Erik Larson Gives Us Another Winner

I've been on a particularly lucky reading streak lately -- great book after great book after great book, with no clunkers. Most recently I read a memoir, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, and a novel, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett; both were over-the-top terrific. I wasn't sure my luck would continue, but it sure did! Last night I finished reading Erik Larson's newest book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, and I stayed up WAY too late finishing it because I just couldn't stop so close to the end.

Not that it should be surprising that an author can make Berlin under Hitler and the Nazis interesting reading. But what was surprising was that at well past midnight I found myself reading the end notes to the book, thinking "Sally, just stop reading and go to sleep, it's just end-notes, for goodness sake!" It's a rare writer who can make even the end-notes to a book compelling enough to keep one's eyes open in the wee hours.

Larson employs a great technique in telling the story of Berlin in the lead-up to WWII by telling the story of America's ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, and his flamboyant, flirtatious daughter, Martha. A mild-mannered professor of history from Chicago, Dodd moved to Berlin with his wife, son, and daughter as Hitler and his band of sadists and psychopaths rose to power.

Dodd's wife and son receive scant attention in the book (mostly because Dodd and Martha left a much greater written record of their thoughts and activities). His daughter Martha, newly separated from her husband, initially found the young men of the Third Reich handsome and exciting, and she threw herself into Berlin's social scene, having affairs and partying. But as proof of the evil intentions of the Nazis became increasingly obvious, she became repulsed, and Dodd became increasingly alarmed and tried to get the American government to step in, or at least speak up. But he is unsuccessful. Although he eventually recognized the dysfunction of the regime and behaved courageously, he was unable to persuade his countrymen to take action until it was too late, and war became inevitable.

Persecution of the Jews increased, as Hitler stripped them of basic rights and economic viability, and random sadistic violence reigned, culminating in the events of June 30, 1934 -- the Night of the Long Knives -- when Hitler ordered a political purge that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of his critics and rivals, many of them friends and acquaintances of the Dodds.

In the end matter to the book, Larson writes about how deeply his research into Nazi Germany affected him: "What I did not realize as I ventured into those dark days of Hitler's rule was how much the darkness would infiltrate my own soul. I generally pride myself on possessing a journalist's remove, the ability to mourn tragedy and at the same time appreciate its narrative power, but living among the Nazis day in, day out proved for me a uniquely trying experience" -- to the point that he had to keep one of his main reference books on Hitler face down on his desk so he wouldn't be forced to start each day with "those hate-filled eyes and slack cheeks and that fragment of Brillo that passed for a mustache" that had become so repulsive to him.

You also have to enjoy a writer who in his acknowledgements thanks his three daughters for "their increasingly astute critiques of my manner of dress" and his wife and "secret weapon" for her margin notes, "complete with crying faces and trailing lines of zzzzzz's...."

I recently read the novel Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada (who makes a cameo appearance in Larson's book), which is also set in Nazi Berlin and is based on true events. It was so horrifying -- and also un-put-down-able -- that I wasn't sure I was ready for another book on this bloody, sadistic, sorrowful period in our world history. But Larson is a extraordinarily good writer and story teller, and once I started I couldn't stop.

Larson is also the author of The Devil in the White City (about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and a serial killer), Thunderstruck (about the invention of the wireless and the chase for one of Britain's most famous criminals), and Isaac's Storm (about the deadly hurricane off the Gulf Coast in 1900), among other books. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Russian history, language and culture. He received a masters in journalism from Columbia University. He has been a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and for Time Magazine and has written articles for The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other publications. He and his wife and fashion-conscious daughters live in Seattle, where he owns an old British sports car named Mrs. Peel.

Day 17: The Emperor of All Maladies

It's Day 17 in our 24 Days of Books. Only one week til Christmas Eve -- egad! The book for Day 17 is The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. Sadly, cancer has been with us for a long time -- the oldest surviving description of cancer is written on a papyrus from about 1600 BC -- and it continues to bring pain, sadness, and a lot of questions. It will kill about 600,000 Americans by the end of this year, and more than seven million people around the planet. Mukherjee, a physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion.

