The Other King James Version

Gareth Russell, The Six Loves of James I

James Stewart (Stuart) was crowned King of Scotland, probably illegally, at only ten months old, inheriting from Mary, the mother he barely met. He was raised under spartan conditions, with the expectation that he’d eventually command in battle against the English, the French, or his own barons. But by disposition, he was better suited to scholarship, theology, and poetry. Desperate and lonely, he sought companionship wherever he could find it.

Anglo-Irish author and historian Gareth Russell has written multiple biographies of European monarchs’ private lives. Russell admits he chose the “six loves” angle as a deliberate parallel to Henry VIII’s six wives, but pinning down exact numbers is difficult. He has to reconstruct James’ private life through diaries, letters, and other contemporary documents, many written in coded language. Because unlike Henry, James’ multiple dalliances were with men.

Russell describes James’ strict, cloistered education, under Presbyterian clerics who despised anything even slightly feminine. They taught him to distrust his mother’s legacy, women’s advice, and anything nurturing or fair within himself. (Poetry, back then, was highly manful, and James became an accomplished lyricist.) They also mostly denied him any friends his own age. His childhood seems bleak and lonely; no wonder he rebelled when he came of age.

Even before reaching adulthood, James began the royal prerogative of keeping “favorites.” These were all men; he showed little interest in women, either erotic or platonic. Rumors of James’ relationships ran rampant, though his contemporaries described them only obliquely, as addressing them directly would’ve been unseemly. Courtiers described James’ male favorites as “minions,” a word that had judgmental connotations that modern English has largely lost.

Understanding James’ relationships in modern terms is difficult. In early modern Scotland and England, sexuality was an action, not a state of being; the word “homosexual” wouldn’t be coined for centuries. Russell includes a detailed appendix on the processes of translating Jacobean-era social descriptions into modern English, because like race, sexual identity is a social construct, one which James’ contemporaries, like ours, often deployed maliciously.

In this book, Russell attempts to write a strict biography of James’ private life, not a history of his political reign. This proves difficult. Back when monarchs had actual political power, it was often difficult to separate kings’ private and public lives, especially when kings like James plied his favorites with the one gift a chronically cash-strapped monarch could give: aristocratic titles. Private life and public power were inextricably entwined.

Gareth Russell

James broadly favored good-looking men in their early to middle twenties. Most shared his scholarly inclinations, though in Russell’s telling, at last one favorite was a doofus whom James thought he could rehabilitate. At this late date, it seems painfully naïve to pretend James didn’t have sexual relationships with men, though his association with the King James (Authorized) Bible has made admitting that difficult for some commentators.

But again, James wasn’t homosexual in the current sense. He apparently never loved his queen consort, Anna of Denmark, though he certainly respected and trusted her. Sometimes he seems to have even liked her. They had seven children, and when Anna died, James was legitimately grief-stricken. Russell also identifies at least one, possibly two women James had as mistresses, affairs noted for their passion but not depth or durability.

From the monarchy of Scotland, James graduated to the monarchy of England. The English crown had less power under constitutional standards, but more prestige, and becoming King of England entangled James in European power politics. James’ willingness to trust male favorites with court authority left him vulnerable to aristocratic criticism, especially as he disfavored foreign wars, which contemporaries disparaged as terminally feminine.

Then as now, calling a man “feminine” was the highest insult.

In Russell’s telling, James’ private life seems a balance of contrasts. His strict Calvinist upbringing, with its disdain for women and femininity, probably influenced his relationships with men, in ways his teachers never intended. He wrote extensively on theology, but was ambivalent toward faith. He was proudly Scottish, but barely visited the nation after becoming King of England. He loved his favorites so deeply that he jeopardized his kingdom.

Most important, there’s no separation between King James and James Stewart. He trusted his wife, his lovers, and his sons with remarkable power. He experienced passionate love but jealously guarded the royal prerogatives, eager not just to be king, but to be seen as majestic. All subsequent British monarchs have descended from James, through a distaff line. He wasn’t always prudent, but he was always King.

Radium, Capitalism, and America

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 117
Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, and D.W. Gregory, Radium Girls

In the early 20^th Century, American industry was all a-flutter over this new-fangled mineral the Curies discovered in France: radium. Rare and expensive, but highly charged, radium had early commercial uses in patent medicines, cancer treatments, and even cosmetics. But it had its most lucrative boom in luminous paint. Radium paint appeared in wristwatches, dashboard instrument dials, and other technical processes. The women who hand-painted those dials were paid well.

When British author Kate Moore started reading about the radium fad, which happened mostly between the World Wars, she discovered that nearly everything published dealt with the science and the scientists. Nobody ever compiled much about the dial-painters, who were almost exclusively women in their teens and twenties. But the dial-painters paid the highest price for industrial radium, which caused sarcomas, osteoporosis, and a revolting disorder called Radium Jaw.

So Moore decided to close the gap. She pored through countless documents, many of which had remained in storage for decades or never seen outside the family, to reconstruct the lives of blue-collar women frequently overlooked by mainstream historians. Moore reveals a handful of young women whose modest ambitions included the desire to become wives, mothers, artists, or entrepreneurs. History had other plans, turning them into spokespeople for the changing times.

Radium dial-painters in Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois, used techniques first pioneered in painting expensive bone china. The painters mostly started work around age fourteen or fifteen; Moore says one started painting aged only eleven. They used camel-hair brushes, and to accurately paint small numerals, they got their brushes to a fine point by putting the bristles in their mouths. Thus they ingested microscopic amounts of radium.

But saying “microscopic amounts” does the poisoning an injustice. Radium bonded with calcium in their bones, where it emitted constant radiation with a half-life beyond a millennium. Years after leaving their jobs, many women began experiencing the first common symptom: tooth decay. But their teeth were only the external symptom. Their entire lower jaws, exposed directly to radium, were rotting out of their mouths. Many witnessed their mouths crumble.

Though the women had were fortunate to find doctors who believed them, and helped them seek treatment, the medical establishment refused to believe radium was dangerous. Not just medicine, either—their employers, backed with armies of attorneys, stonewalled the legal system to prevent having to accept responsibility for their former workers. Using legal maneuvers that sound suspiciously familiar a century later, they abused the courts to remain rich and untouchable.

The companies, U.S. Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company, shared a common technique: deny and stall the proceedings until the women died, almost all painfully and ignominiously. If they outlived the women, the cases lacked a plaintiff, and culpability went away. Thus these companies pioneered the literal process of privileging their profits over workers’ lives, an approach that remains commonplace today.

Grace Fryer, unofficial captain
of the New Jersey radium girls

Dial-painters, who were again almost entirely women, began working as teenagers around 1917; nobody was held legally responsible for their suffering and death until 1938. The decades-long slog through medical and legal delays presaged the hurdles faced by many working-class Americans in subsequent decades, suffering injuries caused by silica, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and other pollutants. The dial-painters simply came first, thus paving the way for others.

Worse, industrial stonewalling techniques remain commonplace today. Though the dial-painters’ ordeal led to America instituting worker safety regulations, many companies now simply move manufacturing to unregulated economies in Latin America or the Pacific Rim. There, they repeat the pattern of hiring teenagers with slim, lithe fingers, working them to capacity, then denying responsibility for their workplace injuries, which sometimes manifest only years later.

