We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School For Boys, by Erin Kimmerle

 

"They was throwaways."

9780063030244

William Morrow, 2022

241 pp

hardcover

It wasn't all that long ago that I read Colson Whitehead's excellent The Nickel Boys, 

a novel inspired by the stories of abuse from men who as children were sent to the real-world Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.   It is also a story of the long reach of trauma that lasts well after the horrific events at the fictional Nickel Academy, and how an investigation headed by a team from a Florida university that uncovers a "secret graveyard" sent one man back to finally confront the past and his pain.  As Whitehead wrote in his book, "Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but ...  no one believed them until someone else said it."  

In We Carry Their Bones, Dr. Erin Kimmerle of the University of South Florida, who is also a leading forensic anthropologist, explains that she had been introduced by a friend to a "local reporter" who had been working on "a series of stories" about "the dark history" of the Dozier School, including "brutal beatings and sadistic guards and mysterious deaths."  

  As she notes,

"The stories raised questions about a purported cemetery on the school's property, and the reporter had hit a dead end.  He had found the families of boys who died in custody and were buried at the school, families that had never found peace, for they'd never been given the opportunity to properly mourn. No one could point to the location of the graves where their brothers and uncles were buried. No state official had stepped up to find those burials."

While there was a small cemetery on the once-segregated black side of the grounds known in the records and among the locals as "Boot Hill," Dr. Kimmerle and her team were not "confident" that this was the only burial site.  Permission to explore all of the grounds was denied by the Department of Juvenile Justice (which had claim to the side of the school where white boys had been confined and which did not close until 2011), and in 2012, the reason given was "pending sale of the property and other liability concerns."    Kimmerle understood that with the sale of the "220 acres of the boys' school land,"  the new owners might very well "pave a parking lot on top of the graves of little boys," and that time was of the essence.   

Just briefly, because it is a book you must read for yourself so I won't go into too much detail here, We Carry Their Bones details the work of Kimmerle and her team in investigating the area while trying to discover not only an actual number of burials, but also in trying to identify some of the remains so that they could be returned to their families.  She realized that a major part of her work was to glean as much information about the school as possible from the historical record, and to get to know as much as she can about the place and the people.  Among her discoveries were the names of boys whose deaths had gone unreported by school officials, including boys who died after having run away, those who died after having been "paroled to local plantations for labor" or boys who died from illnesses while in "overcrowded living conditions, without adequate food or medicine."  Most importantly, her findings didn't jibe with those of  the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), who 2008 were tasked by the governor at the time to "investigate the 32 unidentified graves that were marked by white metal crosses" and to figure out the identities of the dead in those graves.  He had also directed FDLE investigators to determine "if any crimes had been committed."   The FDLE had reported that they found  

"no evidence to suggest that the School or its staff made any attempts to conceal and/or contributed to the deaths of these individuals"

and documented the number of burials as thirty-one, which just happened to correspond to the number of crosses (made out of pipes) placed there in the 1990s.   Kimmerle's  use of ground-penetrating radar suggested at least fifty burials in the area of  Boot Hill, and the historical record speaks for itself as far as covering up crimes.   

Her struggle to gain access to the school's grounds was a tough one.  As one example, state bureaucrats refused her application for  a permit saying that the recovery of human remains was not covered within the scope of the permit, which allowed only for the recovery of "objects of historical or archaeological value."  She also met with stubborn resistance from Marianna locals, many of whom had either worked at the school at some point or had relatives who'd worked there and felt it would be better just to let things be than to rehash the school's history, which might damage the town's reputation and hurt it economically.  As one woman, an archivist Kimmerle spoke to noted, the boys were "inmates, not children,"   as well as "throwaways."  Of course there's also the fact that the school provided free labor from the Dozier boys as part of the convict-lease system and that many of the town's inhabitants had gained financially as a result.  But Kimmerle would not be deterred in her quest,  and with the support of the media, of many of the boys' families and of politicians to whom she appealed, her team would go on to not only excavate remains, but also to examine them forensically and to take DNA samples from relatives in her effort to match those remains to names.   In the end, she would eventually carry some of the bones of the identified boys to reunite them with their families.  

Colson Whitehead's blurb on the front of this book notes that "In a corrupt world, Kimmerle's unflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice," and at every turn it is obvious that her objective was to offer any support and help she could to the families of the Dozier boys who never made it home.  As she points out at the end, "the door was closed to us in the search for historic justice by many who had the power to open it," but Kimmerle's  determination and that of all of the people involved made it so they would not and did not fail.   It is a difficult book to read on several levels but on the other hand, it is a story that seriously needs telling, right now. 

Very, very highly recommended.  

*****

If anyone is interested, there's a documentary highlighting Dr. Kimmerlee's work available online called "Deadly Secrets: The Lost Children of Dozier"

or if you want to read Dr. Kimmerle's report on the Documentation of the Boot Hill Cemetery at the Former Dozier School for Boys, Marianna Florida, you can find it here. 

Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, by Tiya Miles

9781469636146

University of North Carolina Press, 2015

154 pp

paperback

"... let our ghosts be real, let our ghosts be true, let our ghosts carry on the integrity of our ancestors." 

I seriously do not remember why I bought this book in the first place, but some nights ago I chose it from my history shelves completely at random and started to read.  I was instantly blown away and have recommended this book to any number of people.  It's that good. It's that necessary.  

In 2012 Professor Tiya Miles had gone to Savannah to work on her novel; after lunch one day, on her way back to her hotel, her attention was drawn to a woman waving at her.  The woman asked if she would like to take "a historic tour" of the local Sorrel-Weed house, and Miles was "intrigued" enough by the idea of "being beckoned into history"  to buy a ticket.  As she was guided through the house, she learned the story of its owner, Francis Sorrel, a "cotton tycoon" of Haitian heritage, passing for white. Sorrel had lost his first wife to typhoid and then married her sister Matilda afterward.  As the story goes, Matilda had committed suicide "by jumping off the second-floor balcony," because she had caught  her husband and his "mistress," a "slave girl" by the named of Molly, in flagrante.   A week later, Molly herself had been found "strangled, dangling from the ceiling rafters of the carriage house," and while Francis moved to a nextdoor townhouse, Molly and Matilda remained  as resident ghosts.  The author was told that if she wanted to visit the scene of Molly's death, she could come back that evening for the "Haunted Ghost Tour,"  which she did.  In the "stillness of  that night" Miles writes that she cannot say if she "felt Molly's presence," but she did feel a "kind of call," to 

"search for evidence of Molly's life in the archival rubble of urban slavery, to tell her story and redeem her spirit from the commericialized spectacle of bondage I had witnessed"

along with a pledge to "restore her memory and her dignity."  Afterwards, going through historical records, she discovered nothing at all to indicate that a woman named Molly had been owned by Sorrel; as she notes,  

"Although many young women like her surely existed in antebellum Savannah and the torturous rice plantations of the surrounding countryside, this Molly was not among them. Someone had concocted her story of racial and sexual exploitation as a titillating tourist attraction."

And now, she writes, she wanted to know why Molly was "invisible in the historical record and hypervisible on the Savanna ghost-tourism scene. " She also was left with a number of questions she felt needed answering: 

Why were ghost stories about African American slaves becoming popular in the region at all? And why were so many of these ghosts women? What themes prevailed in slave ghost stories, and what social and cultural meanings can we make of them? What 'product' was being bought and sold, enjoyed and consumed, in the contemporary commerical phenomenon of southern ghost tourism?"

