An outstanding biography of the redoubtable Native American warrior Osceola that captures both the fury of battle and the political complexities (and An outstanding biography of the redoubtable Native American warrior Osceola that captures both the fury of battle and the political complexities (and treacheries) of the Great Seminole Wars.
Taken together, the three Seminole Wars of 1816 to 1858 were the longest, most expensive, and most deadly of all the American Indian Wars. And while names such as Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, and Red Cloud are well remembered for the stiff – and often bloody -- resistance they offered to encroaching American settlers and military, the Floridian Osceola is arguably the most notable Native American tactician, fighting the U.S. military to a standstill in a guerilla campaign until he was treacherously captured under a falsely waved ‘white flag.’
Thom Hatch’s biography of Osceola and the Great Seminole War is an enjoyable, easily read, compact biography of both the warrior and his armed resistance to the American government’s forced deportation of the Seminole tribes from southern Florida to reservations west of the Mississippi. For me, war books amount to little if an author can’t vividly recreate the major battles of a campaign. In this area, Hatch excels, recreating key engagements in the conflict, as columns of federal troops and militiamen beat through the Florida swamp and brush in search of Osceola’s out-numbered braves, who lurk ghost-like in the tangle weed of the next hummock.
And while this had its hooks in me simply for its military prowess, Hatch’s writing skills are hardly limited to bullets and cannonades. In fact, his talent in explaining the complex relationships between different Native American tribes – Creek and Seminole – as well as the Native Americans’ loyalty to the so-called Dark Seminoles, escaped slaves and free blacks adopted into the tribe, are critical to understanding the near-impossible conditions the U.S. government imposed upon the Seminole people, hardening Osceola’s resolve to fight. Hatch also does a nice job of picking apart the ‘treaties’ the U.S. Government brought to table, exposing the paperwork as little more than flim-flam that would be casually ignored as soon as an inconvenient word was found on a page.
Osceola and the Great Seminole War is good history: detailed without being monotonous, gritty but spirited; replete with action and politics, balancing great people with great events, and most importantly (for me anyway), peppered with historical curio that make you say right out loud, “Really?” -- for example, in this one, there’s the story of coining the phrase ‘if the creek don’t rise” and the riddle of poor dead Osceola’s missing head. For whatever the reason, this reading year has been a little tough on me -- I just haven’t hit on many really good books -- so it’s nice that as we creep toward the final quarter of 2024 to find a five-star gem like this one. ...more
If I’m going to stereotype a group of books as a man’s man read, then Tom Clavin’s Follow Me to Hell fits the label. Told ”All outlaws look good dead.”
If I’m going to stereotype a group of books as a man’s man read, then Tom Clavin’s Follow Me to Hell fits the label. Told with a squinty-eyed glare and a spit of tobacco juice, Clavin’s biography of legendary Texas Ranger Leander McNelly has so much historical grit that you might just have to wipe a little sweat from your brow and knock the dust from your footwear after finishing. Thankfully, even for a cowpoke like me who’s never left his armchair, this trail ride is well worth saddling up for as Clavin spins quite the yarn, meandering through the backwaters of Texas state history while capturing the larger-than-life figures – lawman and outlaw – who flocked to the Lone Star state in the mid-1800s to make their fortunes.
In his introduction, Clavin compares the story to a tale spun beside a campfire amid the chaparral, and he’s true to that voice. While Leander McNelly might be the focal point of much of the book – and no more than two thirds of it at that – Clavin digresses into so many side treks that the average reader might have become hopelessly lost in the thicket without the author as a guide, but these treks end up as delights, whether Clavin is recounting the Confederate states little remembered invasion of the American west during the Civil War to the ill-fated Mier Expedition and its poorly advised invasion of Mexico in 1842 to his short biographical sketches of McNelly’s more notorious opponents, such as outlaws John Wesley Harden and John King Fisher. If you are fan of the West and the nooks and crannies of its history, then you’ll end-up as lost as I was in Clavin’s recounting.
Of course, the book is titularly about the exploits of Texas Ranger McNelly – and if there’s a fair criticism, it’s that it takes a whole third of the book to get to him in earnest – but once the captain slips on his spurs and loads his Springfield, it’s a wild ride of bullets and bravado. McNelly’s gutsy crossing into Mexico to apprehend a few cattle thieves, arguably the climatic tale in the story, is as riveting as any stand-off in history, earning McNelly a hero’s reputation after he dared an international incident. One can’t help but wonder had not the US Army shared a Gattling gun at a critical juncture, McNelly and his men might still have earned a reputation, but one more akin to that of George Armstrong Custer and his calvary at Little Big Horn. For me, McNelly’s bravery bordered on a death wish, which is not unsurprising, beset as he was with a worsening case of tuberculosis that was inevitably killing him.
Follow Me to Hell is a solid bit of old American western history told plainly and seasoned with a bit of cow paddy, gunpowder and wry humor that is recommended for history buffs and aficionados of cowboys, cattle drives, and the taming of wild frontier. And though Clavin avoids weighing in on more modern politics, one can’t help but walk away from this one noting that the unsettled nature of the Mexican-American border goes back quite a ways and that the insistence by some to try to find a way to keep ‘them on their side and us on ours’ is hardly a controversy that began recently. ...more
’Such are the lonely testaments to an extraordinary ship.'
If anyone needs yet more proof that the Nazis were absolute monsters and could pervert just ’Such are the lonely testaments to an extraordinary ship.'
If anyone needs yet more proof that the Nazis were absolute monsters and could pervert just about anything into something awful, then there’s the story of the ocean liner Cap Arcona. Built as a luxury cruise ship between the World Wars, the Cap Arcona was one of the few bright spots in the post-war German economy, ferrying well-heeled passengers from Europe to South America in near-decadent luxury. Carrying some 1,325 passengers per voyage, “The Queen of the South Atlantic” boasted personal valets, large staterooms, lavish meals, tennis and shuffleboard courts, a heated pool, gambling and dance clubs, and a ship’s orchestra. The pride of the Hamburg-Sud steamship line, the Cap Arcona successfully made some ninety-one opulent trans-Atlantic voyages.