Playwright D.W. Gregory recounts the New Jersey dial-painters, whose suffering came first, and whose legal struggles captivated an American public basking in the glow of that other innovation, the wire service. Gregory presents a snappy, fast-paced memory play, depicting one painter, Grace Fryer, and her struggle to receive her day in court. Backed by volunteers and her fellow dial-painters, Grace militarizes national media to get public opinion on her side.

Despite what you’d expect, Gregory’s play was produced fifteen years before Moore’s book appeared; Moore cites Gregory in her bibliography. Gregory’s version is both quicker and more intimate, eschewing the technical details and knowledge Moore lavishes. One could read these as two versions of the same story: one personal and close, the other inclusive and exhaustive. They’re two ways of looking at an event that changed America’s relationship with the moneyed class.

The Courage to Change a Broken World

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 115
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

Paul Farmer, Harvard-trained MD, had Haitian friends in his youth, so traveling to Haiti seemed the natural choice. When he arrived, he discovered a kind and magnitude of poverty that he couldn’t believe still existed within the United States’ sphere of influence. Moved by the plight of the suffering, he made Haiti his life’s work, teaching and treating patients part of the year at Harvard, so he could dedicate most of the year to Haiti.

Journalist Tracy Kidder discovered Farmer’s medical mission while reporting on the American invasion of Haiti in 1994, an invasion undertaken for supposedly benevolent purposes, to restore Haiti’s elected government. Kidder encountered Farmer because Farmer didn’t hesitate to name the discrepancies between the American mission, and what Americans actually did. Farmer’s confrontational style forced American diplomats to examine their choices. It also forced Kidder to question his own motivations as a journalist.

The Paul Farmer whom Kidder describes grew up relatively poor and rootless in the American Southeast. Trailer park denizens were “his people.” But he was also a hard worker, a speedy student, and an amiable, gregarious personality. He made friends and connections with an ease that might make others jealous. He maintained friendships with wealthy patrons and university peers, but also learned to speak Haitian Kreyol fluently, and won trust among the country’s chronically exploited peasantry.

This isn’t so much a biography, as a Boswell-like immersion in the subject’s life. Kidder follows Farmer to his free clinic in Haiti’s Central Plateau, among the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. Farmer and Kidder walk along unpaved switchback roads through steep valleys, delivering medications to agrarian peasants who consider Farmer a literal wizard. Despite being younger than Farmer, Kidder often struggles to maintain Farmer’s breakneck pace and athleticism.

Although Haiti was the Western Hemisphere’s second nation to overthrow European colonialism, it never achieved the prosperity or stability of its older cousin, the United States. American slaveholders couldn’t abide a nearby neighbor populated by rebellious slaves, and never recognized Haiti until after its Civil War. Throughout the Twentieth Century, Haiti served as the proxy battlefield between America and France for hegemony over the nominally democratic world, a battle that propped up anti-democratic strongmen like the Duvaliers.

Dr. Paul Farmer

Farmer, moved by the peasants’ plight and the social mores of his Roman Catholic upbringing, saw bringing medicine to Haiti as his personal mission. But by “personal,” he didn’t mean “individual.” Kidder herein profiles several prominent allies, including Ophelia Dahl (daughter of Roald) and Jim Kim who participated in his mission. Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health, managed to parley several bouts of good luck into a longstanding project. These elements included wealthy benefactors, and Farmer’s own medical celebrity.

Two widespread diseases in Haiti, which dominated Farmer’s early career, were drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS. Though neither disease originated in Haiti, mean-spirited Northern PR spun those diseases together with Haitian identity in the world’s imagination. This meant that Partners in Health, backed with a comfortable but not large endowment, became a global leader in TB and AIDS treatment. Farmer’s mission suddenly went from regional and personal, to global. Farmer got dragged along with it.

Kidder was present to watch much of this sudden growth. He set out to write about Farmer’s work in Haiti, but during the writing, he accompanies Farmer on trips to Peru, France, Russia, and elsewhere. Kidder chronicles Farmer’s transition from a simple Haitian country doctor—something Kidder quotes Farmer saying he only wanted to be—to a transnational medical diplomat, visiting medical conferences in Europe and North America, and treating TB patients in Latin American slums and Russian prisons.

Throughout, Farmer is driven by his personal Christianity. Though Farmer eschews doctrine, and shows impatience with formal theology, he heeds the Gospel’s message of feeding and comforting “the least of these.” Kidder repeatedly Farmer citing a “preferential option for the poor,” a term from Liberation theologian Gustavo Guitierrez. Among Farmer’s allies is a former Salesian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Farmer embodies the self-effacing service described in the Gospels, and too often ignored by many First-World Christians.

This book shipped in 2004, as Farmer’s celebrity reached new heights, and describes a man with benevolent goals still before him. Three years later, Farmer died unexpectedly, on an outreach visit to Rwanda, his desire to retire to his inland clinic unfulfilled. This biography testifies to the good which First-World citizens can achieve, if we channel our privilege toward those in need. When we use our advantages to serve others, the world changes around us.

The History of Women and their Sexual Choices

Jennifer Wright, Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

This may shock and astound some people, but in the 19th Century, people actually had sex. This has been redacted from most pop histories, which present the era as either a bastion of restraint, or a desert of sexual repression. But just know that, if you think that, you believe a fable that later people sold you. Before the Gilded Age, people frequently had sex, and then as now, they didn’t want to get pregnant.

It’s hard to avoid the phrase “then as now” when reviewing this biography of Madame Restell, old New York’s most famous abortionist. This partly reflects pop historian Jennifer Wright’s intentions, as she deliberately compares the Tammany Hall era with our own. But it also bespeaks how much of history’s seedier side later historians bowdlerized. Wright doesn’t just restore Madame Restell to American history, she shows readers how much of history we’ve had withheld from us.

First, her name wasn’t Madame Restell. Ann Lohman, née Sommers, née Trow, reinvented herself as a sophisticated French physician, when she was actually a working-class immigrant from northern England. Like millions, she entered America through Ellis Island, looking for work, only to find an America overcrowded with similar immigrants. Despite being a skilled laborer, she couldn’t readily find work. She did find, however, that Manhattanites often had sex recklessly, and wanted to purge the evidence.

Some women in 1830s New York went into sex work because it paid well. Others took factory or domestic service jobs, but found bosses who saw their employees as essentially their personal harem. And some already simply had as many children as they could afford to raise. Again, the phrase “then as now” seems germane. Ann Sommers apparently apprenticed herself to a Manhattan compounding pharmacist, and soon started selling contraceptives. That word “apparently” looms large.

Jennifer Wright has written multiple pop histories about important people (mostly women) or events in American history. This is apparently her first book to spotlight just one individual. She works heavily from primary sources, which mostly means newspapers, from the heyday of American newspaper publishing. And that, in turn, means wringing the most salient facts from lurid 19th-Century scandal rags. During Madame Restell’s time, journalists weren’t overly burdened with professional ethics or commitment to accuracy.

Jennifer Wright

Wright therefore must frequently extract the details of Madame Restell’s life from what her detractors didn’t say. (Restell herself apparently didn’t keep a diary, and therefore isn’t her own primary source.) Many of Restell’s accusers claim her wanton abortion practices were potentially deadly to women, for instance, yet they consistently failed to find one dead woman from Restell’s roster. This apparently means that, unlike many of her peers, Restell had no blood on her hands.

