History books of the year – review

Simon Schama: 'learning, wisdom and humanity'. Photograph: Tim Kirby/ BBC/ Oxford Film and Television

Alfred Hitchcock defined drama as life with the boring bits left out. These days publishers are trying to produce history books with the boring bits left out. The public still wants to read history, goes the thinking, but no longer has the time or stamina to wade through doorstops – huge books on big subjects that take weeks to digest. But reduce it to serviceable chunks – single out a year, a moment, or an individual – and they'll go for it.

It's easy to be snobby about this: the American historian Douglas Brinkley has dismissed One Summer: America 1927 (Doubleday), Bill Bryson's bestselling romp through the year that Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Sacco and Vanzetti were finally executed as "remedial pseudo-history", composed of "stray anecdotes", "cliches and hokey summations", even while saying "America needs more accessible, easy-to-read history". I don't think Bryson and Messrs Doubleday will be missing sleep over that.

Actually, the publishers are right: the market has changed. The difficulty is that books produced to a formula aren't necessarily easier to write than other kinds; and they don't always work. In 100 Days to Victory: How the Great War Was Fought and Won (Hodder), Saul David reconfigured a familiar narrative into 100 beautifully sharp snapshots and made a huge subject accessible to a broad readership within a reasonable compass; but the exercise left an unsatisfied feeling – a taster menu, not a proper meal.

Two recent books on the Holocaust were also written to a formula. The detective story approach worked well in Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (Heinemann) but in Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Chatto) the needs of narrative forced Wendy Lower to tell an important story hastily and through a few individuals. It would have worked better at greater length.

These things are subjective, of course. As a general reader I'm quite happy to let others guide me through the labyrinth. And good writers develop their own formulae. Graham Robb's preferred method of travel is the bicycle and 15,000 miles in the saddle lie behind The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe (Picador), an extraordinary book that uses digital mapping and modern software to revive the old thesis about ley lines and straight tracks in pre-Roman Gaul and Britain – Asterix as road engineer. The sources on the period are so limited that it is hard to know whether Robb's speculations about the druids are revolutionary or crackpot. The Romans, by contrast, left a heavier footprint, even in benighted Britannia, and in Under a Different Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain (Cape) Charlotte Higgins set out in a camper van to explore and reflect on the remains – an elegant addition to a long antiquarian tradition.

In Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History (Allen Lane) Catherine Merridale approached a huge subject via a single building, the Kremlin, that gloomy tyrants' lair in the centre of Moscow. Conspiracy and claustrophobia under the onion domes is not normally my thing – I loathe Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible – but here the sharp intelligence and atmospheric prose kept me absorbed.

The truth is, though, that our best historians, being touched with madness, transcend publishers' formulas and assume that readers will happily spend weeks sharing their obsessions. This year several of the big beasts of the jungle were strutting their stuff.

Max Hastings easily saw off his rivals in the battle for the first world war centenary market, which took place a year ahead of schedule. His Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 (HarperCollins) was old-fashioned military history, shamefully readable and spiced up with jibes at the defence policy of Blair and Brown. There were more insights into current debacles in William Dalrymple's Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury), another book unafraid to retell an old story with enormous gusto, but greatly enhanced by Dalrymple's mastery of Afghan sources and his passion for the subject.

I haven't always been Simon Schama's greatest fan: he can be glib and self-satisfied. But The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000BCE-1492CE (Bodley Head) found him at his best. Perhaps because he was on home territory, the mannerisms were under control and the extraordinary breadth of Schama's learning, wisdom and humanity was allowed to shine through.

Rana Mitter's China's War With Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane), a book that has long cried out to be written, provides Anglo-Saxon readers with an authoritative account of one of the cornerstones of the second world war. But why should we welcome Richard Overy's The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45 (Allen Lane), a veritable doorstop of a book, when there is already a vast library on the subject? Because this topic has reached the point where it needs to be pulled together and Overy, by combining Herculean archival work with lucid writing, has done just that. If not the last word on the subject, the last for while. David Caute's Isaac & Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (Yale) used a minor spat between two refugee Jewish intellectuals, Isaac Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin, as the pretext for a fascinating tour of the cultural battleground of the cold war.

Not many laughs here. So, for my lighter nominations I'll go for O My America! Second Acts in a New World (Jonathan Cape), Sara Wheeler's entertaining account of women who left these shores for the United States in the 19th century, and The Author's XI: A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon (Bloomsbury), a delightful homage to the days when the likes of PG Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and JM Barrie put willow on leather. It'll make the perfect antidote to grim news from Australia.

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Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson – review

The discovery of fire, writes Wilson, marks the moment when 'upright apes became more fully human'. Photograph: Alamy

Early on in this fascinating history of the kitchen, Bee Wilson ponders the possibility that there was, thousands of years ago, a single man who discovered for the first time that food could be transformed by fire. If such a man had existed he would not only have started off the entire history of cooking, but he would also have been responsible for altering our very physiology. Wilson, quoting anthropologist Richard Wrangham, explains how the discovery of fire marks the decisive moment where "upright apes became more fully human", providing, through a more balanced and nourishing diet, "a dull human body with a brilliant human mind".

Wilson's book seems light-hearted at first glance but through its deep inquiry into our changing relationship with food and cooking, throws light on the evolution and development of humanity itself. Effortlessly and elegantly, Wilson shows us, through discussion of spoons, forks, fridges and hobs, how the entire history of our species can be navigated in a journey around the kitchen.

Wilson takes us down almost all possible routes in her exploration of kitchen-related invention, from the earliest knives and pots to futuristic "smart fridges" with Wi-Fi and Twitter feeds. In an especially enlightening passage, she explains the emergence of the overbite in our anatomy as correlating with the development of blunt, non-corrosive table cutlery in the 18th century (a development that reduced the amount of cutting and chewing done at meal-times, eliminating the need for teeth that could "cut" for us).

Despite the fascinating content, however, Wilson's witty, colloquial style can sometimes feel forced (as, say, in the comparison between a medieval knife and Harry Potter's wand) and occasionally gets in the way of the otherwise concise narrative. But this remains both a poignant history and a reflective study of how we live today; modern kitchens, despite their "hard, chilly lines", are "filled with ghosts" of the inventors and engineers that have influenced the way we cook through history. No matter how futuristic our appliances, the act of cooking will for ever be "an old, old thing: using the transformative power of fire to make things taste better".

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Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History by Catherine Merridale – review

The Kremlin: ‘Its history, like the history of Russia itself, has been written and rewritten.’ Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/ EPA

You never forget your first view of the Kremlin, the crenellated walls towering over the river, the golden domes of the cathedrals, Red Square on its flank, the exotic fantasy of St Basil's Cathedral. More than any other great complex of buildings, except perhaps Peking's Forbidden City, the Kremlin radiates the will to power, to domination, to empire, and to mystery.

It is full of ghosts, too, the ghosts of those who lived or worked or suffered violent deaths there, the ghosts of the musketeers whom Peter the Great butchered on its walls, of the underlings whom Stalin sent to their deaths in the nearby Lubyanka cellars. You can still feel their terror as you walk late at night along the empty corridors in the old Senate building towards the office where the Georgian tyrant worked.

