Ozarks mystery

In 1929, a sixteen-year-old girl from the high country of northern Arkansas accused five men of murdering her boyfriend. Her melodic name was Tiller Ruminer, and she’d known the five men all her life: she was related to most of them by blood or marriage. 

The dead man was Connie Franklin, a drifter who’d come passing through six weeks earlier, and who had promised to marry Tiller. Now Connie was gone, five men were in jail, and a flock of newspaper reporters was about to descend upon the Ozark Mountains to cover a crime that turned out to be even more sensational than they realized. 

The story of Connie Franklin and Tiller Ruminer is told in Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South by Brooks Blevins. The most interesting aspect of Ghost of the Ozarks is its portrayal of the region’s culture, like this fascinating passage about the name of an Arkansas town, which was originally named Buckhorn. In 1883, the town changed its name to St. James: 

 ...as a memorial to Jesse James, the patron saint of disgruntled ex-Confederates and the powerless poor whose life of banditry had been cut short less than a year earlier in St. Joseph, Missouri. Local legend has it that James and his gang spent the night at the home of A.W. Canard in Dugan on their journey back to Missouri after holding up a stagecoach in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1874. There is no hard evidence that the James gang ever came through Buckhorn, and Arkansas, like other states in James’s orbit, abounds with “Jesse slept here” lore... Buckhorn residents’ memorializing and simultaneous beatifying of Jesse James reflected not only the community’s overwhelming Confederate sympathies a generation after the war but also the probability that St. Jamesians viewed vigilante terrorism as an acceptable expression of communal will. 

As for the murder of Connie Franklin - well, it’s a problematic story. In the years since 1929, the Ozarks have been transformed by Depression, war, and the march of modernization. The descendents of the people involved were far from willing to talk about the past, even to an Arkansas native like Blevins. 

And many of the documents relating to the case have disappeared, including trial records. Blevins had to rely on newspaper reports for much of his story, and these, he shows, were far from reliable. Newspapers were determined to portray the story as one of violent feuding moonshiners.  Their articles were full of preconceived notions of what mountain folk were like. 

Only one thing emerges clearly: no one in the case seems to have been deeply committed to telling the truth for long. Unusually for a true-crime book, by the end Blevins can’t even say for certain that there was a murder at all.  

Though there might have been. Depending on who you ask.

A lady's disgrace

Isabella Robinson was not happy. She told her diary that, although she loved her sons, she regretted her marriage and felt suffocated by her husband. She longed for companionship, affection, and (shockingly), sex. The year was 1860, and respectable married ladies weren’t supposed to long for those things.

They certainly weren’t supposed to put it in writing.

In 1858, the laws that governed divorce in Great Britain were loosened to make it easier for people to unshackle themselves from miserable marriages. Two years later, Henry Robinson sued Isabella for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Also named in the suit was her lover, from whom Henry hoped to win damages for the ruination of his now-unwanted wife. The true story of this shattered marriage and extraordinary lawsuit is told in Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale.

Summerscale explains that, even under the more permissive 1858 law, divorce could not be consensual; two people couldn’t just decide to call it quits. Someone had to be wronged, and it was easier for a husband to be wronged than a wife. A man could divorce his wife for adultery, cruelty, abandonment, or bigamy; for a woman to divorce her husband, she had to prove that he had done two of those things.

What made Isabella’s divorce extraordinary was the diary, in which she poured out her misery, her sense of failure as a wife and mother, and her yearnings for other men. During the divorce case the diaries were presented as evidence, and large, deeply private sections were printed in newspapers and pored over by the public. People chatted about Isabella’s innermost agonies over the breakfast table: Was she a vile seductress? Or mad? Did she have some kind of uterine disorder that made her feel this way?

The case opens a window onto a time when the world was quite different, when any sort of challenge to the social status quo had the potential to be enormously degrading. Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace is as fast-paced as a domestic novel, full of betrayal and scandal; but for one unfortunate woman, the stakes were real.

A History, A Theory, A Flood

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick is about, well, information - how it is stored and transmitted and manipulated, and how these things have transformed society. I thought it looked a little dry; to be honest, I was intimidated by its serious cover and its air of mathiness. But Gleick is the author of a biography of Isaac Newton that I enjoyed very much, so I gave it a try. I found it really interesting.

Gleick starts out with talking drums. Early European visitors to Africa knew that the forest was filled with the mysterious sound of drumming, but they didn’t realize until the middle of the 19th century that those drums were actually quite complex coded messages.