Until the Nazis.
Author Robert P. Watson traces the bizarre, bloody, and ultimately tragic fate of the Cap Arcona (and those who had the misfortune to be aboard her) through the very last hours of the Second World War in Germany. Used as a ‘body-double’ for the HMS Titanic in an outlandish scheme by SS propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels to a create a blockbuster propaganda film, Watson’s reader’s screening of the Nazi’s attempt to create their own Hollywood on the Rhine is as weird as it is ultimately disturbing.
But as disquieting as the first act of this tragedy is, it is but a mere taste of the horrors to come. The aging and ill-maintained Cap Arcona is put into service during the last desperate days of the war, first ferrying German war refugees past predatory Russian subs then, in a dreadful piteous final flourish, transformed into a floating concentration camp for detainees of some twenty-five nationalities, only to be mistakenly gunned to the bottom of the Baltic Sea by Royal Air Force bombardiers just hours before liberation. Perhaps 5,000 people died on Cap Arcona, most prisoners or concentration camp victims, in what is one of history’s worst maritime disasters.
This is a pretty spell-binding tale, but certainly not for the weak of stomach. Watson is unflinching – as he should be – in describing the atrocities perpetrated by not just Nazi overmasters but by invading Allied troops against hapless German civilians, worsened by the desperation of a failing, flailing, murderously mad regime. If there’s a weak point to this story, it's that the spotlight often drifts well away from the titular Cap Arcona; Watson may insist in his introduction that he never wrote his promised book of the final days of Third Reich, but for most readers this is about as complete an epitaph on Hitler and the Nazis end as one needs.
For history and maritime readers, The Nazi Titanic is a compelling book, a macabre niche in history that makes for fascinating reading, but which also wounds head and heart in contemplating the awful real-life consequences. ...more
Hoods, robes, and guns. Midnight initiations. Red lights in dark rooms. The Black Oath with its death pledge.
The mix of championship sports and a secr Hoods, robes, and guns. Midnight initiations. Red lights in dark rooms. The Black Oath with its death pledge.
The mix of championship sports and a secret society of terrorists in depression-era Detroit is an odd blend of story elements, but author Tom Stanton makes it work, painting a vivid picture of the grit and grime of the Motor City during the mid-nineteen thirties. As the Tigers, Lions, and Redwings took – to this day -- the only trifecta of national sports championships in a single season (with Joe Louis as the uncrowned champ of professional boxing to boot(!), hooded, black robed men intimidated and murdered labor organizers, minorities, and political opponents with beatings, floggings, hangings, and shootings.
Being far from a baseball aficionado myself, Stanton was still able to captivate me in the Tigers’ quest to go from worst to best and bring home their first World Series Championship to owner Frank Navin. While Stanton might only be recounting ballgames on paper, his pen captures all the drama of the critical contests between Tigers, Cardinals, and Cubs. Even as a relative non-sports fan, the competitions made for fascinating reading, especially as Stanton does such a good job telling the backstories of the star players. By the time the games start, Stanton has got you caring about these long-ago ballplayers, convincing the modern reader to route just as hard for the team’s success as contemporary Detroit fans did decades past.
Juxtaposed against the game of baseball (and to a lesser extent football, hockey, and boxing) is the specter of the Black Legion, which through a process of threats and deceit impressed an ever-growing number of men into its order across several Midwest states. Evil and heartless, Stanton ties the sect to a number of murders – many racially or politically motivated, others coldblooded killings that made widows and orphans of some of the area’s poorest people. Again, Stanton does a really good job of profiling some of the Legion’s most notorious members (and their most heinous actions), peeling away the group’s penchant for forcing people into membership and frightening them into silence.
In addition to these main threads, Stanton packs an amazing amount of detail into his book; by the time the reader is finished, it feels as if you’ve walked the streets of old Detroit and nearby rural environs for at least a baseball season. For pure sports fans, the level of detail may be a bit too much and the tale does end-up slightly uneven: there’s lots more baseball up front, less of some of the other sports, while most of the fallout coming from cracking from the Black Legion case is saved to the end. However, I kind of liked the pacing, but if you’ve come for one and not the other, you may be missing sports or history connections a little depending on where you are in the book.
Recommended … even for the non-sports fan … Stanton will still make you a faithful Tigers fan at least for one magical season and be glad the Black Legion got put out of business. ...more
’Care has been taken not to dimmish the terrors of this last resort of poverty, because it has been deemed better that a few should test the minimum r ’Care has been taken not to dimmish the terrors of this last resort of poverty, because it has been deemed better that a few should test the minimum rate at which existence can be preserved, than that the many should find the poor house so comfortable a home that they would brave the shame of pauperism to gain admission to it.’
An asylum. A jail. A poorhouse. A charity hospital. Author Stacy Horn gives us the grandly dismal tour of the institutions on Blackwell’s Island in this well-written, morbidly engaging history of Damnation Island where tens of thousands of New York City’s indigent were cast away. Opened by the city fathers as a refugee for the insane, the sick, and the poor and as a penitentiary for the criminal, Blackwell’s Island (and many nearby islets) became atolls of misery, suffering and horrible abuses.
While this is very much a social justice history, Horn’s prose is every bit as sharp as that of a novelist as she artfully constructs the tale to follow in the footsteps of the Reverend William Glenney French, a chaplain for the island, who dutifully ministered to the souls wallowing in Blackwellian purgatory, building-by-building, north to south. French left behind vivid (and depressing) observations which Horn quotes liberally to portray the despair found within those ill-lit, dank and dismal buildings while at the same time capturing numerous other vignettes of the famous, infamous, and carelessly forgotten whose lives intersected with Blackwell’s shores.
