Judy Blume: 'I thought, this is America: we don't ban books. But then we did'

'I don't know that you become a writer: you just are' … Judy Blume. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Judy Blume, tiny and smiley and as warmly open as befits the author of seminal novels about growing up Forever…, and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret is sitting in a hotel in London and talking about the hate mail she has received. It comes, she says, every time she speaks out on behalf of Planned Parenthood, an American pro-choice group for mothers.

"I went to a couple of places two years ago and I got seven hundred and something hate-mail warnings – 'We know where you are going to be and we'll be there waiting for you', that sort of thing," says Blume. "My publisher sent me with a bodyguard. He was wonderful, I loved knowing he was there. And nothing happened and probably nothing would have happened, but it was very scary."

It is an incongruous revelation. Blume, 76, is the sort of author who is beloved by her fans, who stretch from the children of today to the adults who read her books when they were growing up, and were astonished at finding a novelist who spoke so clearly, so uncondescendingly, so directly, to their concerns, whether masturbation (Deenie), periods and boobs (Margaret), sex and birth control (Forever…), or death (Tiger Eyes).

Her books have sold 82m copies worldwide since The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo, her first book, was published in 1969. She has been given an award for lifetime achievement from the American Library Association, the Library of Congress living legends award and the 2004 National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. But Blume is also the recipient of a more dubious accolade: she is one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century. Her books have drawn fire from parents ever since the 80s for their frank depiction of puberty and sexuality, from Deenie, the 13-year-old who touches herself in "this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling", to Katherine and Michael, the teenagers who fall in love and have sex – ever so responsibly – in Forever ….

"Deenie, Forever …, every year, somewhere, they're challenged," says Blume. "When I started, in the 70s, it was a good time for children's book writers. Children's reading was much freer than in the 80s, when censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy. My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don't have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don't do this, we don't ban books. But then they did."

Blume's theory is that children read over what they aren't yet ready to understand. Sometimes, she says, "kids will actually go to Mom or Dad and say 'What does this mean?', which is the perfect time to talk to them about it. But that's when sometimes parents get hysterical. Really. It's like, 'Argh, I don't want to talk to you about this, let's get rid of this book, I don't ever want to talk to you about this, I don't ever want you to go through puberty.'"

Blume most famously tackles puberty is in Margaret, her story of a sixth grader who talks to God like a friend, worries about being the last to get her period, and longs for breasts. "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. I just did an exercise to help me grow. Have you thought about it, God? About my growing, I mean. I've got a bra now. It would be nice if I had something to put in it."

"There's a lot of me in Margaret," says Blume. "I talked to my own private God the way Margaret does. I would plead, 'Just let me be normal', which meant let me have my period, give me some breasts, and hurry up ... You know, the 50s, the body image for women was round and curvy, and I was this skinny little thing, very small, and I wanted to be round and curvy the way round and curvy women today want to be skinny things."

"Everybody who writes fiction draws from their own life, but if it ended there, it would be very boring," she says. "When I talk to kids and they say, 'How do you become a writer?', well, I don't know that you become a writer: you just are. I always had stories, they were always there inside my head. I never told anyone, but they were there."

She trained as a teacher but never taught; she was married before she graduated from college. "It was ridiculous, [the idea] that any marriage would work that starts that early, before you have any idea who you are." She recalls: "It was the most traumatic time of my life. My father had just died and the wedding was scheduled. I was 21, we got married and I did my final year at college. Then, before that ended, I was pregnant, and had two babies by the time I was 25, and then started to write."

She'd make up rhyming stories when she was washing the dishes at night and added her own illustrations, sending them off to publishers. Then she decided she wanted to write novels, took a writing course, and out came Iggie's House, the story of Winnie, a girl whose quintessentially white surburban-American street gets its first black family, and who is confronted with – and confronts – racism.

"Writing saved my life," she says, seriously. "It saved me, it gave me everything, it took away all my illnesses. I loved having little kids, I relate to little kids, but something was missing, and I don't think about this every day, but when I think about it, it's that creative energy. I was an imaginative, strange little girl, and in school I had a lot of creative outlets. I danced, I sang, I painted, there was a lot of that, and suddenly I didn't have any of that. I've thought about this – I think that's why I was having such a bad time. And there was the marriage, too, but that's another story." Her marriage, she says, lasted 16 years and "we're very good friends now. But it was very tough, and I felt lonely and didn't have the friends I had when I was in school. I missed that female friendship." She left, along with her children, in 1975. In 1976 she married again, and moved to New Mexico, but the marriage didn't work out. She has been married to her third husband, George Cooper, since 1987.

Blume talks a lot about friendship, female friendship – as well as George, her best friend, Mary, is here in London with her. It's a key theme of her novels, too – Summer Sisters; Here's to You, Rachel Robinson; Just As Long As We're Together.

What followed Iggie's House was an extraordinary period of creativity: between 1970 and 1977 she published most of the books she is now most famous for, including Blubber; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Then Again, Maybe I Won't and Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself, her most autobiographical book. "I was very prolific in those years ... I was young and I remembered everything. I had total recall," she says. "I think I wrote Margaret in six weeks; now it's like four years. It was spontaneous, it just poured out. And in the middle of that I was writing the Fudge book."

Fudge, the naughty toddler who drives his brother Peter wild, was originally drawn from her son; Forever…, she says, was written after a request from her teenage daughter (it's dedicated to her: "For Randy as promised … with love"). "She was reading all these books, where a girl succumbed [to sex], she would be punished, sometimes she would die. And Randy said, 'Couldn't there ever be a book where two nice kids do it and nobody has to die?' And I thought 'Yes, I need to write this'."

Blume's protagonists range in age from toddler Fudge to the adult Caitlin and Vix of Summer Sisters, but perhaps her best work centres on the crossover from child to teenager, whether it's Tony; in Then Again, Maybe I Won't, making sense of a world where his friend is shoplifting, or Margaret. "I love the cusp," she says. "I always wanted to write, but I wasn't interested in writing about teenagers, because, looking back, I felt teenage Judy was very boring and bland. It was the 50s, and I hated the 50s. We all just wanted to fit in and none of us, not even with a best friend, were willing to go deeper. The 50s was such a time of 'Pretend everything's OK, pretend it's all good.' Our parents had just come through the war, everyone just wanted their families to be happy, we didn't want to rock the boat."

The younger Judy was more interesting, she thinks. The family hadmoved to Florida when her brother was sick, leaving her father, a dentist, behind in New Jersey. "I was making all kinds of bargains with God, feeling that I had to protect my father ... I adored my father, not only worried about him flying, which was a very scary idea, but worried about him being safe. It was a bad year, and I became ritualistic. I took on the burden of feeling responsible for his wellbeing, at nine, but never telling anybody. God, what a burden, when I think about it now, for a child."

Blume's recall of her childhood is exact. She says she finds it easy to "connect with children, to see their side of the story". "I'm very attached," she says. "I don't know why. I think some people just are. And I don't think it's necessary to have children to be like that. Maurice Sendak never had children but he was so connected to the child inside that he never lost that."

She's currently working on a new novel for adults, her first since 1998's bestselling Summer Sisters. The untitled novel is set in the 50s, partially, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Blume grew up, and sees her tackling again a topic which preoccupies her – young pregnancies, and young motherhood. One of the main characters has a baby right after high school, and never tells the father.

"I come back to that again and again – what if, what if – it could so easily happen," she says. "It was a very scary idea that you could get pregnant, and three of the best girls in my school were pregnant, at graduation, and it changed their lives. There was no abortion, you know. Yes, some girls got shipped to Aunt Betty's house in the country and came back without a baby, and some girls had a hasty marriage."

"I think we got married young because we wanted permission to have sex, all the way sex, and so yeah, we all got married young, my generation. Our parents didn't because they came of age during the depression, they had one, maybe two children later. My mother was 34 when I was born, which today is nothing, but in my generation that would have been old. We rushed into marriage and having children before we had any idea what we were doing."

When her American publisher announced publication of the new novel in summer 2015, the news was greeted with rapture and covered by outlets from Time to the New York Times. An earlier New Yorker piece called her books "talismans that, for a significant segment of the American female population, marked the passage from childhood to adolescence".

Blume's younger fans have poured their hearts out to her for years – she even published a book of their letters, and had to go to counselling to learn "how to be supportive without feeling that I needed to save them". Her adult fans recall her as the author who understood. "It's hard to understand, now that YA fiction is so widely written and accepted, that in the early 80s no one else wrote like Judy Blume," says novelist Charlotte Mendelson. "It wasn't only that her protagonists were funny, and sympathetic; they lived in a totally recognisable ordinary world, and had real, painful, modern problems; reading them made one feel much less alone. She signed a copy of Deenie for me recently, and my joy was uncontained."