Europeans consistently thought of Africans as primitive, animal-like or child-like, which might be why it took them so long to understand the significance of the drums. After all, Europeans had been struggling to find a way to send accurate and complex long-distance messages for a long time. They wouldn’t succeed until the invention of the electric telegraph. The Africans had been doing it for centuries.

Gleick also explains the way the drums worked. The African peoples who used them did not have a written language - so how did they encode these messages? The answer is quite ingenious.

The Information is (to me) most interesting as it delves into history: the differences between Aristotle and Socrates, one literate and one pre-literate; the codebreaking work of 17th century natural philosopher John Wilkins, which foresaw the development of the binary system; the fascinating, failed invention of a thinking machine by Charles Babbage in the 1800s, and the even-more fascinating programming of that machine (entirely conceptual, since it was never built) by Ada Lovelace.

Alan Turing was already one of my heroes due to his World War II codebreaking work and tragic fate; in this book he gets his due as one of the pioneering mathematicians of the modern age. Gleick also delves into how information science came to profoundly influence other sciences, like biology (in the study of genetics) and sociology (memes).

I admit I got a little lost when we got to quantum mechanics, black holes, and chaos theory; but Gleick is such a good writer that I almost understood it. Well, some of it. Maybe.

Even if your grasp of math and science isn’t quite on the cutting edge, The Information is clear, rich, and worth reading if you like history and ideas. It’s much more riveting than that plain black-and-white cover might suggest.

Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter?

I like nonfiction books about really terrible things. I don’t know why, but I find it interesting to vicariously experience nightmarish suffering from a safe distance, through the pages of a well-researched book.

A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres is one of these. Subtitled The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, it tells the inside story of The People’s Temple Full Gospel Church, founded by a charismatic preacher named James Jones in the mid-1950s.

When I opened this book, I knew only what everyone knows (or thinks they know) about Jonestown: it was a religious cult whose members first moved to Guyana and then, in 1978, drank cyanide together. Nearly a thousand people died, over 200 of them children.

Scheeres uses 50,000 pages of letters, journals and other documents found in Jonestown and recently released by the F.B.I. in an attempt to understand the people who belonged to the People’s Temple. Why did they follow Jones? What did they hope to find in the jungles of South America? She succeeds in helping the reader get to know them: the angry young black man who wanted to fight injustice; the elderly woman who grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, who believed Jones was a savior; the working-class man trapped by his wife’s devotion to Jones; the rebellious boy desperate to escape.

Originally, it seems the People’s Temple was a very attractive church, preaching kindness and empathy. Jones taught a gospel of racial and sexual equality, and reached out to both white and black parishioners at a time when most churches were deeply segregated. Christians who believed in social justice might well find the People’s Temple appealing.

But over the years, it evolved. Jones began to teach his followers that they were hated and feared, even going so far as to fake attacks and assassination attempts. He also began to systematically drug people, and to punish those who seemed inclined to question his authority. And that was just the beginning.

The story is chilling and heartbreaking, especially since it’s accompanied by smiling photographs of those who died. It doesn’t answer all the questions surrounding Jonestown - I don’t think any book could satisfactorily do that. It does explore the inexorably-escalating horror with compassion, and details the little-known stories of those who survived.

A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown is a work of great empathy for people caught in a terrifying trap. It is awful and fascinating.

A true, terrible story

In 1821, off the west coast of Chile, a ship's lookout spotted a drifting whaleboat, rigged with mast and sail - obviously the relic of a shipwreck. The boat was full of human bones, along with two living men, emaciated, incapable of speech, and apparently mad. To their horror, rescuers saw the men greedily clutch at the remains of their mates - the food that had sustained them upon their voyage.

The whaleship Essex set sail from Nantucket in 1819 and came to grief about as far from land as it is possible to be, in the middle of the Pacific. The ship was destroyed by a large and apparently vengeful sperm whale. Of the twenty men who escaped the wreck of the Essex, only eight survived, scattered across the Pacific - three in one boat, two in another, and three on a deserted island. The survivors suffered extremes of hunger, thirst, exposure, and loneliness; some of them resorted to cannibalism to survive.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick uses this true incident to tell the fascinating story of Nantucket whaling - how the ships plied their trade, seeking sperm whales thousands of miles from home, killing and butchering them at sea. To a modern reader, the details of 19th century whaling are appalling. Just as bad is the arrogant, destructive behavior of the whale crews when they reach such (to us) precious natural wonders as the Galapagos Islands.

