Genre: American History

A+ #AudioBookReview: Propaganda Girls by Lisa Rogak

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: Propaganda Girls by Lisa RogakPropaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS by Lisa Rogak
Narrator: Samara Naeymi
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: American History, U.S. history, women's history, World War II
Pages: 225
Length: 6 hours and 1 minute
Published by Macmillan Audio, St. Martin's Press on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The incredible untold story of four women who helped win WWII by generating a wave of black propaganda.
Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane Smith-Hutton was the wife of a naval attaché living in Tokyo. Marlene Dietrich, the German-American actress and singer, was of course one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. These four women, each fascinating in her own right, together contributed to one of the most covert and successful military campaigns in WWII.
As members of the OSS, their task was to create a secret brand of propaganda produced with the sole aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers. Working in the European theater, across enemy lines in occupied China, and in Washington, D.C., Betty, Zuzka, Jane, and Marlene forged letters and “official” military orders, wrote and produced entire newspapers, scripted radio broadcasts and songs, and even developed rumors for undercover spies and double agents to spread to the enemy. And outside of a small group of spies, no one knew they existed. Until now.
In Propaganda Girls, bestselling author Lisa Rogak brings to vivid life the incredible true story of four unsung heroes, whose spellbinding achievements would change the course of history.

My Review:

The “propaganda girls” of this book’s title didn’t just want to “See what the boys in the back room will have,” as Marlene Dietrich, the most famous of those “girls” frequently sang in her pre- and post-war nightclub acts AND to “Her Boys” during her USO tours, they wanted a chance to BE those boys. Not for the drinking and carousing – not that they didn’t – but for the work and the freedom to use their gifts to their full potential without being shoved into corners labelled “women’s work”.

[Marlene Dietrich, somewhere in France, sitting on the ground with soldiers in an audience, at the foot of a platform stage] 1944.
Betty MacDonald, Barbara “Zuzka” Lauwers, Jane Smith-Hutton and Marlene Dietrich had each gone beyond the work that was considered “suitable” for women in the years before the war. Betty was a newspaper reporter, Zuzka a linguist, Jane a diplomat’s wife and translator, and Marlene Dietrich was Dietrich, one of the most famous people in the world. They were, to a woman, ambitious, intelligent, driven AND stifled in the 1930s.

Then the war happened to the world, and suddenly there was a need for people like them, including women like them, to think WAY outside of any box to end the war faster – no matter how underhanded their work might seem in peacetime or how many corners they’d have to cut or rules they’d have to break to get the job done.

Their job, specifically, as members of the Morale Office of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was to create and distribute – however possible – “black” propaganda. In other words, these women and their colleagues were the ‘spin doctors’ of the war. But they didn’t just slant the news and the leaflets and the radio broadcasts to make the situation for the Allies look a bit better than it was and the situation for the Axis to look just that much worse than it was.

Jane Smith Hutton during her six-month captivity in the US Embassy in Tokyo in 1941-42

Oh, no, that would have been too easy. Perhaps also a bit too honest. And also, “white” propaganda was somebody else’s job. The “propaganda girls” and the rest of the Morale Office didn’t just slant the news and everything else – their job was to make it up out of a whole cloth of plausibility and authentic, if stolen, material, wrap it around a slanted truth, and drop the whole thing out of a plane in the form of leaflets, or send volunteer POWs over the line to put it in soldiers’ latrines, or broadcast it as altered, morale-sapping songs sung by Germany’s own voice of nostalgia and regret, Marlene Dietrich.

In spite of the conditions under which they all worked, everything from shortages of food to eat and supplies to create their handiwork, nightly bombings and frequent blockades, or the all too common quashing of their efforts by military men who either couldn’t tolerate the way that OSS bent all their precious rules of warfare, couldn’t abide that women were the ones doing that bending, or both, they still got the job done, over and over again, no matter how little they were thanked or how seldom they were able to quantify their results.