Where Horn does dive into data and social commentary, it’s with a verve that makes the statistics, laws, and politics easily digestible and her occasional wry bit of humor keeps things from ever getting pedantic. Blackwell’s Island is nowhere anyone would want to visit, let alone be condemned to live out the rest of the lives, but the modern reader could not ask for a better guide to its depravities than Horn who captures the heartlessness of societal abandonment of its most vulnerable and the cruelty of conflating poverty or illness with criminality and deserved destitution. ...more
Sarah was now widely perceived as a pirate’s wife, an associate to an outlaw, and a disgraced socialite.
While there are bookcases full of pirate tales Sarah was now widely perceived as a pirate’s wife, an associate to an outlaw, and a disgraced socialite.
While there are bookcases full of pirate tales and I am sure many volumes dedicated to the notorious buccaneer Captain William Kidd, it is largely overlooked that many privateers left families at home as they sailed the ocean swells. In Kidd’s case, he married for love to a redoubtable New York socialite Sarah, who followed him to his ship and later jail as she sacrificed nearly everything to try to keep her husband from the English gallows.
Author Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos’s telling of the story of Sarah Kidd is a clean, well-paced biography that provides a nice sketch of pre-revolutionary America and the relative role of married women in the colonies. I say relatively, because Sarah certainly broke a lot of molds, navigating a life that whips from riches and respectability to rags and infamy, with a shrewdness, savvy and resilience that carried her through four marriages and the Boston jail.
The challenge is of course that the historical record for Sarah (and women in general) of the period is rather thin and another good example that the lives of many remarkable people are likely lost to history simply because they lacked the means to tell their story. Sarah’s tale is an exception. Despite her character and experiences, she would have otherwise been ‘invisible in colonial history,’ as Geanacopoulos observes, if not for the notoriety of her husband.
Consequently, the largest part of the book (and much of what is known about Sarah) orbits around the fate of her husband. Captain Kidd fills about as much of the book as Sarah does. But Geanacopoulos squeezes as much detail as can be had about her even if some of it leans toward well-grounded conjecture. She also paints a rather sympathetic picture of Kidd, emphasizing his ties to his family and, though not himself an entirely blameless criminal, points out he took a lion-sized rap for a coterie of English gentry that encouraged (and financed) his privateering.
So if pirate history is your thing, The Pirate’s Wife is worth your time, if for no other reason than the uniqueness of its perspective. ...more
”No disaster other than the usual incidents to border warfare occurred until gross disobedience of orders sacrificed nearly eighty of the choice men o ”No disaster other than the usual incidents to border warfare occurred until gross disobedience of orders sacrificed nearly eighty of the choice men of my command … Life was the forfeit. In the grave I bury disobedience.”
Author Dee Brown remains one of the American west’s best historians, weaving a vivid and engrossing account of The Fetterman Massacre which saw a confederation of native American tribes lure, trap and destroy a detachment of US soldiery just past the walls of Fort Phil Kearny on December 21, 1866, in what is now modern Wyoming. The loss would (at the time) be the bloodiest defeat suffered by U.S. troops on the Great Plains (only later eclipsed by the massacre of George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn).
With much of the book focused on Colonel Henry B. Carrington, the controversial builder and commander of the fort, Brown traces the U.S. government’s increasingly aggressive efforts to secure the Bozeman trail, beginning at the building of the military outpost and ending at its dismantling. The narrative is rich and, once again, I’m hard pressed to imagine I would have lasted very long in the wilds, trucking through heavy snows, felling trees and wild game, let alone building fortifications on the frontier. Brown packs in both facts and personalities, without slackening the pace of this engaging narrative. And while the majority of the story is from the white man’s perspective, Brown (as much as he is able) tries to offer a balanced view, including tribal cultural features and perspectives. I, for one, particularly liked the chapter headings, subtitling each month with Native American seasonal descriptions.
The climax of the book is, of course, the battle, which Brown describes in cinematic detail. Despite the lack of survivors, Brown is able to recreate the engagement in frenetic and often gory details as the U.S. infantry and calvary are decoyed into a well-laid trap by Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. It does not go well for the soldiers. The aftermath is also intensely portrayed, bodies brought by the dozens into the isolated outpost, grieving widows, and heroic dashes by outriders into the teeth of a blizzard to carry news of the bloody defeat and bring military relief to the by now panicked fort.
Perhaps the only bummer of the book is the author’s biography (with photos!). After thoroughly enjoying the tale, I found out that this new favorite writer of mine …. is dead. Sure he leaves behind quite a considerable bibliography, but as an author that was ‘brand-new-to-me’, I was very saddened to learn that Dee Brown is no longer at his keyboard.
Regardless, Dee Brown's The Fetterman Massacre is great history, told with verve and immensely enjoyable reading. ...more
”Wicked men did not arrive in [elected] office by some foreign power. We, the people, have done it.”
As I write this in the Spring of 2023, it’s hard t”Wicked men did not arrive in [elected] office by some foreign power. We, the people, have done it.”
As I write this in the Spring of 2023, it’s hard to imagine a more bitter or divisive time in U.S. politics.
Unless of course, you read books. Then you begin to realize that Washington politics have -- more often than not -- always been bitter and divisive … and even quite a bit bloodier. From an assault with a deadly weapon in the Senate to a fistfight in the House, the stormy pre-Civil War era perhaps culminated in the ‘in broad daylight’ murder of a US District Attorney by a sitting US Congressmen after the former engaged in a salacious and scandalous affair with the latter’s wife.