But these particular whalers certainly paid for it. Philbrick describes the inconceivable ordeal the men endured after the destruction of their ship. It is not a story of adventure and heroism, like (for instance) Shackleton's voyage in the Endurance. The consequences of the mistakes, ignorance, and weakness of the officers of the Essex are all too plain. Philbrick examines these, and shines light on some of the troubling aspects of the story.

For instance, is it significant that the first four men to be devoured by their crewmates were all African Americans? Why were the three men stranded on the deserted island African Americans? (Were they wiser than their fellows?) The answers are not straightforward; the decisions facing these men were surely among the most agonizing imaginable.

The tale of the Essex was renowned throughout the world and inspired the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In the Heart of the Sea is not a happy tale; but it's a well-paced, intense, and satisfying one.

Americans in the Tiergarten

What would an outsider, arriving in Berlin in 1933, say about Hitler's Germany? Erik Larson found two such outsiders, who left copious impressions in diaries and letters.

They were William Dodd, the American ambassador who came to Berlin in 1933; and Martha Dodd, the ambassador's 25-year-old daughter. Larson's book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin tells the story of their initial willingness to like and accept Nazi Germany, as well as their growing disillusionment and eventual horrified rejection.

Dodd was a college professor, known for his intelligence and incorruptible honesty. But he had no diplomatic experience, no finesse, and was stubborn and inclined to lecture. He valued reason above all things, and his inability to sway the Nazi leadership with good sense shocked and depressed him.

Dodd grew convinced that Germany represented a grave threat to Western civilization, but could get no one in the United States to pay attention to his warnings.

I found Martha's story fascinating. A beauty whose status as an ambassador's daughter gave her instant social cachet, she was quite willing to have a good time in Germany, scandalously dating a number of men. Martha was pro-Nazi at first; she loved the enthusiasm of the German people, their ardent desire to rise above the wreckage of their nation’s past and create a new future. She was willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities, for a time -- until she could ignore them no more.

If you're interested in the years that lead up to World War II, you should enjoy the unique viewpoint provided by Larson's In The Garden of Beasts.

Do not operate machinery under the influence of this book

I had to turn off Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. The audiobook was so exciting that I could barely concentrate on my driving. I pulled over to a safe place, and started the book playing again. Getting to my destination seemed less important than knowing what was going to happen next.

Unbroken: a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption tells the true story of Louis Zamperini, the bombardier of a B-24 crew flying missions in the Pacific during World War II. In May of 1943, his plane went down and Louie, his pilot, and one other crewman endured a nearly two-thousand mile ordeal in an open raft on the Pacific. They staved off starvation, thirst, madness, sharks, and strafing from a Japanese plane. Eventually, the crewman died; on the forty-seventh day after the crash, Louie and his pilot drifted into the Marshall Islands and were taken prisoner by the Japanese.

Though it is a work of nonfiction, this book is extraordinarily suspenseful. Hillenbrand's descriptions of air battles are exhilarating; her insights into the relationship between prisoners and guards are thought-provoking. Zamperini's experiences were nothing short of amazing.

Perhaps because we are again a nation at war, stories like this one - of courage and defiance during wartime - are especially resonant. Click here to put a hold on the book; and if you choose the audiobook, remember to keep your eyes on the road.

Planning and banning in the U.S.A.

In 1935, Oregon became the first state to regulate the safety of condoms. Soon other states passed similar laws, and by 1937 the FDA set up federal inspections of prophylactics. Before that, as the CEO of the company that makes Trojans explained, defective condoms were simply marketed under other brand names. "If there is a flagrant hole or a flagrant defect," he admitted, "naturally they are sold too."

I learned that from a fascinating book called Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America by Andrea Tone. The book begins in 1873, when passage of the Comstock Act outlawed a variety of "obscenities," which included vulgar books and pictures, and also contraceptives. The author shows that this and other laws interrupted a voracious American demand for birth control products.

Since for many decades contraceptives were illegal, a thriving black market supplied consumers with remedies that were unregulated, inconsistent, and by our standards highly sketchy. The number one contraceptive of the 1930s and 40s gave, at best, only the illusion of control. At worst, it delivered painful and dangerous chemical burns. And female readers of this book are likely to reflexively clutch their abdomens when they see the photograph of 19th-century IUDs.

Not surprisingly, laws and customs dealing with contraception are very revealing when it comes to attitudes towards sex and gender throughout history. Contraception also opens a window on opinions towards apparently-unrelated matters, like race and class. For instance, companies did not market diaphragms in places like Harlem, on the theory that the method was too complicated for African-Americans to learn.

