by Kitty Kelley

South Carolina is the state that gave rise to the Civil War. Three days after Abraham Lincoln was elected president, its legislature passed a resolution calling his election “a Hostile Act” because he was against enslavement. Weeks later, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by 11 more Southern states that then formed a rebel government, declaring itself the Confederate States of America and triggering the war.

After four bloody years and 700,000+ deaths, the Confederacy surrendered. More than 4 million enslaved people were set free, and Reconstruction began (despite “Black Codes” enacted to limit the rights of those freed). Since then, 153 African Americans have served in the U.S. House of Representatives, including nine from South Carolina, giving rise to this book, The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation by Jim Clyburn (the ninth).

The Sixth Congressional District is the only bit of Democratic blue sky peeking through in the Republican red Palmetto State, and it’s represented by James Enos Clyburn, dean of the state’s congressional delegation. Clyburn is the first Black man to represent his state in Congress since 1897. He’s been reelected every term since 1992 and served as majority whip under Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He became a presidential power broker in 2020 when he endorsed Joe Biden in South Carolina’s Democratic primary, giving Biden the momentum to capture the nomination and later win the presidency. Biden rewarded Clyburn in 2024 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Now, the congressman is celebrating himself, his predecessors, and their shared history in a tribute to the African Americans who fought so hard for equality against racial injustice. In honor of the movement to “Say Their Names,” here are the first eight African Americans to represent South Carolina in the United States Congress:

• • Joseph H. Rainey (1832-1887), born enslaved, became the first Black member of the U.S. House of Representatives and was the longest-serving Black member of Congress in the 19th century.

• • Robert C. De Large (1842-1874) was “mulatto elite,” wealthy, and a slaveholder himself who moved to Charleston for an education despite laws against teaching Black people to read and write. De Large was considered “Brown” and accorded privileges not available to Blacks, earning him no respect from his colleagues — and little from Clyburn.

• • Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884), a Northerner, didn’t grow up in an enslaved state but moved to South Carolina as an adult and a free man. He co-founded the nation’s first-known Black law firm in Charleston and married into a prominent mixed-race family, which put him squarely among the Black elite of the day.

• • Richard H. Cain (1825-1887), another Northerner who moved to South Carolina as an adult and a free man, became the first Black minister to serve in Congress. Cain personified the faith that sustained the Black community through the dark centuries of slavery. As Clyburn writes: “Faith is a through line in American history, particularly in the Black community.” Throughout the book, he celebrates the church as a pillar of that community, particularly the A.M.E. Church known as Mother Emmanuel, established in Charleston in 1818. (Clyburn also applauds Cain for purchasing and running a small newspaper to educate and inform his community, which is something Clyburn did for several years before being elected to Congress. He continues to write columns in 200 Black newspapers across the country “to make sure our message gets through the fractured and polarized media landscape today.”)

• • Alonzo J. Ransier (1834-1882), the first of two Black lieutenant governors of South Carolina, served only one term in the House of Representatives yet made himself heard: “We are circumscribed within the narrowest possible limits on every hand, disowned, spit upon, and outraged in a thousand ways.” Defeated for re-election, Ransier returned to Charleston and worked as a day laborer for the city until his death.

• • Robert Smalls (1839-1915) was a Civil War hero whom Clyburn describes as “the most consequential South Carolinian who ever lived.” While working on a Charleston ship during the war, Smalls plotted an escape when his white supervisors went ashore for a night of drinking, leaving the vessel unattended. During those hours, Smalls commandeered the ship and steered its enslaved crew and their wives into Union waters. “I thought this ship might be of use to Uncle Abe,” he told the Union blockade commander who boarded the stolen steamer. Harper’s Weekly heralded Smalls’ act as “one of the most daring and heroic adventures since the war commenced.” Smalls was summoned to meet President Lincoln, and when “Uncle Abe” asked why he’d dared such an escape, the young man simply said, “Freedom.”

• • Thomas E. Miller (1849-1938) studied law at the newly integrated University of South Carolina and became the first president of what is now South Carolina State University. He “was biologically white” but adopted by free Black parents. He asked that his gravestone be inscribed: “Not having loved the White less, but having felt the Negro needed me more.” Inspired by this, Clyburn instructed his own family to one day inscribe on his gravestone: “He did his best to make the greatness of America accessible and affordable to all.”

