Winston Churchill, famously a gregarious figure, has been fairly easy for biographers to figure out — he freely voiced his opinions and never seemed to hold anything back in word or deed. His truly voluminous writing output attests to that and the challenge has generally been more about narrowing down his story. I’ve read a bunch of books about Britain’s best-known leader and feel like I know the guy pretty well.

Dwight Eisenhower, on the other hand, has long been known as one of the more difficult world leaders to get a handle on. Biographers still can’t seem to nail down the real Ike. He was light-hearted at times, but carried huge burdens and could easily fly into a rage; he played the part of a modest Midwesterner, but enjoyed the finer things of East Coast living; he appeared to be a laissez-faire leader in both WWII and as president, but managed to pull strings and seemingly always come out on top. For all that I’ve read about him, Eisenhower is still a bit of a puzzle to me.

Author Jonathan W. Jordan managed to compellingly write about both of these titanic 20th century figures in the same book, using their professional and personal relationship as the backbone for Ike and Winston: World War, Cold War, and an Extraordinary Friendship.

A Friendship Forged in War

At the start of their decades-long relationship, Churchill was at the pinnacle of his power and Eisenhower was a somewhat lowly desk jockey in D.C., angling for more influence as World War II broke out. Ike, with a knack for accomplishing large-scale administrative tasks, worked his way up the ranks and ended up leading America’s armed forces in Europe, which included the game-changing D-Day landings in the summer of 1944.

In those fraught years, Churchill (who doubled as War Minister) and Eisenhower went toe to toe in deciding the best course of action for overcoming Hitler’s forces, with each man taking turns winning these debates. In the midst of that, they recognized each other’s brilliance and came to see their sparring matches mostly as friendly bouts rather than deal-breaking differences.

Once the war was over, Churchill was kicked out office — he was viewed as a wartime leader — and Eisenhower wandered for a bit, both men unsure of the future but not quite ready to hang things up forever.

The Relationship Turns Political — And Then Personal

Then fate intervened once more and brought the men together right as Churchill was again elected as Prime Minister in 1951 and Ike was elected as president in 1952. The two men were still on the same side, but their relationship became more political, almost transactional, than it was before. And the U.S. was now the undisputed world power rather than Great Britain.

Their relationship didn’t necessarily turn sour, but it also wasn’t exactly rosy in this period. Churchill and Ike came to loggerheads about how to handle Russia, nukes, and the emerging world order — with Ike most often winning those particular battles.

What ultimately emerged though, especially after both men were out of power, was a genuine friendship and fondness for each other. They shared experiences that only they — in the entire world — could understand. For all the “odd couple” energy you’d expect out of this relationship, the two men fit together quite well on the world stage. Churchill preferred being front and center, whereas Ike liked to work his magic in the background. And both were curmudgeonly, but in different ways, while also maintaining their earnest humanity and lightheartedness.

Why I Loved This Book

Jonathan Jordan managed to handle these outsized personalities with a deft touch, giving each character their proper stage time. I actually felt like I came to know Eisenhower a bit better than I ever have before, though that may admittedly be due to simply having a bit more to work with each time I read about him.

Every author of history and biography — especially when it comes to these particular figures — must weave together small details about work habits and personal idiosyncrasies with large-scale, world-changing strategic ideas. Over the course of ~500 pages, Jordan did that remarkably well; the pacing was just right and I never felt like it was a chore to keep the pages turning.

I ultimately came away from Ike and Winston with more respect for both Churchill and Eisenhower, and a much richer understanding of how their relationship forged the successes of WWII as well as the building of the post-WWII world. As always, though, I wasn’t entirely satisfied — no matter how much I read about these two, I always want to dive into more.

Plus, it’s always nice to read about dudes making friends, even when those dudes are two of the most recognizable names in history.

If you’re a fan of that intersection between World War II, the Cold War, and geopolitical statecraft, this is a must-read.

Get the book

Thanks so much for reading. Be good to each other.

-Jeremy

Katherine Grandjean is a historian of early America, particularly focusing on colonialism, violence, the environment, and the American Revolution. Her newest book, Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution, was published in June. It tells the fascinating (and incomplete) story of America’s first serial killers: the infamous Harp brothers.

If you missed my review, check it out now:

I was honored to be able to interview Katherine about her new book and why she finds the Revolutionary Era so appealing.

