Women's History Month 2026: Women's History Books Reads Over the Last Year (Part 2 of 2 )

 

A Fatal Thing Happened On the Way to the Way to the Forum:  Murder in Ancient Rome.  Emma Southon.  Harry N. Abrams, 2021.  352 pages.

Although I reject the stupid social media trend a short while back claiming that men constantly think about ancient Rome, I know that it is a major topic of interest for many people who like history.  Here, however, author Emma Southon illuminates an aspect of Roman history that few, if any, consider.  To paraphrase Southon, ancient Rome was an exceptionally "murder-y" place.  That in itself is not very different from our own society which has a morbid fascination with murder.  Think of how much of our entertainment - books, television, movies - is murder based.   

In this book, Southon examines a number of murders, including of course the assassination of Julius Caesar.  After all, Rome was conceived in murder when mythical founder Romulus murdered his twin Remus.  The Roman Republic was founded when the last king was overthrown following the suicide of a noble woman raped by the son of the king.  Crowds thronged arenas to cheer as men, women, and animals slaughtered each other. Criminals were crucified.  In one fifty-year period, 26 emperors were murdered.  Rome was an exceptionally violent society. This book is much more than just a recitation of cases, though.  It is an examination of Roman society and culture as a whole, through the prism of murder.  We, as readers, discover how ancient Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.  It's complicated. For much of Roman history, murder was not viewed as a matter for the state to handle.  It was a family issue.  If a person was killed by another person, the victim's family handled it. Then you throw in murders of family members, murders of slaves by masters and masters by slaves, murders of emperors and political figures, and state-sponsored murder.   This book is extremely informative and thought-provoking, and it's also quite entertaining.  The author is a British podcaster with a PhD in ancient history, and the tone of the book is very "podcast-y," and she has that very British sense of humor that I love.  I highly recommend this book for those who are interested in ancient Rome.

The Fifties:  An Underground History.  James R. Gaines.  Simon & Schuster, 2023.  288 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

Too many people think of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and complacency, picturing sock hops, soda fountains, and poodle skirts, but, as I tried to impress upon my students each year, there was always turbulence under that placid surface.  There was the rise of rock and roll and teenage rebellion which shocked older generations.  Beatniks challenged middle-class norms.  Artists shook up the art world.  The Red Scare and the Lavender Scare sent shock waves through government and society.  The civil rights and feminist movements started ramping up.  There was a lot of angst, anger, confusion, and conflict.  This book celebrates several individuals who were brave enough to stand - often alone - on their principles and lead fights that they believed needed fighting.  In particular, Gaines selects gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmental movements.  A couple of the people discussed are familiar names, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and Rachel Carson for example, but the others aren't nearly as well known, or as celebrated as they should be.  There's Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and computer scientist who is considered the father of cybernetics, the forerunner of Artificial Intelligence.  There's Harry Hay who first envisioned a national gay rights movement in the 1940s.  There's Pauli Murray whose law school thesis provided much of the legal basis for Thurgood Marshall's arguments in Brown vs Board of Education and whose legal work made sexual discrimination unconstitutional. Gerda Lerner pioneered the concept of women's history as an academic field, despite being told by superiors and colleagues that there wasn't enough material to study.  Isaac Woodard was a black WWII veteran who was blinded by a South Carolina sheriff because he dared to look him in the eye.  These are all important stories that should be shared.  This book should be widely read.  Almost makes me wish that I was back in the classroom in order to share them. ... Almost.

The Taking of Jemima Boone:  Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America.  Matthew Pearl.  Harper, 2021.  288 pages.

In July 1776, twelve-year old Jemima Boone, the daughter of the best known frontiersman in the American colonies, and two of her friends were kidnapped by a small group of Cherokee and Shawnee warriors.  Over the next few days, Boone and a group of men from the settlement of Boonesborough took off in hot pursuit. After about fifty miles, the pursuers caught up, rescued the girls, and killed some of the warriors, including a son of an important war chief named Blackfish.  This incident, fueled by British efforts to tamp down colonial resistance on the frontier before it blew up, led to a broader conflict as the Shawnee, the pro-war faction of the Cherokee, and elements of other tribes launched a major effort designed both to seek revenge and to end, once and for all, white encroachment into the region known as Kentucky.  The actual kidnapping and rescue are dealt with rather quickly in the book, but the real story is the aftermath.  The summer of 1776 was extremely consequential in American  history.  As delegates in Philadelphia argued over the Declaration of Independence and the opening months of the Revolution, white settlers were crossing the Appalachians into Native American territory, foreshadowing the conflict and extermination that was to follow.  This book is an excellent account of the events.

The Sinners All Bow:  Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne.  Kate Winkler Dawson.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025.  320 pages.

Kate Winkler Dawson has made a name for herself as a true-crime author and podcaster, and her newly published book is a great one.  It's a great topic, a story-behind-the-story, a whodunnit, a true crime story, a story-that-inspired-a great-story story.  On December 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead,  hanging, on a small New England family farm.  Sarah was a mill girl.  Like many other single girls in New England, she had been drawn to the textile mills and long, hard work days, far from their families.  Her life was difficult, and she struggled.  She found solace in Methodist churches and meetings.  The Methodists were a relatively new denomination, and the established Congregationalists looked down on them, aghast at their fervent - in their eyes, frenzied and wild -  worship style and their loud, frantic, "hell-fire and damnation" style of preaching that didn't require formal education. In their eyes, Methodists were drunk, ignorant, promiscuous, and criminal, blasphemers Traditional, staid New Englanders also tended to look down on mill girls in general, often considering them wanton women, challenging societal mores.  Sarah's death stirred up a lot of controversy, especially after it was discovered that she was pregnant.  Questions arose.  Was it murder or suicide? Who was the baby's father?  As to the latter question, evidence soon pointed to a local, married Methodist minister named Ephraim Avery.  Was he also a murderer?  A noted author of the time, Catherine Read Williams,  immediately began investigating and published her own book about the case in 1833, perhaps the first true crime book in American history.  The case, and Williams' book inspired another book that you may have heard of, a little novel called The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Nearly two hundred years later, Dawson takes up the investigation, using Williams work, her own research, and modern forensics and experts to answer the questions and determine the truth, successfully weaving the stories of Sarah, Hawthorne, and Williams together.

