The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown

9780670025817
Viking, 2013
404 pp

hardcover

"They weren't just nine guys in a boat; they were a crew."

Considering that I'm not at all a sports person, it seems odd that I would even be reading a book about the University of Washington crew team.  I didn't know what to expect, but after reading the first chapter I was totally hooked.  It only got better from there.

It's probably a given that almost everyone is familiar with the fact that at the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, Jesse Owens walked away with four gold medals, throwing the Nazi ideal of the Aryan supremacy right back in Hitler's face. Another thing about that year's Olympic games that most people are familiar with is the call for a boycott of the games, as rumors were circulating about what was really going on in Germany and the repressive measures of the Nazis. But it's very unlikely that anyone other than sports historians or people who are really into the history of the Olympic games know about the crew team from the University of Washington who literally battled the odds and not only made it to the games, but went on to win the gold medal.  The Boys in the Boat not only takes the readers through the crew's efforts in getting there, but also goes into great depth about the crew members, especially the central figure in this book, Joe Rantz.  His story lies at the heart of this book, but the author also includes stories about the other members of the team, a look at the Depression in the US, and what was going on in Germany at the time. He also examines the sport of crewing itself -- especially the prominence of the teams from elite Ivy League universities.  As he notes, "the center of gravity in American collegiate rowing still lay somewhere between Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, Ithaca, and Annapolis."

Joe's story is the best part of this book.  As an infant, his mother died and his father remarried a much younger woman who for some reason didn't get along with Joe, especially after she and Joe's father started having their own children. At age ten, Joe was told that he wouldn't be living with the family any longer, and he watched as they took off in a car for somewhere unknown.  He pretty much had to fend for himself although a few people stepped up and helped him out. Joe was always good at school, and his older brother offered to take him in during his last high school year so that he would have a good shot at entering a good university, and he was accepted by UW, where he made it into one of the crew boats as a freshman. However, as a poor student in the university's "world of pressed trousers, of briar pipes and cardigan sweaters,"  Joe had to work for every penny he needed to stay in school, and he was often the target of students much more fortunate than himself.  However, some of the students who looked down on Joe had to eat crow as  they tried and failed at the crew team tryouts,  leaving mainly the sturdy farm boys to take the seats in the boat.  Crewing was not easy and there were a number of  mental factors keeping Joe from reaching his absolute best, but with the help of  some brilliant mentoring from the coaches, wisdom from the man whose boats were prized throughout the crewing world, support from an entire city and for Joe, the love of a good woman, he was able to surmount all of his obstacles and go on to become part of an extremely devoted team.

It's already known in the prologue that Joe and his team went on to win a gold medal in the Olympics, but it's the getting there that creates the drama and tension in this book. The way this story is put together is creative  and keeps the reader beyond interested. The author splits scenes between Joe's story, the effects of the Depression in America, what was going on in Nazi Germany and the leaders'  goal to create a fake reality for the rest of the world to see for PR purposes, the sport of crewing, and the team's story.  When all are combined all of these elements  not only firmly situate the book in historical time and place, but also make the reading much more rounded and compelling.

I have to say that I probably wouldn't have bought this book had it not been for an online reader friend who raved about it (thanks, Trish),  and that would have been a shame. There's only a couple of niggly things that I didn't care for. First comes the gushing descriptions of love between Joe and Joyce (okay -- we get it -- but not every time), and there was one spot when the team went to Poughkeepsie (p. 257) and the author notes the following in talking about where they were staying:

"In command of the cookhouse was the imposing figure of Evanda May Calimar, a lady of color and, as it would turn out, an awe-inspiring cook."

The fact that the cook was "a lady of color" has absolutely zero bearing on anything here at all. This kind of usage is one of my all-time biggest pet peeves that really rankles.  But in the big scheme of things, looking at the overall picture, I was really into this book, the research was extremely impressive, and The Boys in the Boat turned out to be one of the best reads of this year for me.  I've added it to the book group lineup to fill November's slot.   I HIGHLY recommend this book -- it's so good that I hated every second I wasn't reading it.