Author Chris DeRose unpacks the last of these transgressions, detailing the ‘trial of the century’ (which like many other ‘unforgettable’ trials are quickly forgotten historically) of Congressman Daniel Sickles who gunned down US District Attorney Phillip Barton Key (son of Francis Scott Key, composer of US national anthem) on a pleasant Sunday afternoon in 1859 just across the street from the White House after discovering a flagrant affair between Key and Sickle’s wife Teresa. The details of the illicit romance are still pretty steamy even 150 years after the fact, and there’s a nice a bit of gumshoe detective work that makes the tale really juicy, worthy of a spicey episode of the 19th century version of Cheaters.
To his credit, DeRose keeps things compelling whether it’s in describing the DC social scene, the murder in Lafyette Park, the packed courtroom of the trial, or the utter anguish of Sickles on discovering his wife’s adultery. Unlike many similar stories, DeRose has access to many first-person, original sources, allowing for a rich emotional picture of the principal parties that helps make the story stick. The ‘victim’ Key can’t help but look like an awful cad, while the shattering of the Sickles’ marriage is appropriately heart-wrenching.
DeRose is a capable teller of tales and Star Spangled Scandal is enjoyable both from the historical and true crime perspectives. From the historical viewpoint, DeRose’s vivid depictions of the Washington social scene on the eve of the Civil War is a highlight; it very much has the feeling of a last desperate party – a final orgy -- before the hell storm breaks. For the true crime buff, DeRose achieves a rare feat in keeping the jury’s verdict secret until page 289. As I was entirely unfamiliar with this, the historical outcome to the trial was a welcome surprise and made for a nice climax late in the story....more
All his sensations, some ebbing some flowing, seemed to be converging on the moment his spirit would abandon his body to the jackals and his corpse wo All his sensations, some ebbing some flowing, seemed to be converging on the moment his spirit would abandon his body to the jackals and his corpse would join the company of skeletons on the Zahara.
As shipwreck and survival stories go, Dean King’s Skeletons on the Zahara is exceptional. Well told and remarkably intense, King details the wreck of the American merchantman Commerce off the east African coast in May 1815, relating the toils and travails of the ship’s thirteen unlucky officers and crew who after abandoning their stranded ship on the rocks off Cape Bojador, survive a harrowing journey in an open boat only to be castaway, emaciated and destitute, on the wild shores of Africa, captured by Arab tribesmen, and sold into slavery.
King is a gifted historian and wordsmith. The grit and heat of the desert shimmers from the pages as King paints a vivid picture of the miseries and depredations of life on the Sahara while balancing the narrative with an engaging picture of the cultures, customs, and characters in the nomadic desert society. Amid the hostile sands, life and death are always balanced on a razor’s edge and King (as the surviving sailors also observed) remains objective in relating the harshness of the seamen’s captors. Where even the smallest scrap of cloth, a morsel of food, or even a drop of water was a struggle to obtain, it’s not hard to imagine cultural morals hardening to match the harshness and paucity of the environment
King is also quite the storyteller, pulling two diverging survivors’ accounts into a single story that is never short on details and ends-up quite the adventure as the beleaguered sailors are smuggled toward rescue past increasingly factious Arab warlords and potentates. Pulling from two separate first-hand survivors’ narratives provides a depth and detail often lacking in similar historic tales, especially as survivors are separated. Some stories continue, while the fate of other comrades often fade into the murk. Fortunately, King is able to keep track of two packs of survivors and follow at least two threads to conclusion.
It's impossible for me not to recommend this one as a great, true-life adventure story and a nice window to an utterly foreign and unforgiving patch of the world. ...more
’The distance separating these two people, who have never met, is approximately eight inches. Close enough to breathe each other’s breath. Murder can ’The distance separating these two people, who have never met, is approximately eight inches. Close enough to breathe each other’s breath. Murder can be a very intimate business.’
In his rise to power, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini survived three assassination attempts. The middle attempt on his life came nearest to success, a bullet taking a chunk out of Il Duce’s nose, and was perpetrated by an unlikely hit woman, an expatriate English noblewomen named Violet Gibson. Tracing the life of this wayward daughter of the wealthy Ashbourne family, author Francis Stonor Saunders portrays a young women struggling with mental health issues well before she developed an obsessive hatred for the Italian tyrant. Her missed shot did not end Mussolini’s life as she hoped, but ironically only further burnished the Italian’s flamboyant reputation, further propelling him up the fascist ladder.
Stonor Saunder’s research is detailed and her prose at times (for example in the prologue) is delivered with a syncopated rhythm that feels nearly breathless. The challenge here, however, is that there is not quite enough drama -- once past the assassination -- to keep that pace. Occasionally, it reads more like a term paper, heavy with quotes from tangential lives, ranging from Virginia Wolfe to Ezra Pound to Lucia Joyce, and feels stretched past the centerline of the story. The end of Gibson’s biography is poignant, cashiered by her family in asylum to die decades later, with Stonor Saunders sifting through letters Violet wrote to friends, family, and government officials begging for clemency -- all of which went unsent by hospital officials and remain dusty, yellowed, and unread in Gibson’s medical file, years after her death.
There are palpable parallels to other attacks made by mentally-challenged individuals on notable public figures. Gibson’s state of mind feels reminiscent to that of John Hinckley Jr.’s attempt on American President Ronald Reagan. Unlike Gibson, however, Hinckley was eventually paroled. For those who question the wisdom of that decision, the calumny of Gibson’s incarceration in steadily declining accommodations and failing health, severed from her connections to her friends and faith, right until her final gasp of breath, may demonstrate the mercy inherent in a more enlightened decision for Hinckley.
Maybe the world would have been a better place had Violet killed Mussolini on that day in April 1926. Instead, her shot martyred only herself. ...more
“On that sea … it was hard to divest ourselves of the idea that there was nothing but death in the world, and we the only living.”
It seems most of the “On that sea … it was hard to divest ourselves of the idea that there was nothing but death in the world, and we the only living.”
It seems most of the books I’ve read about exploration are climatic because they end in disaster.
