Author Talk, C-Span, American History TV
Life of a Klansman. Edward Ball. Farrar, Straus, and Giraux, 2020. 416 pages.
Twenty-five years ago, Edward Ball wrote the huge bestseller Slaves in the Family in which he explored his family's history as South Carolina planters and slaveowners, and he wrote about his efforts to learn what he could of the people his family enslaved and what happened to their descendants. In 2020, he published another volume of family history, Life of a Klansman, in which he recounts the life of an ancestor who was a member of the white racist organizations that "redeemed" Louisiana during Reconstruction, terrorizing the black population of the state and restoring white supremacy .
I have mixed feelings about this book. Granted, Ball has never presented himself as an historian; he's a writer. However, on every page, there are multiple sentences that begin with phrases like "I think, " "I wonder," "I believe," "probably," "maybe," "possibly," "could have," etc. Those phrases just don't sit well me in something purporting to be history. Ball is really just a writer, a very capable writer, who tells his family history in an attempt to exorcise his own personal guilt for the actions and beliefs of the ancestors that he never met. For the last 25 years, it seems, he has crafted a public persona and made money based on remorse for action over which he had absolutely no control and no responsibility. I am glad that I'm not responsible for his therapy bills.
As I said, he tells a good story. The book presents a very interesting look at the incredibly complicated racial entity that is New Orleans and Louisiana, a place totally unique in America, with a history unmatched by any state. Despite all the personal speculation, the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Louisiana is pretty sound. I also enjoyed his conversations with descendants with people tangentially related to his ancestor's story.
All in all, I'm glad to have read it.
Rogues: True Stories, of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks. Patrick Radden Keefe. Doubleday, 2022. 368 pages.
The term "rogues gallery" originated in the mid to late 19th century US when police and detective agencies, like the famous Pinkerton Agency, started assembling detailed descriptions and dossiers on criminals, including photographs, fingerprints, and measurements of facial features. Here, Patrick Radden Keefe has collected a dozen of his articles previously published in The New Yorker magazine. The 21st century rogues profiled here include a wine forger - who knew that wine collecting was so treacherous ? But, then, with collectors willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single bottle and many transactions occurring in shady, black market-like circumstances, it's easy to see why it's fertile ground for criminals. There are also the stories of the professor who shot and killed her colleagues because she was denied tenure, the sister of the biggest organized crime figure in the Netherlands who still lives in fear for her life because she testified against him, the international arms merchant, the whistleblower who exposed money laundering in a Swiss bank, the manipulation of pharmaceutical stock using experimental drugs for treating Alzheimer's, and, of course, a day spent with Anthony Bourdain.
The stories are all incredibly fascinating, and I have written before that I am a huge fan of Keefe's writing. This book does not disappoint.
author talk, National Archives
Historian H.W. Brands is another author who can do no wrong as far as I am concerned. The Last Campaign is definitely another winner. I do quibble slightly, however, with whomever is in charge of subtitling books at Doubleday. The title might mislead some people. This book is not really about a clash between military and organizational genius William Tecumseh Sherman and Geronimo. In fact, Geronimo is totally absent from the majority of the book. Instead, it is a complete and thorough history of the Indian Wars and of the US government's Indian policy in the 19th century. Every treaty, policy, major battle and campaign (and some minor), and personality of significance is dealt with here. Sherman and Geronimo kind of represent the bookends of the period, with Sherman becoming Commanding General of the Army in 1869, with the chief responsibility of pacifying the West, and Geronimo being the last major symbol of armed resistance as his small Apache band defied American and Mexican troops until he was forced to surrender in 1886.
The Last Campaign is great history, as I have come to expect from Brands. Whether the reader is looking for an introduction to the subject of the Indian Wars or the reader is already very knowledgeable about the subject, this book will inform, educate, and entertain.
Author talk
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South. Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. Public Affairs, 2018. 416 pages.
I want to start by saying that I know some very, very fine people from Mississippi. I really don't want to offend my friends from Mississippi. They really are good people --- great people. However, I know enough about Mississippi that it is absolutely impossible to hear the word without thinking of Nina Simone's song, "Mississippi G***am." Seriously. The level of inhumanity, hatred, stupidity, and pure evil present in Mississippi rivals any other political entity in the history of the world. Sadly, not much has changed in the 21st century.
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is a hard book to read. It's about the broken American legal system. And there is no disputing that it is broken, on all levels from law enforcement to attorneys, to judges, and to politicians. As author John Grisham points out in his introduction to the book, innocent people are jailed and executed in America. If there are 2.3 million people in prison and just .5% of them (half of one percent) are innocent, that’s 11,500 people serving time in jail for something they didn’t do. I think we can agree that 1 person is too many, but 11,500? The American legal system is broken, but is there a better one in the world?
This book is specifically about Mississippi, beginning in 1995, and specifically about two men, Steven Hayne and Michael West, a doctor and dentist respectively, who became high-paid medical examiners for hire. The book argues that they presented evidence and testimony that resulted in convictions of many people for horrific crimes that they had nothing to do with. Some of those people were sentenced to life in prison or death row. The authors focus on two men in particular who have been freed because new evidence and investigations have vindicated them, but there are other men still on death row. At the very least, the doctors are incompetent, but it's more likely that they routinely created false evidence that was used to convict innocent people. They were aided and abetted at every turn by Mississippi law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and politicians. To date, those involved in fraudulently convicting dozens and dozens of innocent people, including Hayne and West, have neither admitted wrongdoing or been punished.
My blood boiled as I read this book. Also, the two crimes that are the focus of the book are terrible crimes against toddlers which makes it even harder to read. However, this dysfunction needs to be exposed to sunlight --- not that anything changes, it is Mississippi. The book is also worth reading because of the first few chapters in which the authors discuss the history of the office of coroner, coroners' roles in the Jim Crow South, and the development of pathology as a medical field in the US. For those of the "CSI" generation (and for older people like me, "Quincy"), readers are in for a shock. Autopsies and forensic investigation are incredibly new developments, really only beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, and moving slowly across the country.
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