And they had the time of their lives. Each and every one of them. Not because they were out having a party – they weren’t because the work was hard and grueling and frequently thankless. But because they had a purpose they could absolutely believe in, and had the most scope and independence they had ever had – or would ever have – in their entire lives to bring everything they had to a job that needed, and in fact cried out for, everything they were.

Reality Rating A+: I picked this up because I was looking for a book to fulfill the requirements for the Goodreads “Her Story” Challenge. (I love to read and I love to play games and the gamification of reading is catnip. Seriously.)

Barbara “Zuzka” Lauwers in 1944

This is the book that called to me, and I am ever so glad that I picked it. And equally glad that I chose to listen to it, because the audio, read by Samara Naeymi, was terrific. She brought a verve and a wry smirk and a bit of a smile to the stories of each of these women, and just about made me cry as the story got darker AND as each woman faced their conflicted emotions at the end of the war. Every single one of them wanted the war to end and the killing to stop, while recognizing that whatever the rest of their lives held, it wouldn’t be as fascinating, fantastic or challenging as what they’d just lived through.

None of them had been a great fit for the traditional woman’s role BEFORE the war – and their collective experience of what they could do outside of those expectations cut each of them to the quick. No time after may ever have been as dark – although for some it came close in a personal sense – but nothing would ever be as bright, either, and they all knew it.

As history, or to give it a more fitting name, ‘narrative nonfiction”, the story of the “propaganda girls” is eminently readable. It flows like a novel, and carries the reader along from one woman to another, from one theater of war to another, from one OSS station to another, with the kind of compulsion that keeps readers turning pages. The reader desperately wants to know what happened next and next to each of them, even though the broad brushstrokes of the war are already well known.

Part of that compulsion is that the story told here is one that we’re not all that familiar with. We all know it happened, or something like it, but not the details and not the personalities. In that sense, it reminds me a lot of the many stories about the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park. A history that was well-hidden for decades due to Britain’s stringent Official Secrets Act. Propaganda Girls also reads a lot like The Woman Who Smashed Codes, in the way that it shines a light on the contribution of a woman who worked in military intelligence during the war but whose contributions were often – at the time – attributed to her husband.

Also, I think readers who enjoy the World War II fiction of Kate Quinn and Sara Ackerman will be every bit as captivated by this nonfiction account as they have been by the fictional and fictionalized versions by those authors.

In short (which admittedly I seldom am) I had a terrific time with these Propaganda Girls. If you have the time and inclination, I highly recommend the audio experience so that you can really feel the story with the characters. The audio got me in the feels a lot more than I expected, and that made it just that bit more terrific. Because their experience of their war may have been a product of its time and place, but their experience of being a woman who wants more than the traditional roles available in a man’s world is more universal, and more relevant to the present, than any of us, here and now, ever wanted to see again in our own lifetimes. But we are all the same.

As absorbing and riveting as all of their stories were, that’s the part that lingers for this reader.

Grade A #GuestReview: Waging a Good War by Thomas E. Ricks

Posted on by Galen Charlton | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews> Guest Posts> Guest Review
Grade A #GuestReview: Waging a Good War by Thomas E. RicksWaging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African American History, American History, Civil Rights Movement, nonfiction, U.S. history
Pages: 448
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on October 4, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Waging a Good War, the bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America’s greatest moral revolution—the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization—the hallmarks of any successful military campaign.

An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the Movement’s triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive, resistance—involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement’s adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool—the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new understanding of the Movement’s later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events and overlooked aspects of America’s civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change—and one that offers vital lessons for our own time.

My Review:

In his influential but incomplete work, On War, military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defines war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will”. Martin Luther King, Jr., of course followed the example of Mohandas Gandhi in preaching and practicing nonviolence during the Civil Rights Movement and afterwards.