Mukherjee calls his book a biography because he is attempting to enter "the mind" of this illness, to understand its personality and demystify its behavior. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers,

One of the constants in oncology, says the author, is the "queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope." One of the hopeful aspects he talks about concerns the work of Dr. Brian J. Druker, an oncologist at Oregon Health and Sciences University and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. Last year Druker was one of three winners of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, often called the “American Nobel Prize,” for the development of "molecularly targeted treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia, converting a fatal cancer into a manageable chronic condition.” Another aspect of the disease Mukherjee covers is the infrequency of communication between the doctors treating people with cancer and the researchers studying it in the lab. “The two conversations seemed to be occurring in sealed and separate universes.”

Here's an astonishing fact: Back in 1953, the average adult American smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year, or about 10 a day. Almost half of all Americans smoked. Yet, as one epidemiologist wrote, “asking about a connection between tobacco and cancer was like asking about an association between sitting and cancer.”

The New York Times review of Mukherjee's book called it "an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan." Last Sunday the NYT named The Emperor of All Maladies one of the Top Five Nonfiction Books of 2010 (along with Apollo's Angels, Cleopatra, Finishing the Hat, and the Warmth of Other Suns).

Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.

Here is a short video clip of the author discussing the book and a couple of the major players in his story about cancer research. 

Day 15: The Autobiography of Mark Twain

It's Day 15 in our 24 Days of Books, and we're talking about a new book from an author who died one hundred years ago. Really. I mean I've heard of posthumous publications and all, but this might be a record. The book is The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume One, by, you guessed it, Mark Twain, who died on April 21, 1910, and he is in fact buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. Twain, born Samuel Longhorne Clemens (for a while he wrote under the name Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass), left strict instructions that his autobiography not be published until one hundred years after his death, so that he wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings and so that he could speak his mind frankly (didn't he always do that?).


After many many false starts trying to write his autobiography, Twain finally hit upon two techniques that worked for him. First, rather than write chronologically, he recommended "starting at no particular point in your life and write about whatever interests you and stop when it no longer interests you." Second, he figured out that he needed an audience, so he abandoned his attempts to use a dictation machine and instead hired scribes who would listen to him as he dictated.

So, in essence, this work is an oral biography. Frequently he used items in the newspapers as jumping off points for his dictations, so the book reflects much of what was going on in the world at the time. This stupendous door-stopper of a book (the first volume alone is more than 700 pages!) includes more than 200 pages of explanatory notes intended to "clarify and supplement" the writings by identifying people, places, and incidents and by explaining topical references and literary allusions.

This book is funny, interesting, thought-provoking, and, frankly, timeless. This book is one of the hottest of the holiday season and the volumes fly off our shelves about as fast as they arrive. We just got a handful more in the store today, but I'm sure they won't last long.

Twain published more than thirty books in his lifetime. One of them, Huckleberry Finn, was ranked as the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United States by the American Library Association.

The book just published is the first in a series of three volumes to be published by the University of California Press -- subsequent volumes are due to appear in about five years. Robert Hirst is the Director and General Editor of The Mark Twain Project. Volume One is edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and the other editors of the Mark Twain Project.

Day 10:The Queen of the Nile Returns

Welcome to Day 10 in our 24 Days of Books. Today is all about stripping away the "kudzu of history," the myth that swarms in the absence of fact. Cleopatra is one of the most famous -- and one of the least truly known -- women of all time. She ruled Egypt for twenty-two years, dying at age 39, a generation before the birth of Christ. Now, award-winning biographer Stacy Schiff has written a book --Cleopatra: A Life -- that attempts to restore context to our understanding of the famous leader and to strip away some of the myths that have surrounded her. As the author says, it's "not for the first time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one."