Cher:  Part One:  The Memoir.  Cher.  Dey Street Books, 2024.  432 pages.

Cher is the Icon of all Icons.  Before Chappell Roan, there was Gaga.  Before Gaga, there was Madonna.  Before Madonna, there was Cher.  And she's bigger than all of them. Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only artist to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center. It's hard to name another entertainer whose life has been filled with re-inventions and rebirths.  Now, she's telling her story.

And what a story it is.  Her family's history and her childhood were chaotic, to put it mildly.  The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road look like happy fairy tales by comparison.  It becomes even more surreal (Speaking of surrealism, the later story about Sonny and Cher meeting Salvador Dali is one of my favorite anecdotes in the book.) when she adds stories about playing with Dean Martin's children and Liza Minnelli.  Part one covers her childhood through the 1970s, focusing, of course, on her marriage and partnership  with Sonny Bono and their rise to stardom,  and their divorce.  It ends with her divorce from Greg Allman and with Cher on the verge of launching her acting career.  Cher's always been known for her honesty, openness, and humor.  She pulls no punches here, and I'm looking forward to part two.

She Came To Slay:  The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman.  Erica Armstrong Dunbar.  37 Ink, 2019.  176 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

If any American deserves a fresh, thoroughly researched, well-written, originally illustrated, biography that is equally accessible and enjoyable for everyone from grade school to adulthood, it is Harriet Tubman, and this is the book.  Of course, we all know the basics, that Tubman was the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad who personally escorted hundreds enslaved people to freedom after her own escape.  Some of us may know of her long career as an abolitionist before the Civil War and her service as a spy and nurse during the Civil War.  Fewer know that she became the first woman to lead an armed combat mission - a very consequential mission.  Even after the war, she never stopped, becoming an active suffragist and an advocate for veterans and for the aged.  Tubman's always been near the top of my list of greatest Americans, and this biography is great introduction to her life for yourself and for any younger readers in your life.  

The Mirage Factory:  Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles.  Gary Krist.  Crown, 2018.  416 pages.

Gary Krist is one of those authors at the top of the narrative nonfiction writing game, along with authors like Erik Larson and Abbott Kahler.  In this 2018 book, Krist tells the story of Los Angeles through the lives of three towering figures and their careers from 1910 to 1930:  William Mulholland, the engineering visionary who brought power and water to a formerly written-off barren wasteland in order to make the city even possible, D.W. Griffith, the "father of American film" who built a powerful culture-shaping industry out of a minor novelty, and Aimee Semple McPherson, the charismatic evangelist who built a church that drew tens of thousands of believers each week and who reached millions more each week through magazines, newspapers, tours, and broadcasts on her own radio station.  Singly, they became American icons.  Collectively, they created Los Angeles and made it a major city physically, economically, creatively, and spiritually.  Krist makes the case that all three were both masters of their crafts and masters of illusion, capable of dreaming big dreams and making those dreams come true, overcoming major obstacles in the process.  Yet, the mirages or illusions that they created all dissipated because of their own tragic flaws, "a crescendo of hubris, scandal, and catastrophic failure of design." Each of them saw his or her fortunes and legacies suffer, but the city remained and prospered.  It's a riveting history. No, wait, it's boffo, epic, spectacular, stunning, thrilling, legendary, unforgettable, electrifying, breathtaking, awe-inspiring,  .... etc.

Ring Shout.  P. Djeli Clark.  Tor Nightfire, 2025 (paperback, originally 2020).  192 pages.

If you liked the movie "Sinners," or other horror films by directors like Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele, then this is the book for you.  It's horror, fantasy, and history all wrapped in one virtually non-stop action package.  The setting is 1922 in Macon and Stone Mountain Georgia.  The Ku Klux Klan has been reborn following the release of the movie "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.  As black veterans returned from World War I and started standing up for their civil rights in Jim Crow America, the Klan mobilized and ramped up violence in response.  The Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and a spike in lynchings are just some of the events referenced in this book.  In Clark's re-imagining, the KKK actually consists of two factions, the Klan, comprising the average American racists, and the Ku Kluxes who are actually demonic monsters created and fed by hate and who only exist by stirring and escalating hate.  A small band of women forms for the purpose of destroying the Ku Kluxes.  There's Maryse, armed with a magical sword gifted to her by three spiritual aunties who appear to her in visions, Sadie, a sharpshooter, and Chef, who disguised herself as a man and fought as a Harlem Hellfighter in WWI.  They're aided by Maryse's spiritual advisor Nana Jean and Molly, a self-taught Choctaw scientist and engineer who devises weapons and strategies along with her female apprentices, and Emma, a German Jewish social revolutionary communist.  Following some skirmishes and a major Klux attack on a juke joint in Macon, everybody heads to Stone Mountain, the site where the Klan was reborn and the first crosses were burned, for the final apocalyptic, the-fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance battle.   Clark blends history and horror with Gullah, African, and Caribbean folklore and delivers a very creative and original read and a great ride from beginning to end.