Bitter Waters from author David Howard Bain is an exception as the U.S. Navy’s 1848 expedition to map the River Jordan from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea was largely successful. Lead by the intrepid Lieutenant William Francis Lynch, the party would negotiate with sultans, parley with Arab and Bedouin tribesmen, and dodge bandit ambuscades Indiana Jones-style while traversing the waterway on two skiffs – one of copper, one of galvanized metal – on an almost surreal journey through exotic Middle Eastern culture and past curtains of Biblical historical mist.
Aided by excerpts from Lynch’s original travelogue (and fortunately, Lynch is quite the writer!), Bain paints a vivid picture of lands, characters and journeys that are both pleasantly picturesque and somewhat mystical as the landscape is suffused with Biblical landmarks from the Hebrew fortresses of Masada to the pillars of salt at Usdum. There are chance encounters with ‘lost’ tribes of Arabic Christians, a tense encounter in the bastion of Kerek, and sojourns among hermetic monks (beset by scores of fleas) in cliffside redoubts at Mar Saba. It’s a rich text, even in its depictions of the dismal Dead Sea, which is described as gloomily miasmic, a tributary lake to stygian Hades.
As good as this book is middle to end, it is unfortunately burdened by its first part. It takes 150 pages to get the expedition – nearly half the book! – onto Middle Eastern shores. And while historically detailed, the politics of expedition birthing are less lustrous that even the alkaline waters of the Dead Sea and the amount of pages spent on Lynch-contemporary, sailor-scientist Matthew Maury feels a bit much as Maury ends-up rather ancillary to core tale. It is, however, worth the struggle to get past the groundwork, as the charm of the Jordan Valley enchants the rest of the narrative.
Bitter Waters is good history, rescuing the Dead Sea mission from obscurity and helping prove the point that while tragedy dominates the explorers' bookshelf, missions of success can be just as interesting reads. ...more
”And it is Wagner’s own twisted words and actions that form the noose from which, should I succeed, he will be hanged again before your very eyes.”
Fro ”And it is Wagner’s own twisted words and actions that form the noose from which, should I succeed, he will be hanged again before your very eyes.”
From the very title, author J. Dennis Robinson promises a true crime, case closed account of the bloody double murder that occurred on Smuttynose Island in March 1873. Rich in fact and detail and pulled from a many volumed library of first and secondhand sources, trial records, and historical artifacts, Robinson traces the villainy of one of New England’s most notorious blackguards, the charismatic Louis Wagner. In the dread night, the penniless immigrant slipped away in a stolen dory to rob and butcher two women with an axe on an isolated spit of land in the Isle Shoals while a third woman, Maren Hontvet, ran for her life. It’s rare that a writer delivers on such a bold promise – case closed! – on a nearly 150 year-old killing, but Robinson delivers(!) leaving not a speck of space for doubt that the man whose neck was stretched on the gibbet at Thomaston State Prison was the culprit.
And while Mystery on the Isle of Shoals is principally a true crime clinic that surgically dissects the murder, victims, alibi, trial, perpetrator, and punishment adeptly presenting the ‘hailstorm of evidence’ that sent Wagner to gallows while shoveling into the privy all the speculation of the convicted murder’s innocence like so many gull droppings from the far coast of the island … to say this book is just a true crime tale would be selling it far short. Robinson is painting not just a picture of a crime but a picture of Shoals’ culture and the insular community that once thrived and eventually expired there. Peopling his tale with fisherman, hoteliers, lawyers, police officers, writers, and even more murderers, Robinson submerges us in the history of region and, more than most of books of this type, forces us to feel the reverberations that the Smuttynose murders caused across the islands. And how its shockwaves … marked the place … forever.
Robinson’s trail of evidence may clearly point to Wagner’s size-eleven boot heels, but to his credit, the author gives the criminal a fair enough shake, offering Wagner’s alibi in the criminal’s own words and pointing out that Wagner certainly had his proponents even from his jail cell. In fact, the author’s harshest words are for a contemporary: Anita Shreve who penned the very popular The Weight of Water. As a lover of books, I’m the generally the first to defend authors who bend history in the service of a great story –Make Abe Lincoln a vampire hunter? Chop on I say! – but there is a bit of tastelessness to Shreve’s fictionalization as she transformed convicted murder Louis Wagner into a guiltless patsy and his one surviving victim Maren Hontvet into the killer (who also preferred her brother’s bed to her husband’s). As Robinson points out, too many people take Shreve’s story for the truth, lionizing an unrepentant killer and accepting the smear against the lone survivor of the horrific crime.
I can see where historians become indignant.
The thickness of this one might be a heavy lift for some readers, but Mystery on the Isle of Shoals is worth the pages. Robinson is a perfect tour guide whose prose is crisp, his grasp of facts extensive, and his storytelling compelling. I like this one a lot and, while it will probably be seen mostly as counterpoint to Shreve’s bestseller, this book deserves to stand on its own as not just a great true crime casefile but also a perfect history of an intensely American ecosystem. ...more
I have read quite a number of disaster stories. But there are few books that do a better job of blending the t ”He may be the Frankenstein of the air.”
I have read quite a number of disaster stories. But there are few books that do a better job of blending the true story of an historical catastrophe with ‘weird world’ Americana than Garry Jenkins’ The Wizard of Sun City. Jenkins mixes the tale of the 1916 southern California floods that nearly wiped out San Diego with the biography of the man many would say made them happen: rainmaker Charles Mallory Hatfield. Taking a bet with Sun City politicos, Hatfield promised to fill the Morena reservoir with 10 billions gallons of water by ‘milking’ the clouds with a potpourri noxious chemicals, burnt like incense under the leaden January skies.
