It wasn't all that long ago that I read Colson Whitehead's excellent The Nickel Boys, a novel inspired by the stories of abuse from men who as children were sent to the real-world Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is also a story of the long reach of trauma that lasts well after the horrific events at the fictional Nickel Academy, and how an investigation headed by a team from a Florida university that uncovers a "secret graveyard" sent one man back to finally confront the past and his pain. As Whitehead wrote in his book, "Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but ... no one believed them until someone else said it." By the time he'd written his book, Dr. Erin Kimmerle, a professor at the University of South Florida and a leading forensic anthropologist had already been working at the Dozier School. She explains in We Carry Their Bones that she had been introduced by a friend to a "local reporter" who had been working on "a series of stories" about "the dark history" of the real-life Dozier School, including "brutal beatings and sadistic guards and mysterious deaths."
As she notes,
"The stories raised questions about a purported cemetery on the school's property, and the reporter had hit a dead end. He had found the families of boys who died in custody and were buried at the school, families that had never found peace, for they'd never been given the opportunity to properly mourn. No one could point to the location of the graves where their brothers and uncles were buried. No state official had stepped up to find those burials."
While there was a small cemetery on the once-segregated black side of the grounds known in the records and among the locals as "Boot Hill," Dr. Kimmerle and her team were not "confident" that this was the only burial site. Permission to explore all of the grounds was denied by the Department of Juvenile Justice (which had claim to the side of the school where white boys had been confined and which did not close until 2011), and in 2012, the reason given was "pending sale of the property and other liability concerns." Kimmerle understood that with the sale of the "220 acres of the boys' school land," the new owners might very well "pave a parking lot on top of the graves of little boys," and that time was of the essence.
We Carry Their Bones details the work of Kimmerle and her team in investigating the area while trying to discover not only an actual number of burials, but also in trying to identify some of the remains so that they could be returned to their families.
There was a surprising amount of resistance to the work, but Kimmerle would not be deterred in her quest, and with the support of the media, of many of the boys' families and of politicians to whom she appealed, her team would go on to not only excavate remains, but also to examine them forensically and to take DNA samples from relatives in her effort to match those remains to names. In the end, she would eventually carry some of the bones of the identified boys to reunite them with their families.
Colson Whitehead's blurb on the front of this book notes that "In a corrupt world, Kimmerle's unflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice," and at every turn it is obvious that her objective was to offer any support and help she could to the families of the Dozier boys who never made it home. As she points out at the end, "the door was closed to us in the search for historic justice by many who had the power to open it," but Kimmerle's determination and that of all of the people involved made it so they would not and did not fail. It is a difficult book to read on several levels but on the other hand, it is a story that seriously needs telling, right now.
5+ stars; oh my god, people, you must read this book.
In September of this year the longlist for the National Book Awards will be released, and I woul5+ stars; oh my god, people, you must read this book.
In September of this year the longlist for the National Book Awards will be released, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this book there. I also wouldn't be at all surprised if it wins -- it more than deserves this accolade and any other that comes its way; it is truly one of the best books I've read in a very long time.
Clint Smith was born and raised in the city of New Orleans, and yet, as he says, he "knew relatively little" about the city's "relationship to the centuries of bondage" rooted in its
"soft earth, in the statues I had walked past daily, the names of the streets I had lived on, the schools I had attended, and the building that had once been nothing more to me than the remnants of colonial architecture."
He quotes historian Walter Johnson as saying that "the whole city is a memorial to slavery," and realizes that "it was all right in front of me, even when I didn't know how to look for it." After the statue of Robert E. Lee was taken down in May, 2017, Smith notes that he had become "obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with," and with "teaching myself all of things I wish someone had taught me long ago." In an interview with Publisher's Weekly, he notes that as he watched the "architecture of [his] childhood coming down," he thought about how
"these statues were not just statues, but memorialized the lives of slave owners and how history was reflected in different places."
