General Books - Page 12

Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam

Pope Brock

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen young con man–arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers.

It was all nonsense, of course, but thousands of paying customers quickly turned “Dr.” Brinkley into America’s richest and most famous surgeon. His notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country’s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business.

Their cat-and-mouse game lasted throughout the 1920s and ’30s, but despite Fishbein’s efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics. Thumbing his nose at American regulators, he built the world’s most powerful radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande to offer sundry cures, and killed or maimed patients by the score, yet his warped genius produced innovations in broadcasting that endure to this day. By introducing country music and blues to the nation, Brinkley also became a seminal force in rock ’n’ roll. In short, he is the most creative criminal this country has ever produced.

Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation that pit Brinkley against his nemesis Fishbein, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling.


From the Hardcover edition.

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (Perennial Classics)

Frederick L. Allen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Contemporary AND historical!Recently while doing research for an exhibition on the 1920s, I purchased this fabulous little book 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Recently while doing research for an exhibition on the 1920s, I purchased this fabulous little book called Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote it in 1931, before Prohibition was even repealed!

I bought it because I wanted a contemporary perspective on the decade from someone who was there. I was astounded at his insight into a decade that he not only lived through, but also did not have much distance from.

As a rule, historians generally wait at least a decade in order to examine the recent past. When you are still living through it, you often don't have enough perspective to evaluate what the implications were or are going to be.

However, Allen was spot on with his analysis of the 1920s. He admits early in the text that he is not trying to make any sweeping historical observations, and he is keenly aware of the dangers of trying to interpret events that were so recent. Instead, he says he is writing to capture the spirit of the age, as he remembers it.

But I found that many of his statements were consistent with current historical scholarship of that era.

His analysis of the Red Scare was particularly insightful. He writes, "...upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin...A cloud of suspicion hung in the air, and intolerance became an American virtue."

Considering he was writing only 10 years after fear of communism swept this country, I was impressed with his courage to be honest about what was really going on. Although by the end of the decade, people were no longer concerned about a communist revolution, those who led the charge were certainly still alive.

His attitude toward Prohibition represented the common thought of the era that the "noble experiment" was indeed a failure. Yet, it would be two years after his book was published that the 21st amendment was ratified.

He accurately describes the spirit of the times, writing, "In those days people sat with bated breath to hear how So-and-So had made very good gin right in his own cellar, and just what formula would fulfill the higher destiny of raisins, and how bootleggers brought liquor down from Canada."

The 1920s were of course a time of radical change in manner and morals. People rejected anything "old fashioned," looking instead to what was current and up-to-date. "It was better to be modern - and everybody wanted to be modern - and sophisticated, and smart, to smash the conventions and to be devastatingly frank," Allen writes. "And with a cocktail glass in one's hand it was easy at least to be frank."

Allen also writes about the Scopes "monkey trial" - challenging the teaching of evolution in schools - with a hint of humor that really captures the bewilderment of the locals: "It was a strange trial. Into the quiet town of Dayton flocked gaunt Tennessee farmers and their families in mule-drawn wagons and ramshackle Fords; quiet, godly people in overalls and gingham and black, ready to defend their faith against `foreigners,' yet curious to know what this new-fangled evolutionary theory might be."

When my book arrived, it was obviously a bit tattered. My copy was from the 1964 reprint, so it looked a bit dated from what you expect from modern history books. The print was quite small and seemed intimidating when I first opened it. There is a 1997 and 2000 reprint available as well.

But it turned out to be the most interesting read of any book I used for my research!

Allen is witty, extremely intelligent, and has the unique perspective that can only be achieved by living through these events yourself.

If you are a Roaring Twenties enthusiast, or only casually interested in the era, I highly recommend this book. It provided me with a wealth of information, and lots of snappy quotes that really added to my exhibition.

Editorial Review:

Only Yesterday deals with that delightful decade from the Armistice in November 1918 to the panic and depression of 1929-30. Here is the story of Woodrow Wilson's defeat, the Harding scandals, the Coolidge prosperity, the revolution in manners and morals, the bull market and its smash-up. Allen's lively narrative brings back an endless variety of half-forgotten events, fashions, crazes, and absurdities. Deftly written, with a humorous touch, Only Yesterday traces, beneath the excitements of day-to-day life in the 20s, those currents in national life and thought which are the essence of true history.