Moscow's Kremlin – the word means "fortress", and Moscow was far from the only Russian city to have one – began life nine centuries ago as an obscure wooden fort on a hill by a river in an almost impenetrable forest far away from what most Europeans then thought of as civilisation. Thanks to the ruthlessness, energy and sheer good fortune of its rulers, it evolved from the muddy centre of an insignificant princedom to become the capital of a mighty state. Peter the Great moved the government to his new capital of St Petersburg on the Baltic Sea. But the Kremlin never lost its symbolic force and never ceased to provide the stage for coronations and other national celebrations. And in 1918, the ancient fortress once again became the seat of power when the Bolsheviks set up their shop there. In April 1989, it saw the beginning of a new revolution when Gorbachev's almost democratically elected assembly met there, and propelled Russia into a kind of unruly open politics unseen for 70 years. It was the object of Yeltsin's ambition when he boasted that he would soon return to "our Kremlin" as Gorbachev's successor. And it is still the backdrop to the confected ceremonies of Putin's Russia, with their pastiche 18th-century uniforms and their nostalgia for an imperial past.

Sometimes, indeed, it seems as if the Kremlin were not merely the stage, but almost the main protagonist in a drama where human actors had little more than walk-on parts. Its history, like the history of Russia itself, has been written and rewritten to reflect the passing requirements of whoever happened to be ruling the country at the time – tsar, commissar, democrat or Strong Man. Rebuilt after even the worst catastrophes – Napoleon's failed attempt to blow it to pieces, the bitter revolutionary battles of 1918 – it epitomises Russia's ability to survive, to recreate itself from disaster, come what may. After the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, when the Russian state effectively ceased to exist, and again after the Soviet collapse four centuries later, the ceremonies of the Orthodox church were celebrated once again in the Kremlin cathedrals in a haze of gold, incense and glorious singing as a comforting symbol of continuity with a rose-tinted past.

It is this histrionic and partly manufactured role that Catherine Merridale describes in The Red Fortress. As in her earlier books on Russian attitudes to death and war, she combines impeccable scholarship with a deep feeling for the humanity of the people she writes about. Her style is accurate, spare, direct and warm-hearted, about as far from the academy as you can get. And she has done the work, ferreted around in the most unlikely archives, been to the most improbable places, and talked to people for whom other scholars might not have mustered the time, the energy, or perhaps even the interest. The Red Fortress is much more than just another book about the Kremlin. It is a brilliant meditation on Russian history and the myths with which the Russians have sought to console themselves, all centred on a place which for all of us – foreigners and Russians alike – has come to stand for a people, a state and a whole country.

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Simon Schama: a man always making history | the Observer profile

Simon Schama, respected academic and popular historian. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

In a speech to an audience in London last week, the historian Simon Schama joked about why he didn't need a microphone. "My father always used to stand at the back of the room and say, 'Louder, Simon, louder.' It explains my whole life."

Loud, passionate, ambitious and above all visible, Schama is the antithesis of the ivory tower academic. He has no truck with secluded contemplation. Instead, he thrives on debate, noise and, most of all, people. When he's not on television – and when is he not on television? – he's giving radio lectures, filing op-ed pieces for various newspapers, writing about food for GQ or promoting his latest historical bestseller.

He is a prolific writer who, for all his love of the crowd, has also served his time in the study and the archives. The author of 16 books that cover territory as diverse as slavery, the French Revolution and a three-part history of Britain, he has somehow managed to make 10 major documentary series for the BBC in the last two decades. By many accounts, his latest, The Story of the Jews, is also his greatest.

A towering achievement that demonstrates Schama's finest qualities to exhilarating effect, it is at once epic yet intimate, intellectually commanding but instantly accessible. It is also tremendously moving, both as a document of suffering and a celebration of struggle.

There is a tendency when considering any historical documentary series to hark back to the glory days of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, as if it were itself the embodiment of civilisation after which the barbarians were let loose. But Schama's five-part series stands by itself without any need to invoke earlier cultural high points. It is not just a bravura piece of television, but an astonishing recapitulation of a 4,000-year story.

In 1989, to coincide with the bicentenary of the French Revolution, Schama published his first big selling book, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. No less an authority than Eric Hobsbawm praised the author for his erudition, describing the book as "exceptionally stylish and eloquent", while also criticising Schama's tendency to focus on particular individuals at the expense of a more systematic approach.

What that book demonstrated above all is that Schama is a natural storyteller. He can do analysis and sift facts, but his greatest strength lies in creating a powerful narrative out of the churning, chaotic drama of historical events. History may be one effing thing after another, to paraphrase Alan Bennett, but for Schama the job of the historian is to unearth the effing storyline that links them together.

As he says in The Story of the Jews: "We are our story." Schama said in the first episode that it was what made him want to be a historian in the first place. His own story is that he was born in the closing stages of the Second World War, on the night before the Allies bombed Dresden. He grew up in Essex and north London and his father, who had held dreams of becoming an actor, was a businessman in the rag trade. Schama once said that his childhood home was a removal van, because his father was always going broke.

But his father passed on an interest in Jewish and British history, taking the young Schama on boat trips along the Thames as he spoke about Disraeli and the characterisation of Jews in English literature. By his own account, the household was a lively and voluble place and the family were known in the neighbourhood for "overdoing it". Schama recalls his mother singing Ethel Merman very loudly at the breakfast table.

"'There's no business like show business' while I was eating my yoghurt and putting my coat on."

Schama was a precocious and talkative child, the kind proud parents liked to see perform. But at the age of six he stopped talking for a period.

"My parents liked to show me off as a little mad talker with an amazing memory. I would have to recite the Latin names of flowers. And I remember deciding to refuse them this. It was a prolonged sulk that went on and on to become a kind of brief childhood madness. I enjoyed the power certainly, but it couldn't last."

No, it couldn't. Schama was born to talk and since that brief word strike, his mind and mouth have been working overtime. He read history at Cambridge and gained a starred first, followed by stints as a history lecturer at Cambridge and Oxford before making his decisive move to America to take up a chair at Harvard.

Schama was a friend of his critic Hobsbawm and is also friendly with the late historian's daughter, Julia, for whom he speaks at her Names Not Numbers talking heads events.

"He's very gregarious, warm and intense," she says. "He feels things very deeply. He doesn't pull his punches. He thinks life is important. But he's thoroughly egalitarian – he wants to chat with anyone who comes into his orbit. I think he should be cloned. The world would be a better place."

By the mid-90s, Schama was art critic for the New Yorker, had a chair at Columbia University and had written and presented two series on art for the BBC. Since then, he's balanced his post in New York, from which he took a sabbatical to make The Story of the Jews, with making films in Britain, trailing an ever-growing army of fans in his wake.

With popularity, however, comes envy, particularly in academic circles, and Schama has not escaped the accusation that he has "dumbed down". It's a charge that he vehemently rejects.