• • George W. Murray (1853-1926), born enslaved and “of darkest hue,” became an emancipated orphan and taught public school for 15 years while tending to his farm and livestock. He was the last Black South Carolinian to serve in the House of Representatives in the 19th century.

While this appears to be a staff-written book, it’s been read and annotated by Clyburn, whose 2014 memoir was entitled Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black. A decade later, the congressman still stands “Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black” as he gives to his constituents their magnificent history.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Any book carrying the name of David McCullough usually weighs three pounds less than a horse. His first biography, Truman, ran to 1,120 pages; his second, John Adams, weighed in at 751 pages. Both won the Pulitzer Prize. Prior to those, in 1978, McCullough received the first of his two National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (704 pages). An earlier book, 1972’s The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, spanned 600+ pages. Here was a writer who understood the heft of history — or, as the New York Times wrote in McCullough’s 2022 obituary, “His readers got a lot of work for their money.”

Now comes his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and his researcher Michael Hill with a book entitled History Matters. For those accustomed to a McCullough whale, prepare for a polliwog: This book is a mere 192 pages. Most puzzling is its preface, which tells readers what they are not going to get:

“This book is by no means exhaustive and there are certain areas of his work, his life and his personality that are not covered, including, among other things, his disciplined way of approaching everything, his love of walking and walking sticks, his insistence on things being done in particular ways, his love of lyrics and quotations and his readily available humor.”

Instead, Lawson and Hill offer speeches and essays, some previously published, that the historian delivered on various subjects — including his love of architecture and the glories of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence — which led him to ruminate on what he felt was lacking in American education. “The first is imagination, originality, spontaneity…The second is willingness to take risks.” From there, the applauded historian celebrated “luck, effort, and, above all, work: ‘We are what we do.’”

From an early age, Pittsburgh native David Gaub McCullough, the third of four sons, knew he wanted to be a writer, although he’d once considered a career in architecture. After graduating from Yale (class of ’55), he moved to New York City and worked for Sports Illustrated for five years. Then, in 1960, he relocated to Washington, DC, to work at the U.S. Information Agency under the revered CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. “It was like having a part in a hit show, with a huge cast,” McCullough told the Yale Daily News in 1997, “and even if you only had a bit part, it was still very exciting.”

McCullough, whose sonorous voice narrated the award-winning 1990 Ken Burns PBS series “The Civil War,” seemed to be a gregarious man who needed to share his love of learning, as well as his strong opinions. He praised George Washington as the “greatest American ever”; dismissed Pablo Picasso as “dislikeable”; and defined Richard Nixon as “an absolute disaster.”

In this short book, McCullough advises anyone who wants to be an author to write four pages a day, every day. He stresses doing research: If writing a biography, walk the streets that your subject walked, whether it’s in a Kentucky coal town, the jungles of Panama, or the boulevards of Paris. He recommends taking drawing lessons because he believed writers needed such basics in order to write well. “I think of writing history as an art form.”

He suggests developing the habit of asking people about themselves — their lives, their interests — “and listen to them. It’s amazing what you can learn by listening.” Finally, he counsels writers to “read a lot” and makes sterling recommendations, including President John F. Kennedy’s favorite book, The Young Melbourne, by David Cecil, as well as Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Proud Tower; Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox; Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table; Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker; William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why; Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember; and even Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hatches the Egg.

In the 40 commencement speeches he delivered over the years to various college graduates, McCullough always advised them to read. “Read Delacroix. Don’t just look at him. Read him. Read his journal — one of the most enthralling books I know. Read Churchill. Read history. Read, read, read. Read Trumbull’s memoir. Read the letters of N.C. Wyeth, the magnificent letters of N.C. Wyeth to his children.” Most important of all, he counsels writers to:

“Rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite. When asked if I’m a writer, I think sometimes I should say, ‘No, I’m a rewriter.’”

Here is where the authors miss the brass ring on their merry-go-round. McCullough never used a word processor or a computer. He did all his work and all those rewrites on a typewriter, much of which he saved. His daughter mentions a storehouse of his “letters, calendars, multiple evolutions of original manuscripts with his hand-written editorial changes, ideas, notes, lists, diagrams, paintings, drawings and photographs…” Yet she doesn’t excavate that mine for its vein of gold, which seems like a missed opportunity to share all that her father shared in his creative-writing classes at Wesleyan, Cornell, and Dartmouth.