1. What piqued your interest in this time period and started you down the path as an historian of Early America?

I knew, very young, I wanted to be a writer. But it wasn’t until college that I really thought about writing history. As a kid, I wrote fiction and poetry. But when I was about nineteen, I ended up in a class on colonial American history, plunged into a strange world of county court records and midwives’ depositions and paternity lawsuits. There is something so intimate about reading historical documents sometimes; it’s as if you can hear what people were saying three hundred years ago. It’s like waking the dead.

Early America was particularly alluring to me because it is, on the one hand, very foreign. To study it is to travel to a wildly different world. And yet, it is also an origins story that explains much about how we live now. I like that paradox.

2. What about this crime in particular? How did you decide to tackle a case that you knew would lead to a lot of question marks and dead ends?

The question marks were part of the seduction, to be honest. One of the reasons I found the Harps’ story so irresistible was the mystery at the heart of it: Why did they commit all these murders? When I came across this case, several years ago, I had never heard of the Harps. But, like any historian, I immediately wanted to start diagnosing the causes, the things that went into the making of this episode. I found the impulse to try to solve the puzzle nearly unshakeable.

Dead ends are a regular part of historical research. There are always gaps in what can be known. The dead don’t always leave behind the kind of evidence we’d like. So that isn’t an unfamiliar feeling to me. And it’s doubly true, I think, when you’re investigating murder. Are there slam-dunk cases? Yes. But a lot of them are more cloudy and more circumstantial, and killers don’t usually give a fully satisfying explanation of their motives. So, particularly in a two hundred year-old case, I knew I wasn’t going to have the full picture.

But I still felt, early on, that there were new things to say about this story. And I felt that, where there were holes in the evidence, I could turn the lens outward to let the reader see more of the world around the Harps.

I mean, the honest truth is that I just couldn’t resist it, dead ends or not. The story just hooked me.

3. It was pretty easy to get away with violent crimes back then. Are modern forensics able to shed light on some of these things that went decades and centuries without being solved?

That is such an interesting thought! Probably not, in the Harps’ case. Hardly any physical evidence survives. Believe me, I had to comb through countless archives just to find the surviving documents that shine a light on their lives. But yes, in other cases, where bones and physical remnants persist, it is possible to read things in them that those in the eighteenth-century couldn’t have seen. Here’s a dark example of that: For years and years, historians debated whether or not there had been actual cannibalism at the Jamestown colony, as several records suggested. Then, more recently, archaeologists found a skeleton at the site which seemed to prove pretty convincingly that there was. So maybe we’re headed toward more of that kind of analysis.

4. How can this book and story speak to us today? Obviously, violent criminals and serial killers still exist. It seems, perhaps, that there’s something to be said for trying to dig into motivations and root causes rather than just writing crimes off as “bloodlust.” It’s rarely that simple. 

Yes, it is rarely that simple. This is what people said, for generations, about the Harps: they were just bloodthirsty. Or they were monsters. But think about what happens when you call someone a “monster.” That’s the end of the story. That’s all you need to know. It actually forecloses on the possibility of understanding, in any deeper way, the person’s actions. Their motivations, their experiences, the societal pressures and the historical forces at play—all of that simply disappears from the conversation.

I think this story is profoundly relevant for modern Americans: It’s a tale about violent young men, taking out their rage on society. On innocent fellow citizens. Obviously, that is an affliction we’re still facing, even now. So maybe it’s helpful to try to understand some of its root causes…and its history.

5. Do you have any personal favorite Early America books? 

Of course! So many. There are the classics: Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a sweeping saga of early Virginia, is just a model of narrative history. Laurel Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale—smart, beautifully written, a master class in how you can summon a whole world out of one woman’s diary. Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution—he was a giant, and that book is the superstructure for a lot of my thinking about the Revolutionary era and its meanings.

Then there are some that really shifted my thinking: William Cronon’s Changes in the Land falls into that category. (It’s a classic study of how the environment changed as the English colonized the northeast.) Others I just have deep affection for, like Paul E. Johnson’s Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, about a daredevil who became famous for jumping off of waterfalls in the early nineteenth century.

Is that enough shout-outs? I could go on…

6. Do you have a Mt. Rushmore of history books or authors?

This is a very hard question. Here’s the thing that jumps to mind: My favorite books aren’t histories, actually. The authors I most revere are more literary. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Herman Melville. Margaret Atwood. Twain. If you take some of their sensibilities, and mix in a little bit of Erik Larson or Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, you’ll get a sense of my influences.

