Page by Page: Book Reviews

In Margo Jefferson’s Negroland: A Memoir, a personal and historical account of upper middle-class black family life in 1950s and 1960s Chicago, the colorline is something that must be learned.

Greenspan’s biography provides early 21st-century readers with a thick description of the social, political and cultural climate of the disparate but intimately connected contexts of Brown’s life. More than a time-line, Greenspan’s contextualization calls attention to the cataclysmic events taking place in the world of the renowned abolitionist and writer.

There was something about Mayberry that evoked a kind of Southern nowhere-ness. It was the not the New South of Henry Grady, not the romanticized South of a natural and benign unequal social order like Thomas Nelson page’s. How could Mayberry be that when it had, amazingly, no black people?

Bourbon Street: A History takes a single street as its focus to reveal the multiple overlaps and interrelations of different cultures and different histories. This method has its costs, at times exchanging topical breadth for depth.

Marcus’s chosen form, media’s coveted “listicle,” is of the moment. But, at first glance, his subject matter is not. Who even talks about “rock ’n’ roll” anymore?

The facts of Bernstein’s story—the scope of his talents, the velocity of his ascent—still amaze. His natural gifts were embarrassingly rich: ferociously intelligent, musical, and social in equal measures. But Bernstein was also lucky—in the right place at the right time again and again and again.

While Graham retained authority over the use of his voice, it is unclear how much control he exercised. Graham’s appeal seems closer to that of a capable politician than a shrewd marketer in that his greatest coup was getting people from strikingly different walks of life to believe that he both represented their views and could serve as their moral guide.

Hughes gives us a pleasantly dense tale of the shadows in Richard Nixon’s mind that might have been there even without the Chennault Affair—assuming he would have been elected without the Chennault machinations. We can never know if it determined the election outcome, but one major consequence of the Affair that we do know was Watergate.

Franzen’s strength is probing concepts we have been raised to emulate or strive for. The question of how secrets can either fester or come out is treated on practically every page of the novel.

Absent the convention of an “Introduction,” the reader of Debi and Irwin Unger’s new biography of George C. Marshall must get well along in the narrative before its purpose is grasped. From then on, clarity about what the authors are about intensifies: an attempted take-down of the historical reputation of the man generally regarded as America’s finest public servant in the 20th century.