The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama

Gwen Ifill

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Editorial Review:

In The Breakthrough, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential victory and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.

Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama (all interviewed for this book), and also covers numerous up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on exclusive interviews with power brokers such as President Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, his son Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict, the race/ gender clash, and the "black enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

The Breakthrough is a remarkable look at contemporary politics and an essential foundation for understanding the future of American democracy in the age of Obama.

Personal History

Katharine Graham

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Total reviews: 133 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

An extraordinarily frank, honest, and generous book by one of America's most famous and admired women, Personal History is, as its title suggests, a book composed of both personal memoir and history.

It is the story of Graham's parents: the multimillionaire father who left private business and government service to buy and restore the down-and-out Washington Post, and the formidable, self-absorbed mother who was more interested in her political and charity work, and her passionate friendships with men like Thomas Mann and Adlai Stevenson, than in her children.

It is the story of how The Washington Post struggled to succeed -- a fascinating and instructive business history as told from the inside (the paper has been run by Graham herself, her father, her husband, and now her son).

It is the story of Phil Graham -- Kay's brilliant, charismatic husband (he clerked for two Supreme Court justices) -- whose plunge into manic-depression, betrayal, and eventual suicide is movingly and charitably recounted.

Best of all, it is the story of Kay Graham herself. She was brought up in a family of great wealth, yet she learned and understood nothing about money. She is half-Jewish, yet -- incredibly -- remained unaware of it for many years.She describes herself as having been naive and awkward, yet intelligent and energetic. She married a man she worshipped, and he fascinated and educated her, and then, in his illness, turned from her and abused her. This destruction of her confidence and happiness is a drama in itself, followed by the even more intense drama of her new life as the head of a great newspaper and a great company, a famous (and even feared) woman in her own right. Hers is a life that came into its own with a vengeance -- a success story on every level.

Graham's book is populated with a cast of fascinating characters, from fifty years of presidents (and their wives), to Steichen, Brancusi, Felix Frankfurter, Warren Buffett (her great advisor and protector), Robert McNamara, George Schultz (her regular tennis partner), and, of course, the great names from the Post: Woodward, Bernstein, and Graham's editorpartner, Ben Bradlee. She writes of them, and of the most dramatic moments of her stewardship of the Post (including the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressmen's strike), with acuity, humor, and good judgment. Her book is about learning by doing, about growing and growing up, about Washington, and about a woman liberated by both circumstance and her own great strengths.

The Myth of the Robber Barons

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Myth of the Robber Barons describes the role of key entrepreneurs in the economic growth of the United States from 1850 to 1910. The entrepreneurs studied are Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, James J. Hill, Andrew Mellon, Charles Schwab, and the Scranton family. Most historians argue that these men, and others like them, were Robber Barons. The story, however, is more complicated. The author, Burton Folsom, divides the entrepreneurs into two groups market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. The market entrepreneurs, such as Hill, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, succeeded by producing a quality product at a competitive price. The political entrepreneurs such as Edward Collins in steamships and in railroads the leaders of the Union Pacific Railroad were men who used the power of government to succeed. They tried to gain subsidies, or in some way use government to stop competitors. The market entrepreneurs helped lead to the rise of the U. S. as a major economic power. By 1910, the U. S. dominated the world in oil, steel, and railroads led by Rockefeller, Schwab (and Carnegie), and Hill. The political entrepreneurs, by contrast, were a drain on the taxpayers and a thorn in the side of the market entrepreneurs. Interestingly, the political entrepreneurs often failed without help from government they could not produce competitive products. The author describes this clash of the market entrepreneurs and the political entrepreneurs. In the Mellon chapter, the author describes how Andrew Mellon an entrepreneur in oil and aluminum became Secretary of Treasury under Coolidge. In office, Mellon was the first American to practice supply-side economics. He supported cuts on income tax rates for all groups. The rate cut on the wealthiest Americans, from 73 percent to 25 percent, freed up investment capital and led to American economic growth during the 1920s. Also, the amount of revenue into the federal treasury increased sharply after tax rates were cut. The Myth of the Robber Barons has separate chapters on Vanderbilt, Hill, Schwab, Mellon, and the Scrantons. The author also has a conclusion, in which he looks at the textbook bias on the subject of Robber Barons and the rise of the U. S. in the late 1800s. This chapter explores three leading college texts in U. S. history and shows how they misread American history and disparage market entrepreneurs instead of the political entrepreneurs. This book is in its fifth edition, and is widely adopted in college and high school classrooms across the U. S.