The musician Amanda Palmer has even written a song about Blume: "You told me things that nobody around me would tell ... I don't remember my friends from gymnastics class, / But I remember when Deenie was at the school ... Margaret, bored, counting hats in the synagogue ... All of them lived in my head, quietly whispering: / "You are not so strange." (Blume loves it: "She's sitting at the keyboard in her bustier and garter and she's singing this song, it's so beautiful.")

Palmer says she'd struggled for years to name her "influences", when asked by journalists, "and then it hit me: I totally forgot about Judy Blume. As I traced myself back, I realised that she'd opened up all these emotional doors and windows that started off locked, and I'd taken it totally for granted. It was such a eureka moment that I had to write her a song. And thanks to Twitter, she heard it. I cry pretty much every time I play it."

Teasingly, Blume says right at the end of the interview that she's now planning, sort of, a memoir up until the age of 12; she's not, she ends by chuckling, "going to do a Philip Roth" and announce her retirement.

"George just read me a really funny one [a blog in the New Yorker], it was, 'Ladies and gentlemen, Philip Roth has announced he has eaten his last sandwich.'" She laughs. George is waiting. She heads off to enjoy London.

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READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT: How "Dancing in the Street" Became the Anthem for a Changing America

Aug 16, 2013

Mark Kurlansky
Riverhead
ISBN 978-1594487224
263 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Aaron Leitko

At this point, it's no longer a brand-new beat. It's a familiar beat, one that has woven itself into the fabric of American culture, staking out a permanent position on oldies FM, on your friend's bar mitzvah playlist and at your cousin's wedding reception.

Written by William "Mickey" Stevenson, Marvin Gaye and Ivy Jo Hunter and sung by Martha Reeves, "Dancing in the Street" is among the best-known tunes produced by the Detroit R&B label Motown. It was a hit, too: Released in 1964, it climbed all the way to No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Pop Singles Chart. It never managed to snatch the No. 1 slot, which was held by Manfred Mann's cover of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," but it has certainly eclipsed that song in terms of cross-generational appeal. If you missed Martha and the Vandellas' version, then you heard it a decade later, performed by Van Halen or the Grateful Dead, or as a duet between David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

In "Ready for a Brand New Beat,"Mark Kurlansky argues that "Dancing in the Street" is more than just a catchy tune: It was the anthem of a nation in the grips of political and cultural upheaval.

If you've ever found yourself at an airport bookstore, looking for a way to demolish six hours of idle time, then you're likely familiar with Kurlansky's work. The author has carved out a niche in the nonfiction world by finding drama amid banal subject matter. His formula is most visible in the titles of his best-sellers, which pit kitchen-friendly objects against civilization as we know it: "Salt: A World History" or "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World." They provided entertainment under the auspices of self-enrichment - Wikipedia before Wikipedia existed.

Unfortunately, there's not much drama to "Dancing in the Street." The story behind the song is not particularly eventful. Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. viewed his label as a hit factory, and in many ways the song was just one more tune that rolled off the conveyor belt. In July of 1964, Reeves showed up at Motown's Hittsville studio and was coaxed by Gaye, Hunter and Stevenson to sing a demo version of their new song. The producers liked her version and decided to release it. The process did not involve much in the way of blood, sweat or tears.

In fact, the parties involved in creating the song prove formidable foes to Kurlansky's thesis that "Dancing" captures the early '60s zeitgeist. In their opinion, it was just another song. Though Gordy supported the civil rights struggle, he sought to keep politics out of his label's music. "He wanted to show white people that in the age of dangerous, angry black people, of black power, and ghetto rebellions, Motown blacks were neither angry nor dangerous," Kurlansky writes.

Asked about the political events of the '60s, Reeves insisted that she wasn't involved. "I just want to be responsible for being a good singer."

Stevenson was political, but according to Kurlansky, he believed that the song's only message was that "all kinds of people could get along together." Gaye, who died in 1984, came closest to backing Kurlansky's view. He is quoted in a passage taken from his autobiography, saying that the song "felt political."

Kurlansky's strongest argument comes from analyzing what separated the song from other Motown singles. "The new R&B of the mid-1960s was making the old Motown songs of requited or unrequited love, such as those by the Supremes or Smokey Robinson, seem slightly old-fashioned," he writes. But "Dancing in the Street" was different because it was upbeat, positive and had lyrics that told a more general story. When it was played at a rally, it made sense.

A compelling case for "Dancing in the Street" as a generation-defining riff never quite emerges, though, and most of Kurlansky's arguments could be applied to other songs, like Gaye's "What's Going On," which addressed the times in a more direct manner.

Kurlansky spends much of "Ready for a Brand New Beat" explaining the cultural context of the mid-'60s music business, moving from the origins of rock 'n' roll and the racial tensions that it exposed, to the civil rights struggle and the rise and decline of Motown. In this environment, the purchase of a record could hold additional meaning, and, in a small but significant way, it promoted change in society. Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" was one of those records, but one of many.

Aaron Leitko is a freelance writer in the District of Columbia.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE GREAT DEFORMATION: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

Mar 29, 2013

David A. Stockman
PublicAffairs
ISBN 978-1586489120
743 pages
$35

Reviewed by Marcus Brauchli

David Stockman occupies a rare place in this nation's public pantheon - the serial apostate.

While heading the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, he called out his fellow Republicans for fiscal recklessness and repudiated policies that his boss was promoting. He soon left Washington for a place of presumably sounder financial thinking: Wall Street.

But once again, he encountered mankind's shortcomings. A financier who built elaborate deals on foundations of debt, Stockman proclaimed the folly of such ways. He ran afoul of a prosecutor who accused him of not complying with accounting standards that Stockman later concluded didn't make sense anyway.

Now, he has cast his acid eye on the country's entire economic edifice. What the former divinity student sees doesn't merely dismay, it outrages him morally, page after page, chapter after chapter. Stockman's new tract, "The Great Deformation," is a kaleidoscopic rant against people, institutions and practices he knows well. He attacks, upends, eviscerates, mocks and denigrates them all, usually with some justification, always in the brutalist prose of a manifesto.

The New Deal was a "political gong show," and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon were "peas in a statist pod." Morgan Stanley's former chief executive, John Mack, is a "ruthless gambler and bully who never hesitated to exploit any avenue to make a buck." Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was "obdurate and imperious on everything within his brief." Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman get entire chapters dedicated to their free-market heresies.

But here's the thing: Even as he indulges his spleen, Stockman produces a persuasive and deeply relevant indictment of a system dangerously akilter.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has become a strange fantasy land where many politicians think deficits don't matter, regulators are closely entwined with their charges, and the Federal Reserve manages the economy through high-stakes, high-risk experimentation. The financial turmoil of the past few years is just a glimpse of what lies at the end of the road we're on, Stockman warns.

In showing us where it leads, he takes the long way, ambling past the wreckage of fiscal and market calamities dating back a century, pausing to praise the gleaming fiscal conservatism of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, before arriving at the ever-more-dire failures of the last generation.

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THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION: How 1965 Transformed America

Jan 20, 2013 by Washington Post book reviewers

James T
Patterson
ISBN 978-0465013586
310 pages
$28.99

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

James T. Patterson takes his title from a song that was released in September 1965, "written primarily by P.J. Sloan, a nineteen-year-old admirer of (Bob) Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone,'" and performed on record by Barry McGuire. Just about everyone associated with "Eve of Destruction" is now forgotten, and the song itself hasn't much staying power, but Patterson finds it significant as evidence of a shift then taking place in American popular music, away from bubble-gum soft rock and toward songs of protest: "Its lyrics, accompanied by sounds of bombs going off, were bitter, blunt, and devastatingly bleak about contemporary events, predicting that all manner of terrible developments - war in Vietnam, racial tensions, nuclear weapons - were propelling the United States (and 'the whole crazy world') toward the apocalypse."

Things never got quite that bad (not yet, at least), but Patterson certainly is right to see "1965 - the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural change and polarization - as the time when America's social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called 'the Sixties' broke into view." To be sure, "historical transformation does not arise out of nowhere on January 1 or end on December 31," any more than "the Sixties" were contained solely within the decade from which they took their name. But 1965 was clearly a turning point for the United States, beginning its transformation from "a nation at once hopeful and complacent, largely trusting its institutions and feeling assured about its future path, even as certain deprived groups, notably black people, were complaining angrily of exploitation," into one in which many people "seemed to have become considerably less optimistic about the future than they had been a year earlier."

Patterson, emeritus professor of history at Brown University, has been down this road before, in his deservedly well-regarded "Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974" (1997), a volume in the similarly well-regarded Oxford History of the United States. "The Eve of Destruction," though obviously it deals with a small part of the territory covered in that volume, is by no means merely a rehash. My hunch (and it is nothing more than that) is that upon reflection Patterson came to see that the events of 1965 needed to be discussed at greater length and their significance analyzed more deeply. This is what he has done in "The Eve of Destruction."

As 1965 began, the United States seemed to be, as Lyndon Johnson said near the end of 1964, living in "the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem." Typical Johnsonian exaggeration, to be sure, but the economy was booming, and the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress that had been swept into office on LBJ's coattails in 1964 stood ready to enact his massive "Great Society" legislative program, presumably extending the benefits of prosperity to many more Americans and lifting the burdens of discrimination from those who labored under them. As one who had turned 25 in the fall of 1964, I was old enough to be beginning a career and a family, young enough to be filled with optimism undiminished by hard, instructive experience. Like millions of others, I saw the dawning of the Age of Johnson as a great moment in American history and eagerly awaited all the wonderful things it was sure to bring.

Didn't quite work out that way, did it? Reading Patterson's chronicle, I am all too painfully put back in that terrible year, with all the shock and disenchantment it brought. Its central figure, both heroic and tragic, was Johnson, and though Patterson adds nothing of consequence to our understanding of him, he gets him down exactly right in a very short space - without, I am pleased to note, a scintilla of reference to or dependence on Robert Caro's bloated, wildly overpraised, multi-volume biography. Surely Johnson was the most complex, elusive and troubled man ever to occupy the Oval Office, which is saying something. He "yearned to be loved and honored by all," and his smashing victory over Barry Goldwater certainly pointed him in that direction, but he was "domineering, deceitful, and needy," and even though he also could be "charming, compassionate, sentimental, and openhearted," he was at heart compulsively secretive and a loutish bully who may have been "a consummate insider and wheeler-dealer as Senate [majority] leader" but never mastered the communicative and empathetic skills necessary for a successful presidency.

For all that, his heart was often in the right place. His "determination to effect transformative change" across the whole spectrum of American life arose from his own experiences as a poor boy in Texas, and his empathy for the downtrodden was genuine. But neither he nor his advisors nor his allies in Congress understood the incredible complexity of the problems they sought to remedy through the Great Society, with the result that from education to poverty to civil rights they built up a bureaucratic superstructure that not merely threatened to strangle their good intentions but also laid the groundwork for the conservative counterattack: "Was the growth of the federal government leading to bureaucratic deadlock and confusion, thereby calling into question the effectiveness of democratic government?" The appearance in October 1965 of a new journal, the Public Interest, made plain that serious people as well as political opportunists were asking that question:

"In a remarkably quick time, the journal succeeded in appealing to a number of well-educated readers, many of whom swelled the ranks of a 'neoconservative' movement, as it became called [sic]. Other readers of the journal included policymakers who, like the essayists, were coming to believe that the government was erecting a thicket of regulations, encumbrances, and torts that would baffle federal administrators and clog up the courts. More broadly, they wondered if LBJ and his liberal advisers possessed enough expertise to deal effectively with large and complex socioeconomic problems, such as poverty, inadequate schools, and racial discrimination, and whether the administration was promising more than the federal government - a maze of bureaucracies - could deliver. The success of the (BEGIN ITAL)Public Interest was a warning sign, one among many as of late 1965, that more conservative approaches to governing were gaining favor in the country."

In short, the Great Society was too much, too soon, too carelessly thought through. Add to that the disastrous turns the Vietnam War was taking late in 1965 - and LBJ's angry, secretive, duplicitous response to the war's critics - and you had a fail-safe recipe for political rancor and stalemate. More and more the country became divided between sharply hostile camps on the left and the right, while the "political center, slowly being squeezed, was one of the many stabilizing forces that were to lose strength in the [years] that followed." To lay at the feet of Lyndon Johnson all the blame for the governmental and political mess in which we now find ourselves obviously is unfair, and indeed Patterson is at pains to point out that, especially with regard to Vietnam, "the choices he had to make would have tormented any president," but actions do have consequences, and what took place in 1965 led fairly directly to the present crisis.

"The Eve of Destruction" should be read, then, as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris and, by no means incidentally, the dangers of misreading election returns as mandates. The election of 1964 probably was at least as much a rejection of Goldwater as an endorsement of Johnson, and the rapidity with which Johnson's poll numbers soon collapsed was evidence enough that the electorate can turn on a political leader with astonishing speed and vehemence. Johnson did see through to enactment the two great civil-rights laws of 1964 and '65, but the rest of his record should be seen as an object lesson in the price of vanity. Nineteen sixty-five was indeed a very bad year, and we're still counting its costs.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj@washpost.com.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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Review-a-Day for Tue, Sep 20: Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America

by Faye E. Dudden A review by Nina Silber

For a moment amid the ferment after the Civil War, it seemed possible to at least some Americans that women would win the right to vote. The abolition of slavery put broad questions of voting rights and citizenship on the table, and legislators were eager to act. Women suffragists hoped their time had come. Instead, they saw their "fighting chance" evaporate with the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which outlawed disenfranchisement on the basis of race but not of sex. Women would have to wait half a century before they secured the vote in 1920.

Faye E. Dudden, a professor of history at Colgate College, attempts to shed new light on this episode in Fighting Chance. Hers is a tale of the ideological, political, and often intensely personal disputes that pitted former political allies in the abolitionist cause -- including Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony -- against one another. As they organized and campaigned for suffrage reforms around the country, these ardent activists eventually divided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which Stanton and Anthony did not support because it failed to give women the vote.

Indeed, the two women ended up espousing a racist agenda that denigrated African-American and immigrant men in order to advance the cause of white womanhood. "Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung," Stanton wrote in her newspaper, The Revolution, as she editorialized in 1868 about the folly of allowing such ignorant men to make laws for educated women. Dudden seems interested in at least partly exonerating Stanton and Anthony, portraying their racist rhetoric as a response to those she believes were most to blame for upending the fighting chance for women's suffrage -- chief among them Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who in 1865 succeeded William Lloyd Garrison as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Money is a central thread in Dudden's story. In a legal and economic system that limited women's access to property and wage-earning opportunities, women reformers encountered onerous financial obstacles in funding their campaigns. Phillips was the trustee of an important bequest that both women's rights and antislavery activists could potentially draw upon. Believing that "antislavery" work would remain unfinished until blacks were accorded the ballot and full rights, he directed the money toward that goal and froze the women out.

Lack of funding was indeed an important factor in women's failure to secure the vote, but Dudden's focus on it constrains her analysis. Did Stanton really launch racist diatribes because Phillips deprived her cause of money? Surely the pervasive racism of 19th-century America had something to do with Stanton's attitude, as did her position of relative privilege and her distance -- she lived in New York City -- from the turmoil of the postwar South. Dudden insists that Phillips, in making the antislavery cause primary even after chattel slavery was declared dead, upheld a "pretense that 'slavery' was still at issue." But she acknowledges that immediately after the war President Andrew Johnson "warned that emancipation was only an experiment." Can Phillips honestly be accused of upholding a mere "pretense" in the face of what appeared a genuine threat to the cause he and others had worked so hard for?

In her eagerness to play down Stanton's racism, Dudden emphasizes Stanton's lawyerly tendency to argue "in the alternative" -- her penchant for trying out different arguments, even conflicting and racist ones, so long as she could gain some ground. And Dudden recounts other expressions of racial intolerance, including those of Lucy Stone, a supporter of black suffrage, perhaps in an effort to make Stanton and Anthony's bigotry appear less conspicuous.

All this gives readers a vivid sense of the intensely emotional and rancorous political landscape in which reformers worked immediately after the Civil War. Yet too much in this account hinges on highly personal developments that cannot be considered the most telling aspects of the story. Ultimately, the "fighting chance" for winning women's suffrage was lost not because of Wendell Phillips's arrogance or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's lawyerly style of argumentation, but because Americans remained immersed in a climate of intense racial conflict. This volatile atmosphere convinced Phillips and other reformers that a campaign to advance voting rights for women was a liability in the critical work of securing, in the fullest sense, black emancipation.

Nina Silber, a professor of history at Boston University, has written extensively about gender relations in the Civil War era.

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Review-a-Day for Fri, Sep 23: Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

by David S. Reynolds A review by Drew Gilpin Faust

As the obsolescence and even the demise of the book are widely foretold, it is all the more important -- and comforting -- to recognize how a book can change the world. It is hard to think of many that have done so more emphatically than Uncle Tom's Cabin. Lincoln is famously said to have greeted its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1862 by inquiring, "So this is the little lady who started this great war?" And whether he actually ever made the remark or not, the very fact of her visit to the White House and the emergence of the legend of his respectful, if somewhat patronizing, salutation are sufficient evidence of the remarkable influence that Stowe's words claimed in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was at once a novel and an "event," as Theodore Parker proclaimed soon after it appeared. Today its publication is appropriately included -- along with such occurrences as the Dred Scott decision and John Brown's raid -- on timelines of incidents that propelled the nation towards civil war. In the mounting sectional conflict, words assumed the power of deeds, acts of political as well as social transformation. Originating as a serial, Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in book form in the spring of 1852. By mid-October, 120,000 copies had been sold; by the following spring, 310,000. In England it was even more successful, with sales of a million within a year. Michael Winship has called it "the world's first true blockbuster." It may also have been the first bestseller to produce spin-offs-which came to be known as "Tomitudes": engravings, games, puzzles, songs and sheet music, dramatizations-in Europe as well as the United States. The book was a phenomenon, in its popularity and its influence.

Yet by the early twentieth century it was out of print and would remain so for decades. "Uncle Tom" became an epithet, representing not the admirable saintliness and sacrifice with which Stowe had sought to imbue her protagonist, but -- in the eyes of African Americans such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin -- an embarrassing embodiment of black obsequiousness and self-loathing. In the white segregated South, scorn for Stowe's book claimed different origins: it was seen as part of a long tradition of Northern meddling in Southern racial arrangements. In South Carolina in 1900, a teacher might well make his students raise their right hands and swear never to read Uncle Tom's Cabin -- an unwitting nod to the book's power as well as an affirmation of the white South's racial solidarity. Uncle Tom's Cabin was certainly never taught as literature in the North or the South, because it was seen by critics and scholars as sentimental and overwrought -- less art than propaganda. Hawthorne dismissed Stowe as one of his era's "scribbling women."

But Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin never did disappear entirely. Perhaps the first modern appreciation of her and her masterwork came from Edmund Wilson, not the easiest or the most gentle of critics. His great book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, which appeared in 1962 at the very outset of the conflict's centennial, opens with a lengthy chapter on Stowe. Wilson emerges from his consideration a grudging admirer, acknowledging the prejudices he brought to the text, but demonstrating a thorough conversion. "To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom," he confessed, was "a startling experience." He admitted that "it is a much more impressive work than one has ever been allowed to suspect." Wilson hailed the "vitality" of its characters, the book's "eruptive force," the clear evidence of the author's "critical mind." Comparing her favorably with Dickens and Gogol, he concluded she was "no contemptible novelist." He became a fan in spite of himself.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s drew more attention to Uncle Tom's Cabin as a vehicle of scorn than to either the literary power or the abolitionist sympathies of the novel. It was the emergence of Second Wave feminism and the resultant growth of interest in women's history that ultimately led to a systematic rehabilitation of the book as an essential example of the moral authority and reach of nineteenth-century American women. The cult of domesticity, the centrality of evangelical religion, the influence of social reform, and the impact of the female pen shaped mid-century society and culture in ways that reached well beyond the home. The era's "scribbling women" -- with Stowe the most successful among them -- were both the cause and the result of this transformation.

The past quarter century has witnessed sustained interest in Uncle Tom's Cabin and its author. The book's original popularity derived in no small part from its invocation of so many of the critical concerns of nineteenth-century American culture. As a result it can serve as an almost unsurpassed point of entry into the assumptions of that historical moment. It is a marvelous book to teach -- as I have done with undergraduates, graduate students, and summer seminars of high school teachers. It is a document that captures the sensibilities of people both like and unlike ourselves, and it describes a past world with voices and characters that speak to us across the barriers of space and time -- Tom, Topsy, Eva, Cassy, Mrs. Bird, St. Clare, Ophelia -- even Simon Legree. That Stowe achieved such influence in a period when American feminism was making its first appearances, and that she did so with a text intended to advance the anti-slavery cause, further contributes to its present day relevance, for these two nineteenth-century social movements have had modern manifestations that have shaped our age as fundamentally as they did hers.

Through the work of Jane Tompkins, Mary Kelley, and others, Uncle Tom's Cabin has played a key role in reorienting the study of the American Renaissance to include women alongside its iconic men -- Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville. In 1995, Joan Hedrick won a Pulitzer Prize for the first full-scale biography of Stowe in half a century. And Uncle Tom entered promptly into the digital era as well. In 1852, the book had strained the technological capacities of its time, requiring, according to its publisher, that three paper mills and more than a hundred book binders remain constantly at work to meet the demand of eager readers. Today's technology has extended Tom's reach through a website created at the University of Virginia that has served as a founding model for the digital humanities. "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi Media Archive" is directed by Stephen Railton and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, offering texts, images, songs, poems, even film that document the book's origins, its later renditions on stage and screen, as well as assessments of its history and impact by a range of distinguished scholars. The website makes twelve editions of the book available on a virtual shelf.

David Reynolds, the author of widely read volumes on the nineteenth century, has not only joined the twenty-first century chorus of appreciation for Stowe and her novel. He has reached well beyond his predecessors in his claims for its influence. His book is true to its excessive title: it represents Uncle Tom's Cabin as not just an influence on American life, but a force nearly unmatched in its social and cultural impact. For Reynolds, Uncle Tom's Cabin was "central to redefining American democracy on a more egalitarian basis"; it made the Bible "relevant to contemporary life," and it "replaced the venal religion of the churches with a new, abolitionist Christianity." It also "established a whole new school of popular antislavery literature," and at the same time gave rise to the pro-slavery argument, which is customarily seen as emerging in force in the 1830s but in Reynolds's portrayal does not substantially appear until prompted by Stowe's novel more than twenty years later.

The book's dramatic versions were equally revolutionary, in Reynolds's account, serving even as a "major step toward making theatergoing respectable" and leading also to the creation of the matinee and the long theatrical run. Uncle Tom's Cabin also influenced James and Howells, and profoundly shaped realist fiction and, later, D.W. Griffiths and the emergence of realist film. By century's end, moreover, Uncle Tom's Cabin had set off a "chain reaction" that led to Birth of a Nation "and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan" and also "the self-assertion and protest on the part of DuBois and other African-Americans," resulting in the establishment of the NAACP. Even more than seventy-five years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the appearance of Gone With the Wind was, Reynolds finds, "largely in reply to Stowe."

This one book did all that? "Chain reaction" with its invocation of nuclear force, seems a more apt metaphor than the "sword" of Reynolds's title to capture his assessment of the book and its might. Lincoln may have suggested that Stowe caused a war, but Reynolds offers much more: he assigns to Stowe central responsibility for the unfolding history of much of the following century. As we enter into the sesquicentennial celebration of the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe's achievement reminds us that we must remember more than battles and statesmen if we are to understand the causes, the conflict and its aftermath. But swords and statesmen and armies and governments and writers and preachers all played their complex and interdependent parts in what Reynolds calls the "Battle for America." DuBois, Margaret Mitchell, D.W. Griffiths, and Henry James, not to mention Lee, Grant, and Lincoln, would likely be surprised to learn that the twenty-first century could imagine that the battle over race and power, not to mention culture and values, was really all about Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard University and the author, most recently, of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf).

Since 1914, The New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American culture and politics. At TNR, books, art, film, architecture, theater, dance, and poetry all invite the reader to indulge in the highest levels of aesthetic experience. Subscribe to TNR today for access to literary reviews, pop-culture essays, and nearly a century of writing from the best minds in culture and the arts. Powell's Books customers can save 70% off the newsstand price!

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Review-a-Day for Fri, Sep 23: Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

by David S. Reynolds A review by Drew Gilpin Faust

As the obsolescence and even the demise of the book are widely foretold, it is all the more important -- and comforting -- to recognize how a book can change the world. It is hard to think of many that have done so more emphatically than Uncle Tom's Cabin. Lincoln is famously said to have greeted its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1862 by inquiring, "So this is the little lady who started this great war?" And whether he actually ever made the remark or not, the very fact of her visit to the White House and the emergence of the legend of his respectful, if somewhat patronizing, salutation are sufficient evidence of the remarkable influence that Stowe's words claimed in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was at once a novel and an "event," as Theodore Parker proclaimed soon after it appeared. Today its publication is appropriately included -- along with such occurrences as the Dred Scott decision and John Brown's raid -- on timelines of incidents that propelled the nation towards civil war. In the mounting sectional conflict, words assumed the power of deeds, acts of political as well as social transformation. Originating as a serial, Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in book form in the spring of 1852. By mid-October, 120,000 copies had been sold; by the following spring, 310,000. In England it was even more successful, with sales of a million within a year. Michael Winship has called it "the world's first true blockbuster." It may also have been the first bestseller to produce spin-offs-which came to be known as "Tomitudes": engravings, games, puzzles, songs and sheet music, dramatizations-in Europe as well as the United States. The book was a phenomenon, in its popularity and its influence.