We know, from reliable testimony, that Madame Restell performed surgical abortions. No record exists, however, of where she learned the skills, much less how she learned them with such accuracy that she left few dead or maimed patients, something her peers couldn’t say likewise. We also don’t know where Restell learned her other skills. In addition to selling pharmaceutical contraceptives and performing abortions, she apparently also served as a midwife, adoption agent, and marriage counselor.

Restell gained notoriety, both for her effectiveness, and her personal boldness. Wright finds evidence of Restell’s notoriety in newspapers as far afield as Texas and Wisconsin. Apparently her reputation stretched nationwide during an era when news was limited to the speed of print. Restell was so effective, reliable, and safe—during a time when credentialled doctors were frequently quacks—that she became certifiably rich, plowing her money back into ventures like banking and land development.

This isn’t just one notorious woman’s biography. Madame Restell arose from a specific historical era, and Wright recreates that era for us. Restell’s business arose against a background of conflicting forces: urban industrialization caused gender roles to change rapidly. The women’s movement commenced, but because first-wave feminists were largely Quakers, they had little interest in sexual liberation. The slave economy, followed by the Civil War, created ripples that weren’t always obvious until many years later.

Wright’s biography recreates Restell’s life and times, including times that, in schoolbook American history, has often been shamelessly sanitized. Wright restores the era’s nuance, when social upheaval made abortion something women both despised and needed. But like the best literature, Wright’s history is equally about us, and how today’s social upheaval resembles the Tammany Hall era. She encourages us to learn from Madame Restell, and warns us what might happen if we fail to learn.

The First Church of Charles Darwin

Nick Spencer, Darwin and God

Charles Darwin studied for the priesthood in his youth. Many readers already know this, and have framed this fact to explain or dismiss the idea that Darwin entertained secret religious convictions. Nick Spencer, a British public academic specializing in the intersections of religion and politics, wondered what Darwin’s history meant in context. Fortunately, Darwin wrote extensively on the topic, leaving behind copious primary sources for future scholars.

Darwin came descended from two categories of religious dissidents. His mother’s family, the Wedgwoods, were industrialists with Unitarian beliefs; while his father harbored doubts and became a sort of sceptic, while encouraging young Charles not to voice questions too loudly, because they were rude. Caught between these forces, and unsuccessful in his medical studies, Darwin shrugged his way into Anglicanism, and started studying theology as a career track.

In his youth, Darwin professed “a sort of Christian” belief, a quote Spencer uses generously, because it reflects Darwin’s conflicted position. The future natural philosopher repeated the motions of early Victorian upper-class Christianity, which meant diligent study of books and public politeness, but not necessarily feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Christianity, in the early 19th Century, was simply expected of Britain’s entrepreneurial classes.

But he never had any particular faith. His letters and private journals, which Spencer uses as his chief source, reveal that Darwin questioned whether he could undertake the ceremony of ordination with a clear conscience, since it required him to attest a strongly felt spiritual calling. Darwin was squeamish about telling such a bold lie. When the opportunity to sail on the HMS Beagle as Captain FitzRoy’s confidante came available, Darwin jumped on it.

These early years, Spencer describes only loosely, because Darwin left fewer notes than later, and Spencer appears reluctant to speculate too far beyond his primary sources. His Beagle voyage, however, opens new vistas for Spencer’s documentation. Beginning with this voyage, Darwin began keeping detailed personal notebooks, and sending lengthy letters home to England. His writings began showing increasing doubts about polite Victorian public theology.

Spencer’s remarkably brief (under 130 pages) book doesn’t spend much time on Darwin’s scientific accomplishments; he apparently believes that, if you’re reading him, you’re already aware of Darwin’s science. Rather, he shows foremost interest in how the increasing friction between Darwin’s childhood beliefs, and the evidence he collected from the surrounding world, became something he couldn’t reconcile. One or the other eventually had to go away.

Charles Darwin

Copious correspondence with his future wife, with leading British and American public intellectuals, and with British gentleman clergy, reveals Darwin’s mind brimming with questions. Not necessarily “doubts,” as that would imply moving away from deeply held moral convictions, which he never particularly had. However, he increasingly needed closure on questions about life, suffering, and death, which Christianity couldn’t provide. Especially after Annie Darwin, his favorite daughter, died.

According to Spencer, Darwin never became an atheist, unlike his most vocal adherents today. Indeed, though he saw the enforced cheerfulness of Victorian Christianity as untenable, he couldn’t entirely reject the idea that a universe as complex as ours needed a Creator somehow. He just couldn’t accept upper-class Britain’s dominant theology. He happily accepted the newly minted term “agnostic,” because he had no alternate theory to explain his tumultuous world.

Spencer describes Darwin’s move away from religion as paralleling the movements in science in the 19th Century. Previously a spare-time hobby for gentlemen, many of them clergy, science was instead becoming a discipline in its own right. This parting of ways meant that investigations of the physical world needed to emerge from a pursuit of truth, not from one’s existing beliefs. This was a transition which many Anglican churchmen resented.

Despite that tension, Darwin retained an amicable relationship, not only with scientists and academics, but with theologians. He counted many churchmen as friends, corresponded professionally with others, and used these relationships to test his still-changing religious beliefs. He had his children christened in church, and gave generously to the parish; he remained, in short, a proper Victorian gentleman. He just couldn’t believe in any kind of personal God anymore.

In Spencer’s description, Darwin’s falling-off isn’t a “crisis of faith,” because he never much had faith. He simply stopped giving intellectual assent to a particular kind of Christianity, and felt no inner moral pull to any other religion. Told this way, substantially in Darwin’s own words, Spencer makes Darwin’s struggle feel timely and relevant today. Because the old practices are falling away, and there’s nothing much to take their place.

How One Girl Conquered African Chess

Tim Crothers, The Queen of Katwe: One Girl's Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion

Katwe is one of the poorest slums in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, one of the poorest nations in Africa, Earth’s poorest continent. Children born in Katwe have little hope of improving their lives. That includes Phiona Mutesi, whose mother says she was “probably” born in 1996; that’s as specific as she can be. Phiona would’ve spent her life hawking food from roadside stalls, except an accidental encounter helped her discover her hidden talent: chess.

Sportswriter Tim Crothers has crafted an epic of how one teenager, with everything against her, became a national champion and an international competitor, in a game dominated by children of the well-off. Crothers’ book serves as a biography of Mutesi, of the Christian missionary who unlocked her surprising capability, and of the urban squalor pit that brought them together. Crothers’ writing sometimes struggles to incorporate his many themes, but it’s difficult not to feel moved.

In 2002, Robert Katende, a former child soccer phenom, graduated engineering college without direction for his adult life. A Uganda native who grew up poor, he’d found religion during an extended hospital stay, so he accepted a commission from an American missionary program to teach soccer to boys in Katwe. His principal attraction to Katwe’s youth was that he brought actual regulation soccer balls into slums where kids played with balls made from banana leaves.