Hatfield’s secret sauce worked just a bit too well — or maybe more likely a curious convergence of storms met over America’s west coast, combined, and produced a record-breaking deluge — drowning communities from Oceanside to Tijuana and collapsing the Lower Otay Dam, inundating the valley in a deadly wave of water, mud and debris. Jenkins deftly captures the lives of those caught in the unfolding catastrophe, collecting and adding lots of little and dramatic details that paint a vivid picture of the period, while sparing nothing of the magnitude or the horrors of the catastrophe that pushed many towns right into the ocean.
And while this is a great ‘disaster’ book, Jenkins also paints an endearing picture of the pseudo-scientist Mallory. Coaxing rain from the clouds may have ultimately been flim flam (with Jenkins summarizing the pedigree of artificial rainmaking schemes back to the 1880s), but it’s impossible to finish the tale without taking a liking Mallory (as most of his contemporaries did). In fact, if there are villains, one’s a lawyer (no surprise there!) and the others the bureaucrats at the fledging National Weather Services. Mallory’s cloud milking might be bunk, but his research on climatology data to predict the best windows for precipitation make him about as a capable a forecaster as anyone else in this book!
Whether your itch is weather, emergency management or American folklore, The Wizard of Sun City fills those niches with a well-written, entertaining tale that — as we consider our own climate crisis — might also put a little perspective on things. Water woes are more than just a ‘now’ thing.
I imagine author Jim DeFelice is a spellbinding campfire storyteller. His casual tone and dry wit make his history of the ”Let the Pony come through!”
I imagine author Jim DeFelice is a spellbinding campfire storyteller. His casual tone and dry wit make his history of the Pony Express mail delivery service feel like a fireside chat that brings out the grit and daring of the Old West riders mixed in with plenty of folklore and lots of asides … some of which the author wryly admits may or may not be true. With 1860 records not exactly being either voluminous or flawless, DeFelice sifts quite a bit of truth from the chaff of ‘maybe’ and ‘probably not’ to give a nice historical picture of now near-mythical mail service.
Rather inventively, DeFelice organizes his story geographically, beginning at the Pony’s eastern terminus in St. Joseph’s, Missouri, and then follows the route west to San Francisco, spinning tales about the people, places and messages the riders carried along the way. The device took me a second to get used to – as the timeline can shift a little depending on the locale (and story) the route is passing through – but as a whole the technique works, giving the reader a good feel for the length and hardships of the route. DeFelice is at his best when he’s talking about the trail, the hardscrabble riders and their handlers, the sometimes sketchy resupply points, and the dangers of the track (with the chapter on the Paiute Indian War being a favorite).
Where the ride falters a few beats is in all those asides I mentioned earlier. Some of these are fine but everything from the last days of James Buchanan’s presidency, the Mormons and the Mountain Meadows Massacre to the Donner Party tragedy seep into these pages – some of which only seem slightly associated with the story of the Pony Express. It may just be me -- I have already read whole books on these other subjects and so the to me this felt like re-covered ground – but the further we moved from the history of the Pony, the more things felt like filler.
DeFelice does tie things up nicely with a nice survey of the embroidering of Pony Express legend in the 19th and 20th centuries by dime novelists, traveling showman, and Hollywood pictures. All in all, a good book for Wild West enthusiasts that is cleverly constructed and squeezes as much verifiable truth as is probably possible to find on the subject. ...more
“Everyone was saying that Gibraltar would be forced to capitulate before the end of September; everyone believed it; and if there were any unbelievers “Everyone was saying that Gibraltar would be forced to capitulate before the end of September; everyone believed it; and if there were any unbelievers, they didn’t dare show it.”
Lasting 1,323 days from June 21, 1779 to February 2, 1783, the siege of fortress Gibraltar by Spanish and French forces marked the longest siege in British history. Punctuated by an epic artillery duel – where opposing forces fired unrelentingly upon one another for years(!) – the battle for The Rock was also marked by a daring British sortie against enemy lines, a bloody duel between the fort a string of floating Franco-Spanish naval batteries, privation, tragedy and heroism.
With a string of similarly good histories to their credit, historians Roy and Lesley Adkins deliver much of what you’d expect from this one. Well-researched, eminently readable, compelling history amply illustrated by first person accounts from soldiers, statesmen and civilians on both sides on the conflict. (The numerous diary reports from women – soldiers’ wives who stayed with their husbands and families as the siege began – are of particular credit as early military histories often offer spartan few accounts from non-combatants, let alone women).
For the American readers, Gibraltar offers crucial context to the American War for Independence which is far too often taught in isolation to the larger global war raging between the European powers. The siege of Gibraltar, the nearby island of Minora, and even the threatened invasion of England itself kept scores of British troops and ships from the American shores and, as the Adkins persuasively argue, it was these conflicts on the far side of the Atlantic that helped allow the American colonists to secure their independence by draining English resources into other theaters. As even contemporary politicians lamented, “the possession of America has been sacrificed to the retention of Gibraltar.”
A very nice book to add to your military history shelf on a pivotal battlefront that is oft overlooked. ...more
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said, “that people had been obliged to eat each other when they were hungry.”
By now I’ve read enough books about m ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said, “that people had been obliged to eat each other when they were hungry.”
By now I’ve read enough books about manifest destiny to realize that if someone told me to ‘Go West’ in the mid-1800s, I would have burnt my covered wagon instead. Wild animals, deprivation, starvation, and hostile inhabitants would all have been enough to do me in and (because I tend to make really bad decisions) chances are that whatever was left of me would have probably ended up in someone’s stew pot.
Enter Harold Schechter’s Man-Eater which traces the life and crimes of one of the most notorious American cannibals: ‘the Human Hyena’ Alfred G. Packer. It was the winter of 1874 when Packer and five companions were stranded deep in the Colorado wilderness by heavy snows and bitter temperatures. As food ran out – the travelers having already resorted to boiling their moccasins for soup – hunger pangs (allegedly) got the better of Packer who proceeded to murder his five fellow travelers and then dined on their remains until the weather thawed.
