Keep up to date with what’s happening at the Irvin L. Young Memorial Library, 431 W. Center St., in Whitewater, (262) 473-0530
New in Adult Nonfiction:
• “The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age” by Myra MacPherson
Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin-the most fascinating and scandalous sisters in American history were unequaled for their vastly avant-garde crusade for women’s fiscal, political, and sexual independence. They escaped a tawdry childhood to become rich and famous, achieving a stunning list of firsts.
In 1870 they became the first women to open a brokerage firm, not to be repeated for nearly a century. Amid high gossip that he was Tennie’s lover, the richest man in America, fabled tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, bankrolled the sisters. As beautiful as they were audacious, the sisters drew a crowd of more than two thousand Wall Street bankers on opening day.
A half-century before women could vote, Victoria used her Wall Street fame to become the first woman to run for president, choosing former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate. She was also the first woman to address a United States congressional committee. Tennie ran for Congress and shocked the world by becoming the honorary colonel of a black regiment.
They were the first female publishers of a radical weekly, and the first to print Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in America. As free lovers they railed against Victorian hypocrisy and exposed the alleged adultery of Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher in America, igniting the “Trial of the Century” that rivaled the Civil War for media coverage.
Eventually banished from the women’s movement while imprisoned for allegedly sending “obscenity” through the mail, the sisters sashayed to London and married two of the richest men in England, dining with royalty while pushing for women’s rights well into the 20th century. Vividly telling their story, Myra MacPherson brings these inspiring and outrageous sisters brilliantly to life.
• “Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade” by Walter Kirn
In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn – then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage – set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet.
Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.
Kirn’s one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles.
As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man? To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend’s murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller’s evil.
This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knew – a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: Kirn himself.
• “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War” by Mark Harris
In “Pictures at a Revolution,” Mark Harris turned the story of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 into a landmark work of cultural history, a book about the transformation of an art form and the larger social shift it signified. In “Five Came Back,” he achieves something larger and even more remarkable, giving us the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed Hollywood, through the prism of five film directors caught up in the war: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens.
It was the best of times and the worst of times for Hollywood before the war. The box office was booming, and the studios’ control of talent and distribution was as airtight as could be hoped. But the industry’s relationship with Washington was decidedly uneasy – hearings and investigations into allegations of corruption and racketeering were multiplying, and hanging in the air was the insinuation that the business was too foreign, too Jewish, too “un-American” in its values and causes.
Could an industry this powerful in shaping America’s mind-set really be left in the hands of this crew? Following Pearl Harbor, Hollywood had the chance to prove its critics wrong and did so with vigor, turning its talents and its business over to the war effort to an unprecedented extent.
No industry professionals played a bigger role in the war than America’s most legendary directors: Ford, Wyler, Huston, Capra, and Stevens. Between them they were on the scene of almost every major moment of America’s war, and in every branch of service – Army, Navy, and Air Force; Atlantic and Pacific; from Midway to North Africa; from Normandy to the fall of Paris and the liberation of the Nazi death camps; to the shaping of the message out of Washington, D.C.
As it did for so many others, World War II divided the lives of these men into before and after, to an extent that has not been adequately understood. In a larger sense – even less well understood –the war divided the history of Hollywood into before and after as well. Harris reckons with that transformation on a human level – through five unforgettable lives – and on the level of the industry and the country as a whole. Like these five men, Hollywood too, and indeed all of America, came back from the war having grown up more than a little.
*Descriptions from the publishers.
Upcoming Events:
• Toddler Storytime –Wednesday, April 2, 10-10:45 a.m.
• Wednesday Night Book Club – April 2, 7 p.m.
• Lapsit Storytime – Thursday, April 3, 10-10:45 a.m.