He also states in his book that right now America is at an "inflection point,"
"in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today"
but that while some places have "more purposefully ... attempted to tell the truth about their proximity to slavery and its aftermath," there are others which have "more staunchly" refused. From this beginning, as Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning notes in his blurb for How the Word Is Passed, Smith visited several "historical sites that are truth-telling or deceiving visitors about slavery." Each chapter of this book, as Smith describes in his prologue is a
"portrait of a place, but also of the people in that place -- those who live there, work there, and are the descendants of the land and of the families who once lived on it. They are people who have tasked themselves with telling the story of that place outside traditional classrooms and beyond the pages of textbooks."
They are also, as he says, "public historians who carry with them a piece of this country's collective memories," who have "dedicated their lives to sharing this history with others."
I have become an staunch advocate for this book -- it's one everybody should read, not just for the history within, but also for Clint Smith's writing here, which is not only knowledgeable but truly insightful and inspiring, coming straight from his heart and his soul.
so very very very very highly recommended. ...more
"... let our ghosts be real, let our ghosts be true, let our ghosts carry on the integrity of our ancestors."
I loved this book. I seriously do not remember why I bought it in the first place, but some time ago I chose it from my history shelves completely at random and started to read. I was instantly blown away and have recommended this book to any number of people. It's that good. It's that necessary.
In 2012 Professor Tiya Miles had gone to Savannah to work on her novel; after lunch one day, on her way back to her hotel, her attention was drawn to a woman waving at her. The woman asked if she would like to take "a historic tour" of the local Sorrel-Weed house, and Miles was "intrigued" enough by the idea of "being beckoned into history" to buy a ticket. As she was guided through the house, she learned the story of its owner, Francis Sorrel, a "cotton tycoon" of Haitian heritage, passing for white. Sorrel had lost his first wife to typhoid and then married her sister Matilda afterward. As the story goes, Matilda had committed suicide "by jumping off the second-floor balcony," because she had caught her husband and his "mistress," a "slave girl" by the named of Molly, in flagrante. A week later, Molly herself had been found "strangled, dangling from the ceiling rafters of the carriage house," and while Francis moved to a nextdoor townhouse, Molly and Matilda remained as resident ghosts. The author was told that if she wanted to visit the scene of Molly's death, she could come back that evening for the "Haunted Ghost Tour," which she did. In the "stillness of that night" Miles writes that she cannot say if she "felt Molly's presence," but she did feel a "kind of call," to
"search for evidence of Molly's life in the archival rubble of urban slavery, to tell her story and redeem her spirit from the commericialized spectacle of bondage I had witnessed" along with a pledge to "restore her memory and her dignity." Afterwards, going through historical records, she discovered nothing at all to indicate that a woman named Molly had been owned by Sorrel;
as she notes,
"Although many young women like her surely existed in antebellum Savannah and the torturous rice plantations of the surrounding countryside, this Molly was not among them. Someone had concocted her story of racial and sexual exploitation as a titillating tourist attraction."
And now, she writes, she wanted to know why Molly was "invisible in the historical record and hypervisible on the Savanna ghost-tourism scene. " She also was left with a number of questions she felt needed answering:
Why were ghost stories about African American slaves becoming popular in the region at all? And why were so many of these ghosts women? What themes prevailed in slave ghost stories, and what social and cultural meanings can we make of them? What 'product' was being bought and sold, enjoyed and consumed, in the contemporary commerical phenomenon of southern ghost tourism?"
To find the answers, the author took part in several ghost tours in the South, and the book takes us through her experiences and her conclusions based on three of these: the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah, the New Orleans home of Delphine Lalaurie, and The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville.
It is impossible to miss the author's passion for her subject; writing it in the first person not only highlighted that particular aspect of this book, but also made the reading less daunting than a regular textbook and more like I was actually along for the ride as she made her journey. Tales of the Haunted South is not only an important, interdisciplinary study, it should be required reading for our time and absolutely should not be missed.
