Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America

In 1915, the SS Eastland capsized while tied to its dock in the Chicago River. Over 800 people died.

Michael McCarthy hypothesizes that virtually no one in America today has heard of this disaster. I certainly hadn't, and my first reaction upon learning of it was to think that Chicago saw more than its share of bizarre disasters in the early twentieth century. But, I digress.

Ashes Under Water is the story of the Lake Michigan steamships, and of one in particular - the Eastland - that was beset by trouble from its earliest days. Although McCarthy focuses on other aspects of the story, I was most stunned by the fact that someone who had never built a boat before built one big enough to hold 2,500 people...and it took more than a decade for anything truly terrible to happen.

The second half of the book focuses on the trial that followed, and how the clearly guilty owners tried to pin the blame on the most competent and least guilty man on the boat, Chief Engineer Joseph Erickson. Erickson was defended by none other than the wily Clarence Darrow, he of later Monkey fame.

All told, I found the first half of Ashes Under Water, which covered the Lake Michigan steamship business, Erickson's biography, and the Eastland accident itself, more interesting than the second half, which focused on the trial. From beginning to end, though, McCarthy is detailed and thorough and offers a remarkable reconstruction of a disaster that has otherwise long been forgotten.

The Son

Philipp Meyer's The Son was featured in a 2015 "best books our staff read" round-up. The Son was described as an "old-fashioned epic of the American West" that "imagines the rise to power of the McCulloughs, one of Texas’s most dominant oil and ranching families." It sounded a bit too much like Leila Meacham to pass up.

The Son is actually three narratives, told me members of three different generations of the McCullough family, that together create the family's narrative. The most compelling is that of Eli, the patriarch, whose family is murdered and who is himself abducted by Comanche Indians in early adolescence. To say the experience left an impression that remained for the rest of his 100 years is an understatement if ever there was one. This was the formative experience of his life - which says a lot for a many who then rode with the Rangers, served with the Confederates, and basically settled his part of Texas.

His son, Peter, is cut of a different cloth. He is marked much later in life, as an adult, when violence erupts between the Anglos and the Mexicans, pitting neighbor-against-neighbor and, in his case, father-against-son. From the elderly Jeanne Anne, Eli's great-granddaughter, we receive a contemporary account of her family's legacy, and especially the weight she feels to continue building what her forebears began.

By far, the strongest parts of the book are those narrated by Eli, particularly the early chapters with the Comanches. Meyer's description of the tribe being slowly decimated by disease and war are hauntingly beautiful and at the end of the day, it was the Comanches who left the strongest impression of all on me.

I'm not sure I would go so far as to peg this the best book I read all year, but that it is a good book - even a great book - there can be no doubt. This is a portrait of the American West in all of its violent glory. The McCulloughs, all of them, are secondary.

She Rode with the Generals, but her regiment thought she was a man. : The True and Incredible Story of Sarah Emma Seelye, Alias Franklin Thompson

I actually finished this book, which has probably the longest full title of any book I've ever read, over a week ago. I've been too sick since then to properly write about it, which - given the subject matter - is probably case-in-point about how soft we have gone as a people.

So, Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds was the youngest daughter of a real misogynist. God mustn't like misogynists much, or at least not this one, as he had a crop of girls and a single, epileptic son (whom he hated more than the daughters). The long and short is that Miss Edmonds grew up riding, hunting, cording word, and doing all of the other work of a boy, either in a (misguided) attempt to win her father's affection or simply because sons or no, the work still needed doing.

Fast forward until she's 16 and her father wants to marry her off. Sarah runs away from the family farm in New Brunswick, eventually settling in Flint, Michigan. As Franklin Thomson. As author Sylvia Dannett points out, Sarah could not have left home as a single girl and made a go of things on her own in that era. Living as a man was her only option.

When Lincoln calls for volunteers, Franklin enlists with his Flint friends in the Second Michigan. Within the regiment, they laugh at her tiny feet and refer to her alternately as the Beardless Boy and Our Woman, but given that she is the best rider by far, one of the best shooters, and can generally work twice as hard - drilling, marching, chopping firewood, you name - as any other man, no one seriously thinks she is anything other than a man.