Violence on the one hand, nonviolence on the other. What does Clausewitz have to say to King? Quite a lot, actually, for what King was seeking was indeed to compel his opponents to accede to his will and liberate his compatriots from an unjust system. While the instruments of King’s will did not include bombs or guns directed at his oppressors, they did include thousands of people trained and sent on campaigns to sap the will of their opponents until they ultimately fell back.

Does this sound like a war? In his book Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, war correspondent Thomas E. Ricks makes the case that a military analysis of the strategies, operations, and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement offers a useful point of view for understanding its history — and applying its lessons to current and future conflicts.

Reality Rating A: While the idea of doing Clausewitzian analysis of King’s strategy is not new, military theory is not exactly the most common framework for viewing the Civil Rights Movement. Presumably few, if any, civil rights leaders were referring to their well-thumbed copies of Clausewitz. However, Ricks’ book makes it clear that the movement included many aspects of a series of military campaigns. For example, just as a U.S. soldier is not dropped onto a battlefield without having going through extensive training in their arms and tactics, civil rights protesters received extensive training on how to conduct themselves. That training was essential; very few people are naturally inclined to sit down in the face of mobs, howling dogs, and fire hoses without either fleeing or striking back.

The Civil Rights Movement conducted detailed reconnaissance of enemy territory before engaging in a campaign. Those campaigns included significant advance planning of the aims of the campaign as well as the logistics required – safe houses, escape routes, lists of sympathizers, and plain old cash. The very strategy of nonviolent direct action was very intentional.

Quoting King from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Jesse Jackson with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ( ca. 1966)

The Civil Rights Movement of course would have had little hope of forcing negotiations by violent actions; one against nine are never good odds. But what it could do was highlight injustice and create situations to encourage the state to overreact in the name of preserving that injustice. Fortunately for the protesters, that overreaction often ended up on the nightly television news. Over time, the will to maintain Jim Crow was whittled away as the contradictions revealed by the protests made the status quo untenable. (It is interesting to note the degree to which many of the opponents of the Civil Rights Movement were tactically and strategically stupid. Had more Southern police chiefs acted like Laurie Pritchett rather than Bull Connor by minimizing brutal responses to the protests, the Civil Rights Movement could easily have required much more time to achieve its aim.)

The foregoing just scratches the surface of Ricks’ book, which details the strategies and tactics of several campaigns including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the March on Washington — as well as failed campaigns such as the one in Albany, Georgia. As such, it also serves as a useful capsule history of the Civil Rights Movement during 1954-1968, including the many leaders, foot-soldiers, and organizations involved — as well as their many disagreements. As with any war, the Civil Rights Movement has its casualties, which Ricks describes as well.

From one point of view, the Civil Rights Movement ended successfully with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. From another point of view, there is much left to do to pursue justice. These old challenges — as well as new threats to democracy — make Ricks’ military history of the Civil Rights Movement essential reading for those who want a clear-eyed history of its strategies and how they can be applied to current problems.

A- #BookReview: The Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren Willig

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren WilligThe Girl from Greenwich Street by Lauren Willig
Format: eARC
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: American History, historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, true crime
Pages: 352
Published by William Morrow on March 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Based on the true story of a famous trial, this novel is Law and 1800, as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr investigate the shocking murder of a young woman who everyone—and no one—seemed to know.
At the start of a new century, a shocking murder transfixes Manhattan, forcing bitter rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to work together to save a man from the gallows. 
Just before Christmas 1799, Elma Sands slips out of her Quaker cousin’s boarding house—and doesn’t come home. Has she eloped? Run away? No one knows—until her body appears in the Manhattan Well.
Her family insists they know who killed her. Handbills circulate around the city accusing a carpenter named Levi Weeks of seducing and murdering Elma. 
But privately, quietly, Levi’s wealthy brother calls in a special favor….
Aaron Burr’s legal practice can’t finance both his expensive tastes and his ambition to win the 1800 New York elections. To defend Levi Weeks is a double a hefty fee plus a chance to grab headlines.
Alexander Hamilton has his own political aspirations; he isn’t going to let Burr monopolize the public’s attention. If Burr is defending Levi Weeks, then Hamilton will too. As the trial and the election draw near, Burr and Hamilton race against time to save a man’s life—and destroy each other.
Part murder mystery, part thriller, part true crime, The Girl From Greenwich Street revisits a dark corner of history—with a surprising twist ending that reveals the true story of the woman at the center of the tale.