As someone living in South Florida, about a third of a mile as the crow flies from the coast, reading this book during a very active hurricane season may not have been the brightest idea in terms of mental health. I needn't have worried: it was so well done that I found myself completely engrossed almost immediately. As it turns out, all is not doom and gloom here -- as the dustjacket blurb reveals, it is a melding of
"American history, as it is usually told, with the history of hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation's course."
It is also one of the most compelling and seriously educational nonfiction books of my reading year so far, combining history, personal accounts, the science of meteorology, the growth of forecasting/prediction technologies, politics, and a look at the very real hazards of climate change, which has the potential to bring ever more powerful storms into our lives. It's tough to do a broad history like this one, but Mr. Dolin's done a fine job here and the book makes for great reading even for people like me who aren't particularly gifted in the realm of science. Very highly recommended.
Truly an incredible bit of history and a story well told, very well researched. I will talk more about this book in days to come but for now, at one pTruly an incredible bit of history and a story well told, very well researched. I will talk more about this book in days to come but for now, at one point I was surprised that the enslaved rebels didn't actually send the Dutch colonials packing. Had that happened, these people just might have reached an independence similar to Haiti but much earlier.
I'd first heard of the Green Book while reading Matt Ruff's novel Lovecraft Country a couple of years back. In the novel, set in the 1950s, one of the characters was the editor/publisher of something called The Safe Negro Travel Guide. I remember at the time thinking what a crap thing it was that something like The Safe Negro Travel Guide had to even exist, and wondering if there was some underlying truth to it I looked it up, and sure as s**t there it was, The Negro Motorist Green Book. I was appalled, actually, a) that this was a real thing and b) at my own ignorance -- I had no clue that it existed.
However sad the fact of its existence, it turned out to be, as author Candacy Taylor notes, "an ingenious solution to a horrific problem," representing "the fundamental optimism of a race of people facing tyranny and terrorism."
In Overground Railroad, the author (who has visited over four thousand Green Book sites, and provides some of the photos she's taken in the book) offers an across-the-decades overview of the Green Book, published from 1936-1967, setting her work within both historical and geographical contexts of American history. In doing so, she examines racism and other forces at work in this country that led to the necessity of creating such a guide. Victor Green, who founded the Green Book in 1936, most likely made no money from it, but as the author notes,
"his reward was much more valuable than money, because for every business he listed, he may have saved a life."
As she also states, "real change can come from simple tools that solve a problem," which is what made the Green Book so powerful.
What Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. says about this book on the back-cover blurb sort of sums it all up:
"If 'making a way out of no way' is a theme that runs throughout African-American life, few things encapsulate that theme more powerfully that the Green Book. A symbol of Jim Crow America, it is also a stunning rebuke of it, born out of ingenuity and the relentless quest for freedom."
It is unforgettable, compelling and a book that is not only beyond relevant but also critical reading in our own times, one that should be on the shelves of every library everywhere including the one in your home. It is worthy of winning any book award nomination that may come its way.
more shortly, but I really enjoyed this book, which I read because it's my real-world book group's selection for September. It's sad that it got such more shortly, but I really enjoyed this book, which I read because it's my real-world book group's selection for September. It's sad that it got such low ratings because of people's expectations as a book of true crime, because it's so much more: obsession, passion, history, and an exploration of why people become so consumed by having something that they'll do anything to get it.
As the reviewer of this book for The San Francisco Review of Books wrote, Poisoner in Chief is an "awful story, told fast and well." I couldn't have said it better myself.
According to author Stephen Kinzer, the early years of the 1950s were a "fearful time for Americans," citing among other things the "ugly stalemate" of the Korean War and Senator McCarthy's warnings that "Communists had infiltrated the State Department." The success of the Soviets' first nuclear weapons test led to the fear of being "attacked at any moment," and we also learned that the Communists "had found ways of controlling people's minds." Indeed, the term "brain-washing" was introduced to Americans in 1950; Americans were urged to "prepare for psychological warfare" against "psychic attacks" from the Chinese.