Though all readers may not share the author's socially progressive outlook, Tone's analysis of these demanded but morally-debated products throughout America's history is interesting, important, and quite timely. Whether you're interested in today's politics of personhood, or just enjoy social history, Devices and Desires by Andrea Tone is a great read.

The Typewriter is Holy

I'm right in the middle of reading The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, by Bill Morgan. This book is a "quick and dirty" version of the lives of a very small group of nomadic writers who have influenced or infected – depends on your point of view – our culture for over 60 years.

The Beat Generation had its beginnings in the 1940s when a group of young college students and college student wannabees met, while hanging around bars and clubs near Columbia University in New York City. They liked to drink and talk about great writers and great writing. They had no desire or understanding that they would be instrumental in changing the culture of American society. They wanted to write and be left alone to live life on their own terms. The three most prominent of the group were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

The Beat writers were described in the press as: spontaneous, truth-seeking, imaginative, influential, lovers of individual freedom, artists, poets, writers and geniuses. Other descriptions were not as flattering. Many people characterized this group as prurient, sex-crazed, addicts, alcoholics, felons, murderers, self-destructive, lost, loiterers, bums, selfish, hedonists, motley, thieves, con men, nonconformists, misogynistic and rebellious. In truth, they were all of the above.

This history doesn’t pull any punches. Morgan was closely associated with Allen Ginsberg and had a lot of interaction with the people he writes about. The story he tells is indeed raw and uncensored. There are 16 pages of photos. One is heartbreaking: Kerouac just before he died – penniless, lost and alcoholic.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz
-- excerpted from “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

If you appreciate Beat Generation writers, or if you’d like to get a better understanding of what “went down” back then, read this book. If you know nothing of the cultural history of the 50’s and 60’s, you’ll be surprised at the generational connections that come to light as these nomads crisscrossed the country.

Divided against ourselves

Lately a friend and I have been talking about the Civil War. We've discussed the role of rifled weapons and armored steam-powered watercraft; the cultural and economic differences between the South and the North; the things that had to happen before Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

My friend and I both have a good layman's understanding of the war, partly because we've both seen the incredibly watchable Ken Burns documentary series. My friend is into military history, and has studied the way technology affects battlefield tactics. I'm more interested in the big social trends that led to the war, the the issue of slavery, and the reasons people fought. I've been reading Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, a big survey of the war that won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1989.

Battle Cry of Freedom is beautifully-written, and it presents highly-complicated situations in a way that illuminates without oversimplifying. It begins in 1847, fourteen years before the war erupted, presenting a detailed portrait of a country that was deeply divided but by no means on the verge of dissolution. McPherson's description of how the threat of secession became a terrible inevitability is riveting. Descriptions of troop movements and battles are detailed enough to allow me to keep up with my military-history-buff friend.

The title of the book comes from a marching song that both Northern and Southern soldiers sang, with slightly different lyrics. McPherson points out that both the Union and Confederacy fought for freedom -- but they meant very different things when they invoked that word. He spends much of the book exploring the meanings of the word freedom in the Union and in the CSA.

It's that kind of interesting insight that makes Battle Cry of Freedom such a treasure. It's a good and important book, and it's a great conversation-starter, too.

The murderer was in the house

One morning in 1860, a three-year-old child went missing. His name was Saville Kent, and he was the youngest son of a prosperous family, living in a gracious English country home called Road Hill. By the time the morning was over, his body had been found, brutally murdered and thrust down the hole of an outhouse. The case was bungled by local policemen, and two weeks later a Scotland Yard detective was called in. The detective was Jack Whicher, and his investigation into the murder of Saville Kent exposed rottenness and madness in the bosom of this conventional English family.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is not a mystery novel, though you could be forgiven for thinking it sounds like one. The development of English mystery fiction - the country house with its prescribed number of suspects, the detective who comes in from outside to uncover its secrets - developed as a direct result of the public's fascination with the Road Hill case. The author, Kate Summerscale, argues that such seminal suspense novels as The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James were all directly influenced by the Road Hill murder.

I thought that this book was a bit padded. The author did a lot of research, and she seemed determined to include it all, whether it advanced her story or not. In spite of this, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a very interesting read, a good bet for both true crime junkies and connoisseurs of classic mystery fiction.

Dysfunctional Family Rules Half The World And Causes A World War

Little Willy’s arm was wrapped around his head in his mother’s womb, cutting off the blood supply to his brain and causing a rather nasty case of ADHD.

His cousin Nicky was a physically small and timid lad, bullied by a cold-hearted father who was sure he would never amount to much.