To his accusers, he says he wants to say: "'Try it, Buster. See how unbelievably demanding it is.' Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers. I am completely unrepentant. One should not feel shifty."

With his robust opinions and emphatic delivery, Schama isn't shifty, but he isn't necessarily easy to place. A liberal, he isn't a historian of the left or right. He's not divisive like, say, his fellow TV historian, Niall Ferguson. As one observer puts it: "The liberal left like to think that he belongs to them and the liberal right think that he's one of theirs." This uncertainty was highlighted when he took up an advisory role to Michael Gove, as the education secretary set about reforming the teaching of history in schools. Schama was in agreement with Gove that history had lost its binding thread and become a series of unrelated greatest hits – the Tudors, the Nazis etc.

In 2010, he said that the way that the subject was taught threatened to cut "the cord of our national memory", explaining that "chronology is very important".

His fear, he wrote, was that unless children could be won over to history, "their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of the eternal now".

Never one to remain in her own cage, Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist, suggested Schama's role was "an insult to history teachers" and dismissed the man himself as "not only glitzy, but also cheap".

But earlier this year, after Gove published his draft curriculum, Schama delighted his audience at the Hay festival by deriding the proposals. "It's 1066 and All That – without the jokes," he quipped.

Aside from history, Schama's great passions are food, art and conversation. By his own admission, he has a magpie mind that has led him to write on subjects far divorced from his specialities. "There are one or two things I know I can't write about," he has said."DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor."

With The Story of the Jews, however, he is solidly on home turf. It's the story he's been working on and towards since he started out in academia. In an exam when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had to select between three essay titles. "I chose 'The Manor' and wrote not on feudalism but on how I remembered my Uncle Harry describing Golders Green as his manor."

He set up a Jewish reading group when he lectured at Cambridge, then lectured on Jewish history at Oxford. In the 1970s, he embarked on extensive research with the intention of writing a Jewish history, but daunted by the scale of the task, he eventually gave up. It's to the credit of BBC's Adam Kemp that four years ago he was able to persuade Schama to return to the story that has haunted the historian his whole life.

"It was not just that Jewish history was inexplicable without everyone else's history," Shama recently wrote. "It was that the history of the world was inexplicable without Jewish history." Never has this point been more persuasively argued than in Schama's spellbinding The Story of the Jews.

Born 13 February 1945 in London. His parents were Jews with both Ashkenazi and Sephardic roots.

Best of times The publication of Citizens in 1989, which made Schama's name and won him the NCR Book award.

His twin achievements at the BBC. First, the 15-part A History of Britain to tie in with the millennium celebrations and this year's The Story of the Jews, expected by many to be his greatest yet.

Worst of times It's been a story of unbroken success, but Schama has been repeatedly criticised for his Zionism, most recently coming under attack from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for making a "moral" case for Israel.

What he says "You wouldn't know it but I'm good at... singing. I have a lounge-lizard repertoire. I do a croaky Tom Waits, but need to drink and smoke more to get it right."

What they say "This book shows Schama at his best… a labour of love, as full of memorable incident as a Bellow novel and wittier than a Woody Allen movie." Journalist Daniel Johnson on The Story of the Jews, the book.

"Simon Schama is the most personable… of telly historians… he is bigger on screen than off… his voice… speaks as if to the sound of violins."

Television critic AA Gill.

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THE VILLAGE: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, A History of Greenwich Village

May 1, 2013

John Strausbaugh
Ecco
ISBN 978-0062078193
624 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday.

Where's the map? While there's much to praise and enjoy in John Strausbaugh's social and cultural history of Greenwich Village, there really should have been a map. People who have visited New York as tourists are likely to know that "the Village" comprises the streets and neighborhoods around Washington Square. You do know where Washington Square is, right? Near New York University? This book needs a map.

I emphasize this mainly because Strausbaugh deals with very specific places - bars, restaurants, theaters, clubs, apartment buildings - and he repeatedly identifies their exact locations. Can you visualize the corner of Bleecker and Cornelia streets? Can you pinpoint Patchin Place, once the home of writers E.E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes? (It's a little mews off 10th Avenue, near Sixth.) How far is it from the Cedar Tavern, where Jackson Pollock and Frank O'Hara hung out, to the White Horse Tavern, where Delmore Schwartz and William Gaddis did their drinking, to the Lion's Head, the longtime watering hole of Norman Mailer, Frank McCourt and Pete Hamill?

Such questions of proximity matter because Strausbaugh emphasizes the intensity of Village life. While it's hardly a gated community, Greenwich Village does possess a kind of "under the dome" quality, with musicians, writers, artists and rebels of every kind living next door to each other and out of each other's pockets. You can walk from 14th Street to Houston Street - the rough northern and southern boundaries of the Village - in just over half an hour.

People have always gravitated to this tight warren of streets because of its implicit philosophy of total freedom. Strausbaugh calls it "a magnet for misfits." Here, if anywhere, you could realize your true self, you could be as wild, creative, promiscuous or weird as you wanted to be, and you would actually fit right in. If you were, say, a kid growing up in Ohio and you yearned for a literary life, you naturally daydreamed about having a drink with W.H. Auden at a bar near St. Mark's, dropping by Eli and Ted Wilentz's Eighth Street Bookshop, listening to Bob Dylan at the Cafe Wha?, having your novel published by Grove Press, and shedding a tear when the book ended up on the remainder tables at the Strand. In every way, "The Village" sounded like heaven.

Yet for every masterpiece created, for every career launched, there were scores of broken lives. "The history of Greenwich Village," writes Strausbaugh in his introduction, "is littered with the corpses of those who drank themselves to creative ruin or death, overdosed on various drugs, committed alcohol- or drug-fueled murder or suicide, or partied themselves into oblivion." In truth, until rents grew outrageous, the Village was largely the haven of penniless dreamers, for those just starting their careers or those who were convinced that - despite the failures, the drugs or the drink - they could somehow still make it. The lucky and talented ones nearly always ended up moving uptown to an apartment on Central Park West or out to a house in Connecticut's Fairfield County.

In its structure, Strausbaugh's history may be likened to a portrait gallery. Starting in colonial times and working up to the present, he organizes his chapters around brief biographies of seemingly hundreds of "beats and bohemians, radicals and rogues." If nothing else, the book represents an enormous amount of research and provides hours of entertaining reading.

Back in the 1850s, artsy Villagers frequented Pfaff's, a restaurant-saloon "in the cellar of the Coleman House" (which still stands on Broadway). There you might find all the vagabonds and loafers of the city, including Walt Whitman, the brilliant writer Fitz-James O'Brien (now best remembered for his fantasy stories, such as "What Was it?" and "The Diamond Lens") and the free-spirited poet Ada Clare, who defied convention by trumpeting the fact she was a single mother by having her calling card inscribed "Miss Ada Clare and Son."

Throughout his book Strausbaugh emphasizes the sexual freedom found in the Village and almost nowhere else. In the 1890s the Slide, "possibly the first drag bar in the city ... was at 157 Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson streets, the site of the music club Kenny's Castaways." (See why you need a map?) Nearby on West Third was an equally scandalous basement called - wonderful name - "the Golden Rule Pleasure Club."