There was no real evidence that any of this was actually true; nevertheless Allen Dulles along with "other senior officers" of the CIA feared that "they were losing a decisive race." As Richard Helms would put it many years afterward, they believed that they couldn't afford to "lag behind the Russians or the Chinese" in this area. The CIA became convinced that
"there is a way to control the human mind, and if it can be found, the prize will be nothing less than global mastery."
In a memo written in 1951, CIA officers posed a list of several questions along the lines of "Can we 'alter' a person's personality?" or "How can [drugs] be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item..." , the answers to which, they decided, would be "of incredible value to this agency." Realizing that their current Project Bluebird needed "an infusion of expertise and vision" from outside of the agency, Dulles and his officers decided to bring in a chemist
"with the drive to pursue forbidden knowledge, a character steely enough to direct experiments that might challenge the conscience of other scientists, and a willingness to ignore legal niceties in the service of of national security."
Enter Sidney Gottlieb.
Poisoner in Chief is not at all easy to read on a human level -- it's shocking, it's graphic, and even worse, it's frightening to think that all of what the author details over the course of this book was sanctioned and done in the name of national security and the defense of freedom. It also makes you wonder if anyone involved ever had the least qualms of conscience. "Awful" this story may be, but at the same time, it's compelling enough that you absolutely cannot stop turning pages.
I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hence a big fat five stars, and were there more I would give those as well. It is beyond excellent, poignant, funny at times but always very down to earth and real; it is a book that deserves any and all awards that may come its way in the future. The Yellow House is genuinely that good.
I'm going with 4.5 here -- although I was worried about it since I haven't been impressed with a number of books on the topic, it turned out to be a gI'm going with 4.5 here -- although I was worried about it since I haven't been impressed with a number of books on the topic, it turned out to be a good one.
In The Trial of Lizzie Borden, just so we're clear, the author does not endeavour to solve the mystery of who killed Abby and Andrew Borden, but rather to peel away the sort of mythical elements of this story and get down to realities of the crimes, the investigation, the trial and its aftermath. At the same time, in presenting her account, she also examines the social and cultural factors of this time period, as the dustjacket reveals, to offer "a window into America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and the most troubling social anxieties." By the time I turned the last page, it seemed to me that the trial and the media coverage turned less on guilt or innocence and more on whether or not someone in Lizzie's respectable position could have possibly done such a horrific thing. As her attorney would later say as part of his closing arguments,
"It is not impossible that a good person may go wrong ... but our human experience teaches us that if a daughter grows up in one of our homes to be 32 years old, educated in our schools, walking in our streets, associating with the best people and devoted to the service of God and man ... it is not within human experience to find her suddenly come out into the rankest and baldest murderess."
Robertson's book plays out the story of the case in three parts -- the murder, the trial, and the verdict. Part two is my favorite and the longest and most detailed of the three, covering the trial. It is, in my opinion, the best and most interesting part of the book, because not only do we get a look at the actual court proceedings, in which we come to realize exactly what a circumstantial case it actually was, but even more fascinating to me was Ms. Robertson's presentation of the press coverage of the time. Journalists not only sat in court each day to record the events of the trial and Lizzie herself as she sat in the dock, but went on to provide speculation and opinion to its readers, in some cases making it very clear which side they were taking, rather than offering a more objective stance. Biased media in the 1890s? You bet.
She goes on to say, in getting to the heart of her argument here, that
"Even as the murders themselves seemed summoned from a mythic reservoir of human darkness, the trial of the alleged perpetrator occurred in a specific time and place: America in the Gilded Age, its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling anxieties inscribed in every moment of the legal process. Lizzie Borden was a devout young woman 'of good family' -- a lady -- and an accused axe-wielding patricide. It should not have been possible."
According to the "science" of the day, no one would have been surprised had the murderer turned out to be either someone whose "criminality" would have shown in features marking their ethnicity or class. It might have also been less sensational and more acceptable had the perpetrator turned out have been some strange man who just happened to be on hand to commit these terrible murders. But a woman of Lizzie's station hacking her parents to death so brutally seems to have been a scenario that would have, when all was said and done, constituted some sort of threat to the existing order of Fall River in that particular place at that particular time.
