Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History

Fly Girls delves into some of the lesser known aspects of the "Golden Age of Flying" from the late 1920s until Amelia Earhart disappeared on her round-the-world flight a decade later. Specifically author Keith O'Brien revisits the history of women pilots during this era, not only Earhart, but many others whose names have long since faded from the national conscience: Ruth Nichols and Louise Thaden, Ruth Elder and Florence Klingensmith, with plenty of ink devoted as well to that most famous flier, Miss Earhart.

O'Brien does justice to each of these women, and Fly Girls works as a min-biography for a half dozen of the earliest women pilots. More crucially, O'Brien examines the prejudices these early pilots faced, including the rather preposterous regulation against flying immediately before, during, or after menstruation. Unfair, no doubt, but not terrifying. No, the terrifying risks were borne by all pilots, male and female alike, and again and again O'Brien documents the horrifying results of early planes, rudimentary airfields, and nascent navigation.

Frequently these crashes occurred at the National Air Races, an annual exhibition of the finest pilots and fastest planes, and attendance at which often outdrew the World Series. (I lost track of the fatalities somewhere in the middle years.)

Part history of flight, part women's history, Fly Girls is ultimately a look at an entire era - the zeitgeist, the mores, the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat. In that sense, it serves as a reminder of the sacrifices early pioneers in any discipline must make.

Five stars.

Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

Native Roots is an obscure little book* that delves deeply into the cultures of the native tribes of the America, from the Inuits of the far north to the Incas of South America. Author Jack Weatherford examines aspects of their lives and civilizations from diet and housing, dress and transportation, with extensive sections devoted to the ways in which European settlers incorporated native elements into their new world - particularly when it came to their diet.

Weatherford also spends time education the reader on the ways in which native languages enriched English. Here, we have everything from kayak to raccoon, igloo to tobacco. Which is to say nothing of the continent's place names. My own town, Okemos, is named for an Ojibwe chief of the same name, and like every good Michigander, learned the meaning of Gitche Gumee as a child.

Native Roots especially examines the contributions of individual Native Americans to "American" history and culture, from Pocahontas to the entirety of Henry Schoolcraft's in-laws. Although his approach is less in-depth than those of Peter Starks (Astoria) or Stephen Ambrose (Undaunted Courage) - both of whom focus less of their overall work on the contribution of the Indian guides, but go into greater detail when they do - the overall impact is far greater because Weatherford's approach is much broader and ultimately provides a better sense of the collective impact of Native Americans on "Americanizing" the continent.

As is frequently the case with non-fiction, the audience that will truly enjoy reading Native Roots is relatively s mall, but readers who love early American history, and certainly pre-United States history, should be quickly taken in.


*Native Roots was published in 1992, yet has only 22 reviews on Amazon, so I'm extrapolating here, but I don't think unfairly.

Whistling in the Dark

I am late, late, late with this post. I finished Lesley Kagen's Whistling in the Dark several weeks ago, right before a vacation (sans laptop) and then we came home to a major power outage (so again sans laptop) and I'm just now getting around to this. The big question, as I sit down to type this, is has that time mellowed my views of this book? Perhaps, but if so it's largely because many of the details have become hazy. (Oh, the perils of not recording my thoughts immediately!)

Whistling in the Dark is the story of Sally and Troo O'Malley, whose family is about as dysfunctional as they come in small-town, 1950s Wisconsin. (I think it was Wisconsin - I must admit, that's one of those details that's grown fuzzy. But it was definitely a small town in 1959.) The family didn't start out that way, but after Sally and Troo's father died in a car accident, things tumbled out of control, and now their mother is in the hospital, their stepfather is perpetually drunk (and usually in the arms of a paramour), and their older sister is more interested in her boyfriend than her babysitting responsibilities. All of which would be bad enough, but a murderer is on the loose and Sally just knows she's next on his list. And also his identity...or it may just be her over-active imagination.