Despite immediate popularity, some boys couldn’t participate in Katende’s soccer program: they were so poor, even insignificant injuries could bankrupt their families, so soccer, a contact sport, was impossible. So Katende brought an inexpensive chess set into Katwe. The game was so exotic that the local language, Luganda, had no word for “chess,” yet five boyds proved eager students of the primarily intellectual game. One boy’s sister tagged along to practice one day, without warning.

Phiona Mutesi had almost no formal education, because her mother put her to work, aged about three, to protect the family from destitution. It was an intermittently successful effort. She was probably nine years old when she barged into Katende’s all-boys’ chess lessons. Yet Phiona proved so adept at thinking several moves ahead that she quickly outpaced Katende’s ability to coach her. Within two years, she beat every Ugandan chess champion in her age bracket.

Phiona Mutesi

Within six years, Phiona was Uganda’s national champion, and traveled to international tournaments, playing European and American competitors from wealthy backgrounds. Phiona sat opposite children of the white middle and upper classes before, Crothers admits, she knew how to read. Soon her story wasn’t just about chess. She became the only African her competitors’ sponsors ever encountered, possibly their only direct encounter with truly abject poverty. How many Phionas, Crothers wonders, has the world overlooked?

Crothers’ writing requires some effort. He works to maintain focus on his main characters, but real life, as journalists know, is often sloppy, lacking a narrative through-line. Thus, apart from a brief prologue, it takes seventy pages to bring Phiona into her own story. As Crothers’ mixed biography of Phiona, Katende, and Katwe generally moves among several themes, there are visible seams; chapter breaks sometimes feel like fault lines. Crothers clearly isn’t experienced in long-form.

Notwithstanding these form problems, Crothers crafts a complex, multi-pronged narrative that will attract multiple audiences. Readers of nonfiction and biography will enjoy Katende’s and Phiona’s struggles to emerge from poverty and become their own individuals. Fans of history and iinternational policy will find these protagonists’ stories informative to understand a nation that’s still terra incognita to most American and European audiences. And Christian readers will love how the heroes’ faith guided them through trying times.

Originally released in 2012, when Phiona was probably about sixteen, this book has enjoyed a recent push from Sports Outreach, the mission network that sponsored Robert Katende’s original mission. It also received a 2016 Disney film adaptation. Much of this re-release push has come from Christian sponsors, but this book isn’t exclusively Christian; non-religious readers will find plenty to enjoy, too. Crothers’ mix of history, biography, and sports will engage a complex and diverse audience.

This isn’t the kind of book that general readers often seek out. Its two main themes, chess and African poverty, aren’t exactly big audience grabbers. Yet despite Crothers’ occasional difficulty welding his many themes together, he convincingly sells his story. He’s storyteller enough that his journalism feels like a campfire tale. Perhaps this working-class reviewer can offer no better praise than to say, this book made me stay up past my bedtime to keep reading.

Fuck Picasso

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Seven
Ed Harris (actor/director), Pollock

In 1949, LIFE Magazine published an inside spread about a little-known New York painter named Jackson Pollock. Though he’d snagged occasional high-dollar commissions, nobody outside Manhattan’s intelligentsia knew Pollock until LIFE made him globally famous. Suddenly, canvases comprised of acrylic flowed over the surface, some larger than dining tables, fetched six and seven figures at auction. But this also commenced the artist’s irretrievable slide into self-destruction.

Actor Ed Harris became interested in Jackson Pollock when his father purchased a biography, for no other reason than he believed Harris physically resembled Pollock. As a self-taught expert, Harris never considered anybody but himself to direct this, his directorial debut; he floated several actors, but ultimately decided nobody but himself could enact his vision. This could have descended into an insufferable vanity project. But it does so much better.

Harris commences Pollock’s story in 1941. A 4-F Army reject with useless art credentials and no income, he’s crashing in his brother Sande’s plush apartment. He considers himself an unrecognized genius; his peers consider him a crashing drunk. Enter Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), a fellow budding painter seeking professional connections. She recognizes in Pollock the same genius he envisions, and pauses her own career to foster his.

This poses significant problems. By sacrificing herself (her career wouldn’t resume until after his death), Krasner becomes both Pollock’s inspiration, and his enabler. Because Pollock really is a raging alcoholic, numbing himself to a world so chaotic that sensitive, wounded souls like him can’t withstand the pressure. Krasner quickly discovers that Pollock’s genius arises from his damage; the more tumultuous their life together, the more profound of art he creates.

And it is, undoubtedly, profound art. If you’re unfamiliar with Jackson Pollock, he created his most influential paintings by flowing paint onto the canvas from above, using the brush like a conductor’s baton. The resulting images are chaotic, frenzied, and completely missing any recognizable object; when people say “I don’t understand modern art,” they’re probably thinking Jackson Pollock. But his work perfectly encapsulated the reeling, frenetic post-WWII years.

As director, Harris lavishes attention onto Pollock’s creative process. His style is quick and gestural. In his earliest artworks, he slathers paint onto the canvas directly from the tube—an innovation made possible only by technological advances in quick-drying acrylic paint. Later, working in a converted upstate New York horse barn, he unlocks his later drizzling style by accident, making new expressions possible that no prior artist ever considered.

Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock, possessed by the muse

Therein lies an important theme of this movie: what is art? To Pollock and Krasner, art communicates something internal to the artist; the audience is a latecomer to the process. As his paintings convey Pollock’s inner turmoil, his personal life becomes more ordered. Pollock and Krasner wed, sober up, and become contributing members of their community. He successfully moves his inner pandemonium outward, where art makes the artist more human.

In this environment, art is intensely personal. Where art conservatories teach aspiring painters to mimic the masters, Pollock strives to create something unique to himself. He succeeds, but not without cost. He becomes disdainful of other painters; once, compared to Pablo Picasso, Pollock snipes: “Fuck Picasso.” It’s a beautifully understated moment expressing how, in becoming himself, he has become tragically disconnected from others. Famous, but alone.

But the clamoring public expects Pollock to repeat past successes, even as his inner struggle has moved onward. Trapped into mimicking himself, his psychological struggles reassert themselves, and he lashes out spitefully at anybody who dares approach him like a friend. As he descends back into drunkenness, alienates Lee Krasner (who supports his work but increasingly despises him), and takes a mistress, he becomes a caricature of the malignant genius.

There’s a moment, in the penultimate scene, that any artist will find difficult to watch. Driving drunk, unable and unwilling to divorce his wife, bereft of creative outlet only seven years after achieving fame, he looks at his beautiful but vacuous mistress (Jennifer Connelly), and the life drains from his eyes. Though physically alive when he drives over an embankment, we witness his dying moment. It’s painful to behold.

Renaissance artists created art to praise God—a God not all believed in, but nevertheless. Without God, art becomes something different, something personal. This movie suggests that’s why artists are frequently self-destructive, because they’ve parceled themselves out to the often unappreciative public. Harris has created an engaging story of how art consumes, in every way, the best artists. Like art, it’s beautiful and tragic.

Our Incredible Shrinking Globe

Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

It’s exceedingly difficult to separate books about economic forces from one’s opinion about these forces. Yale economist Jeffrey E. Garten has crafted a remarkable book about globalization, anchored not to abstruse mathematics and distant political machinations, but to the biographies of ten exceptional people who pioneered modern transnationalism. This book is readable, informative, and personable. But this old Distributist can’t help thinking Garten has overlooked his most important points.