I found this a book very much worth reading for anyone who may have an interest in this case. Aside from placing this case in its particular social/historical context, the author seems to adhere closely to fact, doesn't go off on any tangents or theories that weren't expressed at the time, and keeps the narrative interesting enough for rapid page turning. I'm also utterly impressed at the scope of her research. I have read enough reader reviews to know that not everyone agrees with me, but aside from the weird word choice of "mansplaining," I have little to complain about. Very nicely done....more
When I think of all of the time that Mr. Woodman put into his research, let alone writing it up here in a coherent fashion, I'm completely awestruck. It took ten years for this man to research his book and another five to put it all together, and what emerges are a number of accounts offered by a number of different witnesses, painstakingly and thoroughly examined by the author.
This is the second edition of this book, originally finished in 1988 and published in 1991. In the preface to this second edition (2015), the author notes that it "could not have come at a more appropriate time," citing the 2014 discovery of Franklin's HMS Erebus, a find that has "widely been seen as validation of oral history," in "the area uniformly indicated by Inuit testimony." Woodman's book not only, as the back-cover blurb says, stands as a challenge to "standard interpretations and offered a new and compelling alternative" but as he states in the preface, questions "the prevalent dismissal of non-documentary sources." His assumption throughout his research was that "all Inuit stories concerning white men should have a discoverable factual basis," even though many historians had often completely ignored these oral traditions
"because of the inherent difficulties of translation and analysis. When historians did consult the oral record, they often selectively used tales that supported their own preconceptions or the physical evidence, while ignoring the other tales as impossibly vague or unreliable."
It is important to realize that the author doesn't claim to have definitive answers here, since as he says, the Franklin mystery is a "puzzle without the prospect of complete solution," but he does point out in the preface that the 2014 discovery of the Erebus "validates the long-known Inuit traditions" that he explores so thoroughly in this book. His tremendous research also allowed him to
"discover a scenario which allowed use of all of the native recollections, solved some troubling discrepancies in the physical evidence, and led to some significant new conclusions as to the fate of the beleaguered sailors."
While I'm just a very casual armchair explorer, Unravelling the Franklin Mysteryi s probably going to become known as one of the most significant works about the expedition, not just for the author's theories but mainly because of its focus on illuminating the importance of Inuit oral tradition. At the same time, it can be a difficult and most challenging book to read, since it often gets a bit confusing with threads of one story that are picked up in later chapters as he tries to connect dots between accounts, often causing me to have to go back and reread what was said earlier. The other thing I wasn't in love with were the maps in this book. I had several tablet windows open off and on while I read, each with a map so that I could follow the known progress of the expedition, the routes of previous polar expeditions, more specific maps of both coasts of King William Island and then, of course, the western side of the Adelaide Peninsula where the author posited that one of the ships had finally come to rest. Having said all that, I was immediately engrossed and I probably can't even look at another book about the Franklin Expedition for a while, because this one is so good.
Very highly recommended to anyone even remotely interested in the subject....more
Somebody made an error -- this book was not published in 1696, but rather 1969, which obviously makes it a dated work (although less so than if publisSomebody made an error -- this book was not published in 1696, but rather 1969, which obviously makes it a dated work (although less so than if published in 1696!!). But that should not detract any potential readers, since there is still a wealth of information in this book (which is like a survey textbook of the history of the area) that can be of interest as a starting point for anyone even remotely interested in the Amazon. I personally found it fascinating, and as a result have put even more books on my Amazon-history wishlist.
As much as I enjoyed this book, it needs a home. If you're in the US and you want it, it's yours and I'll pay postage. Just let me know.
http://www.noAs much as I enjoyed this book, it needs a home. If you're in the US and you want it, it's yours and I'll pay postage. Just let me know.
