Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony is a two-part PBS miniseries that does a great job of contrasting Anthony’s pragmatism with Stanton’s radical idealism, while also highlighting their lasting friendship and the salient points of the larger suffrage movement.
Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone, by John Kobler, is one of my new favorite books. Kobler goes on wild, fascinating tangents about all the minor characters in 1920s gangland, and the rippling coincidences that tie them back to Capone himself.
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed, is not as anticapitalist as the title makes it sound. Ahamed is an unapologetic Keynesian in his analysis of what caused the Great Depression, and he makes a damn good case for his interpretation. The little anecdotes about the Central Bankers are fascinating too. I wish I’d been able to sneak some into this book.
At Issue in History: Japanese American Internment Camps, edited by William Dudley, is how I believe all history should be taught. It’s a well-curated collection of primary and secondary sources on the issue, with all viewpoints carefully represented. Still, it’s hard not to come out of it feeling like the United States goofed.
The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age, by R. Hal Williams, Jonathan F. Fanton, and Michael F. Stoff, takes the collection-of-sources angle even farther by telling the whole story of the atom bomb through reproductions of official top-secret documents. It’s dense as hell, but it’s also really funny to see Truman being totally passive-aggressive to the secretary of war, and stuff like that.
Martin Luther King, by Godfrey Hodgson, was actually pretty hard to read. What’s cool about it is that Hodgson was a reporter at the time of the civil rights movement, so he got to interview King and all that. What’s bad about it is that the book isn’t very well edited. The chronology is hard to follow, and typos abound.
Conversations with Marilyn, by William J. Weatherby, is a touching story that offers some good insight into Monroe, but it definitely seems like Weatherby played up his connection with her for the sake of publicity. Dude saw her, what, four times?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cory O’Brien is a storyteller by trade, but has also worked as a dishwasher, a plumber’s apprentice, a political canvasser, and a street juggler. He lives in Chicago, where he fills his time by doing twenty-four-hour plays and working in a woodshop on Tuesdays. He has an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Birds terrify him more than anything. They’re highly mobile sociopaths with beady eyes and hollow bones, come on.
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