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo -- And the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, by Richard Lloyd Parry

9780374230593
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
464 pp

paperback


I'm not a huge fan of the run-of-the-mill true crime genre with all of the gory details hashed out for reader titillation.  To me it's the stuff of tabloids, sleazy, sordid, and quick-to-press exploitation, designed to appeal to a voyeuristic audience.  So when I come across a journalist whose writing isn't motivated by the sensational, or who has taken years to research his subject before publishing, I'm generally not disappointed.

Such is the case with People Who Eat Darkness, a very intelligently-written book that moves far afield of the usual mish-mash of true crime.  The book is about the disappearance of a young woman, Lucie Blackman, a young woman from the UK who worked Tokyo in a small club as a hostess, left on a drive to the seaside with a man, and was never seen alive again.  While this description  sounds like it could be fodder for a true-crime writer, there is so much more to this book than any average crime writer would even attempt.  As Parry leads the reader through this compelling story,  you begin to see that he's forming an intensely cogent account not just of an horrific crime, but an exploration of  cultures within a culture, families, Japan's legal and justice system, its history, and the conflicts that arose because of this case.  Although its page count nearly reaches the 500 mark, it moves very quickly, and it's another one of those books I stayed up to read because I couldn't put it down.

Richard Lloyd Parry, the  author of People Who Eat Darkness, was on the scene as this story slowly unfolded over the course of several long years. As he notes about this case,

"The story infected my dreams; even after months had passed, I found it impossible to forget Lucie Blackman. I followed the story from the beginning and through its successive stages, trying to craft something consistent and intelligible out of its kinks and knots and roughness. It took me ten years. ... Lucie's story brought me into contact with aspects of human experience tht I had never glimpsed before. It was like the key to a trapdoor in a familiar room, a trapdoor concealing secrets -- frightening, violent, monstrous existences to which I had been oblivious."

Lucie Blackman had been working as a flight attendant for British Airways to help pay off her debt, but when her longtime friend Louise told her about a way that she could make much more money as a bar hostess in Tokyo, Lucy quit her job and went out to Japan. She worked in a small bar in Tokyo's Rappongi district, part of the "water trade" (mizu shōbai) that ran the gamut from hostesses paid to keep men happy while they drank at a bar to prostitution.  Part of Lucie's job was to keep the customer coming back, and one method of doing this was the dohan, or "date," where the girls would go out with their customer, usually for dinner, then make sure the man returned to the club for more drinking. The hostesses would get a commission, and could be in danger of losing their jobs without x-amount of dohan outside of their regular job. It's not prostitution, but more like being an escort.  It was on one such "date" that Lucie disappeared, only a couple of months after arriving in Japan. She already had plans for the Saturday evening of her disappearance, but she'd phoned Louise to let her know she was driving to the seaside and that she'd be back on time.  When Lucie didn't return, Louise started to worry, and after failing to find out anything about Lucie's whereabouts, went to the local police station on Monday. Going there was risky -- both Louise and Lucie had been working illegally, coming to Japan on tourist visas. The police weren't interested, so Louise contacted the vice-consul who also called the police station, thinking that Lucie may have been abducted.  Then the weirdness began: Louise received a call saying that Lucie had decided to make a "life-changing decision" and join a religious cult. Louise notified Lucie's mother, who notified her ex-husband Tim, who flew to Japan and helped to change the course of the non-existent investigation.  What was eventually uncovered was beyond imagination  -- especially when the police had already dismissed the claims of other women who came close to meeting the same fate as Lucie.  

In writing this book, Parry notes that he hoped to restore Lucie's "status as a normal person, a woman complex and lovable in her ordinariness, with a life before death," and he does this very aptly. However, before the book is over he's also examined Japanese culture, its police, its legal system and much more.   He also goes into the lives of Lucie's family and how each family member tried to cope with the aftermath of Lucie's disappearance, the investigation, the trial and ultimately the loss of their beloved daughter and sister.  

Obviously there's way more to this book than what I can capture in a few paragraphs, but the long and short of it is that it's one of the most compelling, well-written and intelligent  true accounts I've read in a very long time. The author has gone above and beyond in terms of balance, and it's obvious how much this case and the people involved have haunted him.  The story itself may seem beyond belief, but it's one of the most frightening things I've read in a long while, the more so because it's true. And that brings me to a final thought:  while scrutinizing reader reviews, I came across one on goodreads that literally made me do a double take:

"And why would you read this endless, rambling, researched-to-the-point-of-exhaustion book when you can just watch the entire story on Dateline on YouTube and be done with it in an hour?"