Most readers understand globalization, if not from high-speed bond trades and massive offshoring of blue-collar jobs, then from election-year stump speeches about trade deficits and the TPP. Garten recasts this debate in personal, humane terms. Enterprising individuals devised ways that goods, populations, and ideas could move freely, unshackled by prior limitations. This ambitious invention puts all human experience within ordinary persons’ grasp, though never without cost.

Garten unpacks ten important lives that, in various ways, made our world smaller and more accessible. Some are world leaders, like Genghis Khan, Margaret Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping. Some are financiers and business leaders, like banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, oil baron John D. Rockefeller, and Intel CEO Andrew Grove. And some you’ve never heard of, like communications entrepreneur Cyrus Field and revolutionary statesman Jean Monnet.

To a certain extent, Garten acknowledges globalization’s loaded, explosive implications. He describes “the two sides of globalization—the dislocation and destruction that it can inflict and the peace, modernization, and prosperity that it can create.” Sounds fair-minded, right? But this quote describes Genghis Khan, a name virtually synonymous with violent nationalism and rapacity. Not exactly a name the Trans-Pacific Partnership sponsors want hung on their efforts.

Admittedly, as Garten describes, Genghis standardized commerce along the Silk Road (thus this book’s title), separated governance from religion, and established history’s first trans-continental postal service. He also slaughtered dissidents, starved peasants, and shipped the spoils of war home to Mongolia, which produced nothing besides warriors. That thread, of how globalization concentrates power and its attendant wealth upward, permeates this entire book—though the implicit downsides are often buried.

Jeffrey E. Garten

It’s possible to repeat this critical pattern with nearly every chapter. Yes, Prince Henry the Navigator opened trans-oceanic trade and scientific inquiry. He also quickly jettisoned his putative moral justifications in favor of trade, especially the slave trade, a generation before Columbus. Mayer Rothschild created pan-European banking connections that permitted money to trade as freely as goods. He also funded both sides of the Napoleonic Wars, probably prolonging the violence.

Garten’s first three biographies are of out-and-out imperialists: Genghis Khan, Prince Henry, and Robert Clive, the Englishman who subdued India. Of Garten’s ten biographies, only two don’t require Garten to paper over something completely awful: Cyrus Field, who masterminded the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, and Jean Monnet, who laid the diplomatic foundations for the EU. And given the ongoing Euro crisis, Garten must acknowledge well-founded, if blinkered, criticisms of Monnet.

I have two favorite quotes. After an entire chapter lavishing praise upon Margaret Thatcher for undoing the postwar welfare state, steamrolling workers’ rights, and glorifying the financial services industry, Garten writes: “Indeed, the very connectedness that Thatcher’s policies encouraged has created a counter-requirement for more cushions, more redundancies, more advance planning to avert catastrophes—in other words, more government involvement.” That feels like the lede, not a summing-up thought.

Shortly thereafter, Garten writes: “Along among the industry leaders, [Andrew] Grove had the courage to respond to industry slumps by cutting budgets, cutting jobs, and forcing staff to work longer for less money.” Wow, that’s courageous. Did workloads and paychecks return to pre-slump levels? Not according to one IT professional I know in California. Grove, alongside Jobs and Gates, engineered what Jill Andresky Fraser calls the White-Collar Sweatshop.

Rereading everything I’ve written, I realize it appears I hate this book. Not so: Garten has crafted an engaging, human-centered history of a force most private citizens probably consider an impersonal mass. He separates globalization’s facts from the slogans which dominate both sides of the debate, and expounds details too difficult to fit on a protester’s placard. He opened this old Distributist’s eyes to implications I’d never considered.

Rather, I mean Garten writes from a particular position, with a particular goal. His writing serves that goal. Smart, critical audiences can profitably read this book, while recognizing the limitations Garten has set himself. By making globalization human, Garten makes its costs humane. I can express my reservations in straight, uncluttered English, as I couldn’t a week ago. I wish more policy debates were as human-scale and flexible as this.

Death in the Food Factory

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 57
Erika Hayasaki, Drowned by Corn

On the piping-hot morning of July 28, 2010, four young boys climbed inside Bin Number 9 at a western Illinois grain depot to keep the produce moving on high-speed conveyors. They didn't know that OSHA regulations required them to wear safety harnesses when inside a bin, or that management was forbidden to run the conveyors with someone inside, or that the job, defined as legally dangerous, was strictly off-limits to workers under sixteen, as two of them were. They just needed the summer work.

When fifteen-year-old Wyatt Whitebread became trapped in the grainary's downward suction, two friends, Alex "Paco" Pacas and Will Piper, dove in to save him, becoming trapped alongside him. Engulfed in grain and immobilized by its weight, the boys suffered a trauma called "compression drowning," when surrounding weight makes inhaling impossible. Whitebread and Pacas died submerged in loose corn; the effort to rescue Piper took over seven hours and dozens of volunteers. But Piper's journey was just beginning.

Journalist Erika Hayasaki combines George Pyle's factual detail withNick Reding's narrative panache to craft a story of how industrialized, mechanized agriculture squeezes the life from small American towns. This squeezing isn't usually as literal as these boys suffered, though that's becoming increasingly common. But as big-city economic forces strip small towns of meaningful work, forcing teenagers into dangerous jobs under untrained supervisors, Will Piper's odyssey has become painfully familiar.

The deaths in Bin Number 9 were completely avoidable, and left indelible marks on their already impoverished town. But Will Piper, already smoking weed to cope with intractable boredom, found himself plagued with nightmares and survivor's guilt, which compounded his already-present problems. He couldn't hold jobs, dealt drugs to pay bills, and tumbled into disastrous relationships, both sexual and otherwise. After his brief flirtation with small-town heroism, his frequent run-ins with the law made him into a pariah.

Industrialized agriculture incubates the perfect storm of forces to witness how complicated and fractious American life has become today. Everyone needs to eat, but we’ve pushed the process of food creation onto others. We’ve made the means of human survival into low-paid peon work. Meanwhile, the plentiful work and now rural living costs have attracted racial minorities into farming areas once spotlessly white—though much actual work remains strictly segregated by sex.

A mannequin demonstrates the correct way to avoid dying in a grain bin. From the
Department of Agriculture blog essay You Can Die in a Grain Bin in Less Than 60 Seconds

Alienated from his community, seeing his work devalued, Piper became the embodiment of everything scientists agree causes addiction. Life became a self-feeding spiral of shame and avoidance. Without portable job skills, Piper drifted, the epitome of rural disaffection in a culture which openly disparages its own agrarian roots. Will Piper, not Norman Rockwell, represents the real forces and mores driving rural America’s bleak, underpaid hardscrabble lifestyle today.

This almost-book-length essay's official description implies Hayasaki will deal with the social and economic forces that spur underage kids to accept difficult, dangerous work for shameful wages in America's agrarian communities. This is deceptive; in fact, Hayasaki focuses on the long-term consequences Will Piper suffered for surviving. Rather than assessing the overall circumstances coloring rural communities, Hayasaki prefers Piper's character-driven story. This isn't about the disaster; it's about the survivor.