As I work my mind back over the novel, I have to acknowledge that there was nothing particularly terrible or particularly offensive about Whistling in the Dark. No, it wasn't the writing or the characters or the plot, and yet, it was all of those things. The sum of the parts was simply too much. There were too many coincidences, too many pieces that fit together just perfectly, and too many events that were simply too far out there for me to completely buy what Kagen was selling. What's more, Whistling in the Dark defies easy categorization. It's not serious fiction to make you ponder the big questions in life (think The Summer Before the War), it's not a lighthearted "beach read" a la Gwen Bristow, and it doesn't completely capture the zeitgeist in the way The Truth According to Us does. It's not bad, but it's not memorable, either.

Reliance, Illinois

Mary Volmer's Reliance, Illinois is a mostly forgettable novel. Thirteen-year-old Madelyn Branch (defining feature: a massive port wine stain covering half of her body), moves to Reliance with her mother, Rebecca, who for reasons of establishing a marriageable reputation, is transformed into Madelyn's elder sister. (I should add here that the novel is set in 1874.) Madelyn is permitted, just, to reside with the new Mr. and Mrs. Dryfus, but wounded by her mother's lies, Madelyn soon accepts a position with the mysterious Miss Rose, whose forays into women's suffrage are fodder for scandal.

I didn't care much about the characters or most of the plot. I found the storyline baffling at times - I never did fully understand the scandal around the mayoral election - and it felt like the story often flitted between characters and events without much continuity. Samuel Clemens made a guest appearance - the single memorable event in the book, which I'll get to in a moment - but then disappears as quickly and unexpectedly as he arrived. I've rarely disagreed more with the book jacket quote, in this case: "Reliance, Illinois has it all - mystery, politics, war, love, death, and art." The mystery and the politics both felt contrived, and the war was long over. All-in-all, it was pretty meh.

Except.

Except for the one memorable event, when Samuel Clemens expounded on voting rights, thusly: "Give men of education, merit, and property - give such men five, maybe ten votes to every one of your ignorant Joes. As of now, Joe can be made to vote for any cause by anyone who can persuade him through fear or profit to make his mark on the line, even if that cause does damage to him and his family."

Amen, brother.

Never have true - or scarier - words been spoken, further proof, if we needed it, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

According to the author's notes, Clemens views on voting rights came from a variety of sources, including The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Whether he spoke these exact words, or Volmer crafted them, I cannot say, but, Mr. Clemens, I feel your pain.

Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever

Geoff Williams's Washed Away is an in-depth look at the massive floods that decimated the U.S., in particular the middle part of the country, in early 1913. Williams works through the days chronologically, and often the hours within each day. This style took a little getting used to; it had the advantage of being incredibly orderly and organized, but the disadvantage was that I found it easy to lose track of the various characters - this one in Dayton, that one in Indianapolis, another in Pennsylvania, and so on - since they cropped up sporadically, especially in the early chapters.

On the whole, this is a fascinating look at an event that once dominated the national conscience, but has long since receded from even the most detailed history books. (See The Devil Is Here in These Hills or Ashes Under Water for other examples of famous-now-forgotten events.) I have to say, though, that I felt the title oversold the story: at least as Williams has written it, the "changed it forever" piece is not obvious. He does spend a couple of pages at the end on water engineering, but I actually would have liked to learn more about those changes than some of the hour-by-hour accounts. (And now I'm being nit-picky, but Williams did not spend nearly enough time delving into the flooding outside of the Midwest, such as along the Mississippi, as the "most widespread natural disaster" - or the pages of photos of flooded Memphis - would imply.)

Ultimately, I was interested to learn about this flood, particularly having read about the Johnstown flood somewhat recently. Williams does highlight those unlucky, lucky few who are known to have survived both, which can hardly be matched for bad luck.

Best for history buffs. Three stars. 

The Cape Ann

Lark Erhardt is six-years-old in 1938, a young girl struggling to make sense of the grown-up world around her in the midst of a the Great Depression. She lives with her parents in a single room at the train depot, where her father works - steadily, unlike many in small-town Minnesota in this time - but she dreams of the day her family with leave the depot behind and build their own home, a Cape Ann, a dream of a house with hollyhocks and a window seat.

Little Lark is the consummate worrier, principally over her upcoming first confession. She worries, too, about her mama, Arlene, whose constant rows with the hard-gambling Willie hang over the family like a dark cloud. She also must make sense of her Aunt Betty, whose domestic situation is far more precarious than Lark's, and her friend Hilly Stillman, a World War I veteran - and hero - suffering from shell shock two decades on.