Subscribe now

It’s time, once again, to chat about our favorite reads of the previous month.

JEREMY: I read a bunch of great books in August and had a particularly hard time narrowing down the field — especially on the non-fiction side. After some hemming and hawing, my pick is Against All Odds by Alex Kershaw. You’ll hear more soon about this pare-turning WWII history.

I didn’t read many novels this month, but Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent was a pretty easy pick. I’m pretty much the last person to read it, but it deserves all the praise it’s gotten. I’m always nervous when a book gets hyped this much, but it was a great read all around. Complex characters, believable story, excellent writing, and a well-done structure.

JANE: The Poppy Fields by Nikki Erlick was Jane’s pick for the month. We both enjoyed Erlick’s debut hit, The Measure, so it was nice to see the author escape the dreaded sophomore slump. This one is about the journeys we take with grief, but Jane clarified that it’s not a sad book (like you might expect with that description).

GRAHAM (11 years old) and WILLA (8 years old): For the first time ever, the two oldest kiddos have the same pick for their monthly favorite. I don’t know how they found it, but the comic series Lumberjanes has been a hit. It’s about a group of friends in a Girl Scout-like group who fight monsters and supernatural mysteries at summer camp. Sounds fun.

BO (5.5 years old): Instead of getting his own books read to him at night, Bo likes to just tag along with what I’m reading to Willa. Just as she did last month, he’s really into Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series. This month we’re into volume two, Wayside School is Falling Down. It’s a delight for me too1

Your turn! What was your favorite August read?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

James M. Scott is a historian of World War II’s Pacific Theater. His new book, Empire of Ashes, tells the story of Truman’s decision to use nuclear bombs, how Japan’s leadership responded, and what the experience was like on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book is the third book in Scott’s unofficial trilogy of stories about U.S. bombing raids in Japan.

If you missed my review of this excellent series of books, check it out now:

I was honored to be able to interview James about his books and how he arrived at being a WWII historian.

1. You’re a historian of WWII’s Pacific theater. When you started writing about Doolittle’s raid, did you imagine it turning into a trilogy of books about America’s air raids on Japan?

Never! I originally envisioned my book on the Doolittle Raid, Target Tokyo, as a one off, so to speak. It was a great story that I had long been interested in, and I felt I could add to our understanding of it. In fact, the genesis for Black Snow, which was the follow up to Target Tokyo, grew out of a previous book I had written, The War Below, which examined America’s submarine campaign in the Pacific.

In that case, several of the submariners I researched and wrote about ended up in a Tokyo area prison camp when American B-29s flew the devastating March 9, 1945 fire raid against the Japanese capital. That raid, which was the focus of Black Snow, was just a few pages in The War Below, but the story really haunted me. Soon after I finished the Doolittle book, I decided to return to the fire raid.

Similarly, Empire of Ashes grew out of Black Snow. While I was in Japan conducting research on the fire raids, I spent time in Hiroshima interviewing survivors and gathering accounts from the museum. When I wrote my first draft of Black Snow, I added a lot of that material into the manuscript.

My editor read the first draft of the book and very wisely noted that the material did not belong. Hiroshima, he told me, was a different book. As a result, we cut out a lot of that material and kept the focus of Black Snow on the fire raids.

When I wrapped up Black Snow, I had all this great material and a real interest to dig deeper. I went back to Japan, conducted research in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and turned my focus not just on the atomic missions, but on the politics of war termination, both in the United States and Japan.

2. Throughout the three books, readers are introduced to a host of memorable characters: Doolittle, Emperor Hirohito, Admiral Yamamoto, General LeMay, Truman, Leslie Groves, Paul Tibbets, and many more. Who has stuck with you or surprised you the most?

Wow, that’s a really hard question. That’s like asking which of your children you like best.

Doolittle is such an amazing figure, not just for his wartime exploits, but his overall contributions to aviation. I have always thought at some point it would be great to revisit him in a biography.

LeMay and Groves are two of the most fascinating, important, and overlooked individuals of the war. In a conflict filled with large personalities — leaders like Douglas MacArthur and Bull Halsey — LeMay and Groves are often overshadowed. But the pioneering work they did truly helped end the war. I also found them to be very similar individuals. Both were socially awkward, difficult to work for, but had incredible drive and tenacity.

In short, they were the right people in the right place at the right time.

On a similar note, so, too, were Truman and Emperor Hirohito.