Most of Cleopatra's earliest biographers were Roman, male, and writing more than a century or more after her death. They tended to find it more comfortable to focus on her supposed sexual prowess than on her intellectual gifts. Cleopatra was actually Macedonian Greek ("which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor"). She spoke nine languages. She was a commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance. And "even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs." "At the height of her powers she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler."

Schiff was educated at Williams College and worked as an editor for Simon & Schuster until 1990. She left S&S to write a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery -- a book that became a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. She next wrote Vera, a biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her next book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, won the George Washington Book Prize. Clearly this woman knows a thing or two about writing biographies.

Ron Chernow, who knows a thing or two about writing biographies himself (his most recent is Washington: A Life) says about Schiff's new book: "Even if forced at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence. Here she trains her satirical eye and sterling erudition on Cleopatra, rescuing her from the many shopworn myths that have encrusted her story from Plutarch to Shakespeare to Joseph L. Mankiewicz."

This book quickly ran out of stock. We've just received a new supply, but it's bound to disappear quickly.

Kathryn Harrison reviewed Schiff's new book for The New York Times. Below is a brief video of the author reading a passage from the book.

Day 9: Ping Pong Rules the World

Remember when I said at the beginning of the 24 Days of Books that sometimes we'd talk about under-the-radar books? Well, Day 9 is definitely an under-the-radar book: Everything You Know is Pong: How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World, by Roger Bennet and Eli Horowitz.  This illustrated unabashed love letter to all things ping pong includes essays from Nick Hornby, Jonathan Safran Foer, Will Shorts, and Davy Rothbart. As the authors describe the book "We are two passionate collectors of ping pong ephemera who have quietly scoured eBay, flea markets, and yard sales to amass a museum-sized collection of ping pong artifacts. This book uses them to tell the important stories only ping pong can tell: tales of geopolitics, demographic shifts, and velour headbands."

From the introduction: "Ping pong's unvanquished strength lies, paradoxically, in its shabby exterior....Neglected by the corporate hunger for the New New New Thing, ping pong has been allowed to flourish in dark corners and distant alleys around the world, nurturing a wealth of lore, legends, and die-hard fans. It is the magma lurking beneath the Earth's crust, piping hot and eternally bubbling."

The book is chock-a-block full of wonderful old ads, book covers, and fabulous photographs (some a bit on the racy side), including one of performers in Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling show playing ping pong some time around 1890, and a shot of Bill and Hillary playing a game on the 1992 presidential campaign trail.

Recently a group of New York literati types gathered to play ping pong, promote the new book, and raise funds for 826NYC, a nonprofit literary organization, as reported in the New York Times.

This book is loads of fun and is THE perfect gift for the ping pong fanatic in your life (because you know they already have their own paddles).

Day 8: Unbroken, A Dual Story of Resilience

Welcome to Day 8 in our 24 Days of Books! In 2001, Laura Hillenbrand wrote the smash hit, Seabiscuit: An American Legend. Now, almost a decade later, she has another potential smash hit on her hands with another book about redemption and a stunningly fast runner. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, tells the story of Louis Zamperini, a cunning and incorrigible delinquent who as a teen developed a talent for running (often to avoid getting caught) that took him to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Sadly, WWII interrupted his running career. He became an airman, but in May 1943 his B24 bomber jet crashed into the Pacific Ocean. He spent almost seven weeks in a fragile raft, drifting thousands of miles in the middle of the ocean with two (and then one) other survivors, surrounded by sharks and enemy aircraft. Zamperini survived that ordeal, only to be captured by the Japanese and spend two years suffering assaults, humiliation, and physical abuse in a Japanese concentration camp.