Franklin Thompson's Civil War days are awe-inspiring. In addition to serving as a nurse and a postmaster, he is present at many of the major early actions - Bull Run (first and second), Antietam, Seven Days, Fredericksburg - crosses and re-crosses enemy lines as a spy, and serves as an orderly (a role only given to the best riders with the most stamina) to a top general at Fredericksburg. Also, Franklin contracts malaria, suffers fairly massive internal injuries when thrown from a horse, and is never actually hospitalized since that would involve the revelation that Franklin was more Frances than Frank.

When Franklin eventually does desert - due to medical conditions that cannot be treated without real medical care - and melts back into civilian life as Sarah Emma Edmonds, it is as a young lady only three months past her 21st birthday. (So she certainly wouldn't have been laid low by a little bronchitis.) She then goes on to a live several most fascinating decades that see her successfully take on Congress to be awarded a veteran's pension and also be made the only woman member of the GAR.

Edmonds story is humbling, and Dannett does her credit. That said, the full picture of women in the Civil War, as opposed to the biography of one of them women who did so, is best told by De Anne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook in They Fought Like Demons.

Gutenberg's Apprentice

Gutenberg's Apprentice is a delightful little novel. The star, if you will, is young Peter Schoeffer a scribe-on-the-make (this is the fifteenth century, after all), who is devastated to be recalled from Paris to Mainz, Germany, by his foster father in order to become part of a harebrained new scheme to print books. Nothing could be more anathema to Peter's tastes and world view. Still, duty beckons and he enters into an apprenticeship with the inimitable Johann Gutenberg. The rest, as they say, is history: Gutenberg, his business partner (Johann Fust, Peter's foster father), his apprentice, and the rest of the printing team accomplish the impossible by reproducing the Bible using a printing press.

Reading this book, what most impressed me was actually the power of the Church. In twenty-first century America, it's easy to forget how all-encompassing and all-powerful the church was several centuries ago. Other books set in the approximate time period (The Midwife of Venice, for example, or Year of Wonders) certainly touch on the theme. Alix Christie hammers it home: one could do nothing - including print a book - without the explicit permission of the Church. In many respects, people's lives were not their own, a point worth remembering when thinking back on (European) history.

I would be remiss not to add that I enjoyed Christie's writing. Her characters were real, without feeling forced, and she really captured the essence of life in the Middle Ages, without belaboring the point. Often when reading fiction, I complain that the action unspools too slowly or that the author is in a hurry toward the end, but Christie committed none of those grave errors. From start to finish, Gutenberg's Apprentice was a pleasure to read. Reading the author's note and discovering how much of the book was true was the icing on the cake for me. Schoeffer, Fust, and (of course) Gutenberg not only really existed, but based on historical records, existed largely as Christie portrayed them. For a connoisseur of excelling historical fiction, there are few happier conclusions than learning that it really happened the way the author said.

Avenue of Mysteries

How disappointing.

John Irving is a master of improbable characters facing improbable circumstances. I have read - and loved - many of his books that fit this mold. (A Prayer for Owen Meany is the best example of this style - and still the funniest book I have ever read - but A Son of the Circus and The World According to Garp also fit this general mold.)

In Avenue of Mysteries, the characters and circumstances both crossed the line from improbable to impossible, but worst of all, the entire book felt forced. Also, I don't think I laughed out loud a single time. There's no rule that says Irving must make me laugh, but I have come to expect it and certainly appreciate it.

The premise of Avenue of Mysteries is that Juan Diego, a Mexican-American author who loathes to be identified as such, travels to the Philippines to fulfill a promise he made decades before to a man whose name he does not know. This trip allows (causes? forces?) Juan Diego to reflect back on his childhood in Mexico: his beginnings living in a dump with his equally improbable sister, who has a gift for readings minds and knowing the future. In the course of his travels, Juan Diego meets two women, Miriam and Dorothy, whose acquaintance dramatically alters the nature of his travels.

All of which is to say that I believe Avenue of Mysteries is Irving's most nonsensical, dare-I-say-absurd, novel to date. Had I not actually been in the Philippines, feeling Juan Diego's very real pain over the traffic in Manila and the state of the city (yes, bomb sniffing dogs are everywhere), I probably wouldn't have finished it. It's also completely believable that visiting Manila would remind Juan Diego entirely too much of Mexico - Irving's sentence to that effect early in the book was probably the most realistic bit!