In the years just before World War I, the Village enjoyed its first great flowering. At the salon of Mabel Dodge one might encounter a cross-section of its inhabitants, including - in Dodge's own words - "Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, 'Old Friends,' Psychoanalysts, IWWs [Industrial Workers of the World], Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists, Clubwomen, Woman's-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men."

Radical politics and cutting-edge art have always flourished in the Village, and Strausbaugh duly discusses revolutionaries Emma Goldman and John Reed (author of "Ten Days That Shook the World"), John Sloan and the Ashcan school of painters, the proletarian magazine the Masses, the innovative theatrical triumphs of Eugene O'Neill, the career of red-headed poet and heartbreaker Edna St. Vincent Millay, the satirical novelist Dawn Powell, the scandalously bisexual chanteuse Libby Holman, photographer of the grotesque Diane Arbus, such beat legends as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and, not least, guitar wizard Jimi Hendrix.

Besides chronicling cultural activities, Strausbaugh interweaves accounts of local politics, from the era of Tammany Hall through the administrations of mayors Jimmy Walker, Fiorello La Guardia and Ed Koch (all with Village connections). I didn't know that before he entered politics Walker wrote songs, including "Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?" But, then, such serendipitous discovery is part of this book's charm and usefulness. Who would have thought that for many years one of the Mafia's most powerful bosses, Vincent Gigante, deliberately pretended to be a shambling half-wit to throw the Feds off his trail?

Still, for all the craziness of Village life throughout its history, one is still awed by the amount of sheer talent that sometimes congregated in this one small neighborhood. When Harry Belafonte, before he decided to become a singer, signed up for an acting class with Erwin Piscator at the New School, his was "the only dark face" in the class. "He introduced himself to the other nobodies: Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Walter Matthau, Elaine Stritch, Wally Cox, Bea Arthur, and Bernie Schwartz, aka Tony Curtis."

The last chapters of Strausbaugh's book focus, to a large extent, on the post-1960s gay Village, including discussion of the notorious clubs the Toilet and the Anvil, the epoch-making riot outside the Stonewall bar (two doors down from the Lion's Head), and the AIDS epidemic. He ends, as he must, in the present when the old Village is fast disappearing, growing increasingly gentrified and upscale. And yet. To stroll along Sullivan or MacDougal streets or parts of Sixth Avenue is to feel strangely energized even in 2013, as if Greenwich Village were still and would always be the land of dreams.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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SUPERMAN: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 29, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Larry Tye
Random House
ISBN 978-1400068661
409 pages
$27

Reviewed by Michael Cavna

A year ago, within the confines of his Spider-Man-adorned office in Beverly Hills, Stan Lee emphasized to me that during the dawn of comics' Golden Age, many creators were woefully naive about negotiating their rights in a 10-cents-a-book business. And last summer, virtuoso Batman artist Jerry Robinson told me - several months before his death - that illustrators in those early years had no idea how much their original comic art might one day be worth.

Understanding that innocence within a nascent industry helps the reader appreciate the behind-the-scenes world of "Superman," Larry Tye's wide-ranging survey of the Man of Steel. For there is poignancy beneath the pop culture, and the Man of Tomorrow is best understood through the prism of yester-century.

In that regard, Tye - a former Boston Globe journalist who writes with Lois Lane-like passion and moxie - does his homework well. The best origin story pulsing through "Superman" is not the one about the Krypton-to-Kansas alien baby, but rather the one about the superhero's mortal and sometimes star-crossed creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

These teenaged friends from 1930s Cleveland were the kind of real-life fantasy-conjurers who informed Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay": two Jewish boys who identified with the Outsider and dreamed of making him mighty.

With Jerry and Joe as the book's reliable true-north, Tye is free to lead us like a reliable docent, his flights of narrative fancy always anchored in his easy authority. He ably illustrates why Superman became an instant hit with post-Depression American audiences; how Supes' omnipotence inspired various religious and ethnic groups to claim him as their own; and how the superhero has been significantly reshaped over more than seven decades by such men as publishing bosses Jack Liebowitz and Harry Donenfeld (who bought the rights to Superman for a mere $130), DC Comics editors Mort Weisinger and John Byrne, and such Hollywood figures as actors George Reeves and Christopher Reeve and director Richard Donner.

Tye devotes much of the latter half of his book to the act of bringing Superman to the screen. But even then, it's the Jerry and Joe story that resonates most. Both creators routinely fell on hard times, but Donner's first "Superman" movie not only launched the big-budget Hollywood superhero flick that's still with us today, but also helped Siegel and Shuster refill their coffers. (Also interesting: Tales of how Jerry's wife, Joanne - who first posed for Lois Lane as a hired teenager - tried to guilt the film studio into ponying up more money prior to her death last year.)

Tye's "Superman," true to the hero himself, appears with impeccable timing: An image of the crucial $412 check that the DC Comics predecessor first cut for Siegel and Shuster in the late '30s resurfaced on the Internet this year, reminding fans what a pittance the pair originally got (the resultant legal battles continue today). And the release of the billion-dollar-grossing Disney/Marvel film "The Avengers" in May resuscitated the fight over comic book-related fairness, business ethics and creators' rights.

Robinson proved to be a key friend to Siegel and Shuster. He knew what it was to be a teenager who suddenly finds himself drawing one of the nation's best-selling superheroes, your every pencil-stroke helping to define an American icon. And he also knew, better than most, that the Golden Age didn't leave its creators much gold unless they were very, very savvy.

"Superman" is at its best when not bounding or leaping or speeding, but rather simply drawing on the origin story of Jerry and Joe. In its textured telling of rising, falling and rising again, it shares a story as American as Superman himself.

Michael Cavna is a cartoonist and reporter who writes The Washington Post's comics blog, Comic Riffs, at washingtonpost.com/comicriffs. His email address is cavnam@washpost.com.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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FAIRNESS AND FREEDOM: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States

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Washington Post book reviewers

Feb 17, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

David Hackett Fischer
Oxford University Press
ISBN 978-0199832705
629 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by Colin Woodard

It's said you cannot truly understand where you're from until you've spent time elsewhere, and that's perhaps especially true of a place as expansive and unwieldy as the United States, a continent-spanning federation riven by regional fissures and philosophical contradictions. Only by taking a step back - preferably way back - can one see it from the outside in its august complexity, compare and contrast it with other variations of the human experiment, and tease out the ideas and ideals that hold it together and those that distinguishes it from anywhere else.

Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer offers such an opportunity in his latest work, "Fairness and Freedom," itself the outgrowth of a New Zealand sabbatical. The parallels between the island nation and our own were obvious: Both are open and democratic societies with British colonial origins, a frontier legacy, a history of mass immigration, and widely remarked upon senses of optimism.

But what really intrigued Fischer was a striking difference he recognized in their core values. Americans cherish freedom and liberty above all else, and much of our political history and public discourse has been about the meaning of these ideas. New Zealanders, by contrast, have organized their society around fairness, a principle that divides Americans. This book is the result of Fischer's quest to understand how and why these two open societies came to take such different paths and provides valuable insight into the American identity.