Hillenbrand learned about Zamperini while researching her book on Seabiscuit [his coach often said that the only runner who could beat him was Seabiscuit]. In writing her new book, Hillenbrand interviewed Zamperini, now 93, more than 75 times. She read his diaries, letters, and unpublished memoirs; interviewed his friends and family, former Airmen and Japanese veterans, and former Olympians; and pored through forgotten papers in archives. Zamperini wondered why all of their conversations took place over the phone. It was only after reading an article about her that he learned that she suffers from severe debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome.

After the stunning success of Seabiscuit, Hillenbrand suffered a relapse of the syndrome that has ruled her life for more than two decades, since she was 19 years old. From 2007 through the summer of 2009, she never left her house; for some of those months, she never left her room. Despite that burden she has managed to write yet another thoroughly researched, gripping, cinematic true story about triumph and resilience. When Zamperini learned of her condition he sent her one of his Purple Hearts, saying she deserved it more than him.

Unbroken is sure to be one of the biggest sellers this holiday season. Her first book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and led to a smash motion picture; Unbroken is likely headed down a similar path. It's a great read -- a real page-turner -- regardless of the backstory of the author, but that story does make her accomplishment all the more impressive.

Day Two: The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson, is a beautiful piece of narrative nonfiction that tells the story of a mass relocation that, over time, would come to dwarf the California Gold Rush of the 1850s with its one hundred thousand participants and the Dust Bowl migration of some three hundred thousand people in the 1930s.

Wilkerson uses the stories of three individuals -- Ida Mae Brandon Gladney in 1937, George Swanson Starling in 1945, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster in 1953, who left Chicasaw County Mississippi, Wildwood, Florida, and Monroe, Louisiana, respectively -- to chronicle the great untold story of the migration of black citizens from the South to northern and western cities in search of a better life. This pilgramage began during WWI and did not end until the 1970s and would set in motion changes throughout the country that would take nearly a lifetime to play out -- impacting music, cuisine, religion, culture, city structures, and more.

During the Great Migration, the author's parents journeyed from Georgia and from southern Virginia to Washington, DC, where Wilkerson was born and reared. She is the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University.

The people in this movement left the South because "they were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay."

"The would cross into alien lands with fast new ways of speaking and carrying oneself and with hard-to-figure rules and laws....The places they went were big, frightening, and already crowded -- New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and smaller, equally foreign cities -- Syracuse, Oakland, Milwaukee, Newark, Gary."

These migrants did not "cross the turnstile of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such." When the Great Migration began, 10% of black Americans lived outside of the South; by the 1970s, almost half did.

This is a gorgeously written story of a fascinating and little-told story in American history, and it's selling like hotcakes. And I'm not alone in thinking this is a great book: Janet Maslin of the New York Times picked it as one of her top ten books of 2010. If you're thinking about giving this as a gift this year you probably don't want to wait too long to come get a copy, or two -- I'm thinking you might want one for yourself as well!

Here is a video clip (8 minutes) of the author being interviewed on PBS.

Chernow's Bio of George Washington is Here!

You might have to wait a few years between books for Ron Chernow's biographies, but it is certainly worth the wait -- both in terms of quantity and quality.

His first book, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (800+ pages) was published in 1990 and won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The book traced the history of four generations of the J.P. Morgan financial empire. In 1998 Chernow published his biography of John D. Rockefeller, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (also 800+ pages). The book reflected Chernow's continued interest in financial history. Titan was selected by Time magazine and The New York Times as one of the year's ten best books.

In 2004, Chernow published his 832-page biography, Alexander Hamilton, which won the inaugural George Washington Book Prize for early American history. The George Washington Book Prize is sponsored by a partnership of three institutions devoted to furthering scholarship on America’s founding era: Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon. The $50,000 prize is the nation’s largest literary award for early American history, and one of the largest prizes of any kind.

And what an interesting twist of fate that was, because now, six years later, Chernow has produced another doorstopping master work, this time a richly nuanced portrait of the very same George Washington, clocking in at about 900 pages. Washington: A Life, published by The Penguin Press, just went on sale yesterday. I wonder if he'll win the George Washington prize for Washington too?

