The Ghosts of Eden Park: A Review and an Invitation
Often a review of a work of narrative non-fiction will claim that said work reads like a novel. With all due respect to my fellow reviewers, it is seldom true. The Ghosts of Eden Park is an exception. Karen Abbott combines impeccable research with the story-telling devices of fiction to create a work of narrative non-fiction that reads like a very specific type of fiction: the classic detective novel. (Think Perry Mason.)
Abbott opens with a chase through Eden Park that ends in a murder. The reader is left uncertain about which of the two figures murdered the other until she is two-thirds of the way through the book. At that point, Abbott shifts to a courtroom drama, in which it is entirely unclear whether the murderer is going to get off. And at least one reader halfway expected to discover that someone other than the person on trial had actually committed the crime.(Did I mention, think Perry Mason?) The book is a narrative tour de force.
The book has been out several months now, so you may already know who-dun-it. But for those of you who don’t, I’m going to avoid the reprising the plot so I don’t spoil it.* As for the general subject, Abbott’s sub-title sums it up: “the bootleg king, the women who pursued him, and the murder that shocked jazz-age America.” Add in a tough female prosecutor, a very young J Edgar Hoover lurking around the edges of the story, a sordid love triangle, and material excess that makes Jay Gatsby look restrained and you have quite a story.
*This is why I don’t review novels. My hats off to those of you do. It is flipping hard to tell someone enough to make them want to read a book without spoiling it.
———————
A lagniappe: I’m going to interview Abbott Kahler (aka author Karen Abbott) about her real-life thriller The Ghosts of Eden Park on May 7 at 7 PM Central on the Facebook group Nonfiction Fans, which I host with fellow historian and author Theresa Kaminksi,. If you’re interested, you can ask to join the group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1760137804315990/ Once we figure out all the technical issues, it should be Big Fun.
Rebel Cinderella
You’re going to see a lot of book reviews here in the coming weeks, because I’m doing a lot of reading and I love to share books that I think the Marginalia will enjoy.* I will do my best to mix it up.
Next up, a gripping and occasionally heartbreaking account of American reform movements in the early twentieth century, told through one woman’s story: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, by Adam Hochschild . (An author whose work I love.)
In 1905, an unlikely marriage made headlines around the world. Rose Pastor was a young Jewish woman whose family had fled Russia when she was a child. She began working in cigar factories at the age of eleven to support her family and turned a talent for language into a career as a journalist for a Yiddish-langue newspaper. James Graham Phelps Stokes (commonly known as Graham) was the Ivy-league educated oldest son of one of “the Four Hundred”—the families that dominated New York Society in the Gilded Age.
Hochschild tells the story of their marriage within the broader history of the American socialist and labor movements in the first half of the twentieth century. (He also provides a comic counterpoint to their story in the form of Stoke’s Uncle Will: an unpredictable and litigious New York real estate mogul who was an ugly version of the sprightly uncles in P.G. Wodehouse novels, complete with mustache.)
Pastor and Stokes met at a time when patrician reformers were not uncommon. She was assigned to interview him at University Settlement, a settlement house that served Italian and Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. Stokes was not only on the settlement house board, he was one of a number of wealthy, young volunteers who lived on the settlement’s top two floors.
For a time they were the golden couple of progressive thought in America. Their home was a salon for visionaries of all types. But there were pressures on their marriage from the beginning. Graham’s family was never comfortable with Rose’s politics. And Rose was never entirely comfortable with the advantages and opportunities that his privilege afforded her, even though that privilege made it possible for her to become a prominent figure in the socialist and labor movements.
Their approaches to reform diverged as Rose became a rising star in radical circles. World War I and the Russian Revolution drove them further apart. Like many socialists, Graham discovered national patriotism mattered to him more than international brotherhood. Rose remained passionately socialist.
In the end, the immigrant Cinderella and her American prince found their differences too great to overcome. They divorced in 1926 and returned to their natural social habitats, at roughly the same time socialism lost its momentum as a mass movement in the United States.
Rebel Cinderella is a powerful account of a woman who, like so many, has disappeared from our historical narrative. It is also an excellent introduction to the the history of socialism and labor in America, which has also disappeared from our historical narrative.
*Which is not to say that you’re going to get a review on everything I’m reading. Some of the academic monographs I’m reading are enormously useful but are not thrilling reads. Which is not to say I won’t share something that is both very academic and thrilling.
A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
18 Tiny Deaths
(I love this cover so much.)
Forensic medicine is a familiar concept today to anyone who reads mystery novels or watches police procedural dramas on television. But as recently as 1944 only one to two percent of the questionable deaths in the United States were investigated by qualified medical examiners. In 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics, journalist Bruce Goldfarb tells the story of how an elderly woman with no formal education became the unlikely crusader behind the development of modern forensic science in the United States.
It takes a good half of the book before Frances Glessner Lee is introduced to the subject that would be her passion. It is time well spent. Goldfarb paints a picture of Lee as a child of the Gilded Age in Chicago, with all the privileges and restrictions that entailed. (Unable to attend Harvard, she chose not to attend college at all.) He traces the history of how questionable deaths were investigated through the early twentieth century. The two threads come together in the person of her childhood friend, Dr. George McGrath, who was Boston’s second medical examiner. McGrath introduced Lee to what was then called “legal medicine,” telling her stories of finished cases and describing his frustrations with the haphazard use of forensics in police work. She was hooked, both by the stories and by the need for an institutional structure for educating both medical examiners and the police in the principals of forensic medicine.
McGrath may have felt he created a monster. Lee dedicated the next 30 years to developing what she called the “three-legged stool” of legal medicine: medicine, the law, and the police. She used the techniques she learned from her mother’s patronage of the Chicago Symphony to alternately seduce and bludgeon Harvard Medical School into founding a department of Legal Medicine. But she wanted to do more than give money. She insisted on hands-on involvement, culminating in the “18 tiny deaths” of the title: eighteen detailed dioramas known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, which Lee created as tools for training police officers in modern scientific forensic methods.
Late in her life, Lee claimed, “Men are dubious of elderly women with a cause.” 18 Tiny Deaths is the fascinating story of how much such a woman can accomplish.
You may never watch a police procedural the same way again.
The guts of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers