lower legs.

We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca White

The members of SMASH believed it was better to die in honor than to live as their parents did..."~from We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca While

How do we change society? Can we change society? Who are the 'good people' and can 'good people' do bad things for the right reason and still be 'good'? Can people really change?

I was interested in the questions posed by the novel.

The story begins in the early 1960s when two girls meet in a private women's college in the South and become best friends. Their rising awareness of social racism makes them question the values of their society. Decisions are made that take them in different directions. One girl works within the system while accepting the social expectations for a rising female lawyer. The other girl follows a charismatic radical into ever more violent protests and when she has lost everything she seeks out her old friend to help her return to society.

The novel is filled with historical detail and events. Medgar Evans and Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Dylan and Dr. Strangelove, the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, "Hey! Hey! LBJ how many kids did you kill today" are mentioned.

It was very hard to follow Eve into the very dark place she ends up in. I nearly set the book aside as her life became quite disturbing. But I did pick it back up.

Babe, you opted out of a normal life a long time ago.~ from We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca White

Can we keep our pasts a secret? Can we completely change? In the end, Eve became the very person she had sought to avoid becoming. And yet--she still needed a man to guide her. Daniella may have 'sold out' and but she gives it up for important work that better fits her values.

I spent many years not thinking about the 1960s. The cultural and political changes that were the background of my teen years were too depressing to remember.

In 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated I was in Sixth Grade. By the time I graduated from high school in 1970 I had seen the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Viet Nam body count on the daily news, and the rise of the anti-war movement and hippie counter culture. Music went from I Want To Hold Your Hand to Sympathy for the Devil. The elegant full-skirted dresses became sheaths became Mod became Psychedelic became bare feet, bell bottom jeans, and T-shirts. Green Beret pins became iron crosses became Give Earth a Chance pinback buttons. The 1967 Detroit Riots happened a few miles down the road.

I was just trying to grow up, figuring out who I was, and the whole world was telling me to look elsewhere because things of real importance were going on. I resented that. I wanted to be allowed to just deal with my own stuff. Instead, I joined the Political Action Club and read the Detroit Free Press, Newsweek and Time instead of Seventeen.

But I never strayed from my core values. I knew who I was and what I wanted for myself. I felt that the character Eve lacked that internal compass.

Warren St. Clair was a charismatic and idealistic man who is also misogynistic and self-absorbed. Eve knows his reputation, but can't resist him, following him from place to place. When Warren escalates to violence against the system, Eve follows him underground.

Meanwhile, Daniella marries a 'reformed' Republican, a good man who believes that social change happens slowly. Daniella pushes the envelope as a lawyer, working twice as hard to break into the old-boy network.

Justice does not simply show up on it own, gliding in on the wings of platitudes and the promise of prayers. ~from We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca Smith

In mid-age, both women shift, the radical Eva embracing safety and surety and marriage that brings prosperity, and the widowed conformist Daniella chucking it all for non-profit work helping men on death row.

The book could have ended here, but instead, we see how the women's decisions impact the next generation.

Eve and Danilla each have a daughter. Eve's daughter Anna has everything and more, dressing in Laura Ashley clothing and driving a new car. Daniella is financially well off, too, but she insists on a lifestyle in keeping with her values. Used clothing, no conspicuous consumption.

Daniella works and Eve is a housewife, so Daniella leaves her daughter Sarah with 'Aunt Eve' under the care of the maid. Sarah is envious of Anna's life and she worries that her mom is economically insecure.

Eve has a secret that is exposed. When Anna has learned the truth about her mother, it creates a rift.

There is an interesting theme on religion through the novel that is not central to the plot but takes enough space to show the author's concern.

Early in the novel Eve and Warren St. Clair and have a discussion about the value of the church in society. Warren believes the cathedral is a waste of space better used for affordable housing. Eve thinks there is nothing more useful than a church. Warren mentions the German Lutheran Church was complicit with the Nazis, and Eve retorts, not Bonhoeffer's church. Sure, Warren replies. But Bonhoeffer was executed by the state which proves the church either is complicit or martyrs.

Near the end of the novel Daniella and her daughter Sarah have a talk about religion. Eve has joined a right-wing evangelical church led by a charismatic preacher--still drawn to those charismatic men.

Sarah asks Daniella, what if one must hit 'rock bottom' to be saved? Daniella believes in the social gospel, God's will for "the reconciliation of all people" as opposed to God daming some and saving others.

But Sarah understands that her Aunt Eve is searching for stability and family. Daniella only sees that Eve jumps from one "dogma" to another.

Again, a juxtaposition between two choices arises. Is changing the world better than saving souls? Do we need to become completely powerlessness before we can accept God? Is doing justice and showing mercy the mark of walking humbly with one's God?

The book is summed up in one sentence:

We are all good people here, all trying to muddle through this the best we can. ~from We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca White

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

We Are All Good People Here
by Susan Rebecca White
Atria Books
Pub Date 06 Aug 2019 
ISBN 9781451608915
PRICE $27.00 (USD)

Historical Fiction as Story, Interpretation, and Illumination

I read three historical fiction books at once, each about 400 pages long. They were very different not just in subject matter but in how they presented history.

Historical fiction can recreate history through story. It can reinterpret history through an author's viewpoint. And it can illuminate history for deeper, timeless messages. To me, each book represented one of these uses.

Recreating History Through Story: Lost Roses by Martha Hall Kelly

Lost Roses by Martha Hall Kelly is the prequel to her first novel The Lilac Girls. The Lilac Girls tells the story of Polish girls sent to Ravensbruck where the Nazis perform disfiguring operations on their legs. After the war, American socialite Caroline Ferriday takes up their cause and brings them to New York City for corrective surgery.

In her new book, Kelly turns her attention to Caroline's mother Eliza who was friends with Russian aristocrats, cousins of the Romanovs. Like others of their class, they lead a decadent and luxurious life. Kelly draws the daughters and their father to be sympathetic, their stepmother less so. With the toppling of the Tsar and the uprising against the aristocrats, the family finds themselves at the mercy of the Reds. The brutality of the Reds is depicted through two former prisoners who hold the family hostage.

Any 'White Russians' who could fled Russia. Meeting these refugee women, Eliza had compassion and organized to find them homes and employment.

The focus is on the aristocratic Sofya's search for her son who was both rescued and separated from her during the uprising. The boy was in the care of a peasant girl, Varinka, who disappears with him. It allows us to see two sides of the revolution while engaging our sympathy.

The novel was the May Barnes and Noble Book Club Choice. At our local group, several readers were swept into the story. Others wished there was a better grounding in the historical background of the Russian Revolution. It was agreed that family trees would have helped them.

Kelly fell in love with the Ferriday family while researching her first book. She is writing a second prequel about the family set during the Civil War. This book adds to the Ferriday family's history.

The novel is the May Barnes and Noble Book Club selection. I purchased a copy.

Reinterpreting History: Courting Mr. Lincoln by Louis Bayard

At the same time, I was reading Courting Mr. Lincoln, which the publisher offered me. Louis Bayard's novel is about the pre-marriage relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd and Lincoln and his friend and roommate Joshua Speed. The novel is based on the myth created by gay activist Larry Kramer that Speed and Lincoln had a sexual relationship. Kramer claimed to have evidence but he never made it public.

I have read several books on Mary Todd Lincoln and had my own idea of her personality.

The novel begins when Mary arrives in Springfield to her sister's home to find a husband. The frontier town of 1,500 is described as primitive. I had read that Mary was well pursued and admired as a girl, but Bayard gives us a woman tipping into spinsterhood, surrounded by inferior suitors--except for Joshua Speed, who is dapper and handsome but standoffish with the ladies. Mary is at times audacious and has an unwomanly interest in politics.

Speed introduces Lincoln to Mary. Lincoln is stereotyped as a country bumpkin who must be educated to fit into society, a job Speed takes on. Bayard does not really convince me why Mary becomes attached to Lincoln. His character is the least developed. I had read that Mary strongly believed in Lincoln's political future. The book includes their falling out and coming back together leaving the lovelorn Speed to marry a woman who is happy to avoid the physical obligations of marriage.