Fischer is perhaps best known for "Albion's Seed" (1989), which posited the existence of four competing "British folkways" in colonial America - each distinct in its founding values, ethnography, spirituality and societal structure - and showed how their respective influences have been felt thereafter. His "Liberty and Freedom" (2004) revealed how these regional cultures came to define the two guiding ideals of the American experiment in different and sometimes contradictory ways.

Given his past work, one might expect Fischer to have found an ethnographic basis for the differences between the two countries' guiding principles, some revealing set of cultural distinctions between the peoples who initially colonized each place that set them on their distinctive paths. But the key difference, he argues, was a matter of timing. The American colonies were part of the "First British Empire," which died when they became independent; their experience with London was largely confrontational, and the colonists were continually challenged to fight for their rights as Englishmen against imperial officials who denied taht they possessed them. New Zealand was founded during the "Second British Empire," which reached its apogee in the period from 1890 to1945; during this era, London granted Britons abroad the same rights as those at home; colonial ventures in this era had an idealistic bent, an outgrowth of a civilizing mission in which fairness, decency and social justice received plenty of lip service. The Kiwis' central concern wasn't that the empire was tyrannical, but that it was hypocritical. "The irony of British imperial rule," Fischer observes of this later era, "was that it inculcated its ethical ideals by failing to live up to them."

Fairness is a concept that was unique to English, Norse and Scandinavian languages, Fischer reveals, and is properly understood as "not taking undue advantage of other people." His exhaustive historical survey shows that Kiwis of all political persuasions have embraced fairness, even if they disagree on how it is achieved. Their heroes of sport, war and mountaineering are conspicuously celebrated for their decency toward others. Their parliamentary commissions sponsor programs to "promote fair play and good sporting behavior while discouraging a win-at-all-costs attitude among children." It's a country where everyone is insured against accidents - regardless of fault or cause - and is taxed to pay for it based on the danger of their profession; it's more equitable than our own system of tort litigation, which "brings large settlements to a few people ... (while) most victims of accidents ... get nothing."

By comparison, Fischer's survey of our history shows Americans often to be ambivalent about fairness. When veterans of earlier wars complained of being called up to fight Vietnam as well while others had not served at all, President John F. Kennedy famously responded, "Life is unfair," a notion that crops up regularly in our political discourse. Many American conservatives argue that fairness is "hostile to capitalism, destructive of national security, and dangerous to liberty," and that unfairness is virtuous and inseparable from freedom.

Fischer sees many virtues in our ideals, but argues we could learn a great deal from the New Zealand's stress on fairness. "In actual operation," he writes, "freedom and liberty and fairness can be mutually reinforcing ... (each with) the power to reinforce the other's virtues and correct its vices." In an era of increasing inequality, his is a timely argument, and one well worth hearing.

Colin Woodard is the author, most recently, of "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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STRAIGHT: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

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Feb 17, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

STRAIGHT: The Surprisingly Short History of HeterosexualityHanne Blank
Beacon
ISBN 978-0807044438
228 pages
$26.95

HOW WE LOVE NOW: Sex and the New Intimacy in Second AdulthoodSuzanne Braun Levine
Viking
ISBN 978-0670023226
260 pages
$25.95

DIRTY MINDS: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and RelationshipsKayt Sukel
Free Press
ISBN 978-1451611557
270 pages
$25

Reviewed by Elaine Showalter

Will the century change the ways we think about sexual orientation, romantic attraction, love and fidelity? Our sources of information and solace have certainly changed, as science writer Kayt Sukel points out: "Instead of Mom's shoulder, Freud's couch, or the pastor's office, we now look for answers in genetic profiles and brain scanners." But science has yet to come up with matchmaking formulas that would make online dating, or The Washington Post's Date Lab, reliable predictors of compatibility. Science hasn't been able to identify a gay gene or, for that matter, a straight gene; it can't outdo Mom, Freud or the pastor in explaining transgendered people. After Chaz Bono became a celebrity on "Dancing with the Stars," he dumped the girlfriend who had stuck by him through years of his surgical and hormonal change from female to male - strong evidence to me that the operations were successful, but nothing that would show up in a brain scan. We know that technology has changed the way young people find partners, but is it also changing the rules for older men and women? These three books offer both scientific and anecdotal takes on the way we love now.

Despite its tacky title, Sukel's "Dirty Minds" is a serious, informative and highly entertaining survey of the neurobiology of sexual attraction. Sukel consulted a number of outstanding neuroscientists in the United States and abroad about their ongoing work on sexuality, including the examination of brain chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin, analysis of DNA, genetics and hormones; brain-mapping; and animal studies. A fearless as well as tireless researcher, she sniffed a substance called Boarmate, a packaged aerosol spray of boar androsterone used to arouse the desires of female pigs, and then tested it on her unaroused and indignant cat. She participated in a neuroimaging experiment on female sexual desire by having an MRI of her brain performed at a laboratory in New Jersey while she masturbated. When her first orgasm was too brief for good scientific results, Sukel cheerfully tried again, and achieved "great length and latency" the second time around.

But not all women are so willing and able to participate in scientific research on sexual response. Much of the scientific data comes from anonymous surveys, while monkeys and other animals stand in for human subjects in laboratory studies. The lab stars of Sukel's book are the prairie voles, North American rodents who are among the 3 percent of monogamous animal species. Some neuroscientists speculate that the prairie vole may be faithful because of the highly pleasurable brain chemical dopamine, "released after the initial mating session." But before we rush to market dopamine, Sukel cautions, we should note that these "uber-monogamous rodents" are also the lying rats of the laboratory world. Although they stay with one partner for a lifetime, "both the males and the females are still getting a little on the side"; about 20 percent of their offspring have fathers who are not the bonded male. Even for a vole, biology is not destiny. "Hormones are not absolute regulators of behavior," Sukel quotes a scientist as saying, and human beings are far more complex, individual, changeable and affected by their environment than animals.

Sukel concludes that neuroscience does not offer solutions, certainties or advice to the lovelorn. It can't predict which potential partners will attract us or prescribe the determinants of their fidelity. But she also takes comfort from the idea that "there is no 'right' way to approach relationships, no one 'right' partner for me. ... There's already enough pressure involved in the search for love, thank you very much."

Hanne Blank is a historian who in her new book, "Straight," approaches the question of sexual orientation through studying the emergence of "heterosexuality" as a concept. The creation of a term and a category for what had previously been thought universal and natural depended on the creation of the category of "homosexuality" in the late 19th century. Blank takes a skeptical look at the efforts of medicine and science to define what is normal or legitimate in sexual expression. Her historical survey is more academic than Sukel's lively account of neuroscience, but she is often witty in her defamiliarization of the heterosexual. "No one knows," she writes," whether heterosexuality is the result of nature or nurture, caused by inaccessible subconscious developments, or just what happens when impressionable young people come under the influence of older heterosexuals." Using her own marriage to a man with a sex-chromosome anomaly as an example, Blank argues that sexuality is too complex, variable and manifold to be contained within a simple binary framework.

Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of Ms. magazine, is the most breezy and confident of these three writers. The author of two previous books on what she calls "Second Adulthood," a creative life stage for women between 50 and 75, in "How We Love Now" Levine turns her attention to the re-invention of intimacy in older women's lives. Based on interviews with women and responses to a questionnaire she posted on a website, she believes that fulfilling relationships of all kinds are characteristic of the New Intimacy in Second Adulthood, and that they are largely facilitated by the Internet. "In cyberspace, "she writes ecstatically, "we meet, we find, we experiment, we play, we pretend, we reach out, we care for, we share, we tell the truth, we try on personalties, we maintain intimacy, we establish intimacy."

It's nice to think that older women can have such a great time on the Internet, instead of waiting by the phone for a call that doesn't come. But I wouldn't count on it. For new insights into intimacy, love and sexuality, science has more to teach us, even if we may not like the answers. "There's no clever playbook for navigating love's messier situations," Sukel cautions. But neuroscience does have one piece of advice. To find your best match, you have to "up your N," that is, increase the size of your friendship sample. Or as Mom might say, kiss a lot of frogs.

Elaine Showalter, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, has written extensively on gender and science.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Fri, Sep 16: Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent

by John Reader A review by Peter Duffy

There is no more tragic vegetable than the potato. Originating in the Peruvian Andes, it was first domesticated by the Quechua-speaking peoples, who could not help but become reliant on a highly nutritional foodstuff that could be grown in large quantities on small plots in regions inhospitable to grains. John Reader, in his ambling new history of the "propitious esculent," calls the potato the "best all-around bundle of nutrition known." Without any help from other products, it can provide a "filling, wholesome and nourishing meal." But the "innocent" potato, Reader admits, "has facilitated exploitation." It enabled the Quechua to maintain strong bodies while suffering the deprecations of the Incas (and their system of forced labor). The Incas were followed by Spanish colonizers and then by Spanish and Peruvian hacienda owners, whose "feudal stranglehold on agriculture and farm labor" remained in place until just a few decades ago.

When the Spanish brought potatoes to Europe in the sixteenth century, the locals were skeptical. Churchmen denounced the tuber, noting that potatoes were not mentioned in the Bible. Potatoes were ugly, coming in red, black, and purple varieties and looking like "the deformed hands and feet of the leper -- the shunned outcast of the Middle Ages." Potatoes could even make you a leper. "I am told that the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy," wrote the English botanist John Gerard in 1633. But Europe was gearing up for a few centuries of warfare, and the put-upon population, as in the case of the Quechua, would find sustenance in the potato.

As happened everywhere the cultivation of the potato became widespread, their numbers grew -- and just in time to serve as a vast workforce for the Industrial Revolution and its inequitable system of low wages and brutal working conditions. In Das Kapital, Marx cites a pamphlet declaring that "if the labourer can be brought to feed on potatoes instead of bread, it is indisputably true that more can be exacted from his labour." In non-industrial Ireland, the potato was able to maintain a huge army of perpetually near-starving paupers on large estates owned by absentee landlords who had little interest in improving the general welfare. The plant was so ubiquitous that a succession of crop failures in the mid-nineteenth century -- which became the Great Irish Famine, from 1845 to (roughly) 1850 -- reduced the nation's population by a third (half from death) and provoked an outflow of emigrants that would last for a century and a half. Ireland has never come close to matching its pre-famine population of 8.2 million. In 1904, the Irish nationalist Michael Davitt called the "accursed" potato the "enemy of the poorer Irish peasantry."

Reader does not flinch from telling this side of the story, but he is not writing a tragedy. The potato, in his words, was "Peru's gift to the world." He devotes many pages to celebrating important figures in the modern history of the potato, its greatest champions, men who saw the derided vegetable as a force for good. There is Nicolay Ivanovich Vavilov, a Soviet agricultural botanist who was so seared by the loss of life from the Soviet famine of 1921 that he sidled up to Trotsky on a breadline and told him how "his program of research and plant breeding could eliminate food shortages and bread queues for ever." Trotsky passed the word to Lenin, who decided to provide funding for Vavilov's research institute. Despite his scientific acuity (or perhaps because of it), Vavilov eventually ran afoul of a regime that was fixated on grain, and he was thrown in prison, where he died in 1943. (Given the potato's history, this counts as perhaps the only instance of the Soviet Union passing up a valuable instrument of tyranny.)

The greatest hero of the tuber was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a Frenchman who was fed exclusively on potatoes during his time as a prisoner of the Prussians during the Seven Years War. He emerged from captivity determined that "all of France should enjoy the benefits of this hitherto despised crop." He introduced it as a salve against hunger for the poor masses; and he presented it as a curiosity to the aristocracy, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in a private audience in 1785. "Now that the potato was served at court, and had achieved respectability among the aristocracy," Reader remarks, "Parmentier began promoting its virtues with the panache of a modern-day public relations consultant." He hosted dinners that included nothing but potatoes. Benjamin Franklin was said to have attended one of them. The same was said of Thomas Jefferson, who, as president in 1802, served potatoes "in the French manner" at the White House, thus (it is claimed) introducing french fries to America.

Bringing us up to the present, Reader describes the considerable efforts in place to combat "the world's worst agricultural disease" -- the pernicious "late" blight that destroyed Ireland's potato crops so many years ago. The developing world spends upward of $750 million a year on fungicides to combat the disease. Reader also tells -- inevitably -- of how China has utilized the potato during its explosion of growth over the past few decades. China is not only the world's largest producer of potatoes -- they are grown in huge numbers in remote regions of Inner Mongolia -- but it is also a mass consumer of them in the form of french fries. Reader even wonders if the world community could achieve the vaunted Millennium Development Goals with the aid of new disease-resistant strains of potatoes, although he is forced to concede that "while the potato was good at keeping people alive it did not lift many of them out of poverty."

All of which makes you wonder why he begins his book with the triumphant observation that NASA astronauts will be bringing potatoes with them when they eventually reach Mars. Given the history that he subsequently relates, I can only think: God help the Martians.

Peter Duffy is an author and journalist in New York.

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!

View the original article here

Review-a-Day for Fri, Sep 16: Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent

by John Reader A review by Peter Duffy

There is no more tragic vegetable than the potato. Originating in the Peruvian Andes, it was first domesticated by the Quechua-speaking peoples, who could not help but become reliant on a highly nutritional foodstuff that could be grown in large quantities on small plots in regions inhospitable to grains. John Reader, in his ambling new history of the "propitious esculent," calls the potato the "best all-around bundle of nutrition known." Without any help from other products, it can provide a "filling, wholesome and nourishing meal." But the "innocent" potato, Reader admits, "has facilitated exploitation." It enabled the Quechua to maintain strong bodies while suffering the deprecations of the Incas (and their system of forced labor). The Incas were followed by Spanish colonizers and then by Spanish and Peruvian hacienda owners, whose "feudal stranglehold on agriculture and farm labor" remained in place until just a few decades ago.