Faith Sullivan writes beautifully and brings depth and dimension to every character in the novel. Writing from the perspective of a six-year-old is undoubtedly a challenge; I found it took some getting used to for the reader, but ultimately Sullivan's skill as a writer brings a sense of authenticity to The Cape Ann that many books with an older narrative never achieve.

Three-and-a-half stars.

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns is narrative nonfiction at its finest. Like The Son, I discovered Isabel Wilkerson's Warmth in The Atlantic's 2015 best books guide. It is a masterful history of the Great Migration, that movement of six million mostly rural and often sharecropping blacks from the South to cities across America.

Wilkerson tells the broader history through the personal narratives of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who migrated from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1930s; George Starling, who left the citrus groves of central Florida for New York City in the middle of World War II; and Robert Foster, who left small town Louisiana for Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Their lives post-migration held little in common with one another. Ida Mae and her husband worked a succession of unskilled and poorly paid jobs while laying down roots on Chicago's South Side. George Starling took a job with the railroad that saw him traverse his own route time and again; in his absence his children fell victim to the drugs and gangs of Harlem. Robert Foster was perhaps the most successful but least fulfilled. A surgeon of no small renown (he was the personal physician of Ray Charles, for example), he constantly searched for acceptance and approval that were never quite enough.

Against this background, Wilkerson tells the larger story of demographics and discrimination in America, supporting a central argument that the members of the Great Migration were, in ways both large and small, no different from the immigrants who crossed an ocean to reach what they believed would be a land of milk and honey. (She also notes that virtually every individual who was part of the Great Migration steadfastly disagreed, although this reader was certainly convinced, and I believe Wilkerson still is, as well.) Wilkerson conducted interviews with 1,200 individuals, no small feat of anthropology, and delved into a history of Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement, and urban life in America.

I was reminded repeated of Barbara Myerhoff's outstanding work, Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto, which is certainly among the seminal works on the immigrant experience in America. Wilkerson has accomplished no less. In a different vein, I could not help but think of The Warmth of Other Suns as the second act of After Appomattox; Wilkerson provides more than enough examples - many, sadly, a half-century or more after the Civil War ended - that certainly lend credence to Stetson Kennedy's assertion that, "The nation had evidently made up its mind that, so long as the South remained inside the Union and did not go back into the business of buying and selling blacks, it could do what it damned well pleased with them."

The Warmth of Other Suns is a phenomenal work of narrative non-fiction. It should be required reading for every high school student in the country. I'm with The Atlantic: it will be hard to top this, certainly in the category of nonfiction. 

State by State

I am sad to say that State by State is one of the most disappointing books I have read in a long time. It's not that it was bad. It wasn't, per se. It's just that individually and collectively these essays failed to do justice to the America I know.

I love this country. I don't mean that in a chest-beating-flag-waving-patriotic-fervor sort of way. I mean the land - the incomparable experience of cresting a hill in northern New Mexico at sunset, or hiking the California Coastal trail on a cloudless fall day, or the sweet and sticky taste of homemade pecan pie in the Deep South. These are things I love about America, and by-and-large they were completely and utterly absent.

The Arkansas essay, for example, was about bumper stickers. From 1991. This tells me nothing about the state, which is doubly disappointing as it's one of the few states I haven't ever visited. Oregon and Vermont consisted of comic strips, the font too small to read on my Nook, even if I'd cared to. (I didn't - I was interested in essays, not art.) Many of the actual essays consisted of an author's trip down memory lane, typically back to the 1960s or 1970s. That would be fine, had I wanted to know what the state was like 40 years ago. State by State is not a memoir, though, or at least it shouldn't be. A few of the essays do capture the essence of the state - the North Carolina essay on the proper way to eat barbecue springs to mind. Illinois was excellent.