The author's stated goal in writing this latest historical portrait is to present a cradle-to-grave narrative that will create a fresh portrait of Washington that will make him "real, credible, and charismatic in the same way that he was perceived by his contemporaries." "The upshot, I hope, will be that readers, instead of having a frosty respect for Washington, will experience a visceral appreciation of this foremost American who scaled the highest peak of political greatness."

Ron Chernow calls Washington “the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.” Despite Washington's elusivity, Chernow definitely found something to write about: Chernow’s is the longest single-volume biography of Washington ever published. I love thoughtful, meaty biographies -- I can't wait to dig into this one!

You can listen to a brief review of this new book on NPR's "All Things Considered" by clicking on this link.

In the video below, Chernow takes us on a walking tour of George Washington related sites in New York City.

Shotgun on My Chest Video Clip

Last week, for the first time in the 18-year history of the store, we had the pleasure of being entertained by an author in buckskin! I'm serious! Roger Wendlick, who amassed the world's largest collection of books relating to the Lewis & Clark Expedition and noted historian of all things Lewis & Clark, was here to read from his new memoir, Shotgun on My Chest. Our good friend Charles Seluzicki was here to introduce Roger, and we proceeded to have quite the evening from there! This short video clip can hardly do Roger justice -- might I recommend that you read his book if you missed seeing him? You can read more about Roger on our blog.

Presentation by Lewis & Clark Book Collector

Roger Wendlick never married, and he never graduated from college, but he did amass the world's most complete collection of printed materials relating to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He was born in Portland, graduated from Jefferson High School and attended Portland State College for a year. He tried on a variety of occupations, including working as a miner, logger, surveyor, maitre d' and wine steward, guitar player, in a paper mill, and for the US Forest Service, before landing on a career in the construction trades.

While recovering from an accident on the job, Roger decided to head abroad for a while, visiting seventeen countries over a ten-month period. When he returned to Portland he began working in construction again, and, for a variety of reasons, decided that he needed a hobby: "Why not collect something, I thought?"

What made him focus on Lewis and Clark items was something he inherited from his grandmother, who had passed away while he was in Europe: a blue souvenir dinner plate from the 1905 Lewis and Clark World's Fair in Portland. He remembered that it had always been special to her, and he began to explore its history. And thus a man's obssession was born.

In 1980, Roger began collecting materials related to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, working in heavy construction to finance his increasingly expensive obssession. His goal was to assemble the world's most complete collection of printed materials related to the expedition. In 1998, Roger achieved his goal and moved his library to Lewis and Clark College -- in a part donation/part purchase agreement. Since then, Roger has devoted himself full time to studying and teaching about the Expedition.

His book, Shotgun On My Chest: Memoirs of a Lewis and Clark Book Collector, was recently published by local 12-Gauge Press. Roger joins us Tuesday, May 11th, at 7 pm to discuss his book and the history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We hope you can join us for what is sure to be a fascinating presentation!

Historic Photos of Oregon

Last week, William C. Stack was at Broadway Books to present his recently published book, Historic Photos of Oregon, published by Turner Publishing. The book offers a pictorial history of Oregon from the 1860s to the 1970s. Before the event, he spoke briefly with Roberta Dyer, co-owner of Broadway Books.

Tonight at 7 - Oregon's History in Pictures

Oregon is one darned beautiful state. Of course, some might consider me a little biased, given that I am a native Oregon, but what the heck. Just try and prove me wrong! Tonight, historian William Stack will likely prove me right, as he presents his recently published book Historic Photos of Oregon (Turner Publishing), through discussion and slides.

This pictorial history of Oregon, which offers 200 black-and-white photographs, covers the years 1860 through 1971, in five chronological chapters. Although many people are aware of Dorothea Lange's stunning photographs humanizing the tragic consequences of the Great Depression, most people associate her work with California and the Southwest. But she also came to Oregon, where her images of southern and eastern Oregon during the Depression reveal the hardscrabble life of that place and time while also showing the inner strength, pride and joy of those hardworking people. The book includes fifteen of her photographs of Oregon.

