Great Cities Through Travelers’ Eyes
If you’ve spent any time here on the Margins, you know that I love to go traveling with My Own True Love, and that I love to share stories about our travels with the Marginalia. In fact, we’re heading out soon for another stint on our on-going efforts to drive the Great River Road from the headwaters of the Mississippi in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to the place in Louisiana where the road finally dead-ends in industrial parks. *
But traveling as a pastime and writing blog posts about what you learn is different than Traveling on a larger scale and writing a Travel’s Account.
In Great Cities Through Travelers’ Eyes, historian and former editor of History Today magazine Peter Furtado has compiled an armchair travelers’ delight. Building on the idea that cities are the most enduring of all historical artifacts, he presents travelers’ accounts of 38 cities around the world, from Alexandria to Washington, D.C.
Furtado outlines his selection criteria clearly for the reader. All the cities still exist: no romantic musings on the ruins of Persepolis or Machu Picchu are included. He does not use descriptions by a writer native to a city. For example, Furtado gives us Dickens’s opinions of New York and Rome, but turns to writers from Switzerland, China, the United States (via France) and Germany for impressions of London. He does not draw on travel accounts later than the 1980s because he believes that cheap airfares and the Internet have fundamentally changed the experience of travel and travel writing.** Within those criteria, he carefully chooses a wide range of sources from across the centuries and around the world. Men and women. Merchants, conquerors, explorers, pilgrims, journalists and monarchs. (Queen Victoria was mildly pleased with Paris.)
Even without entries from the last 30 years, Furtado gives the reader a complex, and sometimes opinionated, picture of cities through time. Presented chronologically, the entries for each city function as a shaft in a literary archeological dig, allowing the reader to see both change and continuity in how a city is portrayed. The entries also give us an anecdotal history of travel itself, pre-TripAdvisor and and Google Earth.
It’s enough to make you want to pack a trunk and make a Grand Tour. In the short run, however, I’ll make do with a small suitcase, a work bag, a cooler and a road trip.
* We started the project in 2014 with a four-day weekend in Illinois. We’ve done two big stints since then. And I’ve shared it with you all the way–or at least most of the way. (I seem to have missed blogging about the last few spots we stopped at in 2015, including the national battlefield at Vicksburg.) If you’re interested, you can find those posts by searching for Great River Road in the box in the sidebar. (If you’re reading this in your email, click the headline. This will take you to the browser, with the search function, and other goodies.)
**While this may, in fact, be true it also carries a whiff of an old guy complaining that the world has changed and is consequently going to hell. Which may also be true, but “old guys” of all ages and genders have been making this complaint for as long as we have written records of individuals’ opinions.
Much of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Sudden Courage
A little less than a year ago, I posted a review of Paige Bower’s The General’s Niece, a fascinating biography of Genevieve De Gaulle and the role she played in the French resistance I recently read an excellent book that put Genevieve in the broader context of teenage resistants.
In Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940-1945, historian Ronald C. Rosbottom, author of When Paris Went Dark *, examines the often underestimated role played by young people in the French resistance against both the Nazis in Occupied France and the collaborationist policies of the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain in World War II.
Rosbottom begins by describing what it was like to grow up in 1930s France with an emphasis on the long shadow of World War I, the popularity of detective stories and movies, and the rise of leftist politics. When Germany attacked France on May 10, 1940, French adolescents’ lives were disrupted. An astonishing number of them chose to fight back.
Drawing on memoirs, letters and other accounts of young resisters, Rosbottom looks at what led individuals to join the resistance and how inherent qualities of adolescence, such as the urge to challenge authority, contributed to the impulse to resist. He explores the range of resistance activities, from jeering at German-produced newsreels in darkened movie theaters to joining a combat group or helping hide Jewish children. He examines the way gender roles shaped acts of resistance. He discusses the importance of existing youth groups, which provided a foundation for coordinated resistance particularly the Jewish Scout group and communist youth groups. And he makes it clear that the costs were often high.
Sudden Courage is a complicated and inspiring portrait of youthful resistants: their successes, their failures, their occasional inconsistency, and their undoubted courage.