My Review:

This fascinating combination of historical fiction, true crime AND mystery tells the story of the first sensational murder trial in what was then, in 1800, these new United States. We don’t know much about the victim, Elma Sands. They didn’t then, either, which is kind of the point. Sometimes it’s still the point. Trying a case in the press doesn’t require much knowledge of either the victim or the accused, then or now.

But the case – this case is still notorious over 200 years later.

First, because it was the first. Firsts always have a bit of cachet. Seconds, not so much. This wasn’t just the first murder trial, it was also the first such trial to have a full transcript. And if you’re thinking that Pitman shorthand wasn’t introduced until 1837, decades after this trial, you’d be right.

But shorthand did not emerge, fully formed, from the head of Isaac Pitman. The court record for this trial practiced an earlier version of shorthand, and recorded the trial verbatim, admittedly with a few idiosyncrasies.

What makes this case still fascinating, perhaps even more so than it has been over the intervening centuries, are the names of two of the three members of the council for the defence. You know them. Once I name them you won’t be able to see them without filtering that image through their portrayals in Hamilton. (This trial is even alluded to in the play in the fast-talking lyrics of “Non-Stop.”

Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton acted as two-thirds of the defense of Levi Weeks, the man accused of murdering Elma Sands. I’m not saying they formed a team, because that’s a HUGE stretch. By 1800, those two towering figures of American history were at odds. And they were over the course of the trial as well, each attempting to use the notoriety of the trial to further their respective causes in the upcoming election of 1800. Each doing their best and worst so score off against the other because they could – and couldn’t bear not to.

That a young woman was dead and a young man’s life hung in the balance never stopped these lifelong enemies from taking pieces out of each other even while their client languished behind bars and the press raised a hue and cry over ALL their heads.

Escape Rating A-: Of all the books I’ve read this week, this is the one I found the most fascinating and the one I’ve shoved at the most people. It’s a captivating story, sometimes in spite of itself, because of the way that it combines U.S. history and politics, mystery, true crime and the still inspirational voice of the play Hamilton and weaves it together into a compelling mess of a story.

I call the story a mess not because the author didn’t do a terrific job of making it all make as much sense as it’s ever going to – because she absolutely did. But rather, the historical record itself is really, seriously messy as a murder investigation and as a legal case, the question of who really done it has NEVER been resolved, the circumstances under which the case was conducted are basically insane, and the only available evidence for anything at all – except of course for the dead body – are entirely circumstantial and don’t hang together into any cohesive narrative.

Which is why no one ever hung for the crime.

The story, in the end, is at the intersection of two clichés. One, attributed to Mark Twain in multiple iterations, is the one that goes, “The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.” Even today, reading the story, the mind cries out for a logical conclusion, but there’s not enough there to come to one. Which leads to the other screaming cliché, the one where “assume makes an ass out of you and me”. There are a LOT of asses here. It seems as if all the attempts at making sense of this thing, both then and now, start with an assumption that doesn’t hold up.

But as fascinating as the truly messy trial process is, between the in-over-his-head-and-drowning-fast prosecutor and the resulting exhaustion of the judge, the jury and everyone involved, what makes the story sing (pardon the irresistible pun) is the rivalry between Hamilton and Burr. The transcription of the trial does not indicate which of the three defense lawyers made which statements or asked which witnesses which questions. Nor are there any records of Burr’s and Hamilton’s arguments over how the defense should proceed in the days before the trial. But the heated discussions and the hidden thoughts between the rivals feel true to the characters we believe we know – even if or especially because we’re hearing them in Leslie Odom Jr.’s and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s voices.