Even though both came from completely opposite backgrounds — one a former farmer, the other a reclusive monarch — both were in many ways marginalized figures who had to rise to the occasion and figure out how to bring an end to the war before it devolved into a far larger catastrophe.

3. In Empire of Ashes, you wrote that the decision to utilize nuclear bombs is perhaps the most debated question of WWII. What prompted you, then, to write this book? Were there big questions that you felt were still unanswered?

It’s one of those things that you never really realize exactly what you have gotten yourself into … until you are in it….

Truthfully, I never set out to answer that question specifically.

Truman faced what is likely the most consequential decision ever made by a world leader — to hurry up and end the war, should he order the annihilation of two cities, an order that would kill or wound hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children? That is just a mind-blowing proposition for any leader to have to face.

What I wanted to do was back up and look at how we ended up at that perilous point — and what were the outcomes of the decision. And I wanted to do it in an up-close and personal way. I wanted to show readers step-by-step how that process unfolded.

My hope, too, is by telling the story in detail from both the American and Japanese perspectives that readers will grapple with that decision and the outcome themselves.

4. Beyond being an incredibly important slice of history, how do you think this story and subject matter can still speak to us? What does it have to say to modern readers?

Truman’s decision has hung over us all for the last eight decades — and could not be more relevant today. The threat of nuclear weapons by Russia has served as the backdrop for the war in the Ukraine.

The same is true with Iran, where America’s efforts have been designed ostensibly to prevent that nation from obtaining nuclear weapons.

These are big debates and difficult decisions, and I hope readers of Empire of Ashes will come away with a better understanding of what it was like in 1945 — and what that means for today.

5. It won’t be long before we don’t have any WWII veterans with us anymore. How do you think younger generations can keep the memory and lessons of WWII alive?

Buy my books! Just kidding. But you are correct in that we are losing that generation each day, and with them go so many of these incredible stories.

Personally, I find World War II immensely fascinating — the size, scope and scale of the conflict — and just what it took for this nation to win. The mobilization. The money. The logistics. Sixteen million men and women served in uniform. At its height, this nation spent 96 cents of every federal dollar on the war or the debt service. Those numbers are just astounding.

And I do think it’s easy to lose sight of that in today’s day and age where we are accustomed to being a powerful nation. Plus, with social media, streaming services, the Internet, cell phones, etc., we have a wealth of distractions to contend with as well. Along with that we are seeing a decline in young people studying history.

The key, I hope, is that in telling these stories, and in doing so in an engaging manner, historians can hopefully light a spark in some, who like me, will find these stories interesting and want to build on them.

6. What piqued your interest and got you started down that path as a historian?

I landed where I am today purely by chance.

My first job after college was as a public school teacher in rural Japan. This was back in 1997; and it’s important to add that nothing in my education background pointed to me ending up in Japan. After all, I was a Spanish and English major in school. I saw Japan as a one-year opportunity to learn about the country and figure out what I wanted to do in life.

In the 1990s, there were still a lot of veterans around in Japan and people who survived the war. I taught an evening conversation English class at my town’s community center, where some of my students told me stories of surviving the fire raids. Of course, at that time, I knew almost nothing about the raids.

It was during that year, too, that I made my first trip to Hiroshima, where I toured the museum. About two weeks after that visit, I flew to Hawaii for my spring break to see my parents. While there, we visited Pearl Harbor, which like Hiroshima, I found fascinating and powerful.

So, for me, in the span of just a couple of weeks, I literally witnessed the bookends of America’s experience in World War II.

And something clicked.

I started reading all the books that I could get my hands on about the war — but for me, my interest has always been the war in the Pacific. I spent a few years after my time in Japan working as a newspaper reporter before I decided to go back to school when I was around thirty. It was there as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where I began researching and writing my first book.

7. Do you have a Mt. Rushmore of history books or authors?

Wow, this is a tough one, because truthfully there are so many great books and great authors, many of whom are my friends. What I will say is that I prefer narrative nonfiction writers over academics. I enjoy stories.

And history doesn’t have to be boring.

I always say that the best stories are ordinary people in extraordinary situations. People like Harry Truman, a former farmer with no college education, who winds up one day as president … and at a critical moment in our nation’s history… faced with a monumental decision no world leader has ever had to confront…

Now that’s a story I would like to read!

Subscribe now

While reading Katherine Grandjean’s excellent new book, Kingdom of Devils, I had a realization: the vast majority of reading I’ve done about America’s Revolutionary Era revolves around the war itself and the leaders who came to define the nascent nation — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton are among the most famous names in world history, after all.