It is as though nearly all of the authors were thinking what William T. Vollman actually penned in his "California" opening: "...mass culture, with its big box warehouses of the landscape, language, and mind itself, has already destroyed so many differences between states that there is less to say..." In some ways, this is inarguably true. But in so many other ways, this attitude gives short shrift to the entire idea, which was to, essentially, update the 1930s WPA guides. Reading Sir Edward Robert Sullivan's Rambles and Scrambles in North and South America, particularly the North American rambles, is more pleasurable, more educational, and in many ways more accurate and telling, even 150+ years later.

1906

James Dalessandro's 1906 is a fictionalized account of the days leading up to and the aftermath of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Annalisa Passarelli, the music and arts reported for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, leads readers through a rollicking recounting of the earthquake and subsequent fire - as well as her dealings with both the very cream of San Francisco society and its seedy underside of thugs and shanghaiers, pimps and prostitutes, and perhaps worst of all, politicians.

I really, really liked this book. It is well-written and fast paced; a chronicle of both disaster and corruption on the grandest scale. Murder and mystery seamlessly intersect with romance, and trust me, that's a rare quality. My only complaint, and it's a relatively minor one, is that the reader is introduced to a vast number of characters, some of whom simply disappear from the story. Although Annalisa offers a plausible explanation at the end - this is her first hand account of the earthquake, helped along by the occasional personal correspondence or diary - I felt a tad disappointed not to have a final glimpse at some of them, in particular the geology professor. This is but a minor quibble, though, when all is said and done.

While Passarelli, and her co-protagonist, Hunter Fallon, are Dalessandro's original creations, most of the other characters in his pages - from Enrico Caruso to Mayor Schmitz to Shanghai Kelly and Adam Rolf are either entirely true to form or based closely on real individuals from that time. Schmitz - who was indicted on corruption charges not long afterward (thank you, Wikipedia) - and his cronies fixed the death toll at 478, although the real toll was anywhere from 5,000-10,000. And if that weren't enough, the bad guys really did use the chaos and destruction of the disaster to exact revenge on their enemies, which is to say that Chicago in 1919 had nothing on San Francisco in 1906.

 Four stars.

Thanksgiving, 1942

Thanksgiving, 1942 picks up where The First Christmas of the War left off, more or less. The oldest boys - Jonathan and Joseph - enlisted together, after Joseph's high school graduation, and are headed home now, their first visit since they left.

Just as in the previous book, mom Irene is determined to pull off a feast the family will remember for years, ration books or no. Joseph and Jonathan are consumed by thoughts of the fairer sex - and the war that awaits them, while Thomas and Charlene have their own teen angst. Seven-year-old Ruthie  is a side note (again).

Still, the Colemans are likeable people and the story is light and easy and draws the reader in. As I said when I wrote about First Christmas, Alan Simon has created a real family and tells their story with warmth and humor and a side of sass. It is unfortunate, though, that the writing contains so many mistakes as to be absolutely distracting. It is difficult for me to recommend this book, as with the last one, simply on account of the sloppy editing.

Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery

I tried to remember when I saw the title of this book: weren't Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr the guys who dueled each other? Yes, yes, they were. But that was after they teamed up to defend Levi Weeks against charges of murdering a fellow boarding house lodger. (Which was after decades of antagonizing one another, which is why even at the time, Weeks's legal team raised eyebrows. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Twenty-year-old Elma Sands walked out the front door of her Manhattan boarding house the Sunday before Christmas, 1799, and disappeared. Nearly two weeks later, her body was dragged from the depths of one of the city's wells and the murder pinned squarely on carpenter Levi Weeks.

Weeks's older brother, Ezra, is one of the most prominent builders in Manhattan - and Hamilton and Burr both happen to be in his debt, literally, for variously commissioned projects. The elder Weeks wastes no time ensuring that his brother's counsel is the finest ever assembled in the city - and the fine counsel, in turn, wastes no time conducting their own investigation of the gripping case.

Duel with the Devil is non-fiction storytelling at its finest, on par which such works as Flyboys and In the Garden of Beasts.

The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

Richard Rubin's The Last of the Doughboys is easily one of the best books - fiction or non-fiction - that I have read in a very long time. Last year I read, and liked, The Long Way Home (David Laskin), which tells the stories of a dozen European-American immigrants who return to the old country as soldiers in Uncle Sam's army. That book makes a perfect companion to The Last of the Doughboys, not least because the latter actually includes first-hand account from two of the immigrant soldiers in that book: Samuel Goldberg and Anthony Pierro. (Which means that not only did those two survive the war, but survived it by longer than all but a handful of their fellow veterans - in the U.S. or anywhere else.)