Particularly as we hear in those voices the echo of Hamilton’s words to Burr over and under their every debate about justice versus expediency, “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”

A+ #AudioBookReview: The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahonThe Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement by Sharon McMahon
Narrator: Sharon mcMahon
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: American History, biography, history, politics, U.S. history
Pages: 320
Length: 10 hours and 13 minutes
on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From America’s favorite government teacher, a heartfelt, inspiring portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country.

In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

You’ll meet a woman astride a white horse riding down Pennsylvania Ave, a young boy detained at a Japanese incarceration camp, a formerly enslaved woman on a mission to reunite with her daughter, a poet on a train, and a teacher who learns to work with her enemies. More than one thing is bombed, and multiple people surprisingly become rich. Some rich with money, and some wealthy with things that matter more.

This is a book about what really made America–and Americans–great. McMahon’s cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.

My Review:

There are more than twelve. Not just in general, but specifically, in THIS book. Because there are WAY MORE than twelve unsung heroes of American history. And that seems both unfortunate and appropriately fitting at the same time. Because the sweep of history is vast, it’s not possible for every single person who is worthy of being highlighted in history to actually receive that acknowledgement. At the same time, it’s telling that the majority of these unsung heroes are from groups that history, as written by the powers that be, deliberately sweeps to the side because by their deeds and sometimes even their very existence, they challenge the narrative those powers-that-be promote so that they may remain and retain those very powers.

What those unsung heroes were often – but not always – singing their own hearts out FOR, is what makes this book appropriate for this particular week. Because many of the people whose stories are told herein fought for not just the right to vote, as was the case of the female suffragists, but also for the practical ability to exercise that right freely, as many of the teachers and civil rights workers fought.

These are the stories of just a few – not nearly enough – of the ‘hidden figures’ in U.S. history. Each and every one of them, in their own ways, did their very best and occasionally their very damndest – and the newspapers of their time frequently claimed it was the latter and not the former – to figure out and most importantly DO – the next needful thing to make progress.

When a mountain is crested, when a challenge is overcome, when a pinnacle is reached, a few are credited with the accomplishment – no matter how long the journey or how many contributed to achieve the goal. Those are the people whose names finally do end up in the history books.

These are the stories of the unsung heroes, those giants – small but mighty – on whose shoulders those in the history books stood.

Reality Rating A+: I loved this book a whole lot. I was expecting to like it, but I was genuinely surprised by how much I really, truly loved the hell out of it. I was looking for something that had a connection to American history for this week, came across this and thought, “Why not?”

Serendipity for the win because this was marvelous from beginning to end.

This is history, but it’s not history told as a dry recitation of facts. In style, it reminded me a lot of Erik Larson’s style of narrative nonfiction, in that the research is solid but that research is pulled together into an actual STORY that draws the reader into its web.

At the same time, it’s easy to see the book’s antecedents as the author’s podcasts about these and other ‘unsung heroes’ of history, as the book reads as more of a collection of short stories that occasionally intersect rather than a single narrative of history.

The way that the individual stories worked also held shades of Paul Harvey’s radio series, The Rest of the Story, which also told stories of unsung heroes, of people on the sidelines of better known stories, and of quirky bits of history.

While it will drive some readers crazy that the stories don’t link up into a single overarching thing, I found the way that things wove in and out of each other to be a whole lot of fun. Listening to the author read her own work, it felt like she was telling me a story, and that sometimes that story went on tangents to other stories with occasional sidebars into yet another story – with more than a few forays into the author’s opinions and even a few questions about what on Earth some people were either thinking or drinking.

The use of the language of the 21st century to tell this history to a 21st century audience just made it all that much more accessible. Which was marvelous because the stories were already heart tugging, heartbreaking and heart attack inducing by turns, and just filled with crowning moments of both awesome and despair – sometimes at the same time.