How valuable it would have been for readers to learn how the heralded historian wrote and rewrote; how he started; what he added; what he deleted; what he expanded. How did he edit himself, develop scenes, and construct chapters? Did he outline before writing? How did he organize his material? Did he make a chronology of dates and events? How did he decide what belonged to history? What could be discarded?

Ah, yes. A master class from a master is a writer’s ultimate fantasy and nearly impossible to convey in any book. Still, the authors of this one, however slight, manage to give a glimpse into what they call “the good, hard work of writing well” by a master craftsman who never toiled a day in his life. David McCullough wrote and rewrote, then rewrote and rewrote his 12 mammoth books simply because he loved every agonizing minute of the writing adventure.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

By the time James Baldwin was 5 years old and growing up in Harlem, he’d read all the way through the only book in his house — the Bible — and so began his love affair with words. That romance led to his dream of becoming a writer, and he became one of America’s greatest, leaving a legacy of six novels, seven essay collections, one short-story collection, two plays, and one screenplay. He also left behind an indelible presence on television, where he debated William F. Buckley Jr. on politics, instructed Dick Cavett on the Black community, and told David Frost that he had to flee the U.S. “to become a human being.”

Born in 1924, Baldwin never knew who his father was, and his stepfather, a brutal, God-obsessed man, despised white people as much as he detested his effeminate stepson, the oldest of nine children. By the time Baldwin reached adolescence, he felt clobbered:

“I can conceive of no Negro native in this country who has not by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conflict of his life.”

Being poor, Black, and gay, “Jimmy,” as his family called him, felt imperiled in a rich, white, heterosexual nation where sodomy was a crime and poverty a certainty. At the age of 24, he fled the U.S. and, without knowing a word of French, moved to Paris with barely $40 in his pocket. He spent his first Christmas week in jail for receiving stolen goods, but after a few hand-to-mouth years, two suicide attempts, many lovers, and innumerable nights drinking at the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain, Baldwin flourished as a writer. His best-known novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, was the semi-autobiographical story of a young Black man who faced a lifetime of rejection.

The relative freedom Baldwin felt in Europe could never be found in America, where Senator Joe McCarthy thundered about a “Lavender Scare,” the U.S. Senate issued an official report (S. Res. 280) on the “employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in government,” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order barring homosexuals from federal jobs. A decade later, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal aide, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a YMCA restroom for soliciting sex and was forced to resign his White House position.

In those years, Baldwin returned to the States to see his family, and in 1963, he traveled the South on a lecture tour, speaking about civil rights. He became such an effective spokesman for the movement that he was featured on the cover of Time, which wrote, “There is not another writer, black or white, who expresses such poignancy and abrasiveness about the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.” Baldwin died in France in 1987 from stomach cancer. He was 63 years old.

Now comes an eloquent celebration of his centenary in Nicholas Boggs’ spellbinding Baldwin: A Love Story. This mammoth tribute celebrates the artist’s life — personal and professional — by dividing it into four parts, each led by the first name of the man beloved by Baldwin at the time: “Beauford: The Greenwich Village Years, 1940-1948”; “Lucien: The Paris Years, 1948-1955”; “Engin: The Transatlantic Years, 1957-1970”; and “Yoran: The Saint Paul-de-Vence Years, 1971-1976.” It’s a life story that is at once erotic and erudite.

Boggs, every bit the equal of James Boswell, whose 1791 biography of Samuel Johnson set the standard for excellence, received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Columbia. In 2018, he co-edited a new edition of Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, and since then, he’s contributed scholarly tracts to several books on his subject, including The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin; James Baldwin Now; James Baldwin Review; and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin.

Having mastered his subject, Boggs movingly presents Baldwin as the avatar of Black queer literary history and breathes new life into the genre with a volume that will enrich scholarship for the LGBTQ+ community. As John F. Kennedy said, “In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation,” and Nicholas Boggs serves all of us with his love story of James Baldwin.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Being poor, adopted, gay, and Jewish fueled Jeffrey Seller to become a multimillionaire and then spiraled him into psychotherapy four days a week for 12 years. “I always felt like an outsider,” he writes in his Broadway memoir, Theater Kid. But he admits that being a Jew probably saved his life and paved the way to his immense success.