-sigh-

 While I could reply with a comment that would say something sarcastic about why read anything at all if it's been televised, Hollywoodized, or put on YouTube, the reality is that  this account would not have been nearly as thorough or as compelling without the cultural, historical and sociological facets the author brings into the book.  If this isn't your thing, well, you're always free to stick to the mass-market output. If you want something intelligently written, balanced and just plain excellent, then this book is well worth your while.

The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, by Betty Medsger

9780307962959
Knopf, 2014
596 pp

hardcover

 "There are certain points in history where a society goes so wrong, and there are certain people who will say, 'I won't stand for that...I will risk career, life, limb, family, freedom...And I will take this risk, and I will go and do it.' "
                                                                   -- David Kairys (538)


A couple of weeks ago in between airplane changes I caught a brief glimpse of a TV  interview of some sort and heard the words "FBI office," "70s" and "burglary," and I mentally promised myself I'd check on whatever that might have been when I had some free time.  When I finally got the chance, I put those exact words into google and came up with The Burglary, by Betty Medsger.  Looking at the synopsis, I knew I absolutely had to read this book.  Now that I've finished it, I'm recommending it to everyone.  It's that good.

It's not that  J. Edgar Hoover's abuses of power have been a secret up until the publication of this book; au contraire: there have been several  very good books published by credible authors on just how far reaching those abuses have been, as well as a number of documentaries about the same.  However, if you're thinking that this is just another book out to trash J.Edgar Hoover, so why bother, think again.  Ms. Medsger  starts her work from an entirely different place.  Her focus is on how the burglary of the files from a small FBI station in Media, Pennsylvania committed by a small group of nonviolent, antiwar activists led to the "opening of the door"  of J. Edgar Hoover's "Secret FBI."   It was through the theft and then publication of most of these files (the ones containing ongoing "real" criminal investigations were not publicized)  that the public got its first glimpse of how Hoover and his agents were actively violating the constitutional rights of American citizens through surveillance, "dirty tricks," and other less than above-board measures.  These files revealed that

"...there were two FBIs -- the public FBI Americans revered as their protector from crime, arbiter of values, and defender of citizens' liberties, and the Secret FBI.  This FBI...usurped citizens' liberties, treated black citizens as if they were a danger to society, and used deception, disinformation and violence as tools to harass, damage, and -- most important -- silence people whose political opinions the director opposed,"

and revealed an FBI that was "obsessed with monitoring what seemed to be, in many cases, lawful dissent." The publication of the information discovered in these files, aside from revealing a "government agency, once the object of universal respect and awe," that had for years been "reaching out with tentacles to get a grasp on, or lead into, virtually every part of American society," also became the catalyst for the first-ever real investigation into the activities of the Bureau and more pointedly, those of its Director; the revelation of just what the FBI with its squeaky-clean image was really up to also started the first national dialogue regarding the fine line between domestic intelligence vs. civil liberties  in the context of a free and democratic society.

America in 1970 was an "extraordinary time in the life of the country."  Nixon had let loose the news about the US invasion of Cambodia after the secret bombings there, setting off another wave of antiwar protests, more "than ever before, including in towns and on campuses where antiwar protests had never taken place." Kent State was put under martial law, and four peacefully-demonstrating students were shot  by National Guards who had been ordered onto the campus, "the first time Americans were killed while protesting the war."  Unarmed African-American students in Jackson, Mississipi also met their their deaths at the hands of law enforcement; then shortly afterwards, a number of students were beaten with crowbars and other tools by "hundreds of construction workers" during a noontime vigil for peace.  Onlookers who tried to help were also beaten; the construction workers were "honored" by Nixon at the White House later for their "patriotism." When the future organizer of the Media break in, William Davidon, learned that the American government was "suppressing Americans' right to express dissent," he realized that there was a major problem here: 

"how could a government that claimed to be fighting a war for people's freedom in another country at the same time suppress its own people's right to dissent?"

Davidon felt that he had to have some sort of evidence of active suppression of dissent, and after Hoover made some powerful but unsubstantiated accusations about antiwar dissenters Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and Congress quickly supported the Director when his actions were challenged, Davidon realized that he'd probably find the evidence he needed in an FBI office. Gathering other individuals, he organized a nonviolent break in of the small FBI station in Media, PA, timed to coincide with the upcoming Ali/Frazier fight, "the most anticipated heavyweight title fight" since 1938's Louis v. Schmeling bout.

The book takes the reader through the burglary and through what each of the burglars interviewed went through in the aftermath as the FBI pulled out all the stops to find out who'd committed this act;  the author also examines the history of J.Edgar Hoover and the building of his empire within the FBI and his own unchecked growth of power; she examines what kinds of information the burglars found and publicized, including a word not seen before by the public: COINTELPRO and then the journalist who waged a years-long battle with the FBI to get to the root of exactly what COINTELPRO was; the post-publication call for investigation into the Bureau and into Hoover, especially after his death;  she also questions and tries to understand  the long period where there was virtually no oversight by Congress or anyone else for that matter.  Later, Ms. Medsger delves into the problems of a modern FBI whose bureaucratic structure is largely dominated by people of the same minds as Hoover -- and how our current politicians are using this agency and others to swing the pendulum back to a focus on domestic spying once again, especially against ordinary citizens whose opinions may not match with those who run our government.


Above all, much as in Tim Weiner's Enemies: A History of the FBI, the point is driven home that while there clearly is a need for national security, there comes a point when people have to understand that there's a fine line between protection of natural interests and the abuse or potential loss of civil liberties guaranteed by our Constitution.  And before anyone says "yeah, well, I've got nothing to hide so I don't care if these agencies know everything about me," think about another point raised in this book:  perhaps there may come a time in the future when, as Ms. Medsger notes, some form of tyrannical government forms -- and then the seemingly benign information that our intelligence-gathering agencies have gathered can be used against citizens with unlike minds.  I'm seriously NOT a conspiracy nut by any stretch of the imagination, but it is really good food for thought.

Obviously, there's much more to this book than I can possibly set down here so it's one that people must read for themselves to experience the full wham! this book delivers.  I hope it's not simply a matter of preaching to the choir, because The Burglary deserves the widest audience possible.  Ms. Medsger has done a most thorough job here, and is fair in her assessments of how and why Hoover could get away with what he did for so long.  Reader response so far has been very favorable, and like most people who've come away very impressed, I highly, highly recommend this book.

 as an addendum, I somehow bought two copies of this book, so if you live in the US and you'd like my extra copy, be the first to leave a comment here on this post saying you want it. I will pay postage; all you have to do is to email me with an address. 

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, by Stanley Crouch

9780062005595
Harper, 2013
365 pp

hardcover

"What he gave the horn, it gave back. What it gave him, he never forgot."

The ultimate reading day for me includes the following: rain (which we get a lot of down here in the south), a cup or two or three of strong black coffee (no pods -- I love freshly ground) and most important, the jazz music playing in the background.  One of my favorite musicians is Charlie Parker, about whom this book was written.  I have been wanting to read a biography about Parker for a long time; when Kansas City Lightning was published last year, I scooped it up.  But here's the thing:  this is less of a biography than I thought it would be.  At first I was disappointed, but I kept flipping back to the book cover with its subtitle "The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker," and came to terms with the fact that a standard biography was not the author's intention.  I say that up front so that if you start reading and Parker disappears for long periods of book space, don't despair and keep going. The end product as a whole is informative and frankly, quite a ride, one not solely for the jazz lover.  It also speaks to African-American culture of the time, and expands out into a look at  blues, swing and jazz in the context of a wider American culture.    

Starting out at New York's Savoy Ballroom, the "Madison Square Garden of the battles of the bands", the story takes you back in time to the Kansas City and the origins of Parker's eventual rise to fame.  It was a place where musicians held court at 18th Street and Vine, where the blues morphed into a new form of jazz.  The book is filled with the people, music, culture etc that influenced Parker, often related via interview by people who were there who had a connection with him. There are also times where the author goes off on serious but informative tangents and  not just in the world of music: he spends time talking about the Buffalo Soldiers, the impact of D.W.Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," which portrayed African American men as the white man's worst enemies vis-a-vis white women; there is a also a brief history of minstrelsy which eventually serious African-American musicians refused to be a part of; the rise and downfall of boxer Jack Johnson and his later betrayal of Joe Louis among many others.  But it's when he's into the music and the musicians that the writing shines;  the descriptions of after-hours jam sessions where musicians were free to be themselves are amazing.  Even though there are a number of gaps in Parker's personal life story here (as the author notes, it's largely because so much of his early years remain undocumented), the beauty of this book lies in the world surrounding Parker and how it influenced his near fanatic drive to create something new, something  already inside him needing to come out. 

While sometimes the writing meanders, when he's ready to bring Parker back into the scene, he's in tight control.  Some of these parts  are reimagined, while others are based on personal memories and research. At the same time, he lets the reader know when discrepancies arise -- for example, stories told by Parker's first wife Rebecca don't always mesh with the eyewitness accounts of her sister.  But while in places the writing might strike an off-key note (for me there were a few, especially when he equates "Charlie's curiosity about narcotics" to his affection for Sherlock Holmes mysteries) taken as a whole, the book has a cool flow to it, filled with vivid jargon in a style that is truly his own. 

Reader response has been generally favorable toward this book; after perusing several professional reviews, the same is true on that level as well.  I also discovered that Kansas City Lightning is just one of a two-volume set, so I'll sit tight and eagerly anticipate the next book.  In the meantime, I can very highly recommend this book, especially to fans of jazz and of Charlie Parker, but also to anyone who is into African-American history.  A definite no-miss.

Thank You For Your Service, by David Finkel.

9780374180669
Sarah Crichton Books (FSG), 2013
256 pp

hardcover


"When you have a solider of that caliber, you know when he's broken, and when he's broken, he's gotta be fixed."

Rarely in life does a book come along that has me telling everyone I know that they have to read it. I just finished  Thank You For Your Service, and if you have friends or family returning from military deployment, you may find this book to be an invaluable resource.  Yes, there are a number of books on PTSD out there on the market already, but trust me -- you will have never read anything like this one.

Mr. Finkel's prior book The Good Soldiers, had him embedded with men in an army battalion in Baghdad during the 2007 surge. Thank You For Your Service finds him embedded yet again, but this time here in the US, after the soldiers' deployments are finished.   As the dustjacket blurb states, "He is with them in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments"  in a period he calls the "after-war," as these men begin the process of trying to recover.  The book focuses on soldiers returning with "the invisible wounds of this war, including traumatic brain injury,  post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety," causing emotional, mental and physical scars, often  finding their outlet in spousal abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse and sometimes suicide.  But it's not just the men --  the author also offers the viewpoints and voices of  wives or girlfriends who try to adjust to their men being home but broken.  In most cases, the women are simply not equipped to handle the changes and they often wonder what happened to the men they said goodbye to at the start of  their deployment.

The Army does offer some help for their men, but it comes largely in the form of medications -- often a high-powered combination of meds to control anxiety, depression, and sleeplessness.  There is also the possibility of entering Warrior Transition Battalions (WTB), but just getting in is a bureaucratic nightmare.  One man had to collect over 30 signatures in a given amount of time, only to find that some of the offices he had to visit were closed or manned by inadequately-prepared staff.  And although these soldiers have to sign a Contract for Safety, including a promise that if they are feeling suicidal they'll let someone know, the suicide rate continues to climb.  In Washington, at least one man, General Peter Chiarelli,  took the suicide rate very seriously, demanding accountability for each and every self-inflicted death at regular meetings.  However, his efforts were often at the mercy of senators and other high-ranking officials, whom he had to wine and dine and who sometimes had other things that were more pressing. In trying to put together "lessons learned from the cases," details revealed that it was "difficult to learn much at all."  Attempts to find patterns in the suicides remained elusive, and trying to get at a cause for both suicide and PTSD was nearly impossible:

"...could the cause have something to do with the military now being an all-volunteer force, and a disproportionate percentage of those volunteering coming from backgrounds that made them predisposed to trauma?"

or more importantly,

"Could it have nothing to do with the soldier and everything to do with the type of war now being fought?"

Have we asked too much of these men?  There are other treatment options but for men like Adam Schumann, the veteran whose story is central to most of  this book, it would mean, as his wife notes,

"...seven weeks of no work and no pay. That's two missed house payments. Car payments, too. Electricity. Gas. Phone. Groceries."

The rehab treatment place where Schumann eventually  received help was saved from closing at the last minute by an anonymous donor.

The soldiers and their families who agreed to participate in Finkel's work did so knowing that everything would be public and on the record, and this openness is what makes this book so haunting. Sometimes I had to put the book down, regroup emotionally, and then come back to it -- and when a book can do this, the author has done an excellent job.  Most highly recommended; my favorite book of the entire year.

The Girls Of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, by Denise Kiernan

9781451617528
Touchstone, 2013
371 pp

hardcover

If you are at all interested in women's history or in the history of America's nuclear program, The Girls of Atomic City should be one of those books that gets added on to and then moved up to the top of your tbr pile.  It is one of the most thought-provoking nonfiction books I've read in a long time.

Pretty much everyone knows the iconic figure of Rosie the Riveter, who symbolized the women helping out the war effort during World War II.  When the men went overseas, many of the women left behind were called on to do jobs previously done by men, and their work amped up production lines to keep the war going.   The Girls of Atomic City explores some of the women who also kept things going in a project located  in a facility in what is now Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one that was geared toward putting an end to the war.

 The women were trained to do only very specific tasks without understanding the overall project that their labors helped to create.  They were not allowed to talk about their work, nor were they allowed to question anything, and they never knew who might report them if they did.  The project was so secret that wives couldn't talk to husbands about their work, dating couples couldn't discuss their jobs, workers couldn't talk to families or friends on the outside, and  violations of that rule often ended up with people simply disappearing, never to be heard from or seen ever again.    The women, along with the majority of men working at Oak Ridge, had no clue at all that everything they did helped to contribute to the production of the atomic bomb that was used first in Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki.  It was only when the bombs were dropped that the news was released, and people finally realized what it was they'd been working on.  In The Girls of Atomic City, the author examines the personal and professional lives of some of the women who called Oak Ridge home for the duration.  It can get a little boggy sometimes with too much detail, and in some cases doesn't seem to go far enough in terms of questions that weren't asked, but despite these flaws, an overall look at the big picture makes this a history well worth reading. It also made me wonder whether or not something like an Oak Ridge might be possible today in terms of the sheer amount of secrecy involved, but that's a point I'll take up later.  The book is definitely thought provoking and also provides a look inside the America of the WWII years.

Across eastern Tennessee, residents in 1942 found themselves having to move away from their homes, their farms and their land, much of which had been in families for generations.  The US Government needed the multi-thousand acres of  space for construction of  a facility for enriching uranium, a project so secret that all but a handful of  people who eventually came to work there had no idea of what all of their work was for.  The place was known as the Clinton Engineering Works (CEW) , a place staffed mainly by women since men were off doing their part in the war.  That's not to say that there were no men there, but a lot of the women working at CEW were attracted to the idea that they would be contributing to bringing their men  home safely and sooner.  They were also urged to take the jobs because of the money they'd be making, and for some, it was a chance to get away from home and do something entirely new.  The book also examines how some of these women made the best of living their lives despite the crappy housing, the mud and the restrictions placed on them as women, both at home and in the workplace.  For example, if a married woman  or women with children came to Oak Ridge before their husbands could get there, they found that they were not considered heads of household without their men and had to take what they could get in the way of housing, which wasn't that great. It was worse for African-American workers, who were segregated in every way from everyone else, but needed the jobs for the pay that they could send home to families left behind. But despite the harsh conditions, people here managed to build communities of friends and settle in for the duration.

Some of the best parts of this book deal with how the vast amount of secrecy had an effect on day-to-day relationships -- by the time all was said and done, some 75,000 people lived and worked at Oak Ridge  under an all-pervading aura of secrecy where conversations, even those between husbands and wives, were limited to mundanities rather than what happened at work that day. People never knew who would rat them out -- one woman in Kiernan's book was asked to spy on others shortly after she got there, and in some cases, people who talked a little too much were there one day, gone the next and never seen again.  Signs were posted everywhere to keep things under wraps so reminders were ever present. The secrecy even made local outsiders wonder if Oak Ridge was some huge social experiment going on under their noses, since the people who frequented local shops wouldn't discuss what went on in there or gave flip answers to questions.

 Thoroughly researched, the author also discovered women still living who had actually worked there and got their stories, which gives adds an extra layer of authenticity to her work.  The book is organized in a compartmentalized structure, where you meet a character or two, then on with what's going on at Oak Ridge, moving to small sections about the science and what was going on in the world with atomic research. One of the best parts of this book is at the end,when people realize after Hiroshima exactly what their work had created, and the very mixed feelings this discovery generated.

The telling is not without its flaws, though.  Sometimes the book bogs down with a lot of details.  For example, how many times did we need to hear about all of the shoes that were lost to the mud? If it wasn't high heels, it was saddle oxfords or shoes that cost their owner a lot of money -- I mean, seriously, once is enough for readers to get the point. And other than human interest, why did we need to know about one woman's  interactions with prospective in-laws in New York? There are a number of little stories like this one, and while they help to make these people a little more real for modern readers, they become cumbersome and irrelevant  after a while. Then there are places where I felt the author could have done more follow up. For just one example, there's the story of Ebb Cade, the African-American man whose legs were broken in an accident. He was put into an Oak Ridge hospital where he received injections of plutonium even before his bones were reset -- Kiernan gives us a little bit of that story, including the pulling of his teeth, then fails to follow up in any more detail on what happened to him, as previously discussed in Ellen Wellsome's The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War or in James H. Jones' most excellent Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments.    

Overall though, The Girls of Atomic City is an incredible and eye-opening book, not just about the people who lived there and what they were doing, but about a time in America when this sort of secrecy on the part of the government was rarely questioned and was accepted as vital to national security.   I think the big question I was left with at the end of it all was whether or not a project involving so much secrecy on the scale of Oak Ridge could ever occur again in the U.S.  Highly unlikely, but then again, maybe there are things like this going on right under our noses that we don't know about.  I definitely and most highly recommend this book to anyone interested in women's history,  Cold War history or the history of the war effort in the United States.

If you're at all interested in this topic, there's an entire website with pictures documenting the  history of the CEW during the 1940s.  The book has pictures, but there are many, many more at this website.

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the the Spending of a Great American Fortune, by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

 9780345545565
Ballantine/Random House, 2013
456 pp


hardcover
 
 Empty Mansions is a book that proves the old axiom that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, and,  I would add, just as captivating.  The centerpiece of this book is Huguette Clark, a privileged, incredibly wealthy woman who chose to live her life happily by staying hidden. Huguette's story may seem to some to be the stuff of madness, but the the authors disagree, calling her  a "modern-day 'Boo' Radley," someone who shut herself away  in order to remain "safe from a world that can hurt."    Huguette died in 2011, at the age of 104, two weeks shy of 105, but her death isn't the end of this story.  As of yesterday, according to a report from one NPR station, jury selection began in the trial to decide who gets what from her estate.  Empty Mansions takes you from the wide Montana prairies to the smaller world of the privileged elite; from a beautiful mansion topped with a golden tower on Millionaire's Row in New York City  to a hospital room next to a janitor's closet in this strange but well-told and thoroughly-researched story.

The book takes the reader through the life of  W.A Clark,  former senator from Montana and self-made multimillionaire known as the "copper king," and his family -- his wife Anna La Chapelle, daughters Huguette and older sister Andrée.  Clark had other older children from a previous marriage, but lived with his second family on New York City's Millionaire's Row in a six-story mansion at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-seventh street.  The sisters grew up in opulence and lived privileged lives, all before tragedy struck with Andrée's death at the age of 16. After having lost her sister and best friend, Huguette was sent alone to a school for the "daughters of elite," where her dance teacher was Isadora Duncan.   In 1925 her father died, but due to the terms of his will, Anna and Huguette moved to an apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue. Huguette married in 1928, but it didn't last, and she was divorced by 1930.  As time went on, Huguette began to stop seeing visitors, becoming reclusive, and eventually stopped leaving her apartment.  Anna died in 1963, and Huguette "throws herself" into her art -- which consisted of painting and meticulously furnishing dollhouses, or more accurately, storyhouses where she could move her dolls (a massive collection) through the rooms, having them do different things, and studying cartoons frame by frame. She spent tons of money on these projects, and was also very generous with her money among friends and supporting worthy causes (along with paying for upkeep of the "empty mansions" she'd inherited) from her "fairy-tale checkbook,"  but above all valued her privacy, trusting in her attorney and her accountant to handle all business transactions.  But Huguette had also been getting treatment for skin cancer, and when her doctor died in 1990, she didn't look for another one, and all the while she was getting worse. A friend persuaded her to go the hospital for treatment, and she ended up at Doctors Hospital,  a "treatment center for the wealthy,"  in New York City.