I ended up speed reading through half the book. I do hope readers understand this is fiction! The portrait of Mary may surprise some readers who only know the yellow journalism view of her later life, the mad widow reduced to selling her clothing and sent to the asylum by her only surviving child. In the end, I see this as Joshua Speed's story, assuming he was in love with Lincoln.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Courting Mr. Lincoln
by Louis Bayard
Algonquin Books
Pub Date 23 Apr 2019
ISBN 9781616208479
PRICE $27.95 (USD)

Historical Fiction as Illuminating: The Guest Book by Sarah Blake

The third novel I was reading at the same time was an ARC sent to me by the publisher, The Guest Book by Sarah Blake. It caught my interest early with beautiful, descriptive language and interesting characters. It is about the culpability of silence and the Milton family secrets, how wealth and privilege control the gates of power, and the acceptance of prejudice, racism, and anti-Semitism.

It is a family drama covering three generations of a wealthy, white family of privilege with deep American roots. There was a Milton in the first class at Harvard. They built a banking empire and thrived even during the Depression.

The first chapter is set in 1935 when young wife Kitty is filled with the joy of spring and ends with a horrible tragedy. I was hooked and compelled to read on.

The Guest Book recalled to mind E. M. Forster's Howard's End, one of my favorite novels. Forster's novel set in Edwardian England considers class and inheritance. Blake's novel considers prejudice and inheritance. Some characters can not give up their protected status of privilege and some rankle against it, hoping for a more just and equitable system.

In 1939, at the height of the Depression, Ogden Milton purchased an island retreat in Maine. Ogden hopes to begin anew with his wife Kitty after a tragic accident shattered their world. The island becomes part of their lives, representing all that is good and beautiful. It also holds them to the past, a place that resists change, from the upholstery and wallpaper to the ghosts that haunt it.

Milton's banking concern survived the Depression and continued to thrive during the war--partly because of German investments in steel which lead to business with the Nazis. When the steel magnate's daughter, who married a Jewish musician, asks Kitty to keep her child, Kitty turns her down. They return to Germany and are never heard of again. It is a guilty secret she keeps for decades.

Kitty and Ogden have daughters Joan and Evie and son Moss.

Evie behaves correctly, going to college and marrying the 'right kind' of man.

Joan has epilepsy and believes she will never marry. Then she meets Len Levy, a self-made man hired by her father's bank. He is a man of vision but his idea of opening the stock market to the middle and working class is rejected. Len is Jewish and people like the Miltons stick to their own kind. They keep their affair secret.

Moss is to inherit his father's position but chaffs under the expectations and prejudices of their aristocratic social class. He dreams of writing music for a new America and the changes he hears humming just out of reach.

On a fatal night in 1959, the family gathered on the island for Evie's wedding, two outsiders arrive at Moss's invitation. Len Levy and his Chicago childhood friend, Reg Pauling, an African American writer. Although they went to Harvard with Moss, these men know there are walls and gates that shut them out. In spite of Moss's vision of a new America of inclusivity--in spite of the passionate love between Len and Joan--they understand they are outsiders. The Miltons can be benevolent but they stick to the standards of the past.

What happens on that fateful day is kept secret. It is only known as the day Moss died.

After the passing of their grandparents and parents, Joan and Evie's children and their cousins must decide what to do with the Milton island home. Joan's daughter Evie can't bear to let go of the place, vivid memories mooring her to the island. But the family has run out of inherited money and the grandchildren have chosen idealistic careers that don't come with a large income. Evie's husband Paul, who is Jewish, can't understand her need to hang on to the island.

Evie is tormented by questions. Why did her mother Joan ask that her ashes be scattered on the rocky beach on the island? What was the story behind the photograph of their grandfather Ogden with a Nazi? How did Uncle Moss die? Why did her grandmother Kitty want the stranger Reg Pauling to get Moss's inheritance? Clues impel Evie to detangle the past until the family secrets are finally revealed.