Rubin and Laskin obviously differ in the scope of their work. Laskin set out to describe the immigrant experience while Rubin, in telling stories of what centenarians and super-centenarians remain from that war, by necessity also explores not only explores the American experience in war, but America's experience at war. Rubin has done an incredible about of research on everything from Tin Pan Alley to Alien and Sedition Acts and the veteran experience, particularly in the throes of the Great Depression. He has also spent considerable time walking the battlefields and villages of France, visiting the tiny museums chock full of old canteens and buttons, taken the time to study the layout and maintenance of the many cemeteries that still bear witness to the War to End All Wars.

It helps that those who have lived for 100-plus years have lived, to a man (or woman, in a couple of cases), full and fascinating lives. The family of one lived on what Rubin posits may have been the only integrated street in New Orleans - or the South for that matter - and was neighbors with Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson fame. Others were among the first to open "Indian Country," better known as Oklahoma, or to see  a "flying machine" in action.

The stories, not surprisingly, speak for themselves and yet, what Rubin adds to the recollections is simply done so well that his interjections and asides are part of what makes the book so great - as with his comments when a 107-year-old woman asks him if he remembers the "old coal wagons, you know, the ones driven by a horse."

If you read nothing else about World War in the U.S. - or even the later battles on the Western Front, period - read The Last of the Doughboys. Rubin's book is just that good.

The First Christmas of the War (The Coleman Family Saga Book 1)

It's 1941 and the Coleman family has been looking forward to Christmas all year. The Great Depression has finally ended and Gerald and Irene are looking forward to giving their five children a long-awaited "perfect" Christmas with plenty of presents under the tree and a veritable feast. And then, December 7, 1941, the day that shall live in infamy. Now, Gerald and Irene must face the fact that 19-year-old Jonathan and 17-year-old Joseph will, no doubt, join the fight - with 14-year-old Thomas only a few years removed from the same possible fate. Still, the family is determined to make this a special Christmas.

Alan Simon's story itself is excellent. A bit of sweetness, a bit of humor, a touch of sass, the parents seldom without a cigarette in their grasp, the mother with a never-ending list of chores and tasks to be completed each day. The First Christmas of the War feels like America, 1941. (And also 1951...I couldn't help but think of old I Love Lucy episodes on occasion.) I did have two big gripes with this book, though.

First, it needs some serious editing. From missing commas (dates, city-state combinations, etc.) to run-on sentences to "dawning gas masks" (I'm pretty sure Simon meant for everyone to be "donning gas masks"), the mistakes are glaring and distracting. Second, as a type of introduction, I suppose, Simon introduces each character, along with the major plot points for that person. For example, of Charlene, the intro states, "The third child in the family and the oldest daughter, Charlene has just become secretly engaged at the age of sixteen..." Since this is a major plot point, it's unclear to me why Simon chose to unveil so much before the reader has even reached the table of contents.

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana

A Girl Named Zippy is the sweet and funny memoir of Haven Kimmel, born in Mooreland, Indiana, (population 300) in 1965. Her memories are told with a lighthearted and self-deprecating tone, and the many quirky characters come to life in her telling. Zippy ends on Christmas Eve, which I did not know when I began, of course, but which seems entirely fitting.

I was reminded more than once not so much of my own Midwestern birthplace, but that of my grandmother and great-grandparents, a place which still looms large in my memories. I imagine that such towns did not change much between, say 1965 and 1985, which is why reading this often felt like slipping into something familiar and well-worn. And, although the better part of several decades passed between the two memoirs, I was reminded again and again of Edmund Love's wonderful The Situation in Flushing, which still ranks as my favorite memoir. (It is also worth noting that Kimmel's life and early experiences could not be farther from the life and times of Lady Pamela Hicks, whose Daughter of Empire is the last memoir I read.)