*Another good book
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: An Interview with Dawn Raffel
About a year ago, I posted a review here in the Margins about a fabulous book: The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. (I was not the only person who loved it. NPR named it one of 2018’s Great Reads and it made the New York Times’ “New and Notable” list. ) This week the book was released in paperback, which gave me the opportunity to ask Dawn a few questions about the book, her research, and the story. Fascinating stuff!
Take it away, Dawn
What led you to Dr. Couney’s story?
I had planned to write a novel set at the 1933-34 Chicago World’s fair and was doing archival research when I came across eye-popping photos of Dr. Couney’s incubator sideshow on the midway. When I discovered that Dr. Couney had also been at Coney Island for forty years—that this was far from a one-off—I postponed the novel to get to the bottom of this stranger-than-fiction piece of history.
Dr. Couney repeatedly changed his name and re-wrote his past in some fundamental ways. How do you untangle the history of a man who spent so much time reinventing himself?
That was quite a challenge. It included a deep-dive into vital records, such as probate documents for anyone associated with him. In the archival file containing his daughter’s will, I found a reference to his original name, which was a big break. Tracking down his immigration and naturalization records took almost a year, as those documents are not centrally located, and I was originally looking in the wrong region of the country, in the wrong decade, based on the story he told the press. I pulled out passport applications, ship manifests, business incorporations, birth, marriage, death, and burial records, a bankruptcy record, and transcripts of meetings with concessions committees for various world’s fairs. Finally, I found a descendant. This person would not be quoted but told me knowingly that if I had done my homework and had arrived at certain conclusions, they would not dispute my findings.
You had the opportunity to meet several of Dr. Couney’s “babies”. What was it like to meet them? How did they feel about having their story told after all this time?
This was the best part of the research! I loved meeting the babies, and it was they who kept me going at times when I thought I would never be able to piece together this story. They were thrilled about having this history told, and they all wanted to hear about and meet the others. Several more “Couney babies” came forward after the book was published. The oldest was 98 years old and sharp as a tack. Not one person resented having been placed in a sideshow. They simply felt that Martin Couney had saved their lives, and they thought the sideshow part was kind of cool. I’ve even seen a few newspaper obituaries that have mentioned beginning life in Martin Couney’s sideshow as a mark of distinction.
As someone who trained as an academic historian, chronological order is my default position. You chose a different structure for The Strange Case of Dr. Couney. (Not a complaint. It worked really well.) Why did you make the decision to not use simple chronology to tell your story?
The first draft was in chronological order, and it made for surprisingly flat reading—there was a kind of same-y progression from one exhibition to another. Reluctantly, I decided to move things around, pulling back the curtain on the long years that it took me, and before me, a group of doctors calling themselves the Couney buffs, to get to the bottom of the story. Essentially, there are two narratives lines—one that takes place during Couney’s life and one that follows the investigation after his death. I did it to create more narrative tension, and also to show just how complicated his deceptions were, and how many people were involved in seeking out the truth. I also wanted to introduce the reader to the surviving “babies,” now that they are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. The book went through four drafts, plus a fifth for additional fact-checking, and all I can say is that my editor and agent both found it to be a better read in its final form. I’m glad you think it works!
What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?
I was shocked by the full horror of the American eugenics movement. It’s a shameful chapter of our history that has only recently begun coming more fully to light. Although eugenics did not directly target preemies, they were called “weaklings” in the medical literature, and their prospects were dimmed by a survival-of-the-fittest attitude. Dr. Couney, and later his robustly credentialed friend Dr. Julius Hess, proved again and again that preemies could be saved—their bigger battle was convincing the public, the medical establishment, and the makers of public health policy that they should be saved.
Why is the story of Dr. Couney and his crusade to save babies important now?
It’s easy to look back in time and feel superior to previous generations. But we continue to make decisions about which lives are worth saving and who gets to live. Medical advances from genetic testing and editing to geriatric life-support only make these questions harder. And while we’re at it, if your insurance won’t cover a procedure, there’s no Dr. Couney to come save you. Some people have argued that his sideshows—where patients’ care was paid for by audience admission—were the original medical crowd-funding! More importantly, this story is a reminder to be very mindful of how these “quality-of-life/is it worth it?” decisions are made. It’s also a reminder that advances and innovations may well come from outside “the academy.”
If you want to learn more about Dawn and her work, you can check out her website: https://www.dawnraffel.com/