The story of the Clarks, the author says, is also  "like a classic folk tale" in reverse, with

 "the bags full of gold arriving at the beginning, the handsome prince fleeing, and the king's daughter locking herself away in the tower."

Now, as if the dollhouses weren't weird enough, this is where the story starts getting just plain strange and even worse,  just plain sad.   At the age of 85, within two months of  Huguette's surgeries, she becomes an "indefinite patient," at Doctors Hospital,  choosing to remain there for the rest of her life, never telling family where she was, ordering everyone to respect her privacy at all costs.   According to the authors,  within a month, one of her doctors alerts the hospital's powers-that-be Huguette is the daughter of a multimillionaire, and that he'd be willing to help develop an "appropriate cultivation approach." Behind her back, they made fun of her, but the hospital officials hold meetings to figure out how to get her to give up some of her money.  The president of the hospital, again according to the authors, boldly says that

"Madame, as you know, is the biggest bucks contributing potential we have ever had."

The doctors go all out trying to get her to cough up in a number of measures that can only be described as coercive.

[As an aside, I'm a notetaker when I read, and going through them now, I see I had a "holy sh*t" moment that I noted in the margins when I came upon a scheme to get her to sign over her assets in a "charitable gift annuity"  scheme --

that carried much more risk than benefit for this 98 year-old woman.]  

It wasn't just the officials or her doctors who got part of her money, either, one of them outright blackmailing her into loaning him  an extra $500,000 on top of the million she'd already given him.  Her private nurse/companion is Hadassah Peri who also came to benefit from Huguette's generosity, as Huguette gave her and her family several "gifts" of cash and property, coming to over $30 million dollars.  Every now and then Peri would just happen to mention some monetary issue she was having, and Huguette would take care of it.  For example, Peri once told Huguette that her kids have asthma and there was a flood in the basement.  Huguette tells Peri she should really move, and hands her $450,000 for a new house. Christmas gifts came in the form of tens of thousands of dollars, she paid for Peri's children's schooling, their summer camps, back taxes the family owed to the IRS, a new house for Hadassah's brother and family to use when they were in town, and the list goes on and on and on.  She was being taken advantage of by pretty much everyone, including Citibank, who'd earlier lost millions in jewelry she'd had in safety deposit boxes, and only allowed her to settle for a maximum amount, playing on her need for absolute privacy and knowing she'd never take them to court.  By the time of her death, Huguette was cash poor, and had been selling off extremely valuable possessions  to pay for the little "gifts" she gave out as well as the taxes attached to the gifts. 

The empty mansions of the title refer to the places that had been acquired by the family over Huguette's lifetime, and then rarely, if ever used, and the chapter headings carry the names of the properties. Each one, including Woodlawn Cemetery, had been kept up by Huguette as places to preserve memories, and were left frozen in time with orders to the caretakers not to be disturbed in any way. 

This is truly an incredible story, and I've thrown it into the book group mix this year.  I will say that the first parts of the book that went back to the days when W.A. Clark was making his fortune and building up a tarnished reputation as a Montana senator were pretty dull, and that I almost put the book down.  Once the early history was finished, however, the story picked up with a vengeance.  There were parts that shocked, parts that made me downright angry, and parts where I couldn't tell whether Huguette was mentally disturbed, easily taken advantage of or coerced,  or whether she was just exercising her right to spend her money the way she chose to. I just wanted to know her story and how she got to the point where she chose to stay in a hospital for twenty years, but it turned into much more than that.  There are some really good points raised  in this book, but in the end, I discovered that it actually raises more questions than it answers.  That's not a bad thing, and there are probably things that will never be known, even when this upcoming trial gets underway.  

Definitely recommended, and while not all reviews have been positive, I don't really pay attention to them when I find something I've really liked reading.  If you are looking for something beyond the ordinary, you'll definitely find it here.