Yet by the early twentieth century it was out of print and would remain so for decades. "Uncle Tom" became an epithet, representing not the admirable saintliness and sacrifice with which Stowe had sought to imbue her protagonist, but -- in the eyes of African Americans such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin -- an embarrassing embodiment of black obsequiousness and self-loathing. In the white segregated South, scorn for Stowe's book claimed different origins: it was seen as part of a long tradition of Northern meddling in Southern racial arrangements. In South Carolina in 1900, a teacher might well make his students raise their right hands and swear never to read Uncle Tom's Cabin -- an unwitting nod to the book's power as well as an affirmation of the white South's racial solidarity. Uncle Tom's Cabin was certainly never taught as literature in the North or the South, because it was seen by critics and scholars as sentimental and overwrought -- less art than propaganda. Hawthorne dismissed Stowe as one of his era's "scribbling women."

But Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin never did disappear entirely. Perhaps the first modern appreciation of her and her masterwork came from Edmund Wilson, not the easiest or the most gentle of critics. His great book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, which appeared in 1962 at the very outset of the conflict's centennial, opens with a lengthy chapter on Stowe. Wilson emerges from his consideration a grudging admirer, acknowledging the prejudices he brought to the text, but demonstrating a thorough conversion. "To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom," he confessed, was "a startling experience." He admitted that "it is a much more impressive work than one has ever been allowed to suspect." Wilson hailed the "vitality" of its characters, the book's "eruptive force," the clear evidence of the author's "critical mind." Comparing her favorably with Dickens and Gogol, he concluded she was "no contemptible novelist." He became a fan in spite of himself.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s drew more attention to Uncle Tom's Cabin as a vehicle of scorn than to either the literary power or the abolitionist sympathies of the novel. It was the emergence of Second Wave feminism and the resultant growth of interest in women's history that ultimately led to a systematic rehabilitation of the book as an essential example of the moral authority and reach of nineteenth-century American women. The cult of domesticity, the centrality of evangelical religion, the influence of social reform, and the impact of the female pen shaped mid-century society and culture in ways that reached well beyond the home. The era's "scribbling women" -- with Stowe the most successful among them -- were both the cause and the result of this transformation.

The past quarter century has witnessed sustained interest in Uncle Tom's Cabin and its author. The book's original popularity derived in no small part from its invocation of so many of the critical concerns of nineteenth-century American culture. As a result it can serve as an almost unsurpassed point of entry into the assumptions of that historical moment. It is a marvelous book to teach -- as I have done with undergraduates, graduate students, and summer seminars of high school teachers. It is a document that captures the sensibilities of people both like and unlike ourselves, and it describes a past world with voices and characters that speak to us across the barriers of space and time -- Tom, Topsy, Eva, Cassy, Mrs. Bird, St. Clare, Ophelia -- even Simon Legree. That Stowe achieved such influence in a period when American feminism was making its first appearances, and that she did so with a text intended to advance the anti-slavery cause, further contributes to its present day relevance, for these two nineteenth-century social movements have had modern manifestations that have shaped our age as fundamentally as they did hers.

Through the work of Jane Tompkins, Mary Kelley, and others, Uncle Tom's Cabin has played a key role in reorienting the study of the American Renaissance to include women alongside its iconic men -- Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville. In 1995, Joan Hedrick won a Pulitzer Prize for the first full-scale biography of Stowe in half a century. And Uncle Tom entered promptly into the digital era as well. In 1852, the book had strained the technological capacities of its time, requiring, according to its publisher, that three paper mills and more than a hundred book binders remain constantly at work to meet the demand of eager readers. Today's technology has extended Tom's reach through a website created at the University of Virginia that has served as a founding model for the digital humanities. "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi Media Archive" is directed by Stephen Railton and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, offering texts, images, songs, poems, even film that document the book's origins, its later renditions on stage and screen, as well as assessments of its history and impact by a range of distinguished scholars. The website makes twelve editions of the book available on a virtual shelf.

David Reynolds, the author of widely read volumes on the nineteenth century, has not only joined the twenty-first century chorus of appreciation for Stowe and her novel. He has reached well beyond his predecessors in his claims for its influence. His book is true to its excessive title: it represents Uncle Tom's Cabin as not just an influence on American life, but a force nearly unmatched in its social and cultural impact. For Reynolds, Uncle Tom's Cabin was "central to redefining American democracy on a more egalitarian basis"; it made the Bible "relevant to contemporary life," and it "replaced the venal religion of the churches with a new, abolitionist Christianity." It also "established a whole new school of popular antislavery literature," and at the same time gave rise to the pro-slavery argument, which is customarily seen as emerging in force in the 1830s but in Reynolds's portrayal does not substantially appear until prompted by Stowe's novel more than twenty years later.

The book's dramatic versions were equally revolutionary, in Reynolds's account, serving even as a "major step toward making theatergoing respectable" and leading also to the creation of the matinee and the long theatrical run. Uncle Tom's Cabin also influenced James and Howells, and profoundly shaped realist fiction and, later, D.W. Griffiths and the emergence of realist film. By century's end, moreover, Uncle Tom's Cabin had set off a "chain reaction" that led to Birth of a Nation "and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan" and also "the self-assertion and protest on the part of DuBois and other African-Americans," resulting in the establishment of the NAACP. Even more than seventy-five years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the appearance of Gone With the Wind was, Reynolds finds, "largely in reply to Stowe."

This one book did all that? "Chain reaction" with its invocation of nuclear force, seems a more apt metaphor than the "sword" of Reynolds's title to capture his assessment of the book and its might. Lincoln may have suggested that Stowe caused a war, but Reynolds offers much more: he assigns to Stowe central responsibility for the unfolding history of much of the following century. As we enter into the sesquicentennial celebration of the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe's achievement reminds us that we must remember more than battles and statesmen if we are to understand the causes, the conflict and its aftermath. But swords and statesmen and armies and governments and writers and preachers all played their complex and interdependent parts in what Reynolds calls the "Battle for America." DuBois, Margaret Mitchell, D.W. Griffiths, and Henry James, not to mention Lee, Grant, and Lincoln, would likely be surprised to learn that the twenty-first century could imagine that the battle over race and power, not to mention culture and values, was really all about Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard University and the author, most recently, of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf).

Since 1914, The New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American culture and politics. At TNR, books, art, film, architecture, theater, dance, and poetry all invite the reader to indulge in the highest levels of aesthetic experience. Subscribe to TNR today for access to literary reviews, pop-culture essays, and nearly a century of writing from the best minds in culture and the arts. Powell's Books customers can save 70% off the newsstand price!

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Review-a-Day for Tue, Sep 20: Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America

by Faye E. Dudden A review by Nina Silber

For a moment amid the ferment after the Civil War, it seemed possible to at least some Americans that women would win the right to vote. The abolition of slavery put broad questions of voting rights and citizenship on the table, and legislators were eager to act. Women suffragists hoped their time had come. Instead, they saw their "fighting chance" evaporate with the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which outlawed disenfranchisement on the basis of race but not of sex. Women would have to wait half a century before they secured the vote in 1920.

Faye E. Dudden, a professor of history at Colgate College, attempts to shed new light on this episode in Fighting Chance. Hers is a tale of the ideological, political, and often intensely personal disputes that pitted former political allies in the abolitionist cause -- including Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony -- against one another. As they organized and campaigned for suffrage reforms around the country, these ardent activists eventually divided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which Stanton and Anthony did not support because it failed to give women the vote.

Indeed, the two women ended up espousing a racist agenda that denigrated African-American and immigrant men in order to advance the cause of white womanhood. "Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung," Stanton wrote in her newspaper, The Revolution, as she editorialized in 1868 about the folly of allowing such ignorant men to make laws for educated women. Dudden seems interested in at least partly exonerating Stanton and Anthony, portraying their racist rhetoric as a response to those she believes were most to blame for upending the fighting chance for women's suffrage -- chief among them Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who in 1865 succeeded William Lloyd Garrison as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Money is a central thread in Dudden's story. In a legal and economic system that limited women's access to property and wage-earning opportunities, women reformers encountered onerous financial obstacles in funding their campaigns. Phillips was the trustee of an important bequest that both women's rights and antislavery activists could potentially draw upon. Believing that "antislavery" work would remain unfinished until blacks were accorded the ballot and full rights, he directed the money toward that goal and froze the women out.

Lack of funding was indeed an important factor in women's failure to secure the vote, but Dudden's focus on it constrains her analysis. Did Stanton really launch racist diatribes because Phillips deprived her cause of money? Surely the pervasive racism of 19th-century America had something to do with Stanton's attitude, as did her position of relative privilege and her distance -- she lived in New York City -- from the turmoil of the postwar South. Dudden insists that Phillips, in making the antislavery cause primary even after chattel slavery was declared dead, upheld a "pretense that 'slavery' was still at issue." But she acknowledges that immediately after the war President Andrew Johnson "warned that emancipation was only an experiment." Can Phillips honestly be accused of upholding a mere "pretense" in the face of what appeared a genuine threat to the cause he and others had worked so hard for?