Harlem Rhapsody.  Victoria Christopher Murray.  Berkley, 2025.  400 pages.

Jessie Redmon Fauset was one of the most prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance.  Poet Langston Hughes called her "the Midwife" of the literary explosion that was a huge part of the Renaissance.  At a time when publishing companies refused to publish black authors or employ black proofreaders or editors and even white women couldn't find employment higher than stenographer or secretary, Fauset became the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, founded by W.E.B. DuBois.  In that role, she was responsible for the discovery and mentorship of almost all of the leading literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, to name just a few, and she made The Crisis a thriving and vibrant publication.  She published lots of her own poems and essays and four novels, the first novels to ever portray authentic middle class, college-educated, professional black characters living everyday lives and facing everyday challenges.  Yet, few people know about her or her contributions.  Author Victoria Christopher Murray endeavors to correct that in this historical fiction work.  She delivers a suiting tribute to Fauset and a rich depiction of 1920s Harlem and the culture of the Renaissance.  Fauset's life, however, is more than just literary achievement.  For over a decade, Faucet carried on an extramarital affair with The Crisis founder, and her own boss, W.E.B. DuBois.   Murray imagines the ups and downs of that relationship and its effects on the individuals involved and affected, and on the movement itself, revealing the faults, foibles, and flaws of both Fauset and DuBois.  The novel is a really good read and a history lesson at the same time.

Georgia's Historical Recipes:  Seeking Our State's Oldest Written Foodways and the Stories Behind Them.  Valerie J. Frey.  University of Georgia Press, 2025.  400 pages.

As I always say, there's not much better than combining history and food.  There are few elements of culture that reveal as much about peoples, places, and times as a culture's foodways do.  Valerie J. Frey is a writer, researcher, and an archivist who specializes in finding and preserving history through food.  It's also obvious that she's an avid baker and collector.  Her discoveries of old cookbooks led her to do a deep dive into the history of cookbook publishing in Georgia, and she presents her findings here.  She finds examples from the antebellum period through  World War II and organizes them into fifty sections presented chronologically.  Each section contains a biography of the cookbook writer, the historical and cultural context of the time in which it was written, and sample recipes.  Frey also usually includes her own personal memories, connections, or attempts to re-create recipes, making the history all the more relatable and approachable.  The recipes and cookbooks provide windows onto Georgia history:  what was available, who could afford it, how was it presented, who cooked, who consumed, what did the home look and feel like, what did the larger society look like, and how did all of this evolve over time.  Beyond being a fun and educational read, this book is truly a great addition to the genres of food history and Georgia history. 

Women's History Month 2026: Women's History Reads Over the Last Year (Part 1 of 2)

 

    March is Women's History Month.  Here's a recap of the books that I've read since last March that deal with women's history themes or have notable women characters.

Kugels and Collards:  Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina.  Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey.  University of South Carolina Press, 2023.  256 pages.

South Carolina became home to some of the first Jews to ever live in North America, with the first recorded Jewish settlers arriving in Charleston in the 1690s.  Over the centuries, more Jews arrived, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, then Germans, Russians, and Eastern Europeans, at the turn of the 20th century and, later, escaping the Holocaust.  Jewish families adapted and blended their traditions and foodways in their new home, influenced by contact with other ethnic groups, black and white, and by new and different ingredients that they found.  The result is this history and cookbook, containing some 80 recipes alongside dozens of stories about their creation and history.  As I've said lots of times in the past, it's hard to go wrong when combining food and history, and this book is a revealing insight into a particular culture.

Paper Bullets:  Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis.  Jeffrey H. Jackson.  Algonquin Books, 2020. 336 pages.  

Another book about anti-German resistance in occupied territory during WWII, but this one is unique.  First, it's set on the island of Jersey, one of the Channel islands between France and the UK which doesn't get a lot of ink.  Second, it's the first book to tell the story of two queer artists, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe (known in the art world as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore), whose lives and resistance were almost forgotten.  Third, their resistance involved no weapons, no espionage, and no hiding of Jews or Allied pilots.  Their resistance was writing anonymous notes.  That might sound benign and low-key, but their actions were still punishable by death.

Schwob and Malherbe were well-to-do French women (childhood friends who actually became stepsisters when their parents married) who became lovers and were deeply involved in the cross-dressing, homosexual, gender-bending, artistic, and literary free-for-all that was Paris in the 1920s.  They socialized with all the big names (Gertrude Stein, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Aldous Huxley, among others) of the Lost Generation and Surrealism.  They became avant-garde artists themselves, dabbling in various media but mostly photography focusing mostly on gender and challenging social norms. As the European situation deteriorated, they decided to move to the quaint peaceful island of Jersey.  There, they had to closet themselves as just sisters because it was a different world from Paris.  Their respite was brief, however, as Jersey was occupied by German troops.  The pair began a propaganda war against the occupiers, conducting psychological warfare by creating and distributing "paper bullets" — small typed notes containing wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops.  They would sneak the notes into soldiers pockets, on and in vehicles, and various other places.  Finally arrested and sentenced to death, they continued resistance in prison, reaching out to other prisoners to lift their spirits.  It's quite an interesting story.

Harriet Tubman Live in Concert.  Bob the Drag Queen.  Gallery Books, 2025.  239 pages.  (Audio version 4hrs, 17 minutes)

Wow!  I had no idea what to expect when I first learned about this book, but I immediately pre-ordered it.  We've been fans of Bob the Drag Queen since his first appearance on "RuPaul's Drag Race" and have seen him on a couple of stand-up comedy tours, but a book about Harriet Tubman?  It blew me away.  Pure creative genius and one of the most original things that I've read in a very long time.