As true crime books go, Schechter’s account of one of America’s first celebrity killers is first-rate with Man-Eater covering everything from the infamous deed to the crime scene christenings of Dead Man’s Gulch and Cannibal Plateau to the spectacular series of criminal trials that followed. The research is meticulous, yet eminently readable, with Schechter packing everything into bite-sized (snicker!) chapters that make the pace on this one riveting. Schechter also delivers on a bevy of bizarre anecdotes connected to the Packer case – from sordid tales of other contemporary cannibals to gangster-style killings to a feud turned bloody between a shyster layer and a Colorado newspaper.
The denouement of this one is also nice as Schechter sifts through Packer’s metamorphoses into folklore – ultimately inspiring for example a schlock movie-musical -- to more modern forensic attempts to exhume Packer’s victims and close the case on ‘whodunnit’. But like most true crime stories, the truth remains obscured; it’s why I love so much Schechter’s afterward in which he finally shelves objectivity and gives us his opinion of the case. It’s a nice bit of closure that I wish we got more often in these types of things; while not conclusive, it is nice to hear from the person who reviewed all the evidence.
"In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The youngest of the witches was five, the eldes "In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The youngest of the witches was five, the eldest nearly eighty. A daughter accused her mother, who in turn accused her mother, who accused a neighbor and minister. Somewhere between 144 and 185 witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns before the crisis passed. America’s tiny reign of terror, Salem represents one of the rare moments in our enlightened past when the candles are knocked out and everyone seems to be groping in the dark ..."
As a fan of horror fiction, the Salem witchcraft trails of 1692 have been grist and inspiration for a bevy of my favorite scary books and movies – some good, some bad, and some genuinely unnerving – but all ultimately little more than entertainment. With The Witches, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff delivers a near-perfect layman’s history of the real Salem, the real trials, and the mind-numbing tragedy of those spuriously accused of sorcery. Schiff, like a modern Norn of anthropology in lieu of conjury – slices through the skein of myth, folklore and communal amnesia that cocoons and obscures that terrible year in Massachusetts, laying bare the facts that are in and of themselves utterly horrifying and totally without need of embellishment.
That the hysteria spread so far across the early American colony so quickly; that it was allowed to spread so perniciously with few reasonable voices raised against it; that on the basis of an accusation, households, livelihoods and whole families were dismembered; that colony gaols were stuffed with a miserable mob of women and children (and a handful of men) filthy, shackled and starving; that gallows posts were decorated with the choking, dying bodies of matrons and ministers who had graced church pews and pulpits just months earlier – the madness of it all seeps through Schiff’s pages from past to present. It seems unimaginable that women and men were ruined and hung based on the spit and the screeching curses of a few adolescents and the ‘spectral evidence’ brought by ghosts that not one of Salem’s ‘learned’ judges could even see.
Alongside her meticulous research of the witchcraft trials, Schiff also provides a vivid political picture of the critically overlooked period of the late-1600s interregnum as firebrands in Boston deposed the English Governor Andros in a military coup in 1689, creating a governmental cavity until a new political arrangement could be negotiated with London a few years later in 1692. These political upheavals only further aggravated the witchcraft proceedings which in turn were further antagonized by chilling dispatches from the New England frontier of sudden and complete destruction of whole villages by French and Indian war parties. Schiff’s account of the battles and massacres along the borderlands are chilling. The lack of political certainty and the ‘clear and present danger’ along the colonial boundaries only served to increase the colonists’ desperation and paranoia.
In horror fiction, it is fun to imagine that the devils, ghosts and monsters are real – that the person who claims to see dead people does and the world goes topsy-turvy. The reality of Salem, though, is that the devils were fairy tales, inventions of a disenfranchised group of girls, who (I suspect anyway) were coached to direct their accusations and help settle a few old scores among the townsfolk competing for scant resources. Perhaps the whole thing just got out of hand, the proverbial runaway train that could not be stopped as it crushed anyone unlucky enough to be drug to the tracks, which makes Schiff’s history all the more frighteningly relevant today.
Perhaps today we are savvy enough as a society to scoff at ‘spectral evidence’ and deaf to the whispers of ghosts in our courtrooms, but we are so much better at discerning truth? In an age of random websites, anonymous texts, faceless social media posts, and internet verification, I feel an uncomfortable proximity to my Salem brethren. ...more
“No one was untouched. Everybody lost something; many someone.”
The Great Hurricane of 1938 -- which wreaked havoc along the northeastern seaboard from “No one was untouched. Everybody lost something; many someone.”
The Great Hurricane of 1938 -- which wreaked havoc along the northeastern seaboard from New Jersey to Vermont -- is one of those undeservedly near-forgotten disasters. Swirling off the coast of the Carolinas, the unnamed major hurricane roared north along a low-pressure corridor into Long Island on a mid-September day, barreling through isle and then across New England killing 682 people –most of which were in Rhode Island – and wiping entire beachfront towns into the sea. Journalist R.A. Scotti’s Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938 recovers this monstrously historic storm from relative obscurity, capturing the tempest in all its meteorological wonder and in its heart-rending human consequences.
For the weather buffs out there, Scotti gives a good portrayal of the difficulties of early weather forecasting in the days before satellites and computer models as well as some of the disastrous institutional biases within the national weather bureau that (in this instance) buried the report of a young ingenue forecaster who accurately predicted the massive storm’s deadly track. And while the forecasting information, the hurricane science, and the historical backstory of the opening chapters are okay, it’s when the storm hits that Scotti delivers the tour de force.