In Howard's End, Forster asks who is to inherit Britain. In The Guest Book, the question of who is to inherit the island is at stake. The island becomes a symbol of the monied, white elite's world of privilege. Can they keep it?

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Guest Book
by Sarah Blake
Flatiron Books
On Sale: 05/07/2019
$27.99 hardcover
ISBN: 9781250110251

Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftin

"My future was a mystery, but at least I was leaving hell forever." from Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftin

Abdi's Somalian parents were nomadic herders of camel and goats. His mother bore battle scars from the large cats she fought while protecting her herd. In 1977, drought left his parents with no option but to go to the city of Mogadishu. His father found work as a manual laborer before he became a successful basketball star. When Abdi was born in 1985, his family was living a comfortable life.

Also in 1977 Somalia and Ethiopia went to war marking the beginning of decades-long military and political instability. Clan warfare arose with warlords ruling Mogadishu.

By the time Abdi was six years old, the city had become a war zone and his family had lost everything had fled the city. Existence became a search for safety, with starvation and the threat of death their constant companions.

Call Me American is Abdi's story of how he survived.

Abdi tells of years of horror and fear yet there is no anger or self-pity in his telling. He and his brother Hassam used their wiles to provide their mother with the necessities of water and a little maize and milk for meals.

When Abdi discovered American movies and music and culture he fell in love with America, and by imitating the culture in the movies became Abdi American. He envisioned a life of personal freedom. He taught himself English and then educated others. He was discovered by NPR's This American Life and he sent them secret dispatches about his life.

After radical Islamists took power, anything Western was outlawed. Abdi was punished if he grew his hair too long and had to hide his boom box and music that once provided entertainment at weddings. His girlfriend had to wear a burka and they could no longer walk the sandy beach hand-in-hand.

Knowing he faced the choice of death or joining the radical Islamic militia, Abdi pursued every option to come to America. The process is complicated and few are accepted. He fled Somalia to join his brother at a Kenyan refugee camp where his brother had gone years before.

Abdi had his NPR contacts and even letters from seven US Senators (including Senator Stabenow and Senator Peters from my home state of Michigan) but was turned down. Miraculously, Abdi was a diversity immigrant lottery winner. The required papers were a struggle to obtain when they existed at all. He had to bribe police, and transport to get to the airport. He was 'adopted' by an American family but had to learn the culture and find employment. After several years Abdi found work as a Somali-English translator and is now in law school.

I read this during the Fourth of July week. I don't think anything else could have impressed on me the privileged and protected life I have enjoyed. America has its problems, and when Abdi wins the green card lottery and completes the complicated process necessary to come to America he sees them first hand.

I am thankful for the personal freedoms I have enjoyed. I have never had to sleep in a dirt hole in the ground for protection or worried that by flushing the toilet soldiers would discover me and force me into the militia. No teacher ever strung me up by the wrists and whipped me. I never dodged bullets to get a bucket of water.

I could go on.

Somalia is one of the countries that Trump included in the immigration ban. Had Abdi not escaped when he did, he would not have been allowed to come to America.

I am here to make America great. I did not come here to take anything. I came here to contribute, and to offer and to give. Abdi Nor Iftin in NPR interview

I won a book from the publisher in a giveaway.

Read an excerpt from the book at
https://www.boston.com/culture/books/2018/06/20/abdi-iftin-call-me-american-book-excerpt

Hear Abdi's report on NPR's This American Life
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/560/abdi-and-the-golden-ticket

The Last of the Old-Fashioned Heroes

One hundred years ago the world was reeling from WWI. Every value and belief once the foundation of civilization was called into question by the war.

But before the 'War to End All Wars' didn't end war, men were going on quests to conquer the unknown regions of ice. They faced gruesome suffering--loss of body parts that had frozen, physical exertion in extreme conditions, starvation, threats of crevasses that appeared out of nowhere and thin ice over frigid water.

For what? For glory.

The polar regions offered no gold or marketable flora or fauna, no open land for civilization to claim, no sunny beaches for tourism.

The men who raced to the poles or up the tallest mountains did it for fame and pride and for God and Country. They had something to prove and overwhelming ambition.