Polio: An American Story

David M. Oshinsky

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond.
Here is a remarkable portrait of America in the early 1950s, using the widespread panic over polio to shed light on our national obsessions and fears. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. Indeed, the competition was marked by a deep-seated ill will among the researchers that remained with them until their deaths. The author also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family. As backdrop to this feverish research, Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor. The National Foundation revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America, using "poster children" and the famous March of Dimes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from a vast army of contributors (instead of a few well-heeled benefactors), creating the largest research and rehabilitation network in the history of medicine. The polio experience also revolutionized the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in baby-booming America--increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed--the specter of polio, like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of terror over daily life.
Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio opens a fresh window onto postwar America.

The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume I (The Age of Roosevelt)

Jr.", Arthur M. "Schlesinger

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Bancroft Award Winner for History. Classic on FDR's New Deal 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 18 people found this review helpful.

This outdated book won the Bancroft Prize in 1958 and the Francis Parkman Prize at the same time. The four-volume "Age of Roosevelt" is the an important history of the Great Depression era, written by a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author with his point of view coloring the work.

Most readers probably should choose a more recent book on the subject, such as a good FDR biography. More information has been gathered by other biographers and synthesized into other biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, including Frank Freidel's biography of FDR (and the era), the Kenneth Davis biography of FDr and the era, to several outstanding FDR biographies that came after that. None-the-less, Schlesinger's book is practically primary-source in its level of research.

This book, the first volume, covers the years leading up to the Great Depression and then the three long years of Depression under the Republican Congress and Herbert Hoover. The facts are reported as if you were there. Hoover is portrayed as appearing stiff, aloof and callous, which was a popular impression at that time. Hoover callously said that unemployed people desperately selling apples in the street were actually doing so because selling apples paid more than their regular jobs. His image was made worse by the Hoovervilles where unemployed people lived in small, hastily-built shacks.

During the economic contraction, Hoover's Treasury Secretary deliberately sought a policy of contraction and liquidation, when they should have been providing liquidity to the system.

In the second volume of this history, Schlesinger details the bold actions that FDR and the new Democratic Congress took to confront the crisis during FDR's legendary first 100 days, presented from Schlesinger's point of view. It also describes the radicals who found receptive audiences during the Depression, like Long/Coughlin/Townsend, and how FDR outmaneuvered them to avoid radicalism.

FDR won reelection in 1936 with the biggest electoral landslide in modern history, a triumphant endorsement.

Editorial Review:

The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, volume one of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s Age of Roosevelt series, is the first of three books that interpret the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of the early twentieth century in terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the spokesman and symbol of the period. Portraying the United States from the Great War to the Great Depression, The Crisis of the Old Order covers the Jazz Age and the rise and fall of the cult of business. For a season, prosperity seemed permanent, but the illusion came to an end when Wall Street crashed in October 1929. Public trust in the wisdom of business leadership crashed too. With a dramatist's eye for vivid detail and a scholar's respect for accuracy, Schlesinger brings to life the era that gave rise to FDR and his New Deal and changed the public face of the United States forever.

Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 (America in the King Years)

Taylor Branch

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Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent and Informative 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I am about halfway through this book. Even though I have not finished yet I feel compelled to comment on it. I believe it is extremely important for African Americans of my generation to get a more complete understanding of the civil rights movement. So far this book has opening my eyes and changed the way I view our African American experience.

What is best about this read is it flows like a history book. I give much credit to Mr. Branch for simply telling the story and not adding too much of his own commentary and opinion. That is one of my pet peeves with many of our `writers' today. They want to impose their opinions and biased interpretations. We do not need opinions. We need to educate ourselves with facts and draw our own conclusions. Okay, I will get off the soapbox.