Which is fine. Though I wish Hayasaki addressed the context that made the Bin Number 9 disaster occur, other authors have done so already. Read alongside Pyle and Reding, cited above, Hayasaki's account lays bare the pain plaguing the hearts of contemporary small towns. Though I fear Hayasaki's account is possibly incomplete without the context these other authors provide, committed readers may find this personal tragedy enough to get them reading about the larger social catastrophe.

Too often, the poverty and loss of local control stemming from industrialized agriculture go unaddressed, most especially in those communities hardest hit. Because farmers aren't unified, it's difficult to challenge the monolithic corporations that would rather hire underaged teen workers than deal directly with farmers. Because everybody fears rocking the boat, big festering wounds lurk at the heart of many small American communities. And it risks getting worse before it gets better.

Hayasaki's account may help America begin addressing this painful gulf. If it gets big-city buyers communicating with the small-town farmers who produce the corn they eat, wear, and burn every day, perhaps we've made some incremental progress. Hayasaki's storytelling makes the Bin Number 9 disaster and its aftermath zing with compressed emotional impact. If she doesn't say everything about small town circumstances, she certainly gives the problem a human face.

And that may not be everything America needs, but it's a good solid start.

The Fall of Truman's White House

Robert Klara, The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence

Harry Truman never wanted to be President. A wartime compromise Veep candidate, he inherited the Presidency only 89 days into FDR’s fourth term, and made history, sometimes against his will. But besides a formidable job in dangerous times, Truman also inherited a dilapidated White House. Political historian Robert Klara infuses humor, insight, and panache into his novel-like tale of how Truman rebuilt the Executive Mansion.

Truman received an essentially 18th Century house, suffering terrible subsidence and a rat problem. The Roosevelts, resident at 1600 Pennsylvania for thirteen years, refused their $50,000 annual refurbishment budget as unpatriotic during the Depression and WWII. The resulting neglect, coupled with over a century of haphazard upgrades, conflicting Presidential personalities, and fire during the War of 1812, left Truman a White House ready to collapse.

America’s unlikeliest President, and his struggles to restore America’s most prestigious residence, have been largely forgotten, but make astonishingly gripping reading. With its high-stakes political wrangling, famous names, and cast of thousands, Klara’s narrative resembles a Tom Clancy thriller. That’s no mere hyperbole, since it includes assassination attempts, appalling idealistic intransigence, and the Soviet nuclear research program.

Irish-American architect James Hoban designed the White House as a gentleman’s urban manor, but he built it on spongy reclaimed swampland, erecting its massive sandstone edifice on foundations only eight feet deep. As the Presidential role evolved, an elaborate Georgian mansion appeared increasingly extravagant. Hoban’s interior, built of untreated local lumber, wasn’t updated substantially between 1817 and 1949, and rotted badly.

Klara embroiders what could have been tedious architectural discursions with anecdotes that enliven his story: the time Truman, naked in the tub, nearly fell through the floor, into a formal Blue Room reception below. The precarious antique chandelier that jeopardized a concert pianist’s life. The many fabled White House ghosts which proved to be the sound of rotten superstructure settling. This makes Klara’s tale moving, humane, and often very funny.

More than a building history, Klara writes a biography of Truman’s fraught relationship to the White House. Truman’s wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret, notoriously hated the house. Bess hated the official secrecy that ended her longstanding partnership in her husband’s career. Margaret nearly died when a floor joist collapsed beneath her beloved piano. Truman’s women fled to Missouri every summer, driving a wedge into a formerly close family.

Plagued by professional pressures and the nascent Cold War, Truman spent increasing time in Key West. His centrist views, plainspoken manner, and Midwestern thrift alienated an aristocratic Congress. After a Republican upset in the 1946 midterms, he couldn’t admit his White House was collapsing; the political implications for the “fall” of Democracy’s home address would have been lethal. So he began refurbishments surreptitiously, paying out of pocket.

But Truman’s ferocious re-election brought enough political capital to demand significant upgrades. Just in time, too: as Stalin’s scientists detonated their first plutonium bomb, the President’s role evolved, and with it, his house needs. No longer democracy’s showplace, Truman needed his White House to serve as command center, fortress, and bomb shelter. His architects gutted the old monument, transforming the house and everything within.

Klara combines journalism with deft storytelling, unpacking scorched roof beams and sagging brick foundations so the White House becomes a storied character, rich with events and hidden implications. She proves rife with secrets that reflect her evolving status, and repurposing her for the Nuclear Age reveals secrets throughout American history. Klara’s storytelling manages breathless urgency without resorting to naked hyperbole, no mean feat in political history.

Simultaneously, Klara keeps focus where it belongs. He doesn’t attempt a sweeping Truman biography; rather, his notes direct readers to David McCullough’s renowned Truman for more details. Klara limits himself to how world events, and powerful personalities, transformed one prestigious building. This focus keeps Klara’s story concise, energetic, and readable. His history moves with brisk, novelistic pace and a flair for images and characters.

As history does, Klara’s story brims with multiple players telling multiple stories, some entering and leaving with little explanation. Unlike novelists, who streamline events and characters, Klara remains true to events, meaning readers might feel confused by his constantly evolving dramatis personae. This does require active readership, and good readers might make notes on the endpaper.

Yet Klara’s story never feels cluttered, and rewards eager, curious audiences. Klara’s Truman recognizes his Presidency’s role in changing America, and his White House makes a powerful intersection between America’s elegant past and its post-war world leadership duty. Klara shows Truman renovating America for a new age.

If Life's a Stage, Then All School is Acting Class

Michael Sokolove, Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater

You may not know Lou Volpe’s name, but if you’ve ever seen or acted in a high school production of Les Miserables or Rent, you owe him your thanks. His trailblazing theatre program at Truman High, in Levittown, Pennsylvania, has hosted the public school debuts of these and other storied Broadway plays, proving their viability as amateur productions. In Michael Sokolove’s remarkable biography, Volpe reminds us why education still matters.

For someone who’s contributed so much to amateur theatre, Volpe’s circumstances seem remarkably humble. He’s spent his entire career in one school, cultivating one community’s kids with such dogged persistence that some of his students are third-generation. While his community has crumbled, taking conventional academics with it, Volpe has persevered in an unprestigious art. More important, he has produced graduates ready for adult life.

Volpe’s career is inextricable from Levittown itself. Like its more prestigious Long Island cousin, Levittown, PA, metastasized during the post-WWII building boom. It was a good union town, sending countless husbands and sons to good-paying steel mill jobs. When the mills closed in the 1970s, it left a town unprepared. Now countless grandchildren of original residents, who bought amid hopeless optimism, stay because they can’t afford to leave.

Volpe began teaching English in 1969, and theatre dropped into his lap a few years later. He watched Truman High, a compromise school born from an unpopular merger, struggle to find its identity, with little history and lackluster sports. In an episode so unlikely it defies synopsis, a popular athlete quit wrestling to act in one of Volpe’s plays, giving Truman theatre an anti-establishment edge most theatre teachers would envy.

Lou Volpe

Combining dumb luck with natural curiosity and an immigrant son’s pertinacity, Volpe parlayed early successes into a theatre program so fruitful, even New York and London producers seek his assistance. Truman High’s cool kids join theatre like other schools’ BMOCs join football or business. Theatre, and Volpe, have become Truman’s biggest asset. But in Sokolove’s telling, Volpe’s most successful alumni take lessons from him far exceeding theatre.

