The notion that “the medium is the message” is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but the folks at Rose Metal Press seek to marry the media to the message with their individually designed, beautifully custom-printed editions of what they describe as “hybrid genres.” The result is books that could seem pricey and precious were it not for the fact that they offer a perfect match to the right readers. The Brookline, Massachusetts-based (with a strong Chicago presence due to its co-founder’s local residence) publisher’s books aren’t for everyone, and that’s the point: they don’t need to be, considering each so gloriously fits its own highly personal niche.

Consider the appropriately retro fifties packaging of Tiff Holland’s linked short-short stories, at the center of which is a judgmental, far-from-perfect working-class mom dubbed Betty Superman, whose chief “super” virtue may be honesty to the point of bluntness. Read the rest of this entry »

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Americans who know something of our founding history are aware of the contribution of the Marquis de Lafayette to the Revolutionary War, but few remember the similarly pivotal role of the Frenchman with the sonorous, adopted name Beaumarchais. If he is recalled at all, it is as the author of “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro.” But, by expediting the sale of French arms to American patriots, he engaged in real-life intrigues worthy of his fictional Figaro.

In his new biography “Improbable Patriot,” Harlow Giles Unger captures the innovative, joyous spirit of “Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais,” just as he communicated the different, but similarly indomitable, character of the great patriot Patrick Henry in the splendid “Lion of Liberty.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Ulysses S. Grant earned applause in the North for his generalship during the Civil War, and even the deep respect of former enemies because of his generosity at the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his hard-fighting, haggard veterans at Appomattox, Virginia.

But the great military hero had no head for business, as he had proven in civilian life between the Mexican and Civil Wars, and again as U.S. President from 1869-1877, in an administration rent by corruption in which he had no hand but which occurred on his watch.

Nonetheless, after years of post-presidential financial uncertainty, he had every reason to believe that he had finally secured a large, comfortable nest egg for his retirement with his beloved wife, Julia. Partner in the apparently successful investment firm Grant & Ward, he went to bed one night in May 1884 thinking himself a near-millionaire only to awaken to find his accounts gutted and himself penniless. Read the rest of this entry »

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Harold K. Bush, Jr.’s “Lincoln in His Own Time” is a graceful, worthy addition to the already-massive wealth of Lincolniana. It brings a valuable perspective and literary flavor to a table already yawning with historical fare. At a well-organized just-under-300-pages, it is an accessible ying to the yang of Michael Burlingame’s recent exhaustive, 2000-page “Abraham Lincoln: A Life.”

Bush is an English professor at Saint Louis University, and his particular strength is in identifying and reproducing selections that, in addition to humanizing Lincoln, have literary interest. The collection includes several pieces almost lost to modern readers that are enhanced by the editor’s extensive introduction and knowledgeable prefatory notes. Read the rest of this entry »

Civilizations rise and fall, but Harvard University Professor Niall Ferguson has made a virtual cottage industry out of the impending fate of the West in the twenty-first century. In his fifth book in this vein, “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” he measures our current stall against the material advances of the East—especially China—and finds reasons for both alarm and hope.

Twentieth-century historians, including Oswald Spengler, saw regular, rhythmic cycles with specific stages among the world’s civilizations, but Ferguson proposes that science suggests amending that view. Civilizations, he writes, are “complex systems” (like the weather, or more broadly, climate) wherein huge changes may be wrought in a very short time by specific events.

Therein is the reason for alarm: Will the West’s economies right themselves in time after the market catastrophe of 2008 to withstand the rapid economic onslaught of China? If they cannot, “complex systems” suggests the “fall of the West”— currently led by our American “empire”—could be quite precipitous. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Martin Northway

In his eloquent, expansive homage to American figures central to our western growth, “Lions of the West,” novelist-turned-historian Robert Morgan notes the irony that a godfather of republicanism and limited government, President Thomas Jefferson, engineered the greatest increase of U.S. territory.

Jefferson envisioned an “Empire of Liberty.” “In retrospect we can see the contradiction that Jefferson and his contemporaries could not: Morgan calls it “the oxymoron of imperial power promoting the spread of ‘liberty.’” Two decades after Washington’s warning against foreign entanglements, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase put America on a possible collision course with both Britain and Spain—and later Mexico.

One can track our democratic rationale for expansion from Jefferson’s “empire” through the Manifest Destiny of the Mexican War period to today’s “American exceptionalism” under-girding global defense of the American way (including a capitalism not necessarily coextensive with free enterprise) and adventures like the Iraq War, seeking not physical territory but expanded power and influence. Read the rest of this entry »

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On a visit to the A&P supermarket in Jefferson City, Missouri, when I was small, my grandfather, a retired farmer, began piling sacks of sugar into our shopping cart. “Why so much sugar, Grandpa?” I asked. With a poker face he replied, “You have to get it before the hoarders do.”

Someone had to explain hoarding to me, but in that time of prosperity I could not have fathomed what the low prices and plenty of the “A&P” must have meant to Americans who had experienced the Depression and World War II rationing.

But my own grandfather probably did not know then—as documented in Marc Levinson’s highly readable “The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America”—that after an ascent from the early 1900s, the nation’s dominant grocery chain was already poised to decline; today it is in bankruptcy, its once-familiar logo practically absent from the American marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Orlean, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the bestseller “The Orchid Thief,” has spent the last decade or so researching and writing about Rin Tin Tin, the dog beloved by baby boomers everywhere. Orlean discloses her rosebud right away—when she was a child, her aloof grandfather had a Rin Tin Tin figurine in his office, something to be admired, never touched. For her, retelling the dog’s story is a vehicle for examining life, the universe, and everything: “I knew that I loved the narrative of Rin Tin Tin because it contained so many stories within it: it was a tale of lost families, and of identity, and also of the way we live with animals; it was a story of luck, both good and bad, and the half turns that life takes all the time. It was a story of war as well as a story of amusement. It was an account of how we create heroes and what we want from them. It laid out, through the story of Rin Tin Tin, the whole range of devotion—to ideas and to a companion—as well as the pure, half-magical devotion an animal can have to a person.” Read the rest of this entry »

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It is Ellis Island, New York harbor, 1919. A familiar setting for the hopeful arrivals of millions of immigrants, the scene has been turned on its head as hundreds of non-citizen aliens queue up for deportation from the United States to Europe, largely to now-Soviet Russia. Some of these same people had been welcomed here only years before.

Most have been convicted of no crime, but have been scooped up in raids authorized by U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer at the peak of America’s Red Scare right after World War I. For most, their “guilt” is that of associating with organizations identified as Bolshevist. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

You don’t have to be a history buff to love David Witter’s “Oldest Chicago.” You don’t even have to love Chicago, but surely you will after reading the author’s exultant but informative paean and guide to the city’s most enduring places.

By his own account, Witter, an occasional freelance writer for Newcity, began his romance with Chicago history as a child, playing cops and robbers in  the shadow of where John Dillinger was killed–the Biograph Theater. This volume is filled with stories of many such familiar haunts, but there are also less-known places, like the Oldest Camera Store (Central Camera Company, 1899), Auto Repair and Body Shop (Erie-LaSalle Body Shop, 1934) and Tamale Shop (La Guadalupana, 1945).

Read the rest of this entry »