In her eagerness to play down Stanton's racism, Dudden emphasizes Stanton's lawyerly tendency to argue "in the alternative" -- her penchant for trying out different arguments, even conflicting and racist ones, so long as she could gain some ground. And Dudden recounts other expressions of racial intolerance, including those of Lucy Stone, a supporter of black suffrage, perhaps in an effort to make Stanton and Anthony's bigotry appear less conspicuous.

All this gives readers a vivid sense of the intensely emotional and rancorous political landscape in which reformers worked immediately after the Civil War. Yet too much in this account hinges on highly personal developments that cannot be considered the most telling aspects of the story. Ultimately, the "fighting chance" for winning women's suffrage was lost not because of Wendell Phillips's arrogance or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's lawyerly style of argumentation, but because Americans remained immersed in a climate of intense racial conflict. This volatile atmosphere convinced Phillips and other reformers that a campaign to advance voting rights for women was a liability in the critical work of securing, in the fullest sense, black emancipation.

Nina Silber, a professor of history at Boston University, has written extensively about gender relations in the Civil War era.

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Review-a-Day for Fri, Aug 26: Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire (Politics and Culture in Modern America)

Review-a-Day for Thu, Aug 4: Pathfinder: Blazing a New Wilderness Trail in Modern America

by Ron Strickland A review by Barney Mann

Ron Strickland is the father of the 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest Trail. He is a latter-day trailblazer, author and the paterfamilias of the nation's newest national scenic trail.

Pathfinder is Strickland's eighth book, and for a zealot -- being "focused" alone doesn't drag a wild-dream mountain trail into reality -- Strickland is more than a passable scrivener. Pathfinder interlaces tales of the trail's founding with steep ascents and descents to match the Pacific Northwest Trail's jutting terrain together with a potpourri of Northwest outback characters, other trail "bad boys" like himself, love in the outdoors (nee sex), backpacking tips and a vision of hiking's future.

Pathfinder is like a snowmelt freshet broken free of Strickland's hard-won trail, a 180-degree turnabout from his seven previous efforts -- five collections of oral histories, one anthology and a 1-pound-plus trail guidebook. Here, Strickland lets his own voice loose at last.

In 1970, 27-old Strickland conceived the idea of the Pacific Northwest Trail, a continuous path from Glacier National Park in Montana to the Pacific Ocean. But after 10 years, the trail received a death sentence. A congressional study concluded "it is overwhelmingly evident ... the trail ... is neither feasible nor desirable." Strickland and his Pacific Northwest Trail went underground and fervent volunteers hoisted axes and pulaskis to make the trail an on-the-ground reality. On March 30, 2009, recognition caught up to reality, and the Pacific Northwest Trail became a congressionally designated National Scenic Trail.

A decade ago, Backpacker magazine branded Strickland a "pulpit-pounding evangelist," but in Pathfinder Strickland is all rosy-cheeked uncle, joshing, cajoling and entertaining, repeatedly poking fun at himself. A Strickland pratfall opens the book. At age 7, a jelly-sandwich-toting Strickland won entrance into his first tent. Heaven. The "canvas hut practically sang of the great outdoors." Then his sandwich plopped, jelly side down. Song over. Long before becoming a trail founder, Strickland was a pup tent reject. "Scram, creep."

Sixty years and 23 chapters later, yet again in a tent with food, Strickland recounted that as the temperature plummeted, his new wife Christine wolfed down a slumgullion dinner. When finished, "she looked expectantly at me as her breath danced in the headlamp's beam. 'What's next?' she purred." She wasn't talking dinner. Strickland proceeds, but here I'll let the tent flaps discreetly close.

Slumgullion: a watery stew. It's Strickland's favorite dish. Occasionally, as in navigating the newly minted Pacific Northwest Trail, you may feel lost, but on the whole, Pathfinder is funny, poignant and unsparing in candor. Entering at "Scram, creep" and exiting at a sultry, "What's next?," Pathfinder portrays a kaleidoscope view of a modern trailblazer's life.

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Review-a-Day for Mon, Jul 25: Walking the Dog's Shadow (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America)

by Deborah Brown A review by Scott F. Parker

In his foreword to Walking the Dog's Shadow, Tony Hoagland writes that the poems of Deborah Brown's debut collection "make thinking look easy." As this assessment and the title itself suggest, these poems are full of ideas; they pursue not so much things as the impressions things have left on the speaker in a lifetime full of memories.

Brown's speaker is mature and wise, fully stocked with experiences to recount and reconsider. These remembrances and reflections lead to abstraction, as in "Proof": "Where 'duck' meant / a domesticated aquatic, not a sniper's bullet about to deafen / your ear. When did the innocent part of the country become one / with the rest of the violent world?" But proof is always secondary to experience, and abstraction must be earned; once earned, it might grant one the privilege to view history from a remove, as when the speaker discusses "racism's latest masquerade / in the flag."

Of course, the mind's impulse to create stories ("Narro, narrare, drifts overhead"; "I read how the brain is structured / to make us believe, or want to") and to compress information for meaning means details are squeezed from memory. Sometimes those details are withheld, as in "Don't Ask," when soldiers "knew what could be said after dinner sixty-five years later, / stories scrubbed clean of blood and pain," leading the speaker to wonder, "How do you know what you've left out of any story you tell?"

Brown's poems are sharply attuned to absence: things missing, words unspoken. Many of the recurring images here focus on what's not present: in the title poem the speaker doesn't walk a dog but a dog's shadow, in another poem the moon "plans to move off course," has been driven "away from home," and has deserted the sky. The attention to absence/presence is summed up neatly in "On Not Knowing Your Father": "I am trying to imagine the pain of a phantom / limb, but the pain I imagine is a phantom, too."

Little in this world is real, and what is might be made unreal at any moment: "how could there / be a whole and happy life...when we have no idea when / antimatter might say enough's enough and take over / and turn us all into -- nots?" The appeal to physics reappears in "The Graviton," where we discover just how fragile our existence is:

It's bad enough
not being able to find good fish and chips,
or true love, or an immigration policy
everyone agrees on. But the graviton
has to exist, since everything else exists,
more or less, so the argument goes.

And so, we infer, we must stick with what is real. These are big, empirical poems that tell us to pay close attention. The book's section titles are an instruction set for how to read the poems: "Don't Ask"; "Listen"; "Read Between the Lines." Brown's speaker hovers around the familiar, and if you ask you will already be looking in the wrong direction and miss the turn toward the unfamiliar. Instead, listen to everything she says -- and to everything she doesn't say. It's only in learning to pay attention to what's here and what's not that we can go along with the wisdom of the speaker: "In the middle / of the night, the sky lowers towards me. / It has a mind of its own, / but no secrets from anyone listening."

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KILLER STUFF AND TONS OF MONEY: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 17, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Maureen Stanton
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594202933
326 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Annie Groer

Curt Avery is the fake name of the very real hero of "Killer Stuff and Tons of Money," which is too bad because after whipping through Maureen Stanton's utterly engaging, heavily researched account of her old college buddy's life on the yard-sale flea-market antiques-show auction-house circuit, I wanted to invite myself into his multi-state universe and hang out with all those dealers, collectors, sport shoppers, decorators, scholars and especially the pseudonymous Windsor chair restorer whose brilliantly altered and repaired pieces have fooled a number of top antiquarians and museums.

Not since Larry McMurtry's fictitious rogue "Cadillac Jack," has there been such a charming emissary from the world of the previously owned.

For collectors -- meaning anyone with more than four vintage lunchboxes or a home crammed with Majolica ceramics -- "Killer Stuff" rings as true as a 17th-century bell. For their loved ones grown weary of living amid, and possibly climbing over, countless objects to which they have no emotional ties, this book may shed light on the hunter-gatherer instinct that Avery, and millions of others, possess in spades. (His long-suffering wife has a real job, which provides the family with health insurance.)

Avery's gateway drugs were century-old bottles he and a pal dug up in his backyard as kids and sold at bottle shows. (The author helpfully includes a brief history of trash collection in America.) He didn't plan to become a dealer -- though accepted to Yale's physician's assistant program, he did not enroll -- but the self-taught lover of Americana had a good enough eye to make a go of it after years "being on the scene, gleaning tips from other dealers, working at an auction house for minimum wage (and) studying obscure reference books." Stanton herself grew up "dump picking" alongside a mother fond of discarded rotary phones.

If that passion sounds peculiar, consider that actor Nicholas Cage and rocker Mick Jagger were into shrunken heads; President Kennedy went for scrimshaw carvings; Imelda Marcos owned 500 bras, one of them bulletproof, in addition to her 1,060 pairs of shoes; Napoleon collected books; Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet collected Napoleana; and urologist John Lattimer "literally collected Napoleon" by acquiring the Corsican's penis, allegedly "snipped off by the priest who administered last rites." In 2009, the Association of Collecting Clubs website listed 6,000 groups whose objects of desire range from airline spoons to Zippo lighters.