I am fascinated by mystery stories, and they don't have to be fictional to capture my interest. This goes back to my childhood when I would read anything and everything, fiction and nonfiction alike. Fictional mysteries are the heart and soul of my reading life, but "real" mysteries are equally as fascinating-- I'm talking about the kind of mysteries that may not be answered in my lifetime but are still embedded somewhere in my brain. For me, the fate of the "lost colony" of Roanoke was another such real mystery stemming from childhood, and I joined the ranks of lost colony obsessives. But while I may be obsessed, I'm still picky about what I read and even more so about what I think is plausible, so when I saw that Andrew Lawler (an author I trust whose work I've read many times in The Smithsonian) had published a book about it, I couldn't push that buy button quickly enough. It is an informative, thought provoking and downright captivating book that any Roanoke obsessive must read, unless, of course, you're of the alien abduction or yes, even zombie crowd who thrive on more out-there sort of theories.
At one point I had to laugh when the author describes how his work had gone "beyond professional diligence and into very obsession" that he'd seen in others. As he says,
"The real power exerted by the lost Colonists was not in archives or archaeological trenches but in the stories they spawned,"
so there will continue to be people who, despite the facts presented here, will continue to spin their own ideas or who will further the myths behind one of the most intriguing mysteries in our history.
Bottom line: it's fascinating stuff and Lawler is the right person to put it all together. Very highly recommended....more
Much more to come about this book when I have several free moments. For now, unlike many people, I didn't find this book boring at all. Much more to come about this book when I have several free moments. For now, unlike many people, I didn't find this book boring at all. ...more
[My many thanks to the publisher and to the powers that be at LibraryThing for my copy.]
In the introduction to this book, the author says that
"This is an atlas of the world -- not as it ever existed, but as it was thought to be. The countries, islands, cities, mountains, rivers, continents and races collected in this book are all entirely fictitious; and yet each was for a time -- sometimes for centuries -- real. How? Because they existed on maps."
The Phantom Atlas is a book that is not only filled with photos of "the greatest cartographic phantoms ever to haunt the maps of history," but also with a fair bit of the history of these "phantoms" that reveals quite a lot about their respective provenances and most especially the influence that mapping them would come to have on future adventurers and explorers.
The book goes on to explore why these nonexistent places began to be mapped in the first place, incorporating elements of mythology, religion, and superstition, but also physical phenomena such as the Fata Morgana. Then there are a few stories of the fraudsters who felt no compunction about inventing islands or countries either for fame or for cash, as in the example of "Sir" Gregor MacGregor, who set up a scheme involving land ownership in the Territory of Poyais, which appeared on an 1822 map of central America's Mosquitia region.
The Phantom Atlas is so very nicely done and I'm not simply referring to its amazing, giftworthy quality. It is perfect for people who appreciate the artistic quality of the maps that the author's used here and even more so for people like me who enjoy the history behind them. Some of these accounts are so strange that they could seriously be the basis of pulp fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction or even horror stories. The dustjacket blurb refers to this book a "brilliant collection," and I couldn't agree more.
A series of poison pen letters being circulated in a small English village is the subject of Agatha Christie's 1942 novel The Moving Finger, yet there are a number of other books in which they appear as well. Dorothy Sayers, Edmund Crispin, and John Dickson Carr spring to mind immediately as just a few examples; in the hands of these authors murder generally followed as a result. In The Littlehampton Libels there are no killings, but the poison pen letters circulating in the 1920s within Littlehampton, a "middling town" along the Sussex coast (and beyond), eventually merited police investigations, resulted in four different trials, widespread news coverage, imprisonment, and, as the title reveals, "a miscarriage of justice." The stories of the two women involved, according to the author, is a
"kind of English story told over and over in fiction and film but rarely in works of history..."
And it all began with "a quarrel between neighbors."
In this truly splendid work of microhistory, written in a way I personally believe the best histories should be written, the author traces not only the events in this case, but uses his investigation to also examine how, as he says, these
"outlandish insults form part of a larger story of individuality and originality in unexpected places."
