Edward O’Keefe posits that despite Theodore Roosevelt’s image as a ruggedly individualistic, über-masculine figure, his career was heavily shaped by five women: his mother, two wives, and two sisters. The result is an interesting, though ultimately unsatisfying, book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created A President.
Lawrence Tierney is a solid biography that describes in detail Tierney’s career as an actor, which are the best parts. The worst parts, where the book becomes a slog, are the endless episodes detailing Tierney’s drunken street and bar brawls.
Willis L. Drake was inspired by the example of his father to write Mary Ann Byas-Drake. He was doing what a good father and a good husband should do: Remember his wife and how she affected his life and, more importantly, what her life meant to him.
We always flatter ourselves by the assumption of our own righteous virtue, especially when it is not put to the test. The Dreyfus story, we were told, revealed how precarious assimilation was for racial and religious minorities.
Both Taraborrelli and Anthony reach for an authentic Jackie beneath the layers of scrupulously constructed self-representation populating the archives and historical record. In his preface, Taraborrelli laments that generations of fans, reporters, and the general public have long been “guilty of trying to make her something she was not and never wanted to be–not a mere mortal but, rather, some sort of mythological figure.”
The Forerunner is one of the more important autobiographies written by a St. Louisan. It ought to be read by Democrats, Republicans, and all third-party members. It takes a bit of skill to merge leftist politics, old-time Black evangelical Protestantism, and the supporting craft of nursing into something coherent.
The topic of the Anthropocene is so vast and, well, everywhere, that sometimes you just have to make brief forays into the muck and see if anything makes sense or connects.
Amul Thapar, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the son of Indian immigrants, wants to show that Clarence Thomas is not alone in his views or somehow a fluke, a mistake, or an aberration as a minority jurist. In other words, Thapar wants to make clear that Thomas’s relationship with the American community of color is not defined solely by the people who hate him.
The Eagles of Heart Mountain is an impressive study of the concentration camps that imprisoned over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans during World War II. This is by no means the only history of the Japanese concentration camps, but it is unique in its focus on the Heart Mountain facility of Wyoming and its emphasis on the role of football in providing some joy and self-expression for some of those imprisoned.
Mocked as an Italian, disappointed by his Catholicism, physically unprepossessing, rock and roll offered Felix Cavaliere the charisma of revolution. And revolution is always about how the odd get even.