Growing up in “Cardboard Village,” a housing project east of Detroit, young Jeff auditioned for the annual Purim play at Temple Israel, which tells the Old Testament story of Esther, the clever Jewish queen who saves her people from the villain Haman. Too young then and not yet “out,” the 9-year-old does not audition for the role of Esther. Instead, he’s cast as a sailor in the chorus, and from that experience, he falls in love with theater.

The day after the performance, Seller writes a play for himself and his two fourth-grade pals called “Adventureland.” He shows it to his English teacher and begs her to let him stage it. She agrees, recognizing what she calls “a theater kid,” and Seller becomes a playwright, director, actor, and producer, which charts the rest of his days. He acts and directs plays throughout grade school, high school, and college at the University of Michigan, which he attends on student aid. He spends his summers as a theater counselor at Camp Tamarack.

While grateful for his first theater experience with the Purim play, Seller remains resentful of the synagogue in Detroit that humiliated him as a have-not. “This wealthy temple that caters to its many affluent members has underscored my shame at being poor and my feeling that I am less than the other kids and families who attend,” he writes, adding, “We were so broke we went on welfare.”

Today, at 60, Seller is worth millions, having produced hugely successful plays such as “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights,” and winning four best-musical Tony awards. He’s also the only person in Broadway history to have produced two Pulitzer Prize-winning musicals, “Rent” and “Hamilton.” He’s amassed producer credits for hits like “The Cher Show,” “Sweeney Todd,” and “West Side Story,” as well as for clunkers like “The Last Ship” with Sting. “Money, sex, and ambition is my life,” Seller tells the New York Times.

While no longer poor and living in the projects, the Broadway producer remains adopted, gay, and Jewish, which, he shares, leads him into intense psychotherapy, and finally to writing this book. “I wrote it for everybody who has ever felt left out.”

He divides his memoir into three acts, similar to a theater script. Act I features young Jeff, who’s advised by a friend’s mother to introduce himself as Jeffrey because “it sounds better.” Before he’s in first grade, Seller learns he’s adopted, which he feels isn’t as bad as being poor and living in a “neighborhood where the parents have less: less money, less education, less stability and the kids are deemed less: less smart, less cooperative, less likely to succeed…I want to escape the poverty that entraps me and my dark dour family.” He calls his father “a loser.”

Act II has Seller graduating from college in 1986, heading for New York City, and coming out to his parents, who shrug. “It’s like being right- or left-handed,” says his father. But it’s a devastating time for gays, with the onslaught of the AIDS crisis. “It inhibited me physically,” Seller writes. “I was so afraid of death…of getting sick.”

Thomas Mallon also addresses that paralyzing fear in his new book, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994. In rereading his extracts of those years, Mallon writes in his preface that “the relentless spread of AIDS constantly thwarted the happy entries,” adding that the deaths of friends and lovers plunged him into a whirlwind of grief and fear. Pages later, he observes, “To think there was a time when Anita Bryant was all we had to worry about.”

Act III for Seller whirls him into the stratosphere of financial success, proving his assumption “that I can bend the world to my will if I try hard enough.” Still, he remains so terrified of AIDS that he signs up with the Gay Community Center for a seminar called “Making Safe Sex Fun!” His conclusion? “Bottom line: the connection between sex and death doesn’t go away.” Yet pages later, he writes in wildly X-rated detail about a sexual encounter with two strangers in a steam bath on his 30th birthday.

Seller sprinkles every page of this book with name-drops: “When our next-door neighbor Kurt Vonnegut stopped by one afternoon for an informal lunch…” To see the first run-through of “Hamilton,” “I called Mike Nichols, acquaintance, supporter, friend.” So many names, but no index. No footnotes or chapter notes, either, despite pages and pages of quotes and verbatim recollections of long conversations from his youth, all of which the author attributes to “my phenomenal memory.” Spotlighting his professional achievements, he makes only slight mention of his personal life, including his former lover, Josh Lehrer, with whom he lived for 26 years, and the two children they adopted and raised together.