Another major photographer represented in the collection is Edward S. Curtis, who spent his life documenting life among the indigenous peoples of the American West. The book also shows scenes from the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition; an early shot from the Multnomah Athletic Club, established in 1891; a motorcycle club from 1941, the construction of the Bonneville Dam, Celilo Falls before the building of the Dalles Dam flooded the falls; climbers on Mt. Hood throughout the years; and a wonderful photograph from 1912 of Abigal Scott Duniway, Oregon'smost prominent suffragette, with Governor Oswald West and Viola M. Coe, signing Oregon's Equal Suffrage Proclamation.

In addition to its gorgeous scenery, Oregon has a marvelously interesting history. We hope you can join us tonight at 7 pm for this wonderful event.

What was Lost is Found?

One of the most enjoyable nonfiction books I read last year was The Lost City of Z (Random House), by David Grann (the book is now available in paperback). Recently, the deforestation of vast amounts of jungle in the Amazon have revealed evidence that The City of Z -- or El Dorado, as some called it -- truly did exist.

In a study published in Antiquity, a British archaeological journal, the magazine details how the combination of deforestation and satellite imagery was used to discern the footprint of the buildings and roads of an enormous and sophisticated settlement located in what is now Brazil.

"The combination of land cleared of its rain forest for grazing and satellite survey have revealed a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads," the journal states. According to the authors of the study, the community likely had a population of more than 60,000 people, spanned a region of more than 150 miles across, and may date as far back as AD 800.

This early regional population was likely then wiped out by diseases brought by European conquistadores in the 15th and 16th centuries. The conquistodores had heard from the Indians about a fabulously rich Amazonian civilization, but most scholars concluded that El Dorado was no more than an illusion.

Percy Harrison Fawcett, the British explorer profiled in Grann's book (and soon to be the subject of a big-screen movie, brought to life by Brad Pitt, which presumably explains his out-of-control facial growth of late), claimed he had found evidence of an ancient civilization. He disappeared in the Amazonian jungle during a 1925 expedition. Now, Grann says, "there has been mounting evidence that nearly everything that was once generally believed about the Amazon and its people was wrong, and that Fawcett was in fact prescient."

I'm pretty sure the deforestation of the Amazon basin isn't such a hot idea, but this is exciting stuff nonetheless! And I highly recommend David Grann's book. Speaking of Grann, his newest book just arrived in the store last week: The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.

Author of Massacred for Gold Tonight

On May 25, 1887, at least 34 men were robbed and killed on the Oregon side of Hell's Canyon. You probably have never heard of this massacre, because scant attention was paid to it at the time, and it was subsequently buried by authorities and the community. The reason this mass murder wasn't received with outrage and action is because the murdered men were Chinese immigrants, working as gold miners. In fact, sadly, we only know the names of eleven of the murdered men.

The killers were a gang of rustlers and schoolboys from northeastern Oregon. Eventually, six of the participants were tried and acquitted, while most -- including the ringleader -- were never caught or brought to justice.

We might not know about this story even now, if it weren't for two people: A Wallowa County clerk, who discovered the documents relating to the crime in an unused safe, and R. Gregory Nokes, who has recently published a book about the event -- a book he spent at least a decade researching.

The result of that reseach is Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hell's Canyon, and tonight Greg Nokes will join us at 7 pm to tell us about his book and the event. Nokes worked for The Associated Press for 25 years and for The Oregonian for 15. He graduated from Willamette University and attended Harvard University as a 1972 Nieman Fellow. He first learned about the discovery of the documents while working as a reporter for The Oregonian, and he wrote about the massacre for the paper in 1995.