I picked this up at the library after seeing it on BookBub - still one of my favorite web finds in 2014 - and read it in a matter of hours. Time well spent - and easily recommended for anyone who loves memoirs or small town America.

Merry Christmas!

The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War

As much about the immigrant experience circa 1910 as it is about World War I, David Laskin's The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War offers a unique perspective - or perspectives - on World War I.

Laskin has painstakingly reconstructed the histories of a dozen young, fresh immigrants to the United States, all of whom - by choice or by chance - return to the "Old Country" as soldiers in their adopted country's army to face the horrors of World War I. The men come from Italy and Ireland, Poland and the Pale of Settlement, and from places that have long ceased to exist (Kaszubia, anyone?). They are driven to the U.S. for all the usual reasons, of course, which generally amounts to seeking an escape from bone crushing poverty. Their experiences here are different - from mining in Montana, gardening in Massachusetts, and of course eking out a living on the Lower East Side (population density 1,000 per square block).

Their roles in war vary as well. Sam Goldberg patrolled the desert southwest as part of the cavalry in the aftermath of the Zimmerman Telegram. Most go to Europe, though, where they are deployed along the Western Front to break a four-year-old stalemate. Here Laskin delves into the politics of fighting war: arranging troops, ordering advances, coordinating positions among men who do not speak the same language. All of this, of course, at a time when messages traveled no faster than a good horse and the messenger might be shot en route. (As a sidenote, I remain fascinated by the fact that the All American Division was comprised of men who spoke 43 languages, but frequently almost no English.)

In Europe some men barely see war, but others become heroes. Michael Valente received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions. And some do not come home.

In many ways, given the U.S.'s late entry into the war, The Long Way Home is a bookend to The Guns of August (still one of the finest World War I histories I've read). It is fast paced and, honestly, fascinating, offering insights on the immigrant's experience as well as the soldier's. All told, The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War is an excellent read.

The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America's First Sports Spectacle

I never expected to enjoy a book about a horse race so much.

In 1823, a southern horse (whose shall remain nameless, as the selection of this horse is the heart and soul of the book) and a northern horse, Eclipse, squared off in the first mass sporting event in American history. Running the "heroic distance" (4 mile heats), the race to be the fastest horse was merely a stand-in in the decades-long superiority contest between North and South that would culminate in the Civil War four decades later.

What is remarkable about this book is the quality of the storytelling. John Eisenberg has taken a single event that happened nearly 200 years ago and imbued it with a level of suspense and outsize importance such that the reader feels the outcome truly matters, even if the reader can't quite decide who should win. The characters - two- and four-legged alike - are richly drawn, the conflicts (and there are so many beyond the actual race itself) given life and legs, and the outcome smoothly drawn out to the closing pages.

My only complaint with this book, and it is a relatively minor one, was the frequency with which the main characters are referred to by their nicknames (i.e., William Ransom Johnson is almost always Napoleon and William Wynne is invariably Racing Billy).

The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America's First Sports Spectacle is an improbably wonderful read, certainly for anyone who loves horses, sporting events, American history, or any combination of the three. Four stars.

The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

There is so much potential in Myra MacPherson's The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age. Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin make fascinating protagonists who led amazing lives. As the book notes, Victoria and Tennie were "two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics, and business threatened the white male power structure of the nineteenth century and shocked the world." Or, as the saying goes, well behaved women rarely make history.

In the opening chapters, my hopes were high that Scarlet Sisters would be similar to the Hetty Green biography I read last year. Unfortunately, fairly quickly Scarlet Sisters bogged down in nitty-gritty (largely political) details such that the potential was largely unrealized. Too often I felt that the larger story was sacrificed to what I felt was MacPherson's personal agenda (writing Scarlet Sisters as a counter to the current "war against women"). This is unfortunate because I assume almost anyone reading this book is firmly in her corner already, and would have appreciated a good story more than dozens of detailed pages on the competing factions of the women's suffrage movement, the hypocrisy of the church (we're looking at you, Mr. Beecher) or the possible motivations of the overzealous Anthony Comstock.

In the end, I struggled to finish Scarlet Sisters, which is a shame, as it would have been a good forerunner to Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern.