Picture it:  NYC, present day.  People from the past, including many major historical figures have suddenly returned to life.  There's no explanation, almost no attention paid to it in the story.  It's just the mechanism which makes the story possible.  Don't worry about it.  "The Returned" live their lives and integrate into the present.  Cleopatra, for example, becomes a hugely successful makeup and fashion Instagram influencer.  Harriet Tubman, and several of the people she led to freedom on the Underground Railroad, have returned, and she's on a mission, again - a mission from God.  She contacts Darnell Williams, a once-hot hip-hop writer and producer whose music career is struggling, and tells him that God has chosen him to assist in her mission.  While one might deny God, nobody dares to say No to Harriet Tubman!  Her mission:  create an epic hip-hop album and stage show, a la "Hamilton."  In her first life, Tubman freed about 700 people from physical chains, and many more indirectly.  Now, she's back to free millions from metaphorical chains of all sorts.  Darnell has his own metaphorical chains to break, and he goes to work, with Harriet's guidance, to break free into his own authentic self.  This is a fantastic work, and I so hope that Bob is actively working to create a real album and show; it could be bigger than "Hamilton."  I highly recommend the audio version.  Not only is Bob the reader, but it also includes two of the show's songs at the end.  (NOTE:  The photo above was generated using AI.  There is no known photo of Harriet Tubman spittin' fire.)

Trespassers at the Golden Gate:  A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco.  Gary Krist.  Crown, 2025.  400 pages.

First things first:  the title is horrendous, "Trespassers at the Golden Gate" has next to nothing to do with the story.  But don't let that put you totally off, there's a good story inside.  On November 3, 1870, Laura D. Fair shot and killed her married lover in front of dozens of eyewitnesses, including the man's wife and a few of his children on a ferryboat in San Francisco Bay.  The victim, A.P. Crittenden was a well known lawyer and former California state legislator who had told Fair for years that she was his one, true wife and that he was going to divorce his wife and marry her.  When she finally realized that he was lying, she snapped, setting into motion a legal episode that captured the interest of the entire country.  The resulting trials led to public and private debates about marriage, morality, gender issues, and justice in California and beyond.  

Krist not only relates the now forgotten affair, but he also places the story in a larger context of the development of San Francisco which was a tiny little insignificant village in 1848 that became a wild and rough Gold Rush den of vice and corruption and, by 1870, was struggling to become a cultured and progressive metropolis.  During its meteoric rise, the fortunes of women, blacks, and Chinese in the city rose and fell, and Krist tells the stories of select representatives of those marginalized groups in parallel storylines.  He also introduces characters like Mark Twain, Brett Harte, and Susan B. Anthony who were swept up in the Laura Fair story.  It all makes for a really interesting story and a good history of San Francisco.  My only complaint is that, while I appreciated the tangents and the larger context, I can see that some readers would find them distracting and maybe even consider them filler material to pad a pretty cut and dried, straightforward story.

Stranger in the Shogun's City.  Amy Stanley.  Scribner, 2020.  352 pages.

When asked why they don't appreciate history, many people might say that history is just the stories of kings and queens and the upper class, and, honestly, a lot of history is exactly that.  The lives of kings and queens are the most likely to be documented and written about, creating lots of material for historians to comb through.  "Regular" people don't often leave paper trails.  That's what makes a book like Stranger in the Shogun's City really stand out.  Stranger is the story of Japan just before the 1853 arrival of the American fleet which resulted in Japan's emergence onto the world stage, told through the life of Tsuneno, the daughter of a Buddhist priest.  Tsuneno grew up in a small village, and her parents ran the local temple.  The family enjoyed a relatively comfortable lifestyle, and the children were all educated.  Tsuneno's eldest brother was set to inherit his father's position, and Tsuneno and her sisters were expected to follow the normal path for priest's daughters, probably an arranged marriage with a priest in another village and a life managing the day-to-day operations of the local temple.  However, that life didn't appeal to Tsuneno; she had dreams of life in the big city, Edo (now Tokyo), the seat of power of the Shogun, the de facto ruler of Japan.  She finally makes it to Edo in her mid thirties, having been divorced three times.  Alone and penniless, owning little beyond the clothes on her back, she has to make her own way, and it's a struggle.  Her struggles are documented in numerous letters between her and her family, and they also present a detailed look at life in Edo.   The book is a great window into the culture of 19th century Japan, and specifically into the life of a Japanese woman at the time. 

Starvation Heights:  A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest.   Crown, 2005.  432 pages.

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard.  They were always open-minded when it came to new health treatments and crazes, and Dr. Hazzard's treatment looked promising to them.  Hazzard and her husband were building a sanitarium outside of Seattle that they dreamed would rival Kellogg's famous sanitarium in Battle Creek Michigan.  The sisters entered into her care and submitted to weeks of enforced fasting, subsisting on weak tomato and asparagus broths, and daily enemas.  Claire died, and her sister Dora finally made contact with the girls' childhood nurse in Australia and an uncle who arrived to rescue her.  What they found on their arrivals made no sense, and they got British and American authorities involved, discovering many more deaths caused by Hazzard's "medicine."  It's a real life horror story and a story of extreme quackery tinged with pure evil.

Anna May Wong:  From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend.  Graham Russell Gao Hodges.  Chicago Review Press, 2023.  304 pages.  Updated 2nd edition, first published in 2004.

Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong appeared in over 50 movies, and she was one of the biggest celebrities in the world.  American, European, and Asian movie magazines constantly published photos of her, stories about her, and stories written by her.   She socialized with other A-list celebrities and with European royalty.  She was recognized as an excellent actress, but she was also a stage and nightclub star, as an actress, singer, and monologist, often performing in multiple languages.  She was incredibly talented at presenting herself, thoughtfully using her own hairstyles and wardrobe to develop fuller characters and to advance the film plots.  During the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, she contributed most of her income and much of her time to raising funds for aid to Chinese civilians and refugees.  She invested wisely and made a comfortable living, enough for herself and to educate her siblings.  She was one of Hollywood's brightest stars --- quite an accomplishment for the daughter of a laundryman born in Los Angeles in 1905 who made her on-screen debut at 14.

Yet, few people know her name today, and far fewer have ever seen one of her films.  Her career and legacy were handicapped from the beginning by outside forces over which she had no control.  Strict movie codes of the day forbade any hint of romance between characters or actors of different races, so she was not considered for leading roles.  Her roles were often stereotypical, reflecting American racism. She played the devious Chinese female, almost always a villain or a servant, and almost always forced to kill herself in the end. Hollywood refused to hire Asian actors, casting white actors in "yellow-face," instead.  While she had many adoring fans in China, the Nationalist government condemned her because she embraced being a flapper, bared her legs and arms in films and photos, and she often played prostitutes or slave girls.  She was accused of shaming the Chinese people and their culture.  Wong was a very complicated and interesting character, and there has been a bit of resurgence in curiosity about her in recent years, with new biographies, documentaries, and even a Wong Barbie and U.S. quarters.  This bio was ahead of the curve, however, and this new, updated edition is a thorough look at her life and career, although it's a bit dry.

The Vice President's Black Wife:  The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.  Amrita Chakrabati Myers.  The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.  296 pages.

Even the buffest of history buffs outside of Kentucky have probably never heard of Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth Vice President of the United States and presidential contender who was a US Representative and Senator for years and whose political career was enhanced by stories that he was the man who killed Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames. His family was among the first white settlers of Kentucky and was a prominent family in the area of Georgetown for decades.  However, Johnson's story goes much deeper, and it is an incredibly important and quintessential part of southern history and the legacy of slavery.   

For six months each year, Johnson lived in a boarding house in Washington while doing the young nation's business by day and attending the young society's most exclusive society affairs by night.  As far as Washingtonians knew, he was a lifelong bachelor.  His Kentucky neighbors knew different, and, later, political opponents used that knowledge to tarnish his career and to thwart his presidential aspirations.  The secret?   He was married.  To an enslaved woman that he "owned," a woman named Julia Chinn.  He and Julia had two daughters who were legally his property as well.  He never officially freed wither Julia or his daughters.  Julia died enslaved, and her daughters weren't freed until the ratification of the 13th amendment.  That doesn't make Johnson that unique.  The history of American slavery is the history of interracial sex, consensual and not consensual.  Slaveowners viewed enslaved women as their sexual property, and that view was universally accepted even if it was not stated aloud.  Slaveowners raped, cajoled, bribed.  Some treated their concubines as wives.  Some freed their lovers and children. Some sold them when there was too much gossip and people started noticing resemblances.  A few left their property to their enslaved or freed wives or children.  

Johnson stands out because he called Julia his wife.  The preacher of the church that Johnson's family co-founded married them.  He gave Julia complete and total authority to run his plantation and the Choctaw Academy (a federally funded school for young Choctaw men that provided a major income for Johnson) that was located on his property.  His daughters married local white men, and they and their descendants have "passed" ever since, with the vast majority of their descendants never knowing their family history until the last few years.  In this book, Myers digs deep to tell Julia's story for the first time.  Because there isn't much of a paper trail,  (Johnson's papers are sparse for such a political man.  It is thought that his brothers destroyed most of his letters and documents upon his death due to shame.), there is a lot of "could have," "probably," "possibly," and the like, and a lot of references to similar stories, but she does an excellent job of telling the important story and bringing it to light.  Important and extraordinarily complicated.  Spoiler alert: don't go thinking Johnson was heroic.

Dinner With King Tut:  How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations.  Sam Kean.  Little, Brown and Company, 2025.  464 pages.

I'm a fan of Sam Kean's podcast, "The Disappearing Spoon," and all of his books. He tells great, little-known stories that blend history and science.  His most recent book is one of his best and one of my favorite reads so far this year.  In it, he explores the field of experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeologists are not content to study documents and artifacts.  They seek to experience life as the people of the past did, and they carry out controlled, scientific experiments designed to replicate ancient human behavior and lifestyles, all in hopes of answering the questions that simply analyzing artifacts can't answer.  Some traditional archaeologists look down on the field and consider it frivolous or sensationalistic.  

Kean seeks out the experts and learns the skills that they study.  He learns and practices mummification, hide tanning, trepanation (skull surgery), flint knapping, beer brewing, open ocean navigation, Roman roadbuilding, and ancient tattooing among other skills.  He learns to cook and eat ancient foods including ostrich eggs, guinea pigs, walrus, acorn bread, and various insects.  He plays the ancient Aztec ball game and learns how to build and fire a giant trebuchet (a medieval siege sling weapon).  He relates these experiences with great deference and respect for his teachers, who are - not surprisingly - extremely interesting and unique people, and he incorporates lots of humor, often at his own expense.  (I really wish he had made a video series of each chapter.  I think it would be a huge streaming hit.) But wait - there's more! Each chapter also includes a gripping short story that immerses the reader in each culture that he addresses.  This is a must-read book for people who love history!