Any reader – or listener – looking for true stories of American history that they may not have heard before, or who would like to take a trip down some of the historical roads less well traveled by the history books, will have a grand time with The Small and the Mighty. And may even be inspired to do something a bit ‘mighty’ of their own.

Or even just a small but needful thing. Tomorrow, November 5, 2024, is Election Day in the United States. If you are a U.S. citizen who is eligible to vote, it is your RIGHT to do so. Please exercise that right. A single vote may be a small thing, but it is also a mighty power that many of the unsung heroes in this book fought to their utmost to gain.

Review: Give Us the Ballot by Ari Berman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: Give Us the Ballot by Ari BermanGive Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
Format: eARC
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: American History, U.S. history
Pages: 384
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on August 4th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015An NPR Best Book of 2015Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time.
In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.
Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.

My Review:

Give this book to anyone who believes that the struggle for voting rights in America is over. Because the all too recent history told in this narrative shows all too clearly that it is far, far from over.

This is a difficult book to review. The history related is searing in its intensity. And it is impossible to be neutral. For those who are of the liberal persuasion, it is an indictment of man’s (and woman’s) continuing inhumanity to those who are not part of the white majority. For those who are conservative, it will read very differently. I’ll admit that my mind just won’t go wherever that it.

I wanted to take a bath when I finished, because the things that were done to suppress the African-American vote (and the Hispanic vote) were disgusting and sometimes deadly. In reading this history, it feels as if the deadly has mostly moved to other arenas, but the disgusting is still very much alive and kicking.

A voting rights case in Forsyth County, Georgia, (one county over from my house) was just settled this past week. Voting rights are still being fought for in the U.S., but the fights have moved from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the judicial system. The fight is no less bloody for that blood being time and ink instead of red.

This may be progress of a sort, but it is progress that must be constantly and rigorously defended.

And in a nutshell, that is the lesson of Give Us the Ballot. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was landmark legislation, but it also marked a beginning and not an ending. Poll taxes and literacy tests were finally over. The battleground simply moved to Voter ID laws, redistricting and “at large” elections.

The right to vote is one of the bedrock principles of the United States. This history shows that the fight to make sure that every eligible person is allowed to vote, and that their vote counts, and that their vote has effective power, never, ever ends.

Escape Rating A: This is a book where I think it will be impossible for any reader to read dispassionately. As a liberal, I frankly wanted to wash at least my hands after reading it. I found the indictment compelling and also slightly nauseating. Both that blatant attempts to suppress the votes of blacks, hispanics and students continue, but that they are all too often successful and cloaked in coded language. And frankly, I still hear “dog whistles”.

Progress has been made, but it has also been beaten back by those in power who want to retain that power. And the tools used to beat that progress back seem designed to obfuscate either the motives of the perpetrators or the consequences of their actions. Or both.

This history clearly shows, at least to this reader, that Voter ID laws, reduction in the hours of early voting, voter roll purges and other such measures are both racially motivated and completely partisan. They are designed to suppress the votes of groups that generally vote for the Democratic Party. For someone who votes liberal, it reads like an attempt to turn the clock back and prevent the changes to the population that are occurring in fact from having a proportional impact at the ballot box and in the politics of the country.

Someone with a more conservative political inclination will undoubtedly see this history differently. I doubt that anyone can be neutral on this subject. This history will certainly make you think, whatever side of the political spectrum you fall upon. Thinking about the right to vote, and about making sure to exercise that right whenever possible, is always important.

Reviewer’s Note: Give Us the Ballot was nominated for the American Library Association’s Notable Book Awards for this year. As part of the Notable Books Council, I am pleased to say that this book was on our Awards list for this year, along with other outstanding works of nonfiction, fiction and poetry. Give Us the Ballot is an intensive history of an important and timely topic. It was also a perfect book to re-read and review over the Martin Luther King Day weekend.