To The Edges of the Earth 1909, The Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration recounts the explorers of 1909: Peary's expedition to reach the North Pole, Shackleton's expedition to reach the South Magnetic Pole, and the Duke of Abruzzo's reach for the 'Third Pole' in the Himalayas-- the dangerous K2.

I have loved exciting, thrilling, and horrifying adventure narratives since girlhood. One of my first heroes was Robert Falcon Scott after I read The Great White South about his failed expedition to the South Pole. I have also read books about mountain climbing and K2. I haven't a thread of adventure myself, preferring a comfy chair and a cup of tea while reading about someone else risking their life.

Edward J. Larson's account strips away myths about these men. Peary especially, who may have falsely claimed to have reached the North Pole and whose treatment of Inuit, including his teenage concubine, was by our standards appalling and predatory. And the poor Inuit dogs that Peary 'borrowed,' worked to death, then fed to the other dogs (or his men, as needed.)

Shackleton was better, but there was grumbling over his leadership skills, and he did decide to take ponies to the South Pole as well as an early gasoline engine car, both quite useless.

The rich, handsome Italian Duke seems to come off the best, with few negative stories about him, and his later siding with the Allied forces during WWII.

The explorers needed to raise money to fund the trips. Money was given by rich Gilded Age barons and in exchange, they could have landmarks named after them. Their stories were sold to newspapers and magazines and printed in books. They went on the Lyceum lecture circuit with magic lantern photographs.

Peary brought back Inuit for scientific study; when they died their bones were put on display! And he stole three, huge meteorites which the natives used for iron making.

Oh, the frozen toes! The shards of frozen snow that sliced through good English Gabardine! The suffering described is horrifying. (And to think, I don't read horror stories, or at least that is what I had thought. Turns out--I do!)

Shackleton failed to reach the pole, but he was knighted anyway. Scott was already planning his expedition to the South Pole, as was Admunson, and in 1911 Scott perished while Amundsen reached the pole. Shackleton was old news but still returned in 1914-16 on the Endurance. By then WWI had consumed the world and no one had interest in men fooling around in icy realms. Shackleton died of a heart attack on his way to try one more time to reach the pole.

No one really knows if it was Cook or Peary, or Peary's companion Henson, who reached the North Pole. Or if either reached it. With no solid land, the ice over open water offered huge challenges. There were ongoing battles over their claims and bad feelings which sullied Peary's reputation.

"The time was when the search for the North Pole stood for the very acme of uncommercialized heroism," wrote Dean Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago divinity school. Those were the days, indeed. Today, the opening of the Arctic waters brings dreams of drilling for oil and dollar signs.

The Icebergs by Frederick Church

The 19th c saw the rise of the romanticizing of the Arctic-- the barren, uncharted expanses of ice captivating the imagination. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein retreats to the North Pole, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins wrote the play The Frozen Deep, Frederick Church painted icebergs and Albert Bierstadt glaciers.

Could anyone then have imagined the aqua lung enabling men to view the ocean's bottom or an Endeavor that went into space? Or that the Arctic glaciers would be melting, the Arctic Ocean open and iceless?

I received a free e-book from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

To the Edges of the Earth
by Edward J. Larson
William Morrow
$29.99 hardcover
ISBN: 9780062564474

For more books on Polar expeditions:

Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2017/03/ice-ghosts-200-years-searching-for-lost.html

Marooned in the Arctic: Ada Blackwell's Extraordinary Life
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/03/marooned-in-arctic-ada-blackjacks.html

White Eskimo: Knud Rasmussen's Fearless Journey into the Heart of the Arctic
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/11/an-explorer-of-people-knud-rasmussens.html

The Great White South by Herbert Ponting

Fiction about the Arctic and Antarctica:

My Last Continent by Midge Raymond
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/06/my-last-continent-by-midge-raymond.html

The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-birthday-boys-by-beryl-bainbridge.html

To the Bright Edge of the World
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/09/to-bright-edge-of-world-by-eowyn-ivey.html

The Terror by Dan Simmons