But, of course, even in the midst of revolutionary times, other noteworthy things happen.

Over the course of 1-2 years in the late 1790s, just as the nation was in the middle of figuring itself out, Wiley and Micajah Harp went on a killing spree, murdering dozens of innocent people. The brothers were deeply impacted — and left behind — by the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. In the midst of great change and upheaval, it’s inevitable that some folks get left behind. For the Harps, that change led to a life of violent crime.

These brothers are not unknown to true crime aficionados, but they were totally new to me. They were, in fact, America’s first documented serial killers and remain among the most prolific in our nation’s history. Let’s explore.

Subscribe now

America’s First Serial Killers

“The Revolution did not always look like redcoats marching in lockstep on the mucky roads outside of Boston or like minutemen massing on Lexington Green.”

With 250 years in the rearview mirror, it’s easy for us moderns to forget the idea that the Revolutionary War was actually a civil war. When the Americans prevailed, it was a cultural and political tide shift unlike any these people had been through before. There were new laws, currency, customs, and entire ideologies.

It was a “deeply destabilizing” time period of land grabs, fraud, and violent interactions between varying groups of people.

Enter the Harp brothers of Appalachia.

Subject to both new taxes and (likely) some fraud, their precious land ended up no longer in their hands. They didn’t take kindly to that and instead got in the business of killing. And boy did the Harp brothers do a lot of killing — perhaps upwards of a three dozen victims, with not much of a real pattern other than their victims being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Many historians and true crime nuts have simply concluded that the Harps were full of an unquenchable bloodlust. But Grandjean makes the compelling case that they were actually responding to a unique cultural unmooring; they couldn’t adjust to this new world being unveiled and took their anger out on innocent men, women, and children.

Making the tale even more interesting was reading about how a case like this was handled back then. There was no central police or investigative institution; justice generally came in the form of self-organized posses. And forensic science was non-existent, making it impossible to determine the kinds of details that modern detectives rely on. It made for a dramatic and somewhat mysterious ending — one that I won’t give away here.

Conveying the Unknowable

Throughout the narrative, Grandjean is very upfront about the dates and details that aren’t totally verifiable in the historical record. There’s a lot we know about the Harp brothers and their crimes, but also a lot we don’t. To combat some of that unknowability, she carefully recounts the cultural and sociological landscape of the era, making educated inferences when it seems responsible and flatly stating guesswork when that’s all she can do.

I found it rather commendable that Grandjean built her story in this manner, giving readers the inside scoop on her research successes and dead ends. Even in the field of history, there are things that will forever remain a mystery. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a great story to tell within those limitations.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that’s so honest about where it’s coloring outside the lines — it gave me a nuanced appreciation for the work historians do. I actually came to wish there were more authors who would admit when research reached a roadblock and then make some guesses anyway; let readers ponder through the possibilities instead of feeling the need to give a single clear picture of events.

A Final Word

I really enjoyed Kingdom of Devils, particularly for its window into some of the ordinary characters of the Revolutionary Era. It was eye-opening to read about just how upending that time period was — especially for average folks who didn’t have clear allegiances in the war and were simply trying to get by. Grandjean also offered fascinating insights into the violence and vigilante justice system of the time period. It was a gripping story that I had a hard time putting down and is well worth the ~250-page investment.

Thanks so much for reading. Be good to each other.

-Jeremy

I’m a sucker for any book about Harry Truman, so when an early copy of James M. Scott’s Empire of Ashes landed on my doorstep — subtitled “Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent Into Total War” — I immediately moved it to the top of my reading list. I started in, but before I got too far I discovered that this was actually the third book that James Scott has written about America’s bombing raids in Japan. I put down Empire and grabbed Target Tokyo and Black Snow to read first. Little did I know, I had just kickstarted one of the best WWII reading experiences of my life and read all three in the span of a couple weeks.

Let’s explore a bit deeper.

And stay tuned in the next week or two for an interview with James M. Scott.

Subscribe now

Target Tokyo — Jimmy Doolittle’s Famous Raid

When you read enough WWII books and watch enough shows/movies, you inevitably stumble across Jimmy Doolittle’s post-Pearl Harbor bombing raid — it didn’t do a whole lot strategically, but made a big difference in morale for both the Americans and the Japanese. It also made Doolittle a hero both to the nation and to his own crew; as one crewman said afterwards, “He is the greatest guy that ever climbed in an airplane.”