Masters of Sex:  The Life and Times of of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How To Love.  Basic Books, 2009.  432 pages.

Thomas Maier's newest book is the biography of a secret British agent who worked his way up high into the FDR administration and helped to inspire Ian Fleming's creation of James Bond.  When I picked up that book, I looked at his past works and decided to read his biography of pioneering sexologists Masters and Johnson.  It was the basis for a Showtime drama that I watched from 2013 to 2016.  For more than four decades, William Masters and Virginia Johnson were the leading American experts on human sexuality, following the groundbreaking work of Alfred Kinsey.  They changed Kinsey's paradigm, however.  Whereas Kinsey relied on interviews with thousands of subjects to learn about sex in America, Masters and Johnson actually watched and recorded thousands of people having sex in their laboratory, and they used scientific instruments to take thousands of measurements during the process.  They published their findings and offered physical and mental therapy to thousands  of couples and individuals who traveled to their St. Louis offices for solutions to sexual dysfunctions of all varieties.  They went from working in secret isolation -fearful of condemnation from the scientific and medical communities, the legal establishment, and the general public-  to becoming media darlings and pop culture icons.  During their journey, America's experts on love and sex had their own relationship issues with other people and then entered into their own relationship with each other, a relationship fraught with each individual's personal foibles, egos, insecurities, and character flaws.  Maier uses interviews with both principals and many others in their circles as well as Masters' own unpublished memoir to tell their story.  It is a thoroughly engrossing story.  One thing that I took from it was the truth behind the aphorism "There's a fine line between insanity and genius."  It's interesting that so many people hailed as scientific geniuses throughout history tend to be mentally unbalanced in some way and often not very nice people.  The word "hubris" definitely comes to mind while reading this book as well.  Note:  As a person with common sense might suspect, this book is full of extremely graphic language and descriptions. 

 

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in February 2026

 

Author Talk

Last Seen:  The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families.  Judith Giesberg.  Simon & Schuster, 2025.  336 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the free review copy.  

No matter how you slice it, every aspect of slavery is unfathomable.  From the racist attitudes that led to its acceptance and justification, to the sheer brutality, to the magnitude of despair and devastation that it caused, to the realization of just how much slavery contributed to American growth and development, to the lingering after effects still felt today, slavery is almost impossible to comprehend.  Here, author Judith Giesberg adds yet another element to the mix.  One of the most harrowing and horrifying cruelties of slavery was separation of families.  American slavery did not recognize any legitimacy when it came to marriages and families amongst the enslaved people.  Loved ones were sold away from each other and separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.  Runaways escaped, often losing all contact with relatives forever.  As soon as slavery ended in 1865, members of the "Freedom Generation," those that had been enslaved and their children, began searching for parents, children, spouses, lovers, friends, and even fellow veterans with whom they had lost contact.  As late as the early 1920s, individuals placed classified ads in and wrote letters to the editors of black newspapers.  These notices were posted and shared and, since most of the formerly enslaved were illiterate or just learning to read, pastors read the ads from the pulpit.  Giesberg has created an incredibly moving narrative based on an archive of almost 5,000 ads and letters by choosing several specific stories to research and explore in depth.  She tells the stories of the searchers, their lost family members, and even their enslavers, revealing happy and not-so-happy outcomes.  She does an excellent job of bringing a lesser known aspect of slavery into the light.  

Trailer for the Netflix series

One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Editorial Sudamericana, 1967. Harper & Row, 1970 (US).  422 pages.

Another classic read,  Garcia Marquez' magnum opus and one of the iconic touchstones of Latin American and world literature.  One Hundred Years of Solitude follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional Latin American town of Macondo. Founded by José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Úrsula, Macondo grows from an isolated village, whose citizens do not die, into a town shaped by civil wars, foreign exploitation, and modernization, only to fall into decay. The novel blends magical realism with history, portraying extraordinary events—such as ascensions into heaven, prophetic manuscripts, and ghostly visitations—as everyday occurrences. Across generations, the Buendías repeat patterns of obsession, passion, violence, and solitude. Names, personalities, and destinies recur, suggesting the inescapability of fate. Úrsula’s long life anchors the family, while later descendants struggle with isolation and emotional detachment. As time loops and memory fades, the family becomes increasingly disconnected from both its past and each other. Finally, ancient prophecies are revealed.  It's a lot.  There are a lot of characters, a lot of symbolism, a lot of magic, and a lot going on.  There's enough fodder for many deep and long literary conversations and debates.  It really is a magical other world.  I'm not sure what it is, but it was a memorable visit.

 

Old School Indian.  Aaron John Curtis.  Hillman Grad Books, 2025.  352 pages.

Abe Jacobs is a Mohawk Indian who left the reservation at eighteen to go to Syracuse University.  There, he met his future wife Alex, and they moved to Miami where she became an elementary school teacher, and he became a clerk in book store with dreams of being a writer.  Their relationship is wild, unconventional, passionate, and open, and Abe has lost touch with his Mohawk identity.  At age 43, he develops an extremely rare autoimmune disorder that his Miami doctors say is basically untreatable and terminal.  Running from his illness and troubled marriage, Abe returns to the Rez and his family.  He reconnects with tradition, his Mohawk identity, and himself in what's described as a "coming-of-middle-age" story that deals with family and the deeply embedded ripple effects of history and culture.  It's also irreverent, funny, and innovative.  Like There, There by Tommy Orange, I think it's destined to be a modern classic.  If college professors taught novels anymore, I could see it added to required class reading lists.  I would say the same for high school reading lists, except that it is pretty sexually explicit.  It's a great book club selection, and a great novel.