And little Georgie just wanted to spend all day riding horses and shooting defenseless animals.

Instead these three hapless cousins wound up ruling most of the world. And they didn’t do a very good job of it.

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Cousins And The Road To World War I by Miranda Carter describes the end of an autocratic Europe whose time had already passed. Complex family relationships (all were grandchildren to England’s Queen Victoria) only exacerbated equally labyrinthine political machinations as they jockeyed for colonial territory and military superiority. Their personal lives were an endless round of lavish yet meaningless social functions, military parades and mostly loveless marriages whose sole function was the begetting of heirs to their doomed dynasties.

Carter’s book is a fascinating look at the personalities behind the thrones of England, Russia and Germany as they goose-stepped their way to World War I and their own inevitable declines. And you can reserve it here.

The Demon Under the Microscope

Chemistry was my worst class in college. I worked so hard, and learned so little. The experience left me frustrated and bitter, so it would take an awfully good author to interest me in a story about an innovation in organic chemistry. Thomas Hager is a good author, and The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug is a good book.

In 1932 a team at Bayer AG (a division of the infamous German chemical company IG Farben), headed by Gerhard Domagk, developed a new chemical. The chemical, marketed as Prontosil by the Germans and containing the compound sulfanilamide, was a powerful medicine, one of a group that came to be known as sulfa antibiotics. Sulfa revolutionized health care all over the world. In 1924, Calvin Coodlidge, Jr., the 15-year-old son of the President of the United States, died of an infection that spread from a blistered toe. After sulfa came on the market, not just the treatment of infections but the medical establishment's entire attitude towards illness was different.

Hager grounds the story of Domagk and his chemical innovation in its cultural relevance, going all the way back to the first observation of "animalcules" (or bacteria) by a Dutch lens-grinder named Antoine van Leeuwenhoek in 1676; through the use of antiseptics in surgery by Joseph Lister in the late 19th century; through the bloody battlefields and septic operating rooms of World War I; to the sulfa experiments performed by the Nazis on women prisoners in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

The book's many digressions are fascinating. I learned about the development of the German chemical industry in the 20th century, and the way it was affected by the rise of the Nazi party. I learned about the 1937 recall of one sulfa-containing cough syrup after it was linked to the deaths of over 100 people, and the subsequent strengthening of the powers of the FDA to ensure the safety of medicines. I even learned a little about chemistry.

The Demon Under the Microscope can be found in our catalog here. If you prefer to listen to it on audiobook, click here.

History Comes Alive: BBC Documentaries With Michael Wood

I am an avid reader of history: U.S., European, Asian, Ancient, Economic. you name it, I read it. Lately, I’ve also been checking out Newport Library’s collection of historical documentaries on DVD, especially those titles hosted by historian Michael Wood. Aside from his dashing good looks and nerdy English academic charm, what appeals most about Wood is the rapt enthusiasm for his subjects. Newport library has a number of his BBC programs, including several of the book tie-ins.

The Story of India is Wood’s most recent film. This two-disc series looks to India’s wondrous past to explain its current dynamic presence on the world’s socio-economic stage. Exotic and colorful, filled with music, art, warfare and religion, The Story of India is one my favorites.

On the opposite side of the globe, in England, Wood goes In Search of Shakespeare. So little is actually known about the Bard, his family and friends, that Wood’s inferences, based on the historical context of the times, fill in the color surrounding Shakespeare’s life. It is this contextual coloring that breathes wonderful depth into the world of the English language’s bravest writer.

One of Wood’s earliest films, first presented in 1985, In Search of The Trojan War, is an ancient history buff’s dream come true. Wood presents an in-depth examination as to the likelihood of the Trojan War. He wonders if history can prove the existence of its main chracacters, Agamemnon, Achilles, and the woman whose face launched a thousand ships, Helen of Troy. You probably already know that most of these questions are unanswerable, but just for sheer depth of Wood’s historical imagination, I give In Search of the Trojan War top marks.

We also have:

In Search of Myths and Heroes

Conquistadors

Legacy: the Origins of Civilization

In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great

China: The Mandate of Heaven

(Some of the titles are available only in VHS format and downloadable video from Library2Go.)

Woods has a great talent for placing his subject in a broad cultural context and weaving disparate historical elements together to present an informative and entertaining television program. And his enthusiasm for his topic, be it a Spanish Conquistador pillaging across the Andes or the emotional depth of a Shakespearean tragedy, is sure to win you over.

Click on the highlighted title to reserve it.