There are, instead, clever one-liners written by a Broadway obsessive. “Going to see the Shuberts [theater owners Bernie Jacobs and Gerry Schoenfeld] is like going to see the Wizard…They remind me of the Muppet Show hecklers, Statler and Waldorf, except they are not even a little bit funny.” The Shuberts’ competitor, Jimmy Nederlander, gets described as “a crap shooter from Guys and Dolls.”

Seller writes that, ultimately, Theater Kid is a book for gays who love musicals:

“Musicals make me feel good in a way that no other experience can, except sex. There, I said it. Musicals and sex. I can’t live without sex; I can’t live without musicals.”

And that’s a wrap.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Women might be surprised to learn that much of what hangs in their closets was designed by a woman they’ve never heard of — the leotards and leggings, hoodies, denim jackets, leather skirts, dresses with pockets, side zippers, and ballet flats. Yes, even the jersey wrap dress. All this time, you thought it was Diane von Furstenberg who gave you an hourglass figure in the 1970s. Actually, DvF simply resurrected and glamorized what Claire McCardell had already made into a wardrobe staple decades before.

As an unknown designer, McCardell made a monkey out of Christian Dior, with his padded shoulders, tightly cinched waists, and teetering high heels, which he trumpeted in 1946 as his “New Look” for women. Unimpressed by the French maestro, McCardell cut her ready-to-wear garments to fit a woman’s natural shape, making Dior’s wasp-waists look like skeletal twists. Betty Friedan agreed, and years before she rattled America with The Feminine Mystique, she wrote a 1955 magazine profile of McCardell entitled “The Gal Who Defied Dior.” That same year, McCardell made the cover of Time. Yet it’s Dior whose name reigns in fashion today, while McCardell and her creations faded after her death in 1958.

But now comes glory for the forgotten fashionista in a sparkling tribute by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, who’s written Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.

Growing up as a tomboy in Frederick, Maryland, playing with her brothers, McCardell refused to be encumbered by the hoops and stays and bones and wires of her era. She began making her own simple clothes as a youngster and would eventually graduate from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, later known as Parsons School of Design. Spending her junior year abroad, she set sail for Paris to study the intricacies of haute couture. At the age of 23, McCardell returned to New York City determined to make a career in fashion. She modeled sportswear at B. Altman and Company for $25 a week and then landed a job sketching ready-to-wear designs, but with no real experience and unable to keep up with production, she was fired in 1929. But she bounced back weeks later, found another job on Seventh Avenue, and started at the bottom of the pay pole.

McCardell was blessed by the gods of career girls and gradually soared because she knew what she wanted to do and never stopped chasing her goal. Having decided she didn’t want to have children or become a housewife, she postponed marriage for many years so she could bring her designs to the world. Psychologically, she needed to work. “Without it,” Dickinson writes, “she wasn’t sure who she was.”

A practical woman, McCardell used her own experiences to fuel her designs. For instance, she grew frustrated having to lug a 100-pound steamer trunk full of clothes from her apartment to the docks of the Hudson River and then onto (and, later, off of) an ocean liner every time she traveled to Paris on a buying trip. So she devised a system of five different garments made of crease-free jersey that she could interchange while traveling and that fit into a single suitcase. Such a system of separates was unheard of in 1934, but it would revolutionize American fashion 50 years later.

Next, McCardell designed the “Monastic dress,” a tent-like garment with dolman sleeves and belted with thin ties that wrapped multiple times around the waist. The frock — which freed women from corsets, girdles, and crinoline — sold out its first day in stores. Then, the clever designer conceived the “Pop-over dress” as something fashionable women could wear while cleaning the house before they popped over to a cocktail party. The Pop-over cost $6.95 in 1942, sold more than 75,000 in its first season, and won a Coty Award for McCardell. On a creative blitz, she also designed the “Diaper bathing suit” and Capezio ballet flats, and she put pockets in everything from capris to evening gowns. She moved zippers to the side of garments instead of the back so women could dress themselves without assistance. In doing so, she invented American sportswear for women and pushed the ascent of American design, which eventually challenged the fashion dominance of France.

In this achievement, McCardell was surprisingly aided by New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who summoned a group of fashion journalists to educate him about the industry. After listening to the women, the mayor vowed to help build an organization to foster American fashion, which led, months later, to the creation of the New York Dress Institute, which protected and promoted the designs of American clothiers.