The Kite Runner Trailer 2007

The Kite Runner.  Khaled Hosseini.  Riverhead Books, 2003.  371 pages.

Another classic down.  Few books appear on as many contemporary "Best Books" as this one does.  On one level, it's the story of two Afghan boys, Amir and Hassan.  Amir is the son of a wealthy and powerful local merchant, a highly respected pillar of the community, and Hassan is the son of the family's faithful servant and a member of a persecuted minority in Afghanistan.  A horrible crime committed against Hassan drives the two boys apart, and the families separate.  It's also a story about fathers and sons.  Finally, it's the story of Afghanistan.  Over the next decades, the upheaval of the Soviet invasion and occupation, civil war, and Taliban theocracy further disrupts their lives and destroys the country.  Amir and his father migrate to the US where they struggle to survive, and Amir struggles with guilt over the end of his relationship with Hassan.  Years later, he's drawn to return to Pakistan and Afghanistan by a dying family friend who reveals family secrets that push Amir to risk his life to find Hassan's son and to bring him back to the US.  It's an extremely moving and heart-rending novel, well worth a  read, even though elements of the plot are pretty  predictable.

Lecture on the Zorg Massacre

The Zorg:  A Tale of  Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery.  Siddharth Kara.  St. Martin's Press, 2025.   304 pages.  

Between 1517 and 1867, about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto the Middle Passage.   About 10.7 million survived the voyage, to be sold into lifetime bondage on brutal plantations in the Caribbean and in the Americas.  Yet, there are relatively few first-person accounts of the horrible practices, a fact that makes sense for a couple of reasons.  First, the Africans, of course, were almost entirely illiterate and kept so intentionally for the rest of their lives.  Today, there are so few accounts written by Africans that the authors can be counted on a few fingers, the most famous examples being Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley.  Second, most of the white men involved in the actual work of the slave trade were illiterate as well.  Even the ship captains and first mates most often had very limited literary abilities.  Finally, the whole episode is so massively shameful that many who were involved, and who profited from it, most likely made the effort to erase memories and documentation from existence.   The case of The Zorg Massacre was a watershed event that led directly to the galvanization of the abolitionist movement in Britain that led to the abolition of the British slave trade and slavery in Britain and the British Empire.  The Zorg (aka The Zong) was a Dutch slave ship captured by the British during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in 1781.  A ship's doctor, with no prior leadership or navigation experience or expertise, was made captain and proceeded to overload the ship with nearly 400 enslaved people, almost double capacity, and set sail for Jamaica.  A normal voyage would have taken about 55 days, but the incompetence of The Zorg's officers added 20-25 days to the journey.  On the verge of running out of water, with days and days at sea left, the decision was made to reduce demand by throwing more than 130 living people overboard to drown.  When the ship finally returned to Liverpool England, its owners decided to file a claim with the insurance company that had insured the lives of the slaves --- "property" --- in order to recoup some of the financial losses incurred.  The company refused to pay, arguing that the murders were the fault of the slavers and that the claim was an attempt to defraud the company.  The ensuing court case was highly publicized at the time, and then seized by abolitionists as a vehicle by which to spread knowledge of the horrors of slavery amongst the general public, with the aforementioned Equiano and other famous British abolitionists, several of whom had once directly participated in the trade, leading the away, making speeches, writing letters, publishing accounts, and lobbying for legislation,  all citing the massacre as evidence.  The whole story is told in this excellent book, and the details about the practices and conditions of all aspects of the Middle Passage are necessary and heartbreaking.

Author talk

Harlem Rhapsody.  Victoria Christopher Murray.  Berkley, 2025.  400 pages.

Jessie Redmon Fauset was one of the most prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance.  Poet Langston Hughes called her "the Midwife" of the literary explosion that was a huge part of the Renaissance.  At a time when publishing companies refused to publish black authors or employ black proofreaders or editors and even white women couldn't find employment higher than stenographer or secretary, Fauset became the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, founded by W.E.B. DuBois.  In that role, she was responsible for the discovery and mentorship of almost all of the leading literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, to name just a few, and she made The Crisis a thriving and vibrant publication.  She published lots of her own poems and essays and four novels, the first novels to ever portray authentic middle class, college-educated, professional black characters living everyday lives and facing everyday challenges.  Yet, few people know about her or her contributions.  Author Victoria Christopher Murray endeavors to correct that in this historical fiction work.  She delivers a suiting tribute to Fauset and a rich depiction of 1920s Harlem and the culture of the Renaissance.  Fauset's life, however, is more than just literary achievement.  For over a decade, Faucet carried on an extramarital affair with The Crisis founder, and her own boss, W.E.B. DuBois.   Murray imagines the ups and downs of that relationship and its effects on the individuals involved and affected, and on the movement itself, revealing the faults, foibles, and flaws of both Fauset and DuBois.  The novel is a really good read and a history lesson at the same time.

Georgia's Historical Recipes:  Seeking Our State's Oldest Written Foodways and the Stories Behind Them.  Valerie J. Frey.  University of Georgia Press, 2025.  400 pages.

As I always say, there's not much better than combining history and food.  There are few elements of culture that reveal as much about peoples, places, and times as a culture's foodways do.  Valerie J. Frey is a writer, researcher, and an archivist who specializes in finding and preserving history through food.  It's also obvious that she's an avid baker and collector.  Her discoveries of old cookbooks led her to do a deep dive into the history of cookbook publishing in Georgia, and she presents her findings here.  She finds examples from the antebellum period through  World War II and organizes them into fifty sections presented chronologically.  Each section contains a biography of the cookbook writer, the historical and cultural context of the time in which it was written, and sample recipes.  Frey also usually includes her own personal memories, connections, or attempts to re-create recipes, making the history all the more relatable and approachable.  The recipes and cookbooks provide windows onto Georgia history:  what was available, who could afford it, how was it presented, who cooked, who consumed, what did the home look and feel like, what did the larger society look like, and how did all of this evolve over time.  Beyond being a fun and educational read, this book is truly a great addition to the genres of food history and Georgia history. 