I don't normally go seeking other reviews to include here, but I was so disappointed in this novel that I had to see if it was me or if it was Irving. Judging by the USA Today review, it was me. From their review: "Irving weaves together two vibrant storylines into a charmingly inventive novel."

USA Today also gave it four stars, where as I am included to think that one is sufficient.

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

Cokie Roberts's Founding Mothers has been on my reading list for some time. I put off reading it, though, after I finished Capital Dames, Roberts's work on women of a slighter later generation (namely, the Civil War as opposed to the Revolutionary War). Have just finished Founding Mothers, I can say what a mistake it would have been to not read it.

As a refresher, my chief complaint about Capital Dames was that Roberts tells the reader, rather than shows the reader, about the clever letters the women wrote. Rarely does she offer the reader more than a sentence or two at a time. In this way, it's difficult to get a real sense of the women as individuals, and they all kind of run together. Not until the last chapter did I feel like their true voices began to emerge.

In contrast, the women of Founding Mothers - Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, Eliza Pinckney, and Jane Mecom chief among them - emerge fully formed. Perhaps it is a testament to these women, that they were made of sterner stuff or wrote with more grace and humor, or perhaps it is the way Roberts approached this book, in a conversational tone full of her own humorous asides, but something here really clicked. (And speaking of asides, Mecom was the youngest sister of Benjamin Franklin, and his lifelong correspondent. She fares much better in Founding Mothers than in Book of Ages, which is entirely devoted to the Franklins' correspondence.)

Roberts opens with a disclaimer that these were extraordinary women, women who had the ear of the Founding Fathers, and that their experiences were not representative of the vast majority of women of their time. Fair enough, but Roberts also delves into the existence of the ordinary woman, where possible, and as it fits neatly within the narrative. Her account of women soldiers in the Revolutionary War is fascinating, particularly in contrast to the way those of the Civil War were treated. The former received official recognition and pensions; the latter were shunned and shamed for decades. She also examines the (slow) evolution of girls' education and the initial fights over suffrage. For example, in New Jersey women voted in large numbers until 1807 when voter fraud led the state's (need I say: all male) Assembly to clarify that only white males would be allowed to vote. But I digress.

Roberts also devotes no small amount of ink delving into the various scandals of the day, more than one of which revolved around Alexander Hamilton. Evidently, Martha Washington showed good common sense in naming her tomcat Hamilton. Even by today's standards he was a bit of a cad.

In short, Founding Mothers is pure reading pleasure. It is one of the best and most complete books on women's lives, certainly the best I've read since Plantation Mistress.

Five stars.

Ruins of Us

Keija Parssinen's novel is a bit off the beaten path from my usual readings. It is current fiction, set very much in the present, but in Saudi Arabia. This is only natural as Parssinen is herself Saudi-born. The protagonist is Rosalie al-Baylani, the American wife of a Saudi billionaire, whose world is upended when she discovers that her husband has taken a second wife.

Ruins of Us is the story of how she navigates these new and fearful waters, but more importantly it is the story of love, of choices, and of memory. Through Rosalie, Parssinen powerfully explores the essence of choice: what it is to make a choice, how one weighs past and present and future when doing so, and how each choice, no matter how small, is connected to the larger whole of one's life.

Each of the characters, of whom there are primarily five, are well created. These are full-blooded people, complex in nature, and utterly human. They range from 14-year-old Mariam al-Baylani, who years for just a bit more freedom, to her older brother, Faisal, who flirts dangerously with the thrills of extremism. The al-Baylani family feels real and complete, awful and wonderful, loving and resentful. They are, in short, all of the things that real families are at one time or another.

I must confess, given how much I loved the first nine-tenths of the book, I was deeply disappointed in the last 20-odd pages. I felt that Parssinen worked too quickly to wrap up the story after its climax. I would have liked to read more about how the relationships evolved and, particularly in the case of Rosalie, how she determined to make her choice.

Three-and-a-half stars.