Sokolove, who studied under Volpe before theatre found him, entwines Volpe’s biography and career with larger trends in American society and education. While suburban poverty slowly destroys Levittown, and education standards come to favor quantifiable job skills, Volpe persists in something older and more fundamental. Drawing his theatre students from all economic and academic strata, his program rewards one core value: self-discipline.

I suspect Sokolove and Volpe share my opinion that schools do students a severe disservice by fitting them for careers. Life’s most important lessons cannot be tested on a Scantron sheet. Current attempts at standardizing education reward memorizing facts, and discourage individual curiosity. Sokolove reveals recent trends in education that even I had not known, seemingly designed to leave students helpless, apathetic, and dependent on authority.

Michael Sokolove

But I always forget: that’s probably not accidental, is it? Dispirited students graduate to become excellent office or factory drones.

By contrast, Volpe’s theatre program cultivates character and moxie. Sokolove depicts Volpe pushing his actors, demanding they know themselves so they can create their characters. While many of Volpe’s best actors struggle academically, they find his theatre richly rewarding, in ways governments cannot test. Sokolove interviews Volpe’s alumni, who report, sometimes decades later, that they remember Volpe’s greatest lesson: strength of character.

These aren’t students born to luxury, the stereotypical rich arts kids. Many must leave rehearsal early because their families rely on the money from their after-school jobs. Yet even Volpe’s technical positions become hotly contested prizes, which may surprise theatre teachers who’ve gone begging for someone to run the light board. The prize is not necessarily theatre itself; Volpe opens doors into students that regular textbook academics never even acknowledge.

When Volpe retired in 2013, hundreds of his alumni returned for his final show. Some have risen in theatre’s highly competitive ranks, propelled by their experience with a teacher who demanded the best, then showed them how to reach it. Many others, though, left theatre after high school. The most important lesson Volpe taught them wasn’t theatre. It was to know themselves, and always act on what they know.

Sokolove doesn’t disguise his personal affection for Lou Volpe. Nor should he. Most successful people have one teacher who persuaded them to exceed themselves and break new ground. The ripples Lou Volpe created have impact beyond one underfunded school, or one dilapidated suburb. This book reminds us what good teachers do, and should inspire coming generations to discover that one glimmering truth.

I.M. Pei Builds the 20th Century

Jill Rubalcaba, I.M. Pei: Architect of Time, Place and Purpose

Ieoh Ming Pei was born into a Chinese society whose best days seemed behind it. Wracked with revolution, hectored by European capitalists, China appeared to be on its last legs. But Pei’s family stayed ahead of the violence by moving among a succession of Buddhist monasteries, ancestral meditation gardens, and modern urban developments. These ancient and new influences provided Pei’s first education in making buildings both useful and uplifting.

Jill Rubalcaba has a substantial résumé publishing history and historical fiction for middle grade readers. Her publisher is pushing this new biography of IM Pei for readers age twelve and up, but with its lavish illustrations and sweeping human landscapes, adults will find plenty to like as well. You could press it into your kids’ hands if they’re looking for a purpose to drive their lives, or you can display it as art in pride of place in your living room.

Like many Chinese in the years between the world wars, Pei’s family sent their oldest son to study in America. Architecture initially put him off, with its emphasis on rococo design frippery, but Pei happened to hit the field just as Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus pioneers revolutionized the discipline. Suddenly, instead of being the exclusive domain of rich sybarites, artful design promised to allow ordinary people the chance to live in beautiful spaces.

Unable to return to China when the Communists took over, Pei instead joined forces with a Manhattan land tycoon, designing low-cost housing for the post-war economic boom. Though “high art” architects looked down on this kind of work, it proved a valuable learning experience for Pei. He learned, because he had to, how to perform feats of remarkable engineering with scarce materials and less money. This would pay off when he graduated to more ambitious projects.

More than once in this book, Rubalcaba quotes Pei insisting that he has no specific “signature” as an architect. And there’s something to that, inasmuch as he doesn’t incorporate the same ornamentation into every design, like Le Corbusier’s elevated pylons or Maxwell Fry’s picture windows. But with his fondness for radiant natural light, glass architecture, and geometric minimalism, Pei most certainly has his own distinct, and influential, style.

Rubalcaba focuses on just a few of Pei’s buildings (notably not including perhaps his most famous design, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum). These range from well-known and iconic, like his glass Louvre pyramids and Hong Kong’s landmark Bank of China building, to less famous buildings, like Kyoto’s Miho Museum and Beijing’s low-rise Fragrant Hill hotel. Her descriptions of Pei’s ambitious process emphasize architecture as art, not “mere” system.

Importantly, Pei seems to relish challenges. Designs like the Kennedy Presidential Museum and Fragrant Hill were marred from the start by community opposition, bureaucratic intransigence, scarce resources, and budget shortfalls. But the skills Pei first cultivated building postwar housing on a shoestring paid off with interest. He designed elaborate workaround techniques that not only saved the project, but presaged today’s environmental design.

Jill Rubalcaba

And Pei proves important principles which current designers and artists could stand to emulate. He eschews pretentious ornamentation, keeping focus on simple geometric forms which enhance whatever work or leisure happens within their walls. His lack of ostentation breathed new life into the Louvre, which was decaying before his intervention. And his National Center for Atmospheric Research building, designed half a century ago, still looks innovative and new.

Rubalcaba fleshes out her fast-moving but detailed text with breathtaking illustrations. Pei’s preliminary pen sketches give way to detailed design drawings and models, photos of construction in process (Pei importantly appears on his sites, not just designing from some glass-enclosed Manhattan office), and comprehensive landscapes of his finished buildings. Rubalcaba emphasizes Pei’s architecture as doing and living, not art on paper.

She also does a remarkable job situating her subject in his life and times. As she states, Pei’s work is inseparable from the Buddhist gardens and minimalist Chinese design of his boyhood. Her photos document what remains of Pei’s ancestral China, and she incorporates numerous pictures from his life, including interactions with such luminaries as Paul Mellon, François Mitterrand, and Jackie Kennedy.

Rubalcaba dances along the border between children’s book and grown-up art folio, creating a product sure to please anyone who loves great design, fine photography, and contemporary history. She makes Pei come alive through his works, and his buildings come alive through him. This book is a pure pleasure to read, look at, or just to hold.

The Life of Burma's First Citizen

Peter Popham, The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi

It’s amazing, sometimes, how we can admire individuals in the public eye, yet know so little about them. Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Burma’s democratic resistance movement, has drawn international acclaim, celebrity support, and the Nobel Peace Prize; yet her actual identity remains an enigma outside her home country. British journalist Peter Popham tries to explain her life, her work, and her context in this new biography.

Known as Daw Suu to her adherents (literally “Aunt Suu”), the daughter of General Aung San stands as heir to her country’s name and reputation. General Aung San fought the British until he squeezed independence from them, but was assassinated before seeing the free Burmese flag flying. To keep the general’s family under control, the new state gave his widow a diplomatic posting to India, and young Suu grew up mostly abroad.