In Target Tokyo, published in 2015, James M. Scott brings readers behind the scenes in those planning rooms, both on the American and Japanese sides. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. needed to do something to respond, but our bombers couldn’t reach Japan at that point in the war, at least not without getting aircraft carriers too close to shore. So James Doolittle devised a plan that involved stripping B-25s (super cool planes, for aviation nerds) to their nuts and bolts, loading ‘em with bombs, and then continuing on to friendly Chinese airbases rather than returning home.

But Scott’s narrative didn’t end after the raid; unbeknownst to me, there was still a lot more story left. All but one of the sixteen B-25s had to crash-land and the 80 men involved in the raid had to find their way back home; a few died on impact, many survived gruesome injuries before making it to safe harbors, and eight poor souls were captured by the Japanese and taken as prisoners. The aftermath for the injured and captured was harrowing, to say the least. It was hard to read at times, but I couldn’t put the story down.

Target Tokyo is a book that’s filled to the brim with individual acts of courage that are hard to fathom today. It’s probably my favorite of the trilogy. It’ll fill you right up with American vigor and patriotism — right in time for the next couple books to make you question your beliefs.

Black Snow — The Shift to Total War

While U.S. bombers couldn’t immediately strike Japan after Pearl Harbor (outside the Doolittle raid), military forces moved quickly to remedy that problem. By capturing a series of Pacific islands and spending billions to develop the massive B-29 (another very cool plane), General Curtis LeMay was set up to take the fight to the Japanese homeland in an all new way as the Pacific war came to a head in 1944 and 1945.

In Black Snow, published in 2022, Scott walks readers through the decisions that dramatically shifted America’s bombing tactics. Rather than utilizing daytime precision bombing of military targets — which wasn’t working — LeMay started nighttime raids of major urban areas. More than that, he began using materials like napalm, the flaming gasoline jelly that later became infamous in Vietnam.

The horror of these raids is hard to imagine. Japanese cities were dense and largely constructed of dry wood. They were tinderboxes. While we tend to think of the nuclear bombs as the moral shift of WWII, Operation Meetinghouse in the spring of 1945 — almost half a year before the nukes were dropped — killed as many people and destroyed as much square mileage. This was when America’s strategy changed to total war — no target would be off limits from here on out.

In some especially grim but important chapters, James Scott brings readers to the ground level of Tokyo as these bombs are being dropped in the middle of the night, creating multiple literal and unstoppable firestorms across the city. It’s as harrowing as anything I’ve read.

Black Snow is a sobering read that’s likely to challenge what you think of the “good guys” vs. “bad guys” in WWII. The reality is closer to something like, “We all had to be bad guys in order to stop the really bad guys.”

Empire of Ashes — A Decision That Changed the Course of World History

While LeMay’s nightmare-inducing raids were destructive nearly beyond comprehension, they didn’t force Japan into surrendering. It was going to take even more.

FDR knew this and launched the Manhattan Project to develop the nuclear bomb — only he didn’t tell his vice president about it. So in the summer of 1945, when Truman had been president for just four-ish months, he had to guide the United States’ nuclear strategy with no template for what this bomb would do in the real world, and a real sense that whatever happened would permanently alter geopolitics from that point on.

There was not only a moral question, but a true strategic question, too. Would the bomb even work? What if it didn’t? Would it be enough? How many bombs would we have to use? How would Japanese leadership and citizenry respond?

What James Scott does especially well in Empire of Ashes is take differing points of view — Japanese political and military leadership, American political and military leadership, and Manhattan Project leadership — and weave them together into an all-encompassing story. You can read about each of those threads separately, but this is the best book I’ve read that combines them into a cohesive narrative.

Scott also took the time to convey the horrifying on-the-ground experience of the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s very well done and is certainly going to stay with me.

Empire of Ashes is an incredibly important book that deserves a place on any WWII shelf, especially when paired with the other two books in this unofficial trilogy.

Thanks for reading. Be good to each other.

-Jeremy

It’s time, once again, to chat about our favorite reads of the previous month.

JEREMY: I’ve been on a real hot streak of history reads, so it was hard to pick this month’s favorite, but Target Tokyo by James Scott takes the cake. Vivid storytelling and breakneck pacing — I couldn’t put it down. On the fiction side, I really loved my third reading of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, especially because it was alongside hundreds of others over at Dying Breed.