Anyway I highly recommend this book. It is a very long read, but if you seek a deeper understanding of the African American experience this is a great start. Many of the issues we face today can be interpreted more accurately by getting a more complete account of our past.

Editorial Review:

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.

Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.

Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.

On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family

Lisa See

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Scrutable Family Success 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

There's not much magic realism or mystic exoticism about this blunt, detailed, multi-generational history of an immigrant family. If you're looking for a novel, you'll find that Lisa See has written several. I repeat, this is a history, and it will be of interest chiefly to historians and other social scientists, professional or arm-chair.

Ms. See's great-great-grandfather arrived in America in 1867. The shabby treatment that he and other Chinese immigrants received is part of American history, but here in this book it becomes more vivid because See includes the reader in her "family album." Suffice it to say that the Fong/See family shrugged off indignities, worked hard, brought kinfolk to share the work despite arbitrary and unfair hurdles, took root in America, and succeeded more or less to the measure of their immigrant dreams. So it was with my mother's immigrant family from North Europe, and so it has been with every immigrant complement to America's cultural universality. Quite a few of the Fong/See second-comers spent time at the detention center of Angel Island, as described in the book "Island" which I reviewed a few days ago.

The drama in this history of the branching See family - what makes this book memorable - is a love story, the secret and perilous marriage of Fong See, the son of the 1867 immigrant, to a woman of European heritage, Letticie Pruett. Interracial marriage was illegal for decades in California, as in many states, and the penalties were a lot more severe than mere annulment. The Fong See clan ran the risk of deportation, and the couple had reason to fear ostracism and personal violence.

There's a sheaf of family photos in the center of the book. There's a snapshot of Richard See - fourth generation, I believe - with his buddies in Levis and Pendletons, getting ready for a fishing trip. Then there's Lisa herself as a girl in Chinese silks, but gasp! Lisa has wide European eyes, long blonde hair, and freckles!

My mother's sister and her Norwegian-American husband Jim, the last of my Minnesota kin to live on a homestead farm, came to visit me in San Francisco in the 1970s. One evening I took them, with other relatives and friends, to a Chinese restaurant. Jim is not what you'd call loquacious; he was sitting with his back to the room and paying more heed to the talk at other tables than to us. Just behind him, a family was talking about visits to colleges, arguing the merits of Cal Tech versus MIT. Jim got curious and turned around - discretely? oh yeah! - to see what the family looked like. Then he gaped at me and whispered "them folks are Chinese!" "Well," said I, "what do you expect in a Chinese restaurant?" "But they're speakin' English!" quoth he.

The heart and soul of Lisa See's history of her extended family is exactly what my uncle didn't understand. The Chinese who came to America were not insidious strangers and inscrutable menaces to European American culture. They were just plain folk.

Editorial Review:

Out of the stories heard in her childhood in Los Angeles's Chinatown and years of research, See has constructed this sweeping chronicle of her Chinese-American family, a work that takes in stories of racism and romance, entrepreneurial genius and domestic heartache, secret marriages and sibling rivalries, in a powerful history of two cultures meeting in a new world. 82 photos.

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys : An American Saga

Doris Kearns Goodwin

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In its drama and scope, Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is one of the richest works of biography in the last decade. From the wintry day in 1863 when John Francis Fitzgerald was baptized, through the memorable moment ninety-eight years later when his grandson and namesake John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States, the author brings us every colorful inch of this unique American tapestry. Each character emerges unmistakenly, with the clarity and complexity of personal recollection: "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston and founder of his dynasty; his independent and shrewdly political daughter, Rose, and her husband, the cunning, manipulative Joseph P. Kennedy; finally, the "Golden trio" of Kennedy children--Joe Jr., Kathleen, and Jack--whose promise was eclipsed by the greater power of fate. With unprecedented access to the Kennedy family and to decades of private papers, Doris Kearns Goodwin has crafted a singular work of American history: It is at once the story of an era, of the immigrant experience, and--most of all--of two families, whose ambitions propelled them to unrivaled power and whose passions nearly destroyed them.