Very briefly, because there is so much to this short but extremely complex study that I could never hope to capture here, the book begins with a look at the growth in popularity of the ghost tour, examining how haunted history has come to captivate audiences everywhere.  We live in an age in which "ghost lore has moved into myriad cultural forms" widely available on television and online; she quotes the editors of the book Popular Ghosts  who note that "we appear to live in an era that has reintroduced the vocabulary of ghosts and haunting into everyday life."    In the American South, as Miles notes, the "surge in haunting tales has taken on a particular cast, and often features spirits who are said to have been slaves."   

In her journey to find the answers to the questions posed above, the  author took part in several ghost tours in the South, and the book takes us through her experiences at three of these -- the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah,  the New Orleans home of Delphine Lalaurie,  and The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville.      As the back-cover blurb reveals,  the guides of these tours, "frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South"  often rely on "stories of enslaved black specters,"  in which their

"haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain."

Professor Miles'  work highlights the commonalities which she discovers in each tour, discerning a particular, overall pattern while examining and analyzing the ways in which this industry appropriates a number of elements of African American culture.  These tours  borrow the experiences of enslaved people which are  "boiled down to an exotic essence, and sold for a price," while the "black history material" Miles encountered was  "romanticized or decontextualized."  While violence is part and parcel of the "signature tales" of these places, what is presented is done in such a way as to trivialize the actual brutality endured by enslaved peoples, especially women;  the tourists are offered "narratives that temper the history of slavery and race relations, assuage guilt, and feed fascination with the racialized other."  In this way history becomes sanitized, kept at a "safe" distance from the ghost-touring public.  The reality is though that far from a means of entertainment, the ghosts of enslaved peoples are "deadly serious messengers from another time that compel us to wrestle with the past,"  one that is "chained to colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy but a past that can nevertheless challenge and commission us to fight for justice in the present." 

 It is impossible to miss the author's passion for her subject;  writing it in the first person not only  highlighted that particular aspect of this book, but also made the reading less daunting than a regular textbook and more like I was actually along for the ride as she made her journey. Tales of the Haunted South is not only an important, interdisciplinary study,  it should be required reading for our time and absolutely should not be missed.  

A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes, by Eric Jay Dolin

9781631495274
Liveright Publishing/WW Norton, 2020
392 pp

hardcover


As someone living in South Florida, about a third of a mile as the crow flies from the coast,  reading this book during a very active hurricane season may not have been the brightest idea in terms of mental health.  I needn't have worried: it was so well done that I found myself completely engrossed almost immediately.    As it turns out, all is not doom and gloom here -- as the dustjacket blurb reveals,  it is a melding of

"American history, as it is usually told, with the history of hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation's course." 

 From the beginning, the author acknowledges that in writing the "history of the American hurricane," this book must be "selective," given that there have been  quite possibly "more than a thousand" of them over the past five hundred years. Among the individual hurricanes discussed throughout the book,  found here also is a history of meteorology,  which Dolin notes is "intriguing, and at times rather nasty,"  the "influence of hurricanes on the course of empire, the outcomes of war," "critical innovations in communication, aviation, computer, and satellite technology," and he examines how

"the history of American hurricanes forces us to confront thorny questions of how we can learn to survive and adapt to the continued barrage that is sure to come from the greatest storms on Earth."

Beginning with Columbus, the author moves forward through time as he highlights various storms that had some sort of historical impact, for example two which played a "critical role" in the early colonial history of Florida, one of which kept the French from conquering the Spanish.  The 1609 storm that affected  the people of Jamestown also "left its mark on literary history" as Shakespeare's inspiration for The Tempest.  The Treasure Fleet Hurricane off the coast of Florida hit in 1715, sinking an entire fleet of ships carrying "jewels, coins, ingots, and "exotic goods" and ramped up piracy in the Atlantic.   Moving into the 20th century,  the author highlights the  1900 Galveston Hurricane that not only  killed thousands of people but also remains the "deadliest natural disaster in American history."  There's an entire chapter on "Death and Destruction in the Sunshine State," beginning with the 1926 hurricane that "battered Miami," and then the book moves on to more recent hurricanes including Hugo, Camille, Andrew and Sandy through Harvey, Irma and Maria.  As he is discussing these storms, the author adds in the technological advances over time in the areas of forecasting, weather science, and discusses the pioneering efforts of those who put themselves potentially in harm's way, for example, those people who were brave enough to fly into the eye of the hurricane itself.   Most importantly, Dolin reveals that throughout our history with hurricanes, it's not been just a matter of stories about "death, destruction, and despair," but also "charity, kindness, humor, and resilience."

 A Furious Sky is one of the most compelling and seriously educational nonfiction books of my reading year so far, combining history, personal accounts, the science of meteorology, the growth of forecasting/prediction technologies, politics, and a look at the very real hazards of climate change, which has the potential to bring ever more powerful storms into our lives.   It's tough to do a broad history like this one, but Mr. Dolin's done a fine job here and the book makes for  great reading even for people like me who aren't particularly gifted in the realm of science.  Very highly recommended.

Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era, by Jerry Mitchell

"Those guys got away with murder...It's not too late."

9781451645132
Simon & Schuster, 2020
418 pp

hardcover


It's January, 1989 in Jackson Mississippi, and reporter Jerry Mitchell was on assignment for his newspaper The Clarion-Ledger to cover the state premier of  the film Mississippi Burning.  He normally had the "court beat," so this was something different for him.  Mitchell found himself seated next to someone who seemed to know a lot about what was and wasn't true about the film, based on the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.  As it happened, that man turned out to be retired special agent Roy K. Moore, who had been in charge of the FBI in Mississippi at the time.  Later, when the rest of the press had gone, Mitchell stayed behind to listen to Moore talk to two other men, another FBI agent and a journalist who had covered the events at the time.  During that conversation he learned that nobody had ever been prosecuted for the murders of the three men, even though "more than twenty Klansmen' were responsible.  Mitchell wondered how it was possible that twenty people, their identities known by locals who'd never turned them in, could get away with murder.   Why hadn't the state of Mississippi done anything about it?  From further conversations with Moore, Mitchell learned that although one killer eventually talked and had given the FBI what it needed for prosecution, the governor of the state "couldn't" do so, "essentially refusing to uphold its own murder laws."

As Mitchell began to research this case he came to learn about the connections between the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which "worked with and even helped fund the white Citizens' Councils" to help fight desegregation in the state, and  the murders of the three activists.  He'd hoped that by bringing certain facts to light he would "spark"  the Attorney General to "pursue new  charges in the case," but it was not to be and the case remained cold.   Feeling like he'd failed, his colleagues reminded him that they had been able to help

"ferret out unreported details about a twenty-five-year-old murder case that many powerful figures had wanted to keep sealed."

That was at least "something."   He  continued to read about other civil-rights "cold cases," and eventually his research  would lead him to into the murder of Medgar Evers, the firebombing of the home and store of Vernon Dahmer Sr. which led to his death,  and the September 1963 bombing of the  Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham which killed four little girls -- Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.    All of these crimes were the work of members of the KKK; none of those responsible had ever been punished.  The main issue facing Mitchell was that time was not on his side: witnesses and suspects were dying off.  In a "race against time," Mitchell was determined to bring the details of these crimes into the light through his investigations, hoping that his work might be a driving force into not only getting these old cases reopened, but also that people like Byron de la Beckwith, Sam Bowers, and Bobby Cherry (the KKK members responsible) would finally be brought to justice for their crimes.   Yet, what continued to "gnaw" at him after these successes was the "Mississippi Burning" murders that by 1998, still had not been "reckoned with."  Undaunted, and even as the "pool of witnesses and evidence" decreased, Mitchell continued his efforts for justice in this particular case, determined to bring Edgar Ray Killen, "the moving force" behind these murders, to trial.

The book is divided into five parts, each section under the names of the victims of these horrific crimes, beginning and ending with James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.  It is his contention that the "Mississippi Burning" murders were not only the "result of a months-long battle plan," but also that the head of the Mississippi branch of the KKK (the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan), Sam Bowers, meant to send a message

"not just to African-Americans and civil rights activists throughout the state but to the nation at large.  Bowers meant to tell all of America who held power in Mississippi, who called the shots, who could do as they pleased, and who needed to live in fear."

What was just as important, notes Mitchell, is the message of the "murderers' impunity."  As long as they were still in power, as long as they were still free and living among the public, the message would continue to be heard and understood not just in Mississippi, but throughout the entire nation as well.  In each and every case presented here, he offers clear proof of how these people managed to maintain this impunity and escape prosecution;  what I discovered here chilled me not only down to my bones, but to my very soul.  Quite honestly, I was so stunned by what came to light here that right after I'd finished, I could not move for the longest time, just sitting here staring into space and trying to digest what I'd just read. 

While he notes other cases he'd worked on but could not solve, saying that he felt that he'd failed more often than succeeded, I say that he should be beyond proud of what he's accomplished; in bringing out the truth behind these four crimes, he also paved the way for bringing about a long-overdue measure of justice.    He had been told a number of times just to "let the past be," but he has long believed that "Truth rules, while hate thrives on obfuscation, murkiness and fear."   It is important, he says, to know and to remember the truth of what came before in the "past waves of white supremacy" so that we are able to act now and in the future. 

With notes, bibliography, index, etc., the page count runs to just over four hundred pages, but I was so completely engrossed in what I was reading here that the hours just flew by.  I do think it would have helped to have included photos along with text,  but I sat with tablet in hand when I wanted to match names with faces, or to reacquaint myself with the four cases discussed here. And although this rarely happens, I happen to agree with the dustjacket blurber who says that Race Against Time is a "landmark book" and "essential reading for all Americans," adding only that it should be read especially by anyone with even a passing interest in civil rights both past and present.  It's one I'll never, ever forget.

****

My thoughts are from a reader's perspective; here are a couple of real reviews of this book:

from David J. Garrow, at the Washington Post

from Dean Jobb at The Southern Review of Books

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard

9780767913737
Anchor Books, 2006
416 pp

paperback

The River of Doubt begins with Theodore Roosevelt hovering between life and death "deep in the Brazilian rain forest."  It was apparently not quite his time though, as he would go on to finish out his journey through an uncharted tributary of the Amazon, not entirely unscathed but living to tell the tale.  It is a harrowing story of an expedition in which whatever could go wrong did go wrong.  At the same time the author offers a look at the often-unforgiving natural world surrounding these men; she also examines what it was about these particular men that got them through the dangers they faced on their nearly one-thousand mile journey. 


Suffering from a "bruised spirit" after a landslide defeat in his bid for president in 1913, Theodore Roosevelt decided to accept an offer from the Museo Social in Buenos Aires to be a guest lecturer.  He was offered a rather large sum of money for three engagements, but beyond the fees, the trip would allow him the opportunity to see his son Kermit who was working in Brazil.  Roosevelt also had a "passion" for natural history and science, and wondered if perhaps he might be able to somehow "indulge" that passion while in South America. Turning to a friend who just happened to be the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt was offered "full support," and was eventually put together with old friend Father John Augustine Zahm, who was at that time planning his own expedition to the Amazon.   Roosevelt was, of course, delighted and at this stage of the game anticipated "a 'delightful holiday' that would provide 'just the right amount of adventure.' " 

The plan was that the expedition would travel north from Buenos Aires by boat along "well-known navigable rivers to the Amazon."  From there the group would go up the Rio Negro and down the Orinoco before crossing Venuezula to the Atlantic.  Plans changed, however, when Brazil's minister of foreign affairs suggested to Roosevelt that perhaps he would prefer to take a trip "down an unknown river" with Colonel Cândido Rondon, who had earlier discovered and named the Rio da Duvida, but knew very little about either its "course or character."  Rondon would use the opportunity to do a survey of this uncharted territory; it would be more dangerous than the route planned by Zahm for sure, but it was just the challenge that Roosevelt "had been yearning for."   Little did anyone know exactly what was in store for them once they set off on this journey that would ultimately leave Roosevelt at death's doorway.

Millard has done a fine job here, using a number of primary sources which include the journals of other expedition members to give a more rounded view of not only events but of the Amazon itself.  Her writing about the flora, fauna, and people indigenous to the area become integral to the story of the expedition as the group moves further into uncharted territory.  She also realizes that this is not solely Teddy Roosevelt's story; indeed it is probable that no one would have survived had it not been for Colonel Rondon.  Throughout his many years of working in the Brazilian wilderness, Rondon had become a devoted and dedicated advocate for the country's indigenous people; Millard notes that even when attacked by them, Rondon's men had orders to never retaliate.   Rondon left gifts for them instead, and although his peaceful tactics toward the Cinta Larga people was an issue of debate between Roosevelt and the Colonel, it seems that it worked, as the expedition, which could have been decimated "by consensus" of the tribe, was allowed to continue on down the river.

Roosevent and Rondon; photo from the Theodore Roosevelt Center, Dickinson State University

While the book is informative,  the way Candice Millard wrote it also offers readers a suspenseful narrative as to how they survived, as the back-cover blurb reveals,

"an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks." 

I am focused on people in whatever I read, and here, when it comes right down to it,  the question becomes this: when at a point of no return where things are at their worst, what is it within people that allows them to carry on?  In that sense, The River of Doubt is not just about the physical journey made by these men, but a sort of journey of self-discovery as well. 

At times a true white knuckler, The River of Doubt makes for compelling, page-turning reading. And don't miss the PBS American Experience episode "Into the Amazon" which brings this book and this expedition to life. I am a huge fan of Amazon exploration narratives, and this one is definitely high on my list of good ones. 

very much recommended

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, by Stephen Kinzer

9781250140432
Henry Holt, 2019
354 pp

hardcover

As the reviewer of this book for The San Francisco Review of Books wrote, Poisoner in Chief is an "awful story, told fast and well." I couldn't have said it better myself. 

According to author Stephen Kinzer, the early years of the 1950s were a "fearful time for Americans," citing among other things the "ugly stalemate" of the Korean War and Senator McCarthy's warnings that "Communists had infiltrated the State Department." The success of the Soviets' first nuclear weapons test led to the fear of being "attacked at any moment," and we also that the Communists "had found ways of controlling people's minds."  The term  "brain-washing" was introduced in 1950 to Americans by a militant anti-Communist propagandist  by the name of Edward Hunter, who was likely working for the CIA at the time, and who would go on to write a book called Brain-Washing in Red China, stoking fear and exacerbating Cold War anxieties. Hunter  "urged Americans to prepare for 'psychological warfare,' " since Red "specialists" were

"preparing psychic attacks aimed at subjugating 'the people and the soil and the resources of the United States' and turning Americans into 'subjects of a New World Order' for the benefit of a mad little knot of despots in the Kremlin." 

There was no real evidence that any of what Hunter said was true; nevertheless Allen Dulles along with "other senior officers" of the CIA feared that "they were losing a decisive race."   As Richard Helms would put it many years afterward, they believed that they couldn't afford to "lag behind the Russians or the Chinese" in this area. The CIA became convinced that

"there is a way to control the human mind, and if it can be found, the prize will be nothing less than global mastery." 

In a memo written in 1951, CIA officers posed a list of several questions along the lines of "Can we 'alter' a person's personality?" or "How can [drugs] be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item..." , the answers to which, they decided, would be "of incredible value to this agency."  Realizing that their current  Project Bluebird needed "an infusion of expertise and vision" from outside of the agency, Dulles and his officers decided to bring in a chemist

"with the drive to pursue forbidden knowledge, a character steely enough to direct experiments that might challenge the conscience of other scientists, and a willingness to ignore legal niceties in the service of of national security."

Enter Sidney Gottlieb.

Sidney Gottlieb; photo from NPR

Born in New York in 1918;  Gottlieb's college and postgraduate years were spent at University of Wisconsin and Cal Tech, where he majored in chemistry and received his PhD in 1943. Halfway through his doctorate program came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but Gottlieb remained to finish his degree.  In 1943 he tried to enlist in the army but was turned down due to a limp left  from childhood operations on his deformed feet.  Gottlieb was "crushed," but still had a desire to serve his country; after a few jobs working for various departments of  the government in DC, by 1948 he was looking for "more of a challenge" in his work. Ultimately he found it;  as the author states

"Everything suggested that he was headed for a career as a government scientist. So he was -- but he could not have imagined what a phantasmagorical kind of science he would be called to practice."

While this "phantasmagorical kind of science"  involved, as Kinzer puts it, "years of heinous assaults on the lives of others,"  reading about Gottlieb's home life makes for a serious case of cognitive dissonance on the part of the reader.  This man, the "poisoner in chief" and "mind control czar,"   architect of  MK-ULTRA, the  "most systematic and  widest-ranging mind control project ever undertaken" spent his time at home with his family, taught folk dancing, wrote poetry, grew vegetables, tended to his goats, and devoted time to focusing on his own spirituality.  On a segment of NPR's Fresh Air that aired this past September , Kinzer describes it as a "Jekyll-and-Hyde life," which is the vibe I got as well -- we're talking about a man who sought   "inner peace while just as relentlessly laying waste to other people's minds and bodies." 

Poisoner in Chief is not at all easy to read on a human level -- it's shocking, it's graphic, and it's frightening to think that all of what the author details over the course of this book was sanctioned and done in the name of national security and the defense of freedom. It also makes you wonder if anyone involved ever had the least qualms of conscience.  "Awful" this story may be, but at the same time, it's compelling enough that you absolutely cannot stop turning pages.

Recommended. Highly.

Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition, by Buddy Levy

9781250182197
St. Martin's Press, 2019
400 pp

advanced reader edition, so my many thanks to the great people at St. Martin's Press for a paper copy.

I was delighted to have been offered a copy of this book, since I am and always have been a serious devotée of exploration narratives of all kinds, most especially accounts of expeditions in the polar/Arctic/Antarctic regions.  Another factor in saying yes to St. Martin's Press was that it wasn't all that long ago that I'd watched this fascinating story play out on  American Experience (PBS)  in an episode called "The Greely Expedition" and decided that I had to know more, so of course of I was going to accept their offer.  Smart decision on my end:  once I began reading  Labyrinth of Ice a couple of nights ago at about 6:30 p.m., I didn't  stop reading until  two in the morning, and only then because I had to be up by 5:30.

According to the author,  "Like nearly all great stories from the past," the story in this book has already been told,  but he intended this book to

"provide an interpretation that focuses on the adventures, triumphs, and the unity, brotherhood, and patriotism of the men"

 which he does, but he also doesn't skimp on the strength and fortitude of these people required for their very survival.  When this expedition began in 1881, not a single person under Greely's command would have been able to visualize the horrific challenges that would face them only two years later, when things became so dire that the expedition's doctor wrote in his journal while drifting on an ice floe that

"It is terrible to float in this manner, in the snow, fog, and dark. This seems to me like a nightmare in one of Edgar Allan Poe's stories."  

When  Lieutenant Adolphus Greely accepted his mission, he knew after years of studying the history of Arctic exploration that things didn't always go as planned.   However, he ran a tight ship, so to speak, and as the author notes, he also had an "uncanny sense of the thing to do now."  His orders were to  set up "the northernmost of a chain of a dozen research stations around the Arctic," as part of the first International Polar Year,  and to endeavor to locate and rescue the men of the long-missing USS Jeannette, the subject of Hampton Sides' most excellent book In The Kingdom of Ice.  Greely also had designs on reaching the North Pole, or failing that, at least to wrest the claim of reaching "Farthest North" from the British, who held the record.  Sailing from Newfoundland, the men reached their destination of  Fort Conger "more than 1,000 miles north of the Arctic Circle," or as the author says, "quite literally at the far end of the earth."

map taken from CBC News

While Labyrinth of Ice covers their two years there, the real story begins in 1883, when for the second year in a row, "relief-resupply" ships failed to reach these men as scheduled.   When the first summer went by in 1882 with no relief ship arriving, Greely and his men were still well provisioned, so the situation wasn't dire, but when the summer of 1883 began to draw to a close with no relief in sight, his orders were to

"depart with his men and head south, using the motorized launch Lady Greely and three whaleboats, plus a dinghy. They would retreat, scouring the shores, hoping to find food caches or relief ships and men along the coast of Ellesmere Island as far south as Cape Sabine, or at Littleton Island, both some 250 miles south of Fort Conger."

Greely and his men could remained at Fort Conger where, "if well rationed," they would have enough provisions to last another year, but he would never have considered disobeying his orders.  He was supposed to leave by September 1st, but fearing the ice, he made the decision to leave nearly a month earlier on August 9, 1883, thus beginning an ordeal which pushed his leadership and his men to their limits.     The story of the southward journey of  Greely and his men is indeed harrowing, but what makes it even worse was that had there not been so much negativity in Washington DC about Arctic exploration under the auspices of Secretary Robert Todd Lincoln, and had the people in charge of the relief expeditions carried out the parts of their mission that they could have actually fulfilled, things may have been much different in the end.

Levy has done a remarkable job with this slice of American history, and as I said earlier, I had to keep reading it despite the fact that I lost nearly an entire night of sleep doing so.  I didn't find it "dry," as some readers said they did; au contraire, it held my attention the entire time, and it is perfect for people who don't read history as part of their regular lineup.   I have only one complaint, which is that there were so many times I wanted to know the source of a quotation or something he mentioned and there were neither footnotes nor endnotes.  I have an ARC, so perhaps they are put into the final version, so if that's the case, disregard.  I happen to be one of those geeknerds who actually goes to the notes for enlightenment so in that sense, the lack of citation was disappointing.  And just one more thing: I'm not exactly sure why he chose to use Dan Simmons' novel The Terror as a source; frankly, it just seems weird.   The book as a whole, though, is so good and so well done that in the grander scheme of things, I can certainly and highly recommend it to anyone interested in Arctic exploration -- it is truly an unforgettable story that the author has put together here and I can only imagine the amount of time he put into piecing it all together.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story, by Cara Robertson

9781501168376
Simon and Schuster, 2019
375 pp
hardcover

While I was reading this book, I wanted to share something in it with my darling spouse, who shares his work stuff with me (most of it I don't understand but because I want him to think that I care,  I nod and pretend like I do).  Before I began to launch into what I was going to say, I stopped a moment and asked him "You do know who Lizzie Borden was, right?"   Imagine my surprise at discovering that he'd never heard of Lizzie Borden, one of the most recognizable names in American history, a woman whose case continues to fascinate to this day.  (As a pertinent aside, I sat him down and made him watch two  (non-sensational) documentaries about Borden so he's been schooled.)


In The Trial of Lizzie Borden, just so we're clear, the author does not endeavour to solve the mystery of who killed Abby and Andrew Borden, but rather to peel away the sort of mythical elements of this story and get down to realities of the crimes, the investigation,  the trial and its aftermath.   At the same time, in presenting her account, she also examines the social and cultural factors of this time period, as the dustjacket reveals, to offer "a window into America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and the most troubling social anxieties."   By the time I turned the last page, it seemed to me that the trial and the media coverage turned less on guilt or innocence and more on whether or not someone in Lizzie's respectable position could have possibly done such a horrific thing.  As  her attorney would later say as part of his closing arguments,

"It is not impossible that a good person may go wrong ... but our human experience teaches us that if a daughter grows up in one of our homes to be 32 years old, educated in our schools, walking in our streets, associating with the best people and devoted to the service of God and man ... it is not within human experience to find her suddenly come out into the rankest and baldest murderess." 

  Robertson's book plays out the story of the case in three parts.  First, in looking at the facts of the murders themselves, she doesn't open this account with the gruesome events, but rather Lizzie's attempt to buy prussic acid at a local Fall River Massachusetts drug store.  Lizzie wanted the acid supposedly "to put on the edge of a sealskin cape,"  but the author brings in a later article from the New Bedford Evening Standard as reporting that

"If a person wished to kill and avoid detection, and that person were wise, hydrocyanic acid would be the first choice among all deadly drugs."

Prussic acid is, as she reminds us, a "diluted form of hydrocyanic acid."  Immediately  we're wondering exactly why  Lizzie Borden is  trying to buy it -- was she really interested in her cape or was there some other use she may have had in mind?   From there we're taken directly into the Borden household, a place rife with tensions that had prompted locks for every door, Lizzie's resentment of her father's "determined economies" that among other things, kept the family from living on "The Hill" with the rest of the Fall River elite and put his daughters in "virtual social quarantine.  And then, of course, there is the daughters' attitudes toward their stepmother Abby, which had gone  from "chilly tolerance to open animosity" some five years earlier, resulting in the daughters' refusal to eat with their parents and to even speak with Abby "except  in response to a direct question."  Just before she launches into the murders, the investigation and the inquest,  Robertson reminds us of an incident involving two possible food poisoning attempts in the Borden home.

  
Part two is the longest and most detailed of the three, covering the trial.  It is, in my opinion, the best and most interesting part of the book, because not only do we get a look at the actual court proceedings, in which we come to realize exactly what a circumstantial case it actually was, but even  more fascinating to me was Ms. Robertson's presentation of the press coverage of the time.  Journalists not only sat in court each day to record the events of the trial and Lizzie herself as she sat in the dock, but went on to provide speculation and opinion  to its readers,  in some cases making it very clear which side they were taking, rather than offering a more objective stance. Biased media? You bet.

Part three examines the verdict and Lizzie's life after the trial and gets into the "Enduring Enigma" and "popular fascination with the Borden mystery," which combines the "enduring force of myth and the more prosaic intellectual challenge of a detective story, it is a 'locked room' mystery written by Sophocles."     She goes on to say, in getting to the heart of her argument here, that

"Even as the murders themselves seemed summoned from a mythic reservoir of human darkness, the trial of the alleged perpetrator occurred in a specific time and place: America in the Gilded Age, its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling anxieties inscribed in every moment of the legal process.  Lizzie Borden was a devout young woman 'of good family' -- a lady -- and an accused axe-wielding patricide. It should not have been possible."

According to the "science" of the day,  no one would have been surprised had the murderer turned out to be either someone whose "criminality" would have shown in features marking their ethnicity or class.  It might have also been less sensational and more acceptable had the perpetrator turned out have been some strange man who just happened to be on hand to commit these terrible murders.  But a woman of Lizzie's station hacking her parents to death so brutally seems to have been a scenario that would have,  when all was said and done, constituted some sort of threat to the existing order of Fall River in that particular place at that particular time.

 The Trial of Lizzie Borden  is a book well worth reading for anyone who may have an interest in this case.  Aside from placing the case within its particular social/historical context,  the author seems to adhere closely to fact, doesn't go off on any tangents or theories that weren't expressed at the time, and keeps the narrative interesting enough for rapid page turning.    I'm also utterly impressed at the scope of her research.  I have read enough reader reviews to know that not everyone agrees with me, but aside from the weird word choice of "mansplaining," I have nothing to complain about.  Very nicely done.

I still think she did it.

Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann

9780307742483
Random House/Vintage, 2018
373 pp

paperback

I love David Grann's work. I've read his The Devil and Sherlock Holmes which I loved, The Lost City of Z which I loved even more, and I've already pre-ordered his next book The White Darkness, which comes out in October, although you can get a head start on it via The New Yorker.  This book, Killers of the Flower Moon, is probably the most difficult of all of his books to read on an emotional level, since it deals with such an horrific topic.  This one I had to read sections at a time because it was so powerful; it also made me so damn angry I actually found myself yelling.  Personally,  when a person like David Grann can hand me a story that gets me that emotionally involved, well, he has done his job and has done it well.

The back cover blurb gives the basic story, which is divided into three different "Chronicles."  In the first part, we discover that (and this isn't spoiling it -- just sort of paraphrasing the blurb) people in the Osage Nation had the sense to buy up the rights to the land on which they were eventually settled in Oklahoma.  When oil was discovered, as the blurb says, by the 1920s, they became "the richest people per capita in the world."  However, the Federal Government decided that the Osage people weren't capable of managing their own wealth, and as though they were children, assigned guardians to do just that.  As Grann reports,

"Over the tribe's vehement objections, many Osage ... were deemed  'incompetent' and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store.  One Osage who had served in World War I complained, 'I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks.' "

Even worse than the Feds' prejudice in setting up these guardianships in the first place, these people were generally chosen from among the most prominent citizens in Osage County, and in what can only be called a racist move, all of them were white.  In telling this story, Grann has focused on the family of an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart.  As he explains in an interview at vice.com, placing Mollie at the center of the story allowed him to treat her as a real person, not just a statistic or a descendant, and it also gave him the opportunity to tell things from the point of view of the Osage.  The first section takes us to the murders of several members of the Osage Nation, of which Mollie's family became a "prime target," "one by one."

The FBI becomes involved in part two, in which Grann goes through why J. Edgar Hoover wanted his men on the case, the possible suspects, and introduces us to Tom White, a former Texas Ranger turned FBI agent who put together a team that would work undercover to try and solve the case.  While I won't dwell here on what happens next, one of the most infuriating parts about these murders is that the more deeply White delves at the time, the more a much larger picture of a huge and all-encompassing  conspiracy develops and truthfully, I wondered if anyone was ever going to be brought to justice for these horrible crimes. 

But it's really part three that shook me to my core, because of what Grann discovers in his research. About that I will say nothing, but I could hear myself gasping at the implications of what he found.  And to be really honest, I was so upset after finishing this book that I had to step away for a few days just to get myself together again. 

The book is masterfully done, especially since the author sets what happens to these people in the context of the broader period of rampant corruption and graft at the highest levels of government, and in that sense, provides a background for what will occur over the course of this narrative. At the same time,  this book further reinforces the fact that when history is recounted in this country, it's white history, while the Native Americans' stories are for the most part completely ignored.  You only have to be breathing these days to understand why that is.  But overall, what really hit home was the fact that this is not only a story that needed to be told and to be brought out into the open, but that as Grann says, it continues to resonate with the Osage people -- that it is a story that is "still living history for them." 

Killers of the Flower Moon is not a long book so you may be tempted to read it all in one go, but don't.  This book is so powerful that even now while thinking about it, I'm getting angry all over again.  And now that I'm looking over what some other, less than enthusiastic readers have to say, I have to wonder what they expected.  This one from an Amazon reader especially killed me:

"I couldn't connect with any of the victims due to a lack of back story or personal history.  The reader just doesn't get to know the characters. It read like a boring history book that could have been so much more."

To each his/her own, of course, but evidently we didn't read the same book. 

Highly, highly, highly recommended. 

The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, by Andrew Lawler

9780385542012
Doubleday, 2018
426 pp

hardcover

"Why do people search for Noah's ark?...Why do people search for Amelia Earhart? What is going to come out of it? You can't own it. You get fifteen minutes of fame. But anybody could be that person.  There is a mental illness involved with searching for something that hardly be found. I've seen so many people go over the deep end. It's a disease. that is why the Lost Colony is such a great story." 


I am fascinated by mystery stories, and they don't have to be fictional to capture my interest. This goes back to my childhood when I would read anything and everything, fiction and nonfiction alike.    My mom was a member of the book of the month club (or something akin to it way back when) and I clearly remember running out of library books one day and picking up her copy of The Search for Amelia Earhart by Fred Goerner.  I had absolutely no idea who Amelia Earhart was at the time, but I still remember being held captive by the story and the photos.  I mention that book here because it began my intense interest in "real" mysteries -- you know, the kind you may never find the answers to in your lifetime but which never leave your brain.   For me, the fate of the "lost colony" of Roanoke was another such real mystery stemming from childhood, and I joined the ranks of lost colony obsessives.  But while I may be obsessed,  I'm still picky about what I read and even more so about what I think is plausible, so when I saw that Andrew Lawler (an author I trust whose work I've read many times in The Smithsonian) had published a book about it,  I couldn't push that buy button quickly enough.  It is an informative, thought provoking and downright captivating book that any Roanoke obsessive must read, unless, of course, you're of the alien abduction or yes, even zombie crowd who thrive on more out-there sort of theories.

Most people are familiar with the legend of the lost colony (more on this term later), which says that in 1587, a British expedition found their way to the Roanoke Island off of the coast of North Carolina.  Three years later, a ship carrying John White, the governor of that colony, who had gone back to England in the meantime to pick up supplies for the people left behind, comes sailing back to Roanoke only to find it completely deserted.  While searching for his people, including his daughter Eleanor, mother of the first English child born there (Virginia Dare),  White comes across the letters C R O carved into a tree, but of the colonists themselves there is no sign -- as the author says, just "vanished from history."  So what happened to them?

In his book, Mr. Lawler explains how a chance meeting at a dinner held for speakers of an archaeological conference led to him becoming "immersed in the immense literature that has built up around the Roanoke voyages." It seems that in making conversation with a British archaeologist by the nane of Horton, Lawler discovered that the man was "doing a little digging in a place called Hatteras."  Lawler "jokingly" asked the man if he'd found the Lost Colony. It was the mention of Hatteras and the response "Indeed!" from the archaeologist that sparked the author's curiosity,  but further questioning and a number of emails later were met only with silence once Horton realized that he was speaking to a reporter.  However,  out of the blue a year later, the author received an email from the archaeologist saying that  "we now have pretty compelling evidence for the fate of the Lost Colony."   Hatteras, of course, is the modern name for Croatoan, the location that White felt the original colonists had gone to in his three-year absence.  In fact, there was a contingency plan that had been made before White sailed from Roanoke leaving everyone behind on his last voyage.  As we learn,

"If the settlers were to leave the island, .... they 'should not fail to write or carve upon the trees or posts of the doors the name of the place where they should be seated.' A cross over the name of their destination would mean that they left in an emergency..."

 The letters C R O in the tree along the bank of the north shore,  and the word CROATOAN carved into a post in the settlement itself were part  a "pre-arranged code" -- a "secret token agreed upon between them and me." If the colonists had left in an emergency, they were to also add a cross over the name of their destination.   Since the colonists had not left a cross, White assumed and "greatly joyed" that he had "safely found a certain token of their being safe at Croatoan," although he also wrote that the plan had been for the colonists to move "fifty miles into the main," meaning inland, while Croatoan was to the south. 

Horton invited Lawler to come and view their Hatteras findings, and Lawler began looking into other archaeological work being done, including one being done in the area fifty miles inland, and learned that "there was more to the story than a couple of archaeological digs."  As he became interested in the activities and theories of  "a larger cast of modern characters mirroring the colorful Elizabethans they pursued with such passion," he soon found himself "trying to piece together a bevy of smaller puzzles." 

It is from this point that the book launches into the history and the people "central to the Roanoke missions," followed by an examination of different "clues" both archival and archaeological, including the famous "Dare Stones" and other so-called evidence.  And speaking of the Dare Stones,  the author looks into why the story of Virginia Dare continues to hold such a fascination; he makes some compelling observations about  the role this iconic figure and the Roanoke colonists came to play in an America that saw a number of upheavals including slave rebellions and Native Americans being forcibly moved out west.   He reveals how the figure of Virginia Dare has evolved at different times in our history, going for example, from an icon of racial purity to a symbol of "amends for the wrongs done by generations of whites against Indians."    Finally, he comes across another "secret token waiting to be read," as he explores the matter of descendants of these original colonists, whom he says, were not really "lost," until in the nineteenth century when the Roanoke colony became the subject of a romantic fictional story, with little Virginia Dare at its center. 

 At one point I had to laugh when the author describes how his work had gone "beyond professional diligence and into very obsession" that he'd seen in others.  There are several mysteries to be solved here, but as far as he's concerned, the "lost" colonists were like anyone else who in the same situation would have taken steps to insure their own survival -- it's much  more likely that they did the obvious and assimilated themselves into the nearby Native American tribes.  But, as he says,

"The real power exerted by the lost Colonists was not in archives or archaeological trenches but in the stories they spawned,"

so there will continue to be people who, despite the common-sense answer of assimilation, will continue to spin their own ideas or who will further the myths behind one of the most intriguing mysteries in our history. 

Bottom line: it's fascinating stuff and Lawler is the  right person to put it all together. Very highly recommended. 

Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, by Claudia Clark

9780807846407
University of North Carolina Press, 1997
289 pp
paperback

After finishing Kate Moore's Radium Girls, which was okay and did the job the author meant it to do, I wanted to read an historical account of this story.  Where Moore's account is more firmly focused on providing the human face of this tragedy, here we get down to the forces that allowed it to happen in the first place and the attempts made toward reform so that it could never happen again.

As is made clear both in Moore's book and here, the young women who worked painting luminous dials on watches did so by means of lip pointing.  As they put the brushes into their mouths to make them sharper, they were also putting quantities of radium directly into their bodies.  No one at the time could have predicted what would happen next; radium was thought to provide wonder cures, was being sold on the open market;  the dial painters even had fun putting the substance on their teeth, hair, nails, and clothing. 

from Furatermek

However,  dial painters began to show up at their dentists and doctors offices with varying illnesses, including necrosis of the jaw, strange fractures and anemia.  Some of the women and their physicians or dentists began to wonder if their horrific symptoms were related to the radium paint or the factories in which they worked; investigations were made but the powers that be at the dial-painting facilities rejected the idea that the women's troubles had anything to do with the workplace or with their occupation.  In New Jersey, for example, the case of Irene Rudolph led her doctor to make a report to the state Department of Labor, but they found nothing "that conflicted with state factory laws."  Even though one consultant issued a warning that "radium might be behind the illness of the dialpainters," and that "every dialpainter should be warned," no action was taken. Another case came to light in January 1924; by February three of the women were dead, but at every official level where people may have made a difference, nothing was done.  Enter the women of the Consumers' League, committed reformers who worked tirelessly to not only bring these cases into the realm of public knowledge, but to take steps to have radium poisoning defined as an occupational illness, so that the women would have access to compensation.  Without the intervention of the Consumers' League, as the author notes, "the dialpainters would never have established the cause of their illnesses and deaths."

The women's fight to gain recognition for illnesses associated with the industry in which they worked was a long one, and despite the reformers' actions, was often impeded on several fronts. Clark discusses how the factory owners knew about the dangers of radium yet continued to not only deceive these women as to their safety, but it doesn't stop there. Self interest was another factor, in which scientists and physicians who received funding from these companies refused to divulge what they knew so as not to alienate those who funded their work. As she notes, the book traces "the failures of industrial health reform to a faith in the autonomy of 'experts' in both government and medicine."   There's much more here, as she examines the "social and political factors that influenced the responses" of everyone involved.

Clark's Radium Girls manages to give the women in her study a great deal of consideration without all of the litany of suffering that appears in Kate Moore's account, which was one of my big issues with that book. Unlike my experience with Moore's book, in this one  I came away with a better understanding of the historical, social, and legal milieu in which these battles were being fought. And while I was completely absorbed in this book, it wasn' t perfect -- as just one example, as various topics are introduced into the narrative the author ends up having to provide a brief background  so that the book becomes a bit overwhelming in terms of many histories going on at the same time which sort of pulls attention away from the real focus of her work. 

Many readers found this book to be "dry" or lacking sympathy for the dial painters themselves, but I didn't get those vibes at all. Then again, as I told someone recently, I'll probably die with a nonfiction book in my hand because I love getting down to not only the whys and hows of events of the past, but how those past events reflect or have had an effect on the present.  In that sense, I was not at all disappointed with this book, and frankly as someone who knows very little about the history of industrial health,  I found it quite fascinating. 

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, by Kate Moore

9781429649359
Sourcebooks, 2017
479 pp

hardcover

 I am probably going to be the only person in the entire universe of people who've read this book who wasn't overwhelmed.  The reader reviews of Radium Girls are, if you'll pardon the pun, simply glowing, but while I think the author's intentions were great, and the story definitely compelling, my picky reading self had some serious issues with the way this book was written.

The first I'd heard of the "Radium Girls" was while reading the excellent book by Deborah Blum called The Poisoner's Handbook; I remember being absolutely captivated by the story she told of a New Jersey physician, Dr. Harrison Martland (also the Chief Medical Examiner for Essex County) who in 1928 had sent the bones of a young woman to the New York City Medical Examiner. These bones were all that was left of a once healthy person who had the misfortune of taking a job at the US Radium Corporation (USRC)  in Orange, NJ, where she, along with several other young women had been hired to paint the numbers on luminous wristwatches and clocks.  The method they used to apply the paint was to put the brush into their mouths to bring the tip to a perfect point, dip it into the paint, put the brush into water, and then the process would be repeated.  They even played around with it, putting the luminous liquid into their hair, rubbing it on their teeth, etc.  Even though the paint was made of radium, no one seemed too worried, since at the time it was considered to be great for your health -- people were enjoying radium spa treatments, it was put into toothpaste, skin products, drinking water, cigarettes, and many other items -- so there was absolutely no thought given to negative side effects.  But the girls started to become very ill with a rather mysterious and incurable illness; eventually nine of these girls died by 1924.   The bones sent to the NYC Medical Examiner's office in 1928 belonged to Amelia Maggia, who'd worked at the USRC for four years and died in 1923;  Martland wanted the bones tested for radioactivity.

That small part of Blum's book has always stuck in my head, and reinforced by watching an episode of American Experience based on her book, so I absolutely had to read this book by Kate Moore, whose mission here is to

"illuminate the inspiring young women exposed to the 'wonder' substance of radium and their strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances." 

Starting her story in 1917, she brings a human face to these women who were betrayed not only by their bosses, but also by the governments, the courts, and other individuals who continued to deny the lethal effects of radium as these women were slowly dying. In that sense, without a doubt, Moore's book is successful.  She also brings to light several examples of corporate insensibility, especially toward women, and I counted a number of points she made that as of a century later continue to exist.  Reading this book made me angry; it also makes for compelling reading and is steeped in tragedy.    I should have loved it, and maybe I would have if it hadn't been for the writing.  I am one of those very strange people who looks past the story being told down to how it's being told, and it is here where I had several issues.

First, there are a number of places where we read things like "perhaps," or "She could have meant," or "there might have been" --  in short what we're getting here is a lot of  conjecture.  Then come the literary touches the author puts into this work, for example, on page 107 when she talks about "a troubled look" that "crossed" the face of  Arthur Roeder, the president of USRC (how does she know that?) , or how "the Lord works in mysterious ways," heading a section that could have just as easily been left out with no detriment to the point she was making, or using phrases such as "The light of justice flooded in..."   This sort of thing crops up again and again, and I find it particularly annoying.  We also find ourselves reading things like "by all reports" in which there are no reports cited in the endnotes.  There's a particularly egregious error on page 292, in which the phrase "results that showed...", citing a statistic appears, but when I went to look for the citation, there was none; on page 364 she notes in speaking about a particular dying woman that she "lost approximately one pint of blood every time..." and guess what? No citation. No source, no nothing.  Seriously,  while some people might think that because the author describes herself as a non-academic, scholarship standards shouldn't matter, but that's just not the case.   What I object to the most is the purposeful, purely emotional tugging this author engages in.  To put a human face on these women by talking about the horrors they endured is one thing (and she does it very well), but, as just one example,  when you spend two pages describing the clothes people wore at a funeral, or the ribbon in a little girl's hair, and the prayers said by this little girl after her mother had died, well, that's just a bit much and unnecessary.  We already by this point have an abundance of sympathy toward this woman and the costs of her illness to her family in human and monetary terms, so why belabor the point?  And then, of course, there is the constant repetition of the symptoms of the radium poisoning that manifested in different ways -- she spares nothing and goes into overkill in describing every little bit of oozing pus and blood from a number of the women she's studying here. 

As I said, the author is highly successful in bringing their stories out of obscurity and into the light, in showing her readers that these women were human beings with families as well as victims of an industry that tragically turned its back on them when they needed help the most.  So the bottom line is that while I ended up being caught up in the story of the women she profiles,  became incensed that they suffered so needlessly and were refused help, became irate over the fact that some of the very same practices in the corporate universe of the time continue to exist, the truth is that I just can't overlook the writing here.  On the other hand,  readers are LOVING this book, so once again, I seem to be that little fish swimming against the tide.

When all is said and done, I would certainly recommend Radium Girls  because people should know this long-forgotten story and more importantly, these long-forgotten women in this dark episode of American history.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

9780670785971
Viking, 2016
460 pp

hardcover
(my copy from the publisher - thank you!)

"If the American dream were real, upward mobility would be far more in evidence." 

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is certainly one of the most informative books American history books I've read this year; quite frankly it was an eye opener.  If someone had told me that Thomas Jefferson referred to the white underclass of his own time as "rubbish" I probably wouldn't have believed it, since he's revered as a founding father of this nation.  But he actually did use that label, and he wasn't the only founding father or American politician to use that sort of term to describe the "wretched and landless poor" that have been part of our history and our culture since this country began.  And that's just for starters.  But that's the point here -- as the dustjacket blurb reveals, the author

"explodes our comforting myths about equality in the land of opportunity, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present poor white trash."

She also, as she says in this interview, hopes that

"readers, pundits and politicians will stop repeating the tired myth of the American Dream and appreciate instead that the dismissal of the poor has been a crucial and consistent part of US history. Until we fully comprehend the past, our country will continue to paper over class division with empty rhetoric. For whether we like to acknowledge it or not, the history of "white trash" lies dangerously close to the heart of our deeply conflicted, long-ignored class politics."  

And quite frankly, if ever a time we see this in action, it is definitely now coming up to this year's presidential election, which makes this book extremely timely. So now for the nutshell summary:

Isenberg poses the following question in her book:

"How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?," 

and it is this question, answered through an examination of an incredible array of source material, that is the focus of this study. As the dustjacket blurb notes, "white trash have always been near the center of major debates over the character of the American identity," and here she examines just how this has been the case over the last four hundred years. She does this by careful examination and analysis of several sources in contemporary politics, literature, scientific theory and various policies at different moments of America's history.

 Class is, as the author notes "the most outstanding, if routinely overlooked element in presuppositions about early settlement." It was mainly land ownership that perpetuated class distinctions, since it "was the principal source of wealth." Those on the margins without land "had little chance to escape servitude."  As this study also reveals, "The white poor have been with us in various guises" throughout our country's history.  The United States didn't even exist when some British notables began to classify the idle and "wandering" poor as  "human failure" and proposed exporting them to the New World, even going so far as to refer to the poor as "waste people," encompassing indentured servants, slaves, convicts, and men weighed down by debt. As settlement continued, the definition of "waste people" went on to include the landless poor, causing  a "stigma" that would "leave its mark on white trash" throughout our history.

Revered figures such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Thomas Paine, John Adams and other founding fathers can take their own share of the blame for perpetuating class divisions. For instance,  Washington thought that the foot soldiers in the Continental army should consist only of "the lower class of people," while Jefferson was more harsh, describing public education as mainly for the benefit of students "raked from the rubbish." Even John Adams felt that it was natural for people to have a "passion for distinction," with his idea that "There must be one, indeed, who is the last and the lowest of the species." Poor whites have also been relegated to the status of their own particular, separate  "breed," as a means to marginalize these people so that the concept of equality and class could be maintained. As the author comments on this issue, she notes that "If whiteness was not an automatic badge of superiority ... then the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were unobtainable."

As she explains the historical circumstances behind all of this, we also learn that referring to these groups of people in terms that reiterate and reinforce the poor as "waste" has continued over four centuries:

"Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters.Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar Hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people." 

She also reveals that somehow their socioeconomic condition has long been thought by those outside of this group as being their own fault. They have been blamed for perpetuating their own bad "breeding," which along with pitting the white underclass against newly-freed slaves, was a factor used by later proponents of eugenics to bolster their positions. But even worse, they have been

"blamed for living on bad land, as though they had other choices. From the beginning they have existed in the minds of rural or urban elites and the middle class as extrusions of the weedy, unproductive soil. They are depicted as slothful, rootless vagrants, physically scarred by their poverty. The worst ate clay and turned yellow, wallowed in mud and muck, and their necks became burned by the hot sun. Their poorly clothed, poorly fed children generated what others believed to be a permanent and defective breed.  Sexual deviance? That comes from cramped quarters in obscure retreats, distant from civilization, where the moral vocabulary that dwells in town has been lost."  (320) 

And finally, another key point in this book, is that "Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal," and that

 "the discomfort middle-class Americans feel when forced to acknowledge the existence of poverty highlights the disconnect between image and reality."

 In the same interview noted at the beginning of this post,  Isenberg states that

"It is difficult for Americans to talk about class because it contradicts our myths and rhetoric about the promise of the American Dream. Americans celebrate the abstract notion of equality, but history tells us that we have never embraced genuine equality." 

To me, she's hit the nail on the head with that last statement, and those who would care to argue otherwise are the ones who genuinely need to read this book.

White Trash  was very informative and I found myself going long stretches of time without being able to put the book down. This isn't a pop history for the masses sort of thing, and I would find myself repeatedly going to the back to read her notes, iPad at the ready.

 I also happen to agree with many of the major points she makes here, most especially her statement that

"We are a country that imagines itself as democratic, and yet the majority has never cared much for equality... Heirs, pedigree, lineage: a pseudo-aristocracy of wealth still finds a way to assert its social power."  (316)

This is a dominant theme that carries on throughout her work, and she does prove her point over and over again.

As fascinated as I was with much of what she has to say here, I do have some issues.  My biggest problem here is when she says that "class has its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from intersection with race." I'm not so sure I quite buy that statement as it pertains to class in America.  Second, I didn't find the book to be an actual "400-year" history per se, since a large part of her focus is on the South at the expense of understanding the history of the poor white class in other regions in this country.  It's tough to be fully comprehensive when writing a history spanning so much time, and given how intensely she makes her case for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, aside from a brief discussion dealing with a few modern presidents, a bit on the eugenics movement, and "white trash" in books and on television, there is little depth of discussion regarding the white underclass in the twentieth century.

Despite its flaws though, I would certainly recommend it because it is a valuable study that really does debunk some of the  myths about the idealized conception of white equality in America as well as the reality behind the American dream itself.