Like most post-colonial nations, three forces have torn at Burma’s history. The military wants to rule with colonial impunity, as in Pakistan; the intelligentsia wants Western-style democracy, as in India; and people groups that never enjoyed colonial privilege want to restore ancestral identity, as in Biafra. From her adoptive home in England, Suu watched the military, the University of Rangoon, and the Buddhist monks feud for control of the nation.

It’s impossible to detail Suu’s life without investigating the history of her homeland, and Popham doesn’t even try. He minutely examines the forces that led Burma’s nascent democracy into a military dictatorship, and one of Asia’s most developed nations into the pits of extreme poverty. (These passages run to the prolix. Some of Popham’s best passages are also his most technical and difficult; be prepared to soldier through some dense prose.)

For a woman so innately tied, in world narrative, with her country, it may come as a surprise, as it did for me, that she scarcely lived in Burma until her early forties. She attended graduate school in England, married a white man, and had two sons. But she remained in touch with Burma, visiting often, and putting her sons through Buddhist rites of adulthood. She also made a career writing about Burma for Westerners.

Only in 1988, when the increasingly doddery military strongman who ruled her homeland appeared on the brink of collapse, did she return. Even then, she intended it to be a brief stop, lending her father’s name to the burgeoning democracy movement. She had no way of knowing that she would step into a situation where her every action would be freighted with import, her face would energize masses, and she would be unable to leave for twenty-four years.

Popham explains how Suu’s outsider perspective had a profound transformative effect on Burma. In a country where power has always been a zero-sum game (you flourish only at my expense), her spirit of cooperation took the military rulers by surprise. She made inroads against the regime by simply speaking politely. And no matter what, she refused to hit back. Popham acknowledges Suu’s debt, in this, to Gandhi.

This positions her perfectly to communicate her nation’s plight to the outside world. She speaks unaccented Burmese and practices the Buddhism of her deeply religious homeland, but she has a Western education and can speak to Euro-American understanding. As an outsider in both worlds, she has the ability to recognize deeply ingrained prejudices, and subvert them without appearing confrontational.

Some of Popham’s biography is already outdated. It was published in Britain in 2011 before swimming to America this year, and recent changes don’t come up. For instance, Popham makes repeated reference to the fact that Suu has not left the country since 1988, not even to be at her dying husband’s bedside. Not so anymore: earlier this summer, the flagging government let her visit Europe to collect her Nobel Prize.

And despite his best efforts, Popham sometimes comes across as patronizing. He keeps commenting on Suu’s appearance. She’s a beautiful woman, certainly, even now in her late sixties. But nobody would extol young Gandhi’s brooding good looks, surely. Besides, it’s hard for a white European to comment on post-colonial Asia without relying on tropes that would make the late Edward Said pale.

But despite its shortcomings, Popham has crafted a smart, engaging biography of a nation, and its most prominent citizen. He helps white onlookers like me understand not only who Suu is, but why her ongoing campaign matters. And he gives us a model for how the fight for global justice will persevere despite fleeting adversity. Well done.

Reviewer’s Note: this review, and the book in it, were written when Suu was an oppressed outsider leading a resistance movement. After this book and its review, Suu was elected head of state in Myanmar, where she was forced to make the kind of ethical compromises that insiders have to make. Once a Nobel Prize winner and a symbol of resistance, Suu fell on international disfavor. Let this be a lesson: if you want to be internationally loved, never seek nor achieve power over others.

Resisting the Nazis From a Bicycle Saddle

Aili and Andres McConnon, Road to Valor: A True Story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation

At his prime, Italian cyclist Gino Bartali was most famous for winning the Tour de France in 1938 and 1948, the longest gap ever between Tour wins. In the struggle to rebuild democratic Italy after World War II, his victory helped unify the country when struggles between centrist Catholics and the Communist Party almost caused a civil war. Though unknown globally, he remains one of his nation’s icons of sportsmanship.

Only decades later did the world discover how Bartali used his fame and athletics to aid Italian Jews facing systematic persecution during the German occupation. Who better than a renowned cyclist, wanting to keep in shape, to convey sensitive documents and fake ID long distances? And when you want to distract the SS and Polizia from a train smuggling Jews across enemy lines, a sports celebrity can keep all eyes away from the refugees.

Siblings Aili and Andres McConnon reconstruct Bartali’s rise and heyday, from poor roots in an mountain village. At a time when most sports were the exclusive domain of rich sybarites, cycling was refreshingly egalitarian. With only a sixth grade education, Bartali worked for a local bike repairman, learning make-do maintenance skills that would serve him on the professional circuit, saving to buy the secondhand bike that changed his life.

But riding wasn’t a value neutral activity in Bartali’s youth. With the country under the heel of Benito Mussolini, the Fascists used athletes as propaganda instruments. They wanted to reawaken a perceived warrior spirit they believed Italy had lost. The rising star’s every victory got turned into a poster. Bartali, raised by a strict Catholic father to distrust Fascist power, found himself trapped in a monster he couldn’t resist.

So Bartali offered a perfect response: he ignored the machine he was forbidden to criticize. After his first Tour victory, he thanked everybody except Mussolini and the Fascist regime. You can imagine how Il Duce took that slight. But as the “poor boy made good” narrative took Italian fanatics by storm, the state found itself with only one way to silence Bartali: it drafted him, cancelled Italian races, and stopped international sports.

Like that would stop a True Believer. Bartali became Italy’s most famous (or infamous) deserter. And he came under the increasing influence of Cardinal Elia Della Costa, archbishop of Florence. Della Costa taught Bartali how to dance the fine line between law and conscience, and brought him into the conspiracy to rescue Jews from the encroaching machine. To this day we don’t know Bartali’s true contribution to this act of far-reaching heroism.

The McConnons go beyond retelling the story. They are no mere journalists, content to recount the facts of the case. They delve into the emotions behind the circumstances; the history behind seemingly unrelated events; the risk that these heroes took resisting a powerful, intolerant state. Many people involved in Bartali’s story, including his wife and several former teammates, are still alive, and the McConnons interviewed them, conveying their first-hand urgency.

The war put Bartali through serious turmoil. With all the races, and their attendant prize money, on hiatus for several years, he struggled to feed his growing family. His resistance activities nearly cost him his life, including one occasion when his sports heroism couldn’t even save him. Only brief twists of fate kept him off the train bound for Auschwitz. Yet he kept up the fight, because his Catholic faith told him it was right.

He also kept his secrets. Even his wife didn’t know about his heroic interventions until well after the war. Nazi resisters like Bartali often had to work in the dark, and few records were ever kept; even fewer survive. Therefore, we only know as much as survivors tell us, and Bartali said little. In a turn of humility that would seem alien to today’s glory-hungry athletes, he refused to let his sports celebrity take anything from the people he considered the real heroes.

Bartali could have traded on his war heroism. Catholic centrists tried to make him their poster boy after the war, but he refused. Instead, he electrified Italy, and the world, with a come-from-behind Tour victory. This man, prematurely aged by the war, older than nearly any other Tour winner ever, overcame a crushing handicap to win by one of the largest leads ever. Sort of a symbol for postwar Italy, really.

The McConnons brew an exciting stew of sports, history, conspiracy politics, and the war that redefined the modern world. Their narrative holds on tight and brings readers on an emotional ride you won’t forget soon.