Martha Stewart Living, a part of the omnivorous collector's empire, can shape the collectibles markets, notes Avery, while eBay, today's godsend for buyers, is a disaster for some dealers. "Any idiot with a computer and an attic full of stuff can sell on eBay."

Stanton salutes Avery's enduring fantasy, "when there before him that object sits on a table or shelf -- the lottery ticket, the 'retirement piece,' the 'super-best,' the Holy Grail, and he knows it."

Me, I just want to find Curt Avery.

Annie Groer, a former Washington Post staffer, writes about politics, culture and design. She is at work on a memoir.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Wed, May 25: Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise

by Kevin M. Schultz A review by Adam Kirsch

After he was elected president in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower made a famous statement of belief that nicely summarized the mid-century American creed: "Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." There is something absurd about the way the second part of the sentence casually annuls the first: If you don't care what people believe about God, how "deeply felt" can your own beliefs really be? What Eisenhower really seems to be saying is that religious people make good citizens -- more bluntly still, that fear of God is needed to keep people in line.

This principle may or may not be true, but it has nothing to say about the truth or falsehood of any particular religion. Presumably, if Americans started sincerely worshipping Zeus or L. Ron Hubbard, they would get all the same civic benefits as if they were pious Jews, Catholics, or Protestants. The temptation to make a religion of religion, to recommend that other people believe doctrines one does not believe oneself, is a standing temptation for ideologues, especially on the right.

Yet the generosity of Eisenhower's statement is even more striking than its awkwardness. When you consider how much blood has been spilled over questions of theology, there is something quite wonderful about the way Americans are so eager to give every religion equal credit for good intentions -- or even to believe that good intentions are more important than theological correctness. And what is most amazing of all is the way Jews are automatically included in this consensus -- in what Eisenhower went on to call "the Judeo-Christian concept." The very term "Judeo-Christian," which is now a cliché in American political discourse, represents a healing of a 2,000-year-old breach, an off-hand repudiation of the whole bloody history of Christian anti-Judaism.

When and how did America start to think of itself as a Judeo-Christian country, rather than what it historically has been, a Protestant one? That is the question Kevin M. Schultz asks in Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford), and he gives a very concrete answer. The change came about in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks primarily to the concerted effort of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a lobbying and educational group founded in 1927. In fact, the first half of Tri-Faith America reads like a history of the NCCJ, as Schultz draws on archival material to show how the group developed its programs and understood its mission.

That mission was even clearer in the group's original, unwieldy name, National Conference of Jews and Christians (Catholic and Protestant). For if one of its goals was to bridge the divide between Jews and Christians, the other was to stimulate good will between Protestant and Catholics -- groups whose antagonism had been a far more important feature of American history. Indeed, from any reasonable point of view, Catholics posed a much greater challenge to the hegemony of American Protestants than Jews ever could: At mid-century, the population was estimated to be two-thirds Protestant, one-quarter Catholic, and 3 percent Jewish. To many Protestants, moreover, Catholics were inherently unsuited to democracy, because of their obedience to the Church and their communal clannishness. Not until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 would this kind of hostility be wholly put to rest.

It is greatly to the credit of America's mainline Protestant leaders, then, that in the 20th century they put the weight of the Establishment behind the "tri-faith" vision and against the forces of bigotry. The NCCJ had its origins as a reaction to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, with its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic hatreds, and took new urgency from the rise of Nazism in 1930s Europe. Its most popular programs were the so-called Tolerance Trios, in which a priest, minister, and rabbi would tour the country conducting public discussions. The NCCJ's head described these tours as a benevolent American " 'storm-trooping' ... in sharp contrast to Nazi precept and procedure."

Anodyne as the Tolerance Trios sound, they did have to overcome some initial resistance, notably from the Catholic Church. Some bishops refused to allow priests to appear in a setting that suggested parity with ministers and rabbis. Yet the clergy who took part in the Trios went out of their way to minimize doctrinal differences. At one conference in the early 1930s, a priest told a Methodist questioner, "I would hope that you should become a Catholic. But as long as your reason and conscience truly lead you to do otherwise, you have as good a chance to get to heaven as any Catholic." As Schultz notes, this was "a bit theologically soft regarding the Catholic position," but for that very reason it was a good example of how the rhetoric of tolerance helped to produce the reality. The official NCCJ formula, "the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God," nicely elided dogmatic differences.

World War II, Schultz shows, was when Tri-Faith America became official government policy. Privately, Franklin Roosevelt could be cutting about Jews and Catholics, once announcing that the United States was "a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance." But during the war, the political appeal of "brotherhood" was too obvious to ignore. Not only did it serve to tamp down ethnic and religious prejudices that could hinder the American war effort, but it provided a perfect foil to Nazi racism. "We are at war with a people claiming to be a 'lordly race,' " said Henry Sloane Coffin, a leading American Protestant minister. "We must hold fast to our national unity by insisting that all men have one heavenly father who wills His Children to honor and serve one another as brethren."

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, then, the NCCJ was given free access to the American military. Tolerance Trios visited camps and bases; soldiers were issued pamphlets with titles like "A Faith for Young Men in the Armed Forces" and "Why We Are at War." Perhaps the most concise and moving statement of tri-faith unity was the "prayer card" issued to every soldier, containing Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish prayers to be read to a dying man. The kitschiest example, on the other hand, may have been the football game at Ft. Benning described by Schultz in which the marching band formed into a Star of David and played a rousing version of "Ein Keloheinu," before reforming as a cross and playing "Onward Christian Soldiers."

The NCCJ representative at that game noted happily that "the massed thousands cheered wildly and warm-heartedly this gesture of good-will." But then, he wasn't exactly a neutral party. Schultz's institutional focus on the NCCJ means that he has little to say about how its propaganda was actually received by citizens and soldiers and what kind of concrete impact it had on bigotry. (Tom Lehrer, the musical satirist, offered an astringent view in his song "National Brotherhood Week": "It's fun to eulogize/ The people you despise/ As long as you don't let 'em in your school.")

Schultz's treatment of the intellectual and theological dimensions of the subject is also fairly summary. Inevitably, Schultz mentions Will Herberg, whose 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew "affirmed the arrival of Tri-Faith-America," but he has less to say about Herberg's critique of this concept as "religiousness without religion ... a way of sociability or 'belonging' rather than a way of reorienting life to God."

His focus in the second half of the book is, rather, legal and sociological. If World War II enshrined "the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God" as an American principle, the 1950s and 1960s saw Americans wrestle with its limits and contradictions. For one thing, Schultz emphasizes, the divisions among Protestant, Catholic, and Jew were far easier to talk about than the gulf between black and white. The NCCJ faced periodic pressure to broaden its mandate to include civil rights issues; but while many of its members were sympathetic to the cause, the organization itself remained highly cautious.

Still, Schultz argues in his last chapter, "From Creed to Color," that the tri-faith emphasis on "brotherhood" and "the Judeo-Christian heritage" helped to prepare the ground for the civil rights movement, by giving it "a language to tap into." In his "I Have a Dream" speech, Schultz notes, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the tri-faith formula when he referred to the day "when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands."

Yet other postwar developments helped to expose the fault lines in the tri-faith alliance -- in particular, the conflicting agendas of Jews and Catholics. While both of these groups wanted to fight discrimination from the Protestant Establishment, they had different visions of what America should be. Jews, as a small and historically persecuted minority, understood America as a secular country, where Church and State were totally separate. Thus, Jewish plantiffs and lawyers helped to litigate the landmark Supreme Court cases that barred school prayer in the early 1960s, and Jewish organizations strongly objected to plans to include a question about religion on the 1960 census. Catholics, Schultz shows, came down on the other side of both issues. As a large and well-established group, they welcomed a recognition of their numbers and wanted a role for religion in public life.

Such disagreements, heightened by Jews' memories of Catholic persecution, tested but did not break the tri-faith consensus. Today, as Schultz observes, the major divisions in American life cut across religious boundaries. On issues like abortion, homosexuality, and school prayer, conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Jews have much more in common with one another than with their liberal coreligionists.

But the real test for the tri-faith model, which Schultz barely addresses in his book, will be the assimilation of new religious groups into the "Judeo-Christian" model -- above all, Muslims. From Ground Zero to Orange County, the last year witnessed a series of revolting demonstrations of anti-Muslim prejudice in the United States, reminiscent of the kind of bigotry that Jews and Catholics once faced. Tri-Faith America shows that our religious diversity has been a process of mutual accommodation: As "foreign" religions become less dogmatic and distinctive, Americans stop seeing them as alien or threatening. With luck, the same benevolent process will allow us, a few generations from now, to talk blithely of America's Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage.

This review was originally published by Tablet, a new read on Jewish life.