With no warning, residents of the coastal states were trapped on beaches, boats, trains and causeways and in shoreline vacation homes. The water rose in such a rush that when railroad engineers stepped from their train to inspect a trestle, they recalled the water just covering their shoes. To their horror, it was hip high just minutes later! Scotti relates the harrowing tales of coastal homes disintegrating under the onslaught of wind and wave, families and debutantes pushed adrift across Narraganset Bay on bobbing rooftops that scudded from the barrier island to the far shore, of people plucked from the flooded streets of downtown Providence where the water reached 17 feet deep in some places, to the bitterly sad tale of a school bus stranded on the causeway between Jamestown and Beavertail island as the hurricane’s storm surge – towering well over the roof of the bus – engulfs the yellow truck and the children seeking to escape it.
With many ‘big disaster’ books the scope of such overwhelming tragedy is ultimately hard to portray in mere words. Scotti does strive to give the reader that big picture, but it is (wisely enough) these small, human-centered vignettes that in their tiny tragedies paint the full picture of the anguish unleashed amid the maelstrom.
As disaster histories go, this is a first-rate eulogy for those who lived and died amid the storm’s fury. And a worthy addition to any disaster reader or emergency manager’s bookshelf. ...more
Today, it is the most valuable book in the world. And, after the King James Bible, the most important.”
I wish I had this book before my first semester Today, it is the most valuable book in the world. And, after the King James Bible, the most important.”
I wish I had this book before my first semester of college Shakespeare.
As ubiquitous as the plays and poems of the great bard may be today, author Andrea Mays carefully unravels how this quintessential cornerstone of English literature was nearly lost to obscurity, save for the efforts of two of Shakespeare’s best friends (who first bound the playwright’s complete works into an ‘authorized’ First Folio in 1623) and how some 200 years later, the hunt for the surviving copies these folios was galvanized by Henry Clay Folger (and wife Emily), a millionaire oil magnate who amassed the world’s premier collection of surviving First Folios and Shakespearian memorabilia while setting records for collectible book prices.
For the Shakespeare aficionado, Mays packs The Millionaire and the Bard with details, beginning with an insightful thumbnail biography of the playwright and the efforts of unsung heroes John Heminges and Henry Condell to run the Elizabethan version of a ‘go fund me’ campaign to collect Shakespeare’s works. Mays’ compelling history of seventeen century publishing – an almost Sherlockian detective story of printing, pages and bookbinding – is way more interesting than it has any right to be – with Mays playing literary gumshoe extraordinaire through the rest of the book as she uncovers the pedigree of some of the more famous surviving First Folios and uncovers the duels of international bibliophiles questing for the rarest of tomes – sometimes with as much smoke and vitriol as actual battlefield opponents.
More subtly perhaps, Mays is also able to explore the more ethereal (and sometimes admittedly incomprehensible) mania of collecting, that inexplicable, obsessive love for a ‘thing’ that consumes countless hours of effort, dollars, sorting, storing, preserving, cataloging and examination. The ‘collection obsession’ – a hobgoblin well-lodged within my own head – is a weirdly marvelous insanity turning what some would consider junk to others’ priceless treasures. As one who has amassed a great stockpile of ‘stuff’, one can’t help but be bothered by that unavoidable bugbear of the future, “After I’m gone, what will happen to my wonderful collection?’ with the truth (at least in my case) that my family will probably immediately (and pretty happily) be ready to give away stacks of books and boxes of comics to any unlucky attendee to my wake.
Henry Clay Folger, on the other hand, fulfilled every collectors’ most fanciful dream; the final chapter on the construction of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC is not just about the preservation of irreplaceable literature, it’s also wish fulfillment, a modern pharaohs tomb of what was prized in life by one collector continuing on past death.
The Millionaire and the Bard is an exceptional book – not so much because of its plot, characters, style, or setting (though all of that is well done) – but I loved it most because of how deeply it enriched my experience of Shakespeare and the best works in English literature. It is amazing examination of the backstory behind the main story – compelling from beginning to end.
P.S. When I think of collecting, there is only one other book that has tickled my fancy as much as this one … and that’s Michael O'Keeffe’s The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card. I bought and read the book many years ago while stranded at an out-of-the-way airport. While not exactly a baseball card fan, the hunt through flea markets, counterfeiters, and diehard collectors for the ultra-rare by T206 Honus Wagner baseball card is as good as any fictionalized treasure hunt for Aztec gold or the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Another worthwhile read if you can find it! ...more
”The most significant warship of the Civil War, and ultimately the most effect commerce raider in the entire history of naval warfare, was loose on th ”The most significant warship of the Civil War, and ultimately the most effect commerce raider in the entire history of naval warfare, was loose on the vast, concealing ocean,”
A captivating biography of man and ship, Stephen Fox’s Wolf of the Deep is a well-told and researched history of Captain Raphael Semmes and the Confederate cruiser CSS Alabama. Together, the pair’s worldwide depredations during the American Civil War fairly paralyzed Yankee shipping and created a nautical bogyman that shook the Union shipping industry to a near grinding halt.
Fox skimps neither on details nor wit, painting the full picture of the impact the Alabama and her infamous Captain had on both domestic and international relations, including the dance of spies, industrialists, and stool pigeons in merry-old England that helped birth the ship and give succor to her captain. And while historical details are plentiful, Fox’s tale collects no dust; this is a rip-roaring tale of nautical warfare -- an adventure novel as much as historical nonfiction – that sings of cannon-fire, the sting of salt air and frothy water, and the acrid smoke of burning merchantmen slipping as blackened hulks to a watery grave.
There is a wonderful balance in Fox’s work. His depictions of both Semmes and the Alabama are rich enough to bring both to life on the book’s pages; at the same time, there is no avoiding that Semmes -- in defending a government that practiced slavery -- ultimately ends up on the wrong side of history. Fortunately, Fox lets Semmes speak for himself – pirate-soldier, hero-villain, cavalier-brigand Fox’s captures the conflicted duality of the man and his mission and presents it ‘as it was’ for the reader.
Somehow … I’ve ended up with quite a pile of maritime Civil War books; here’s hoping the rest are half as good as this one. ...more