But his obsession with the massacre didn't stop there. Nokes wondered why he, someone educated in Oregon schools, had never heard about one of the worst crimes in the state's history. And as he dug into it deeper, all evidence pointed to a massive cover-up extending for more than a century. When he retired from the newspaper in 2003, he was able to devote more time to research and to running down leads, which has resulted in this wonderful and important book.

Barry Lopez describes Nokes's book as "an act of citizenship as much as it is a commendable work of history," a book that describes "a community's willful denial of it's past." Jim Lynch, author of The Highest Tide and Border Songs, says, "This is an important book. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Massacred for Gold should be required reading in the American West."

We hope you can join us tonight for what is sure to be a fascinating evening with author Greg Nokes.

Day Twelve: Front Page Compilations

It's Day Twelve in The 24 Days of Books, and we've decided to cheat, but only just a wee bit. Today we're going to talk about two fabulous books, instead of one, because they share a theme of sorts. The New York Times Complete Front Pages, 1851-2009 is an oversize volume that includes more than 300 facsimile front pages, plus three DVDs with all 54,693 (!) front pages and links to full articles. Also included are essays by twenty writers, including William Safire, Frank Rich, and Gail Collins. This terrific gift will provide hours upon hours of intellectual entertainment for someone with a fondness for history.

As Monty Python would say, “Now for something completely different.” The irrepressible Onion newspaper has just published their version of front pages: The Onion Presents Our Front Pages: 21 Years of Greatness, Virtue, and Moral Rectitude from America’s Finest News Source, 1988-2008. From their “Super Special Gum Disease Issue” to “Staten Island Historians Piece Together Geneaology of Wu-Tang Clan”, we love ‘em all. This wonderful gift will provide hours upon hours of entertainment of an entirely different ilk.

From the serious to the somewhat-less-than-serious, we've got front page compilations for all! For many more gift-giving ideas, check out our gargantuan December newsletter, which you can read by clicking here.

Day Four: The Hemingses of Monticello

Day 4 of The 24 Days of Books celebrates the book that took just about every prize for history writing last year -- including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed -- the paperback version of which was recently published. Blending biography, genealogy, and history, this multigenerational saga traces mixed-race bloodlines that American history has long refused fully to acknowledge. In her book, which is based on prodigious research in the voluminous Jefferson papers and other ­sources, Gordon-Reed traces the experiences of this slave family over three generations. The account begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735 as the daughter of an African woman and a white sea captain. The Hemings family went to Monticello as part of Martha Wayles Jefferson's inheritance. Individual members eventually found their way to Paris, New York, Philadelphia and Richmond, allowing Gordon-Reed to pre­sent a revealing portrait of the varieties of black life in Jefferson’s era.

At the center of the book is the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, although Gordon-Reed acknowledges that it is almost impossible to portray accurately the nature of their relationship, given that neither left any historical evidence about their relationship. Jefferson eventually freed Sally's children, and Jefferson's daughter allowed Sally to live with her sons as a free woman. For the other slaves at Monticello, however, Jefferson’s death in 1826 was a catastrophe. To settle his enormous debts, his estate, including well over 100 slaves, was auctioned, destroying the families he had long tried to keep intact.

Gordon-Reed, a Guggenheim Fellow, is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University.

For many more gift-giving ideas, check out our gargantuan December newsletter, which you can read by clicking here.

Something New from Timothy Egan

One of my all-time favorite nonfiction writers is Timothy Egan. Some of my favorite books of his are The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest; Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West; and The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dustbowl, for which Egan won the National Book Award -- and deservedly so; it's a terrific book.

And now we all have another book from Egan to look forward to: The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. The book tells the story of the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America. On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men -- college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps -- to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, through the eyes of the people who lived it. Equally dramatic, though, is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. The robber barons fought him and the rangers charged with protecting the reserves, but even as TR's national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by those same rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today.

The Big Burn tells an epic story, paints a moving portrait of the people who lived it, and offers a critical cautionary tale for our time -- characteristics of all of Egan's books. The book will be published mid-October -- let us know if you want us to reserve you a copy.

Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In addition to the National Book Award he won in 2006, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race is Lived in America." He lives in Seattle.

Vicarious Exploration-The Best Kind!

Not too long ago I blogged about David Grann's book The Lost City of Z, which I really enjoyed. It's the fascinating story of Percy Fawcett, who walked into the Amazon Jungle in 1925 with his son and another young man in search of what he called "The Lost City of Z," and none of the three were heard from again! Grann tells Fawcett's story and also heads into the jungle himself to see what he can find out.

Because that book stirred up my juices to read early exploration stories, I decided to read The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard, which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt heading down an unmapped tributary of the Amazon in 1912, following his painful defeat in the presidential election. Interestingly, he took his son along with him as well. Millard tells the fascinating story of this incredibly poorly planned and dangerous trip (which would have been wickedly dangerous even if well planned).

Since I'm still in an exploring sort of mood but looking for something a little lighter in tone, I've decided to read A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventures in Early America, by Tony Horwitz. So far so good! Some of Horwitz's previous books are Confederates in the Attic (about civil war re-enacters), Blue Latitudes (Captain Cook), and Baghdad without a Map (the Middle East) -- all written with his characteristic sharp wit and eye for detail. Horwitz is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist who now lives on Martha's Vineyard with his Pulitzer-Prize-winning wife, the author Geraldine Brooks (March, People of the Book).

I'd recommend all of these books as good reads -- and we've got them all at Broadway Books! For the record, the Grann book is still in hardback only, while the other two are available in paperback. Also for the record, I'd MUCH rather read about the hideous insects, fish (candiru - ugh!), and other deadly or just plain annoying wildlife of the jungle than ever set foot there myself. Aren't books wonderful???

Happy Birthday to You, and You...and You?

Guess who was born 200 years ago today, February 12, 1809? If you said "Abraham Lincoln," you're right! Then again, if you said "Charles Darwin," you're also right. These two great men were born on exactly the same day: one in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky and the other on an English country estate. [For those of you for whom such things matter, that date makes them Aquarians.]

Both are famous, influential change-makers with long-lasting reputations. Both are known for their clear and insightful thinking and writing. Both lost their mother in early childhood, and each lost a beloved child. Besides a common date of birth, they share many traits and experiences. Yet we almost never think of them side-by-side and rarely if ever discuss the Civil War in the same conversation as evolution. A new book from Adam Gopnik (author of Paris to the Moon and Through the Children's Gate), Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, does just that. As Gopnik says, "the point is that when we do come across those who write well and see clearly, we're right to make them heroes." One reviewer described this book as having 'succulent prose and incisive reasoning." How can you resist?

If you want to read more about either man, we've got books in spades. Some of the Darwin offerings include The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (David Quammen), Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography (Janet Browne), and, of course, The Origin of Species itself (Charles Darwin). Our Lincoln shelves are groaning with books, including Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (Fred Kaplan), A. Lincoln: A Biography (Ronald C. White, Jr.), Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon (Kunhardt, et al), Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (James M. McPherson), and, of course, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals.

And if today also happens to be your birthday? Wow, are you in great company -- and happy birthday to you too!

The Civil War

The UO-OSU Civil War game is now officially over for the year -- congratulations to both teams on solid seasons, and good luck in your respective bowl games. I'm playing an impartial role this year so I won't voice an opinion on the outcome. But, if you're still in the mood, here are a couple of new books pertaining to THE Civil War that might be of interest. Robert Roper's book, Now the Drum of War, provides a biographical chronicle of a remarkable and dysfunctional family (Walt Whitman's family) and an examination of the tragedies of the war through the correspondence of the Whitman family. Andrew Ward's book, The Slave's War, provides -- through hundreds of interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs -- a narrative of the war from the perspective of those whose destiny it decided: the slaves.