Who knew U.S. designers would come to owe so much to McCardell? But such is the charm of this book and its author that you’ll care about a designer you’ve never heard of, who became the first American to get her name on a Seventh Avenue label. Years before Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Anne Fogarty, Anne Klein, Donna Karan, Bonnie Cashin, Tory Burch, or Lilly Pulitzer, there was “Claire McCardell Clothes by Townley.”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

The first commandment for authors: Write what you know. And in his fourth book, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, Matthew Specktor does exactly that. Being a show-business baby — his father is still a top agent, and his mother was a one-time screenwriter blackballed for crossing the picket line during a writers’ strike — Specktor celebrates Hollywood at its most glamorous and powerful apex. Having worked in the film industry during the 1990s, he’s professionally equipped to tackle the subject of old-school movie moguls who once made magic.

Specktor opens his book with a prologue recalling his 13-year-old self attending a Sunday afternoon party in the Hollywood Hills with his parents. The party, he writes, is “afloat on…wine and dope.” Most of the guests are writers, directors, actors, and actresses. “The mood is riotous, a little unhinged.” When he joins his mother, “She hands me her wineglass, so I can take a robust swallow.” (Pause here to consider Mom giving her underage son alcohol.)

Looking back at that 1979 party, the author sees it as “the golden hour” when movies reigned at the center of American cultural life. To tell the story of that time — the era of Hollywood’s boom and bust — Specktor, a MacDowell Fellow, uses the techniques of fiction to present a nonfiction story, combining the personal upheaval of his family after his parents’ divorce with the tumultuous revolution in Tinseltown.

He states up front that, to tell this story, he will “occupy the minds of other people,” meaning he won’t attribute previously published material, which might jolt journalists. While roaming free-range through the pastures of others, he declares that he will “use an artist’s privileges” as he melds fact with fiction and jumps from first-person to third-person narration. Caveat emptor: This author is going to color outside the lines. Forewarned is forearmed.

Shortly before this book was published, Specktor gave an interview in which he described himself as growing up “celebrity-adjacent,” meaning he knew people who knew celebrities, and he wrote this “hybrid memoir” with just enough recognizable names to engage readers. For example, he recounts Marlon Brando calling his father and leaving a long, rambling message on the family’s answering machine. That’s the first and last time Brando’s name surfaces here. Perhaps his overreaching gimmick is understandable, considering the competition from real celebrity memoirs published in the past few years, including Streisand’s My Name Is Barbra; Inside Out by Demi Moore; Thicker Than Water by Kerry Washington; Finding Me by Viola Davis; and Making a Scene by Constance Wu.

Specktor’s writing chops make this book catnip for anyone interested in old Hollywood, when the studio system ruled supreme and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boasted “more stars than there are in heaven.” At that time, Lew Wasserman was enthroned at Music Corporation of America (MCA), an emperor atop an empire heralded in Connie Bruck’s 2000 masterpiece, When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence.

For Specktor, “the golden hour” seems to be when Wasserman was sovereign and young Turks led by the “hubris and ungodly ambition” of Creative Artists Agency’s (CAA) Michael Ovitz conspired for CAA to topple the MCA monarch. “It’s good to be King,” Specktor writes, echoing Mel Brooks, “but would it be better to be Emperor?”

Here, the author suddenly interrupts narrating the approaching battle between the two movie moguls to tell readers that he personally identifies with Ovitz because “this man, who is the conduit through which Hollywood will enter its period of imperial decline, is just like me. He loves art with a ferocity few people can equal.” That ferocity will eventually enable Ovitz to build a mammoth collection (Picasso, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko) and make him one of the world’s most renowned art collectors.

Wasserman and Ovitz dominate this book like Iago and Cassio, and throughout, Specktor remains in thrall to the MCA megalopolitan. When he later sees Wasserman, now tottering in his 80s, the author feels “a wild urge to fall at this man’s feet and embrace him” because, to Specktor, Wasserman represents the golden era of Hollywood. Alongside such idolatry for a mogul who never spoke to him, readers might be unsettled by Specktor’s dismissal of his screenwriting mother, now deceased, as a “professional failure.” Conversely, he lauds his 91-year-old father as a success because he represents a client roster of marquee stars like Robert Duvall, Robert DeNiro, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Barbra Streisand, Geoffrey Rush, and Helen Mirren.