There's much, much more of course as you can discover at my reading journal, but the long and short of it is that while this book is likely not going to appeal to a wide audience, it certainly gives credence to the idea that quite often truth is stranger than fiction. Never a dull moment here, I knew it was going to be something right up my alley when I first read about it and I don't regret forking over more than I generally pay for a book to read it. Very highly recommended....more
Trust me, this isn't a book someone should pick up as a casual read -- it's not a history for the masses sort of thing at all, but rather a focused acTrust me, this isn't a book someone should pick up as a casual read -- it's not a history for the masses sort of thing at all, but rather a focused academic study that explores "the history of the insanity defense in the English courtroom from the middle of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century," and the "consequences of the diagnosis for the emerging field of forensic psychiatry." It's fascinating, actually and the kind of history I love to lose myself in.
*update: Some lucky person (in the US) can have my newly-arrived extra copy, which was book #1 from my NYRB subscription that I just started. Just be *update: Some lucky person (in the US) can have my newly-arrived extra copy, which was book #1 from my NYRB subscription that I just started. Just be first to leave a comment and it's yours.
NYRB Classics has delivered what I think is one of its best offerings yet with this book, which, in a word, is outstanding. It is also one of the best books I've read so far this year, and I put it down only when necessary, each time grudgingly so.
On January 12, 1761, the front page of the Copenhagen Post relayed the news that the King of Denmark, who "strives indefatigably for the furtherance of knowledge and of science and for the greater glory of his people," had "dispatched a group of scholars" on a rather extraordinary mission. They were to
"travel by by way of the Mediterranean to Constantinople, and thence through Egypt to Arabia Felix, and subsequently return by way of Syria to Europe; they will on all occasions seek to make new discoveries and observations for the benefit of scholarship, and will also collect and dispatch hither valuable Oriental manuscripts, together with other specimens and rarities of the East."
This undertaking was the first of its kind for the Kingdom of Denmark; it was also of great interest to Europe as a whole since this was to be a journey into Arabia Felix, or what is now known as Yemen, which at the time was "a corner of the world unknown to Europeans."
As Colin Dwyer notes in his review at NPR, this expedition was "King Frederick V's chance to make his own splash in the era of the Enlightenment," drawing on not only this period's focus on science, but also on "the enthusiasm for foreign and particularly Oriental lands."
What the press didn't know was that this small group had already been "riven by bitter dissension" even as they had been rowed out of Copenhagen a week earlier; later on, this discord among these people would come to a head when they realized that one of their number had purchased arsenic, adding fear and distrust to the already volatile mix. That story alone makes for compelling reading, but there's so much more to keep readers turning pages. Arabia Felix follows this remarkable expedition from its origins through its end in 1767, with the return to Denmark of only one survivor who, as the back-cover blurb notes, found himself "forgotten and all the specimens that had been sent back ruined by neglect."
While I won't go into any detail here, Arabia Felix turned out to be a gripping read, full of adventure, tragedy, a number of nail-biting moments, and even humor. The author also reveals how many of the discoveries made on this expedition would come to have great significance for scholars in several fields to this day -- as just one example, the inscriptions painstakingly copied by Carsten Niebuhr at Persepolis were so well done that later scholars built from them, eventually solving the "mystery of the cuneiform script." Speaking of Niebuhr, his amazing story alone is well worth the price of this book, not to mention his often-comical adventures with his trusty astrolabe.
I can't begin to express how much I loved this book. I bought it looking forward to the story of the expedition, but I was not expecting what I found here. Arabia Felix is a very human story in which Hansen gives the men their due, bringing each of these people vividly to life both individually and collectively in terms of the group's dynamic. But it's not just that. Working with a variety of sources, the author manages to bring everything to life -- the successes, failures, miscommunications, misunderstandings, mistakes, and ultimately, what these people sacrificed in the long run to complete their given mission. The tragedy of their stories having been long forgotten is beyond rectified here, and delightedly so.
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