When the Spanish brought potatoes to Europe in the sixteenth century, the locals were skeptical. Churchmen denounced the tuber, noting that potatoes were not mentioned in the Bible. Potatoes were ugly, coming in red, black, and purple varieties and looking like "the deformed hands and feet of the leper -- the shunned outcast of the Middle Ages." Potatoes could even make you a leper. "I am told that the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy," wrote the English botanist John Gerard in 1633. But Europe was gearing up for a few centuries of warfare, and the put-upon population, as in the case of the Quechua, would find sustenance in the potato.

As happened everywhere the cultivation of the potato became widespread, their numbers grew -- and just in time to serve as a vast workforce for the Industrial Revolution and its inequitable system of low wages and brutal working conditions. In Das Kapital, Marx cites a pamphlet declaring that "if the labourer can be brought to feed on potatoes instead of bread, it is indisputably true that more can be exacted from his labour." In non-industrial Ireland, the potato was able to maintain a huge army of perpetually near-starving paupers on large estates owned by absentee landlords who had little interest in improving the general welfare. The plant was so ubiquitous that a succession of crop failures in the mid-nineteenth century -- which became the Great Irish Famine, from 1845 to (roughly) 1850 -- reduced the nation's population by a third (half from death) and provoked an outflow of emigrants that would last for a century and a half. Ireland has never come close to matching its pre-famine population of 8.2 million. In 1904, the Irish nationalist Michael Davitt called the "accursed" potato the "enemy of the poorer Irish peasantry."

Reader does not flinch from telling this side of the story, but he is not writing a tragedy. The potato, in his words, was "Peru's gift to the world." He devotes many pages to celebrating important figures in the modern history of the potato, its greatest champions, men who saw the derided vegetable as a force for good. There is Nicolay Ivanovich Vavilov, a Soviet agricultural botanist who was so seared by the loss of life from the Soviet famine of 1921 that he sidled up to Trotsky on a breadline and told him how "his program of research and plant breeding could eliminate food shortages and bread queues for ever." Trotsky passed the word to Lenin, who decided to provide funding for Vavilov's research institute. Despite his scientific acuity (or perhaps because of it), Vavilov eventually ran afoul of a regime that was fixated on grain, and he was thrown in prison, where he died in 1943. (Given the potato's history, this counts as perhaps the only instance of the Soviet Union passing up a valuable instrument of tyranny.)

The greatest hero of the tuber was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a Frenchman who was fed exclusively on potatoes during his time as a prisoner of the Prussians during the Seven Years War. He emerged from captivity determined that "all of France should enjoy the benefits of this hitherto despised crop." He introduced it as a salve against hunger for the poor masses; and he presented it as a curiosity to the aristocracy, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in a private audience in 1785. "Now that the potato was served at court, and had achieved respectability among the aristocracy," Reader remarks, "Parmentier began promoting its virtues with the panache of a modern-day public relations consultant." He hosted dinners that included nothing but potatoes. Benjamin Franklin was said to have attended one of them. The same was said of Thomas Jefferson, who, as president in 1802, served potatoes "in the French manner" at the White House, thus (it is claimed) introducing french fries to America.

Bringing us up to the present, Reader describes the considerable efforts in place to combat "the world's worst agricultural disease" -- the pernicious "late" blight that destroyed Ireland's potato crops so many years ago. The developing world spends upward of $750 million a year on fungicides to combat the disease. Reader also tells -- inevitably -- of how China has utilized the potato during its explosion of growth over the past few decades. China is not only the world's largest producer of potatoes -- they are grown in huge numbers in remote regions of Inner Mongolia -- but it is also a mass consumer of them in the form of french fries. Reader even wonders if the world community could achieve the vaunted Millennium Development Goals with the aid of new disease-resistant strains of potatoes, although he is forced to concede that "while the potato was good at keeping people alive it did not lift many of them out of poverty."

All of which makes you wonder why he begins his book with the triumphant observation that NASA astronauts will be bringing potatoes with them when they eventually reach Mars. Given the history that he subsequently relates, I can only think: God help the Martians.

Peter Duffy is an author and journalist in New York.

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!

View the original article here

BIG WIG: A Little History of Hair

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Aug 5, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Kathleen Krull. Illustrated by Peter Malone
Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic
ISBN 978-0439676403
$18.99

Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan

In her nonfiction for children, Kathleen Krull has charmingly chronicled more than 100 historical figures, from musicians and artists to politicians and pirates. With "Big Wig," Krull focuses on the top of one body part -- the human head -- and the many ways we've fashioned it through the ages. Covering not just wigs but all manner of haircuts and hairdos, the book is filled with surprising facts and equally amusing illustrations. For instance, Marie Antoinette and other women of Versailles wore their hair over tall wire forms containing a variety of objects, such as bird cages, dollhouses and model ships. Peter Malone's whimsical scenes take liberties (a tiny cannonball is shown being fired from the ship), but they provide wonderful visual references alongside their witty details. Among the highlights, Krull digs up the various ingredients people have put on their heads, from Julius Caesar, who used animal urine and leeches to cure baldness, to the 1970s punks, who used Kool-Aid powder to achieve their unnatural colors. Krull also features the crucial figures of hair fashion, such as former horse groomer Marcel Grateau, whose "Marcel wave" was popular for 50 years. And after reading about the ponytail cut that the Manchu government enforced in 17th-century China, young readers may appreciate anew the heady freedoms we have today.

-- Abby McGanney Nolan

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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KILLER STUFF AND TONS OF MONEY: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America

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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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THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY

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Jun 15, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

H. G. Wells
Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar Square
ISBN 978-0297860419
188 pages
$14.95

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.

While H.G. Wells (1866- 1946) remains best known today for what he called his "scientific romances," he was far more than just the author of "The Time Machine," "The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "The War of the Worlds." The founder of modern science fiction was also a major social novelist of the Edwardian period. Henry James and Arnold Bennett praised his books, and he was widely regarded as their peer. All too often, though, today's readers only vaguely recognize such titles as "Kipps," "Love and Mr. Lewisham," "Tono-Bungay," "Ann Veronica" and "The History of Mr Polly."

So Weidenfeld & Nicolson should be congratulated for making these deeply interesting novels available again. Rather than try to discuss them all, however, it seems more sensible to pick one to illustrate Wells' distinctive merits as a novelist.

"The History of Mr Polly" (1910) is a disturbing comic masterpiece that might have gotten its start from Thoreau's remark that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It could also be seen -- at least in its first two-thirds -- as a more gently satirical and masculine counterpart to Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." Like Emma Bovary, the lower-middle-class Alfred Polly, a subordinate window dresser in a department store, reads novels and dreams of a life of wild freedom and romance:

"Deep in the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over and above the things that are jolly and 'bits of all right,' there was beauty, there was delight; that somewhere -- magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere -- were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind."

Alas, Mr. Polly soon grows convinced that he has fallen into the wrong trade, even the wrong life. Caught in his unsatisfying existence, he views the human condition as one in which we merely struggle, and struggle in vain. We waste our energies trying, quite uselessly, "to get obdurate things round impossible corners." As his friend Parsons complains about life in the modern world, there's "no Joy in it, no blooming Joy!" But then Mr. Polly's father dies, leaving him a tidy sum from insurance, and the little clerk realizes that he might do something more, something different. But what? "I think," writes the omniscient Wells, that "his distinctive craving is best expressed as fun -- fun in companionship." Almost immediately, Mr. Polly meets the three Larkins sisters at the lavish and hilarious funeral supper for his father, where hitherto unknown relatives have come to drink and chow down. Our poor hero sips a little too much sherry and ends up flirting with all three sisters. Worse still, because of his habit of "drinking at the poisoned fountains of English literature," as Wells puts it, bumbling Mr. Polly attempts rakish compliments, believing that "it becomes a man of gaiety and spirit to make love, gallantly and rather carelessly."

In due course, "Elfrid" -- as the girls call him -- finds himself sucked into the Larkinses' orbit and, almost in spite of himself, eventually proposes to one of the sisters, though not the one he'd been intending to ask. In short order, the newlyweds have set up a small shop in the village of Fishbourne. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," Mr. Polly tells himself. "Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were."

Are they now? The seventh chapter of this unjustly neglected novel opens with one of the most lugubrious sentences in English fiction: "For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne." However, his dreams haven't wholly died within him. They live on as "an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty." While his marriage isn't altogether disastrous, neither does it feed his soul. His wife had immediately "ceased to listen to her husband's talk from the day she married him." Their shop is tawdry, its cheap goods seldom wanted. Mr. Polly's only escape is, again, through reading, often the travel accounts of intrepid explorers to the distant corners of the earth.

"Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come out until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him ... that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope -- and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey."

What is left for Mr. Polly? Nothing, he decides, but to kill himself. And from that moment on, Wells' protagonist discovers in himself a new energy, a new courage. And that ultimately leads him to quite a different end from the one he plans for himself.

If you want to enjoy some excellent lower-class English humor, there's plenty of it in Mr. Polly's relations with his fellow clerks, with his wife and her family, and with the various shopkeepers of Fishbourne. But this humor doesn't hide the fundamental angst at the heart of this novel, the despondent cry that all of us utter at one time or another: Is this my life? Is this all there is? In the end, Wells -- that great social visionary -- proclaims that with enough boldness and determination even the least of us may live, to borrow another phrase from Thoreau, "the life which he has imagined." As Wells boldly proclaims:

"But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstances, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether."

Let me close by saying that, despite its perfectly innocuous title, "The History of Mr Polly" is -- long before Camus and Sartre ever wrote -- a classic of radical existentialism, and, after 100 years, still amusing, unsettling and powerfully contemporary.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE: A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holiday to Green Day

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Washington Post book reviewers

May 13, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Dorian Lynskey
Ecco
ISBN 978-0061670152
660 pages
$19.99

Reviewed by Dave Shiflett

Protest music isn't what it used to be. "Steal From Walmart" and even the hundreds of anti-war songs that blossomed in the blood of the war in Iraq don't approach the societal resonance of "We Shall Overcome" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," as British music critic Dorian Lynskey confirms and mourns in "33 Revolutions Per Minute."

"I began this book intending to write a history of a still vital form of music," Lynskey writes. "I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy." As eulogies go, however, this is a lively and sprawling one, beginning with a chapter on "Strange Fruit," written in 1939, and ending with largely ignored attacks on George W. Bush's military policy.

"Strange Fruit," a darkly powerful meditation on lynching, was anything but ignored. It put its singer, 23-year-old Billie Holiday, on the map and remains vibrant today. While protest songs up to that point were "propaganda," Lynskey writes, this one "proved they could be art."

"Strange Fruit" is far more vocally demanding than most protest songs, including Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," written in a New York flophouse in 1940 and borrowing part of its melody from the Carter family's "Little Darling Pal of Mine." In a similar sharing spirit, "We Shall Overcome" commandeered an 18th-century melody and boasts four lyricists, including Pete Seeger, whose rendition found an instant fan in Martin Luther King Jr. "There's something about that song that haunts you," King said, though it did have its critics. "I don't believe we're going to overcome (by) singing," Malcolm X told a Harlem rally in 1964. "If you're going to get yourself a .45 and start singing 'We Shall Overcome,' I'm with you."

Lynskey writes passionately and often admiringly but doesn't stint on the criticism, giving ample praise to Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" but adding that fellow folkie Tom Paxton dismissed "Blowing in the Wind" as "a grocery list song where one line has absolutely no relevance to the next line." Lynskey also reminds us that Dylan was a master of sometimes clunky contrariness: A few weeks after John F. Kennedy's assassination, he claimed a strange kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald: "I saw some of myself in him," he told a New York audience, which rewarded him with a bouquet of catcalls.

Singalong fans will appreciate Lynskey's inclusion of Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag," perhaps most famous for the Fish Cheer that preceded it at Woodstock and helped launch the F-bomb's glorious ascendancy. In this case, the criticism comes from McDonald himself. "What's almost unfathomable is the smallness of it," he says. "It was just another song." Yet we still remember that rag, unlike the hundreds (if not thousands) of songs inspired by the Iraq war. The absence of a military draft might explain the difference. In an earlier era, singing anti-war songs might be considered an act of self-preservation; today, our volunteer services drain such warbling of its urgency and audience.

The book ranges far beyond the '60s and includes songs celebrating gay and black pride, protesting apartheid and hunger, and denouncing various meanies, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There are also amusing nonmusical asides, including a fond remembrance of punkster Jello Biafra's 1979 run for mayor of San Francisco, in which he took a respectable 4 percent of the vote, though that placed him behind Diane Feinstein and Sister Boom-Boom. Biafra later said that punk was "a close-minded, self-centered social club" and "a meaningless fad."

The theme of smugness and encroaching irrelevance weaves through the book, with Lynskey reminding us early on that many protest songs are short on chord changes and long on sanctimony, with fans to match. He characterizes the attitude as "We understand. We are not like them. We are all on the same side."

He gives a terrific example of another problem: the profundity-aspiring musician, in this case country singer Steve Earle, who insisted that American-born Taliban member John Walker Lindh was something of a post-adolescent everyman: "I became acutely aware that what happened to him could have happened to my son, and your son, and anybody's son," weirdly suggesting a widespread youthful desire to join an ultrareligious warrior group that doesn't allow you to drink beer or listen to popular music and stones you to death for unsanctioned sex.

Thankfully, we get a more sober observation from the voice of reason himself, Keith Richards: "You don't shoulder any responsibility when you pick up a guitar or sing a song, because it's not a position of responsibility."

Is protest music dead? The better question, Lynskey writes, is "Is anybody listening?" Not to protest music, it seems, which interrupts the pursuit of unencumbered entertainment. "It is not just that people have lost faith in any performer to help bring about change," he concludes. "They resent anyone who attempts to do so."

Perhaps the only way to bring protest music back home is to reinstitute the draft.

Dave Shiflett is a writer and musician in Midlothian, Va.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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