Shining through this kaleidoscope of false gods and famous names is a short chapter entitled “White Dancing” about a diminutive Black man of towering influence who teaches a graduate fiction workshop that Specktor feels fortunate to have taken years ago. “It is only through him (“Mr. Baldwin: We call him that…”), I am finally able to understand that writing is not some glamour profession, a gin and tonic and a cigarette as you slouch over your typewriter, bitching about the studio’s notes, but a moral one, in which you are tasked with failing again and again and again.”

God bless James Baldwin for trying to save a young man, now 58 years old, who remains bedazzled by Hollywood.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

“As New York goes, so goes the nation” is more than a Big Apple brag. It’s the bellwether of the country, highlighted by the city that takes bold initiatives and establishes the national pulse. Some might dispute that point today, but Russell Shorto makes a persuasive argument for it in his eighth book, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.

The author comes to this historical exploration via his previous work, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, written in 2004, and documenting the initial influence of New Amsterdam. Shorto is a senior scholar at the New Netherland Research Center of the New York State Library, which is in the process of translating 12,000 Dutch records into English.

In the new book, Shorto presents the story of 17th-century America and the three wars waged between the Dutch and the British for dominance of Manhattan Island — “a world-changing event,” he writes, that rocketed the British to victory over the Dutch, and the reason why most residents of the New World now speak English. (When Donald J. Trump became president in 2025, he stipulated that English was to be recognized as the country’s official language.)

At certain points, Taking Manhattan reads like a psychohistory of man’s inclination to plunder and pillage for power and illustrates the rancor of religion and the wars waged over whose deity should reign supreme. The entire era was awash in religious hatreds among knee-bending Catholics, anti-pope Protestants, and bloodletting Puritans, plus Presbyterians and various other religions, all hell-bent on killing each other in the name of God.

In recounting the 17th-century restoration of the Stuart monarchy in Great Britain, Shorto writes that it’s easy to dismiss London as Gomorrah, full of primal urges and indulgences. “There is surely something to that but my inclination is to turn the matter on its head.” With perspective, he does exactly that, pointing out that the previous era of Puritan rule had been pernicious: no drinking, no dancing. People were imprisoned for holding religious services and punished if their children played on the Sabbath. The Stuarts simply restored enjoyment. They rediscovered Shakespeare and no longer demanded chastity be the hallmark of civilization.

Being steeped in the history of the era, and with access to newly translated documents, the author celebrates the Dutch influence on Manhattan but takes issue with previous historians. He questions one declaration that the “sale” of Manhattan in 1626 involved only a verbal agreement. “I find that unlikely,” he writes, “because if they had initially settled for a verbal agreement, the Dutch, being highly conscious of such administrative matters, would have gone back to the Lenape [Native Americans] later to put it in writing.”

Within his text, Shorto also instructs readers “to cast a cold eye on the mindset of our ancestors,” particularly on the subject of religious tolerance, which was sorely lacking in the 1600s. He champions Dutch tolerance but chides Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general who barred Lutherans, Quakers, and Jews from settling in New Netherland, adding that “the attitude toward Native Americans and Africans argues pretty decisively against any broad underlying ethos of tolerance.” Shorto further cautions against applying 21st-century acumen to 17th-century actions. “We don’t need to judge people of the past according to our standards so much as we need to recognize patterns and milestones in history.”

Such compassion is not characteristic of all historians, and Shorto seems to have come by his while growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which he recalled in his 2021 memoir, Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. Writing with certain pain, he told the story of his namesake grandfather, a small-town mob boss in the 1950s who, Shorto estimated, made about $2 million a year over a 20-year period. “The pain he inflicted on [my grandmother], the pain he inflicted on my father…that then colored my father’s whole life, which in turn colored my life,” Shorto wrote. The New York Times summoned a mafia association to praise his book, predicting readers would be with him “All the way, as Sinatra would say.”

Mentioning the memoir in connection with the publication of Taking Manhattan may be instructive to underscore Shorto’s understanding of history’s human dimension and the historian’s moral responsibility to penetrate facts and figures, dates and details to present the ugly underbelly of our nation’s growth.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books