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BRINGING ADAM HOME: The Abduction That Changed America

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May 27, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Les Standiford with Detective Sergeant Joe Matthews
Ecco
ISBN 978-0061983900
291 pages
$24.99

Reviewed by Del Quentin Wilber

It seems like eons ago, but there was a time when parents thought little of permitting their children to wander shopping malls by themselves or to visit playgrounds without adult supervision. That innocence has ended, of course, and its demise can be partially traced to a humid day in August 1981, when authorities discovered the severed head of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in a Florida drainage canal.

The abduction of Adam from a Sears store in Hollywood, Fla. -- where his mother had left him at a video game console while she shopped for a lamp -- and his gruesome slaying generated national headlines. In "Bringing Adam Home," novelist Les Standiford and former Miami Beach police detective Joe Matthews combine forces to provide the definitive account of Adam's death, a crime that they argue so badly shocked the country that it "seemed to mark the end of America's innocence."

The killing was certainly a catalyst for reforms in how authorities track missing children, and it inspired Adam's father, John Walsh, to become the country's leading private crime fighter; his television show, the recently canceled "America's Most Wanted," has helped authorities solve dozens of unsolved crimes and capture hundreds of fugitives.

At its heart, this well-written and well-told book isn't so much an account of discovering the truth behind one of the nation's most notorious slayings as an autopsy of a botched criminal investigation that identified a solid suspect but soon sputtered and took wrong turns for more two decades. The turning point came in 2006, when the Walshes approached Matthews, a retired detective who was also a consultant on "America's Most Wanted," and asked him to try to solve their son's slaying.

Matthews began digging through files and re-interviewing witnesses. The detective was shocked by the sloppy investigative work of the Hollywood Police Department, which handled the case. He learned that as early as October 1983 investigators had developed a solid suspect, Ottis Toole, a troubled drifter who had killed before. Not only that, Toole confessed to having killed Adam to almost anybody who would listen. At one point, the Hollywood Police Department even announced that he was their prime suspect. But the case soon unraveled when he recanted his admissions, leading a Hollywood detective to question the man's guilt. The result: Over the years, tips were not followed up, documents never made it into the case file, and evidence vanished. (Toole, a convicted serial killer and arsonist, died in prison at the age of 49 in 1996.)

Though much of the evidence pointing to Toole's guilt resided in case files, it took Matthews' critical eye to piece it together. The former detective also discovered new witnesses who helped him pin the killing to Toole, and by 2008 his work had paid off -- Hollywood authorities announced that Toole was their man and officially closed the case, helping to bring a modicum of closure to the Walshes.

"Bringing Adam Home" has elements of a thriller, but it focuses so extensively on two unsympathetic characters -- the lead detective, portrayed as a bumbling brute, and Toole, the crazed killer -- that it can be depressing. The narrative of Matthews' detective work does not really get started until more than two thirds of the way into the book, and the authors also found it necessary to recount -- often in great detail -- Toole's various confessions to the killing, making tough reading for any parent.

Readers willing to confront the horrifying nature of this crime will come away, however, with a solid understanding of why it took so long to solve and where the investigation went terribly astray. They will also come to admire the determination of Matthews and the Walshes for refusing to give up -- even after so much time had passed and our collective innocence had washed away.

Del Quentin Wilber covers the federal courts for The Washington Post and is the author of "Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan." He can be reached at wilberd(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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TANGLED WEBS: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff

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May 20, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James B. Stewart
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594202698
473 pages
$29.95

Reviewed by Sissela Bok

In his provocative and hard-hitting new book, James B. Stewart warns of the risks to our society from an epidemic of perjury that has "infected nearly every aspect of society." Citing prosecutors who speak of a recent surge of concerted, deliberate lying by sophisticated, educated, affluent individuals, often represented by the best lawyers, he focuses on four cases involving well-known people at the pinnacle of their fields: business executive and lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, convicted of lying to investigators about the reasons for selling her ImClone stocks; former adviser to Vice President Cheney Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, found guilty of perjury in connection with the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity; home-run king Barry Bonds, indicted for perjury related to illegal use of steroid drugs; and Bernard Madoff, who, while conducting the greatest Ponzi scheme in history and lying to investors and investigators alike, was never actually indicted for perjury.

As in earlier books such as "Blood Sport" and "Den of Thieves," Stewart offers riveting accounts of the unfolding of each of the dramas he takes up. He brings to bear his superb skills as an investigative reporter, interviewing the main participants in the four cases, and acquiring previously secret grand jury transcripts and notes by FBI and other investigators through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Using such documents, along with excerpts from his own extensive interviews, journal entries and other materials, Stewart aims to pinpoint the very moment when participants decided whether or not to "practice to deceive" under oath. For some, to be sure, Madoff chief among them, locating such a long-past moment might be impossible. But many of those found guilty of perjury or false statements in the four cases might at first have rejected out of hand the possibility that they would ever choose to commit perjury, only to arrive at a time when they chose to do just that.

The author's analysis of choices by those who became entangled in the Martha Stewart case is especially interesting on this score. He offers at times minute-by-minute documentation of how Merrill Lynch stockbroker Peter Bacanovic came to give first one account of how Martha Stewart's ImClone stocks were sold, then another; and of how Martha Stewart's testimony came to agree with his second account. At the same time, we see the struggle that Bacanovic's assistant Douglas Faneuil went through, first concealing crucial evidence regarding the stock transaction, then recognizing that he could not bring himself to give false testimony under oath. Faneuil, the author points out, was the only one in his book, among all those shown to have lied, to come forward with the truth "for no other reason than that his conscience demanded it."

Why should so many risk so much by lying under oath, a felony punishable by prison? Stewart considers explanations such as loyalty, manipulative character traits, and the support of enablers with much to gain from encouraging deceit on the part of clients and friends. But ultimately, he suggests, the reason "seems only too obvious: they thought they could get away with it."

Stewart scrutinizes with equal care the choices confronting investigators about whether or not to bring charges against persons they suspect of lying. In the Libby case, Stewart points to Karl Rove and Richard Armitage as having revealed Plame's identity and sorts through the reasons they were not in the end indicted for any crime, even though they were targets of the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Instead, Libby, who had not been the original source of the leak, was indicted on several counts, including two of perjury, and sentenced to 30 months in prison -- a sentence later commuted by President George W. Bush.

The Barry Bonds case shows how difficult it can be for prosecutors to achieve convictions for perjury. Bonds had been granted immunity to charges of taking illegal steroid drugs on the condition that he tell the truth about what he knew, but then he offered testimony that led prosecutors to indict him for perjury. Other trainers and athletes, including Olympic sprinter Marion Jones, were also indicted for perjury. (In April this year, Bonds, while found guilty of obstruction of justice, was not convicted of perjury.)

Stewart is especially scathing when it comes to the failure to indict Bernard Madoff of perjury. It was clear to SEC investigators in 2006 that he was lying about his investment business, but their superiors decided not to press the issue: "At the time of his sworn testimony in 2006, Madoff purported to have approximately $20 billion under management. By the time his scheme collapsed, he had $65 billion. Failing to pursue his lies cost innocent victims another $45 billion."

Despite the voluminous documentation Stewart provides, a cautionary note is needed. The book's very first sentence makes an erroneous claim of vast proportions: "We know how many murders are committed (in the United States) each year -- 1,318,398 in 2009." No source is given for this figure, almost a hundred times larger than the murders actually reported that year. It turns out to refer, rather, to the totality of violent crimes in the United States, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report.

Stewart contrasts the specific number for murders to the absence of statistics for perjury and false statements. "There is simply too much of it, and too little is prosecuted to generate any meaningful statistics." To be sure, there is always too much perjury. And, as Stewart points out, perjury is an exceptionally difficult crime to detect, prosecute and prove. But in the absence of meaningful statistics, what evidence is there for thinking that our present predicament is more serious than in the past, so serious that it now threatens to undermine America? Or for his claim, in his conclusion, that "we appear to be on the brink of becoming a society where perjury is the norm"?

We surely hear a great deal more about lying and perjury today than in past generations, in part because of media coverage of cases such as the ones discussed by Stewart, of charges and countercharges in political campaigns, and of innumerable deceptive messages circulating on the Web. The sheer volume of messages about deceit makes it easier to conclude that there is duplicity everywhere. The same is true of messages about murder and mayhem -- one reason why that impossibly vast figure regarding murders in 2009 in America may go unnoticed by many readers.

Regardless of how we evaluate the present levels of lying and perjury in America, Stewart is right to point to the serious risks of ignoring their debilitating effects. His discussion of these four cases illuminates the damage that individuals who resort to perjury bring to themselves, to those whom they entangle in their schemes, to the workings of the legal system and to public trust. His absorbing, well-documented narratives allow readers a rare opportunity to ask themselves how they would respond if they had to raise their hands and testify under oath.

Sissela Bok is the author of "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life" and, most recently, "Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science."

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