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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Best Books of 2004: Nonfiction
"Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age"
By Kevin Boyle
Holt
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The case of Ossian Sweet -- an African-American physician who moved into a house in a white neighborhood in Detroit in 1925, and found himself fighting for his life and property against a mob of locals -- had been nearly forgotten before historian Kevin Boyle unearthed it to write "Arc of Justice," a masterly narrative history. This despite the fact that Sweet, his wife and the friends who took up arms to help protect his home became the center of a sensational trial and were defended by America's most famous and eloquent lawyer, Clarence Darrow. Perhaps that obscurity is deplorable, but it's a boon to the readers of "Arc of Justice," who will find themselves awaiting the verdict just as breathlessly as those who followed the trial at the time. Would Darrow, capable of bringing grown men -- even judges -- to tears, persuade the white jury to confront the manifest cruelty and injustice of their own social order? Sweet's daring in confronting those inequities, Boyle explains, arose from his difficult history; the grandson of a slave and a member of W.E.B. Du Bois' "talented tenth," the African-American elite, he had seen the advance of civil rights ebb and flow in his 30 years. His story reminds us that even before the famous activism of the '50s and '60s, blacks were battling fiercely for their place at the table, but as to whether Sweet won his own battle, you'll have to read the book to find out.
"Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale"
By Gillian Gill
Ballantine
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Florence Nightingale usually gets depicted as a secular saint (in biographies written for children) or a proto-feminist rebeling against her stultifying Victorian family. Gillian Gill gives us a more complicated, prickly and mysterious woman, and a more fascinating, iconoclastic family. She argues that Florence, far from springing fully formed and utterly original from the frowning brow of bourgeois small-mindedness, was really one in a long line of English radicals, freethinkers and even bohemians -- the same world-changing crowd that produced Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin. "Nightingales" supplies most of the satisfactions you expect to get from the great 19th century novels, beginning with a troublesome inheritance problem (right out of "Pride and Prejudice"), a teeming clan of minor characters including a wayward uncle with a brood of illegitimate children, a tyrannical governess and several spurned marriage proposals. And this is all before Gill gets around to the Tolstoyan horrors of the Crimean War, where Nightingale essentially invented modern nursing while tangling with the army brass. Best of all, Gill is no slavering Anglophile (she grew up in Wales and knows better), so the whole saga is delivered with a mercilessly skeptical eye to the pettiness and absurdities of the English class system.
"American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies"
By Michael W. Kauffman
Random House
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Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a crowded theater in a Washington, D.C. still thronged and giddy after the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. The shooting, and the soon-discovered simultaneous stabbing of Secretary of State William H. Seward, threw the city into temporary chaos. Mobs swarmed the Ford Theater and the house where Lincoln lay mortally wounded, searching for souvenirs and suspects, and threatening to lynch several key witnesses. Evidence was lost, or found and then lost later on. Eyewitnesses contradicted each other, rumors spread, myths were hatched and misconceptions spawned. It was a detective's nightmare, even in the low-tech days before "CSI"-style forensics. The truth about who was involved in the assassination conspiracy and why became the mother of endless confusion. Michael W. Kauffman's "American Brutus" is several unlikely combinations rolled into one: a meticulous history with propulsive narrative power, a fresh take on one of the most examined events in American history, and the eminently rational and convincing product of a raging obsession. Kauffman is an independent scholar who designed an unusual database to sort, search and reorganize the vast amount of contradictory and often dubious data about the Lincoln conspiracies. The new light this information shed on the lives and schemes of John Wilkes Booth and his cronies showed him a Booth who was far more cunning, manipulative and talented than conventional wisdom would have us believe. It also helped him write an astonishingly lucid re-creation of the night of the assassination, and the subsequent hunt for the culprits is as suspenseful as it is enlightening.
"Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival"
By Dean King
Little, Brown
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Just when you think the true adventure story is an exhausted genre, Dean King comes along to prove that all it needs is a little sand. Well, make that a lot of sand, and a whole lot of sun to go with it. In 1815, the crew of a Connecticut-based merchant ship were stranded on the very inhospitable northwestern coast of Africa. Near-death in a long boat is followed by near-death on a shore that's really just the edge of the Sahara Desert. Then the men are captured and enslaved by nomads. They survive nightmarish ordeals: days of forced marches on bleeding bare feet under the scorching sun (naked), starvation, thirst, beatings, sandstorms, even plagues of locusts. They see fabled cities and try to fathom their captors' language and customs. One Muslim trader even seems to sympathize with the emaciated infidels, and a scheme involving ransom money, treachery and escape takes form. Based on the written accounts of survivors, "Skeletons on the Zahara" is a little bit H. Rider Haggard, a little bit Jon Krakauer, a little bit Nathaniel Philbrick and a whole lot of gruesome fun.
"The Working Poor: Invisible in America"
By David K. Shipler
Knopf
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This year was ripe with books about what's wrong with America, most of them one-sided polemics with a limited shelf life. By comparison, David K. Shipler's "The Working Poor" has an old-fashioned commitment to telling the whole story -- in this case the reality that millions of Americans who work hard, full-time if not more, can't keep their heads above water. Shipler, a former New York Times reporter, includes some statistics and some exposés (H & R Block's exploitative "rapid refund" offers, for example, designed to siphon off a whopping portion of poor workers' tax refunds), but the heart and soul of the book are the stories of the people Shipler met. They are trapped in the kind of life Barbara Ehrenreich visited in her bestseller "Nickel and Dimed." Shipler freely admits that few of the poor people he met while researching this book are victims, pure and simple; the great strength of "The Working Poor" is that, while sympathetic, it refuses to sentimentalize or idealize its subjects. But he also demonstrates how one mistake can land an otherwise well-intentioned person in an inescapable swamp of debt and dead-end jobs: Crappy dental work costs one woman all her teeth and, unable to wear Medicaid dentures or to afford better ones, she is continually passed over again and again for a job promotion, no matter how diligently she works. It's impossible not to root for these folks, to want to shake the ones who sabotage their own chances, or to cheer on the few who gain a foothold against all the odds.