Seminole Chiefs on a visit to New York City, 1852.  Abraham standing on right

The Free and the Dead:  The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America's Forgotten War.  Jamie Holmes.  Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2026.  320 pages.

When Florida became a state in 1845, it was probably the most dangerous, least populated, and least explored state in the Union.  White settlers were deterred by heat, hurricane, insects, swamps, bears, wolves, panthers, venomous snakes, and disease.  The interior of the state was largely terra incognita - unknown and frightening for white pioneers.  Meanwhile, the Seminoles and the Miccosukees survived and struggled to maintain their independence and their culture,  The federal government policy of removing eastern Indians to Oklahoma Territory threatened that. In 1835, that threat boiled over into the Second Seminole War which continued until 1842, making it America's longest war until Vietnam.  It also ranks as the most expensive, and one of the deadliest and most destructive of the Indian Wars. When it was over, much of the white development  in the territory had been destroyed and most of the Seminoles had been forcibly removed to Oklahoma, but a few Seminoles and Miccosukees survived and remain to this day.   Jamie Holmes has written a new history of the war, focusing on Osceola the famous warrior leader, and the lesser known Abraham, the Black Seminole leader and interpreter who played very prominent role.  It's a solid history of the war, although I wouldn't call it revolutionary, but it does a really good job of telling the story of the Black Seminoles.  However, I am deducting a star from my rating for the ridiculous use of the phrase "forced labor camps" instead of plantations.

 Bloody Toombs.  Clarke Wright Johnson.  Liberty Hill Publishing, 2017.  452 pages.

I was born and raised in Toombs County Georgia, and my family has deep roots in the area, going back 6 or 7 generations.  Shortly after the county was formed (in 1905 from neighboring Montgomery County), it acquired the nickname "Bloody Toombs."  In the 1920s and 1930s, it was largely due to Ku Klux Klan activity.  In the 1950s and 1960s, it was attributed to the activity of the "Dixie Mafia," although there is some dispute as to whether the Dixie Mafia actually operated in the area or if it was just general lawlessness,  Every so often, I search online for "Bloody Toombs" to see what comes up, finding a few references going back to the 1920s in the New York Times and Time Magazine.  One day, this novel showed up in the search results.  A vampire horror story set in Toombs County, written by a man who has lived most of his life there?  While that's not my normal genre of choice --- not even close --- I was intrigued and had to order it, not expecting much.  My expectations seemed to be confirmed as soon as I turned to the table of contents, and my eye was immediately drawn to a huge typo in one of the chapter titles.  Verdict?  If you're interested in a vampire family saga that stretches throughout the 20th century and reads as if it was written by a slightly talented middle schooler, you might find it to be meh.  It doesn't even necessarily reflect its setting;  it could have been set anywhere in the American South.  You're welcome.  I read it so you don't have to.

Author talk

White Lies:  The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret.  A.J. Baime.  Mariner Books, 2022.  400 pages.  

At the turn of the 20th century, Walter White's childhood in Atlanta was perhaps more comfortable than that of many black children across the South.  His father was a mail carrier.  His mother shopped at Rich's Department Store, where clerks politely called her "Mrs. White," but she wasn't allowed to try on clothes, return clothes that didn't fit.  (The tea room wasn't an option; it did not exist until the 1920s.) Black customers had to trace their feet onto paper in order to shop for shoes, instead of trying them on. There was only one high school for black students, the costly private one operated by Atlanta University.  Public schools for black students only went through 8th grade.  Annual state and local spending per black student averaged about $2, one-tenth of the amount spent per white student.  Black teachers were paid less than half of what white teachers were paid.   Still, Atlanta race relations were relatively calm, until late September 1906 when white mobs murdered dozens of black Atlantans and burned many homes in a multi-day killing frenzy called the Atlanta Race Riot.  According to White, it was at that moment, when an armed white mob besieged the family home and threatened to kill him and his entire family, that 13 year old Walter decided that he was black.  Yes, you read that correctly --- decided.  Walter White had straight blond hair, blue eyes, and fairer skin than some of the white men who killed blacks during the riot.  Throughout his life, those that came into contact with White, black and white, without knowing him assumed he was white.  He could have easily chosen to "pass" and live a much safer life.  Instead, he resolved to "be black" and to devote his life to fighting for civil rights. As a student at Atlanta University, he attracted the attention of James Weldon Johnson who persuaded him to move to New York and to join the staff of the NAACP.  Soon, he volunteered to risk his life multiple times to investigate lynchings across the country.  Because of his appearance, murderers assumed he was a good "patriotic and Christian American" like themselves, and they proudly told him all the details of their horrible crimes, including naming leaders and active participants.  White gathered information and prepared reports for publication and for government officials, often fleeing town just before his deception was discovered.  If caught, he would have been just another victim.  He did this many times as he worked his way up the ladder of NAACP leadership, becoming one of the most effective and respected civil rights advocates of the time.  Things began to change, however, when squabbles with W.E.B. DuBois destabilized the organization, and his extramarital affair with a white woman came to light, White fell from grace, and his legacy was tarnished and largely forgotten.  This excellent biography attempts to give his story the fullness and light that it deserves.