When the World Was Young

Elizabeth Gaffney's When the World Was Young defies easy categorization. Essentially, it is the coming of age of Wally Baker. After the death of her glamorous mother, Stella, Wally, lives with her grandparents, but is largely raised by their black maid, Loretta, in the years after World War II. Gradually, Wally comes to see the complexities unfairness of life in a gradual stripping away of innocence.

When the World Was Young is beautifully written, with prose that transports the reader into Wally's world: Brooklyn, circa 1950. The characters, too, are distinct and sympathetic, even the wildly unstable Stella whose life has been marred by a series of disappointments and tragedies. This is a lovely read, a book that is hard to put down, and one that any lover of fiction should enjoy.

The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America

Electricity is such an ingrained part of our lives that we rarely think of it, unless we happen - temporarily, God willing - to be without it. So it's hard to imagine the entire world before electric lights - the sheer and utter darkness that enveloped everyone and everything from sundown to sunup. Obviously, then, the arrival of electricity was the one of the seminal events of their lives for millions across the world.

Ernest Freeberg works hard to make the reader feel the excitement caused by the electrification of America (with the occasional visit across the pond to England, France, and Germany). He traces the arrival of light from the various oils to gas to, finally, the incandescent light bulb. (Sidenote: Thomas Edison was 32 when he invented the incandescent light bulb.  I learned this in the opening pages of Freeberg's The Age of Edison and spent the rest of the book feeling only slightly inconsequential.)

Electricity was not without controversy as the electric companies, in the era of robber barons, worked to part individuals and municipalities alike from their money as quickly as possible, often while stringing miles of dangerously hung wires. Americans of the day were treated to regular news headlines of men, children, even horses electrocuted by a dangling or fallen wire.

The Age of Edison is an interesting read, though slightly dry, and rather too technical at times. Freeberg notes at one point that, "Few in the public could follow the heated, technical, and contradictory claims made by the rival companies...or the bickering between city inspectors..." I know the feeling.

One Summer: America, 1927

I am finally getting around to reviewing Bill Bryson's One Summer, which I read while I was in Japan last month. I was previously familiar with Bryson only as a travel writer; I needed something to read in e-format, though (no sense carrying 40 pounds of books across the Pacific), and my library had this title available.

I loved it. Even though today is but the first of June and I have, hopefully, more than half a year of good reading ahead of me, I'm certain One Summer will make my "best of" list at the end of the year. The summer of 1927 was one heck of a summer and Bryson covers a tremendous amount of ground here. This was the summer of flight, when flyers disappeared one-by-one in their quest to cross the Atlantic and one Charles Lindbergh actually made it to Paris. This was also the summer of baseball, and specifically of the New York Yankees and the long ball - Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were in fine form that summer, hitting balls out of the park with a regularity never before seen, and that would not be seen again for some decades. Prohibition was in full effect; Bryson references some of Daniel Okrent's more colorful anecdotes from Last Call: Rise and Fall of Prohibition in America, which was one of my favorite 2011 reads. And, of course, we couldn't have prohibition without Al Capone, Chicago, and the mob. (My favorite Chicago mob story actually dates to 1921: when Anthony D'Andrea died, his honorary pallbearers included 21 judges, nine lawyers, and the Illinois state prosecutor.)

Michigan (the state, as well as the university) gets a fair amount of coverage here, too: Lindbergh's parents are UM grads and his mother teaches school in Detroit. (His father is dead.) Henry Ford is going crazy preparing to build a new kind of car, hating Jews, and trying to build an empire in Brazil ("Fordlandia," and neither Bryson nor I made that up), all from the happy confines of southeastern Michigan. And, as an example of how the world has always been populated by deranged and angry folks, Bryson also writes about the school bombing in Bath, Michigan.

And so much more. Calvin Collidge chose not to run for re-election. Four bankers set the world on a path to the Great Depression. Hollywood transitioned from silent film to talkies.

Bryson does a remarkable job exploring the personalities, politics, and problems that captivated Americans that summer and that would ultimately shape the course of the country from entertainment to economics, sports, politics, and the idea of celebrity. He is, as ever, highly readable, engaging, and not a little irreverent. Come one, come all to the pages of One Summer.