JANE: The Borrowed Life of Frederik Fife by Anna Johnston was an easy pick for Jane this month. It’s just a nice story about a down-on-his-luck old dude who finds a way into some community. Jane always has a soft spot for older protagonists.

GRAHAM (11 years old): The oldest kiddo is firmly out of middle grade books and into YA and even adult titles. This month he really liked I Am Not a Robot by Joanna Stern, which is an adult non-fiction book about a woman who experiments with using AI for just about everything for a year.

WILLA (8 years old): I was not familiar with Louis Sachar’s Wayside Stories series before Willa picked it out and wanted me to read it to her in July. We both absolutely loved it. Silly and fun and wholesome.

BO (5 years old): This kid is obsessed with Minecraft these days (the free educational version, don’t worry!) and likes to check out books like The Minecraft Ideas Book from the library — just to flip through and look at the pictures. Goofball.

Your turn! What was your favorite July read?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Adam Cohen is a journalist, lawyer, and author of a handful of American history books, generally with a legal and ethical focus. He’s written about eBay, FDR, the Supreme Court, and most recently, a famed shipwreck.

If you missed my review of his excellent book, Captain’s Dinner, check it out now:

I was glad to be able to interview Adam about the book, shipwrecks, and some of his favorite history reads.

1. I’ve read a lot of shipwreck books, and plenty featuring cannibalism, but I haven’t read any that spent so much time on the (fascinating) philosophical and legal repercussions. Why do you think that dimension has been largely absent from historical disaster/tragedy books? If it’s covered at all, it’s often in a single chapter or epilogue.

In most shipwreck stories, people do what they want (or need) to do, and they are never held accountable. They kill people, they eat people — if they run out of food — and if they survive in the end, they simply return to their lives. The Mignonette shipwreck is different because when the survivors were rescued, they thought they would simply be allowed to go home — but instead, they were arrested and put on trial for murder, for killing the cabin boy and eating him.

Their murder trial became one of the great criminal cases in British legal history — and one that is also widely studied in America. So, this story of the killing and eating of Richard Parker, the cabin boy, is both an adventure story and a story about justice — about what is the fairest thing for society to do to the men who killed and ate him.

2. What surprised you the most about this story once you got into the research? Did you have any preconceptions that got thrown to the wayside?

I began with a strong sense that it was wrong for the captain the kill the cabin boy so that he and the other adults in the lifeboat should survive. I didn’t change that view, but it took on a lot more nuance for me when I read the grim details of what life was like in the lifeboat, and read up on the biology of thirst and starvation. The men’s mouths were so parched that they were making guttural, barking noises. They were so weak they could barely function. The more I read about what it actually felt like, the more I understood what the captain did — even if I still cannot approve of it.

3. Is the law around “the custom of the sea” still debated? Is it different from country to country, or do legal systems tend to agree on what’s right and wrong these days?

The truth is, this issue has largely faded away due to advances in technology. In the Age of Sail, the era in which my story occurred, shipwrecks were common. Being stranded without food or water was common. Cannibalism at sea was, if not common, not all that unusual. But 1884, the year the Mignonette was lost, was toward the very end of the Age of Sail. Steamships quickly replaced sailing ships. Ships soon had radio equipment to summon help.

So the “custom of the sea” was not needed. But the issue of whether killing one person to save several people remains a lively issue in philosophy and law school classes, and it is greatly debated there. The opinion of the Lord Chief Justice in this case has been very influential — it changed not only British law, but American law. I don’t want to say more, though, so as not to give away what happens.

4. Any recommendations for folks who want to further explore this niche subject area of law, ethics, and disaster?

A few things. There is a famous Harvard Law Review article from the 1949 called “The Case of the Spelucean Explorers” that reimagines the Mignonette case as the case of stranded cave explorers in the distant future, who kill and eat one of their fellow explorers, and are put on trial for murder. It offers five possible court rulings. It’s a classic inquiry into the moral issues of the case.

There’s also an essay called “Why Kill the Cabin Boy” from 2020 in which a British medical ethicist applies the lessons of the Mignonette case to the debate at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic about how to allocate ventilators when there are not enough to go around.

For people looking for something lighter, there is a much-loved episode of the TV show The Good Place on “The Trolley Problem,” which raises the same ethical issues.

In addition to my book, I wrote an article for Harvard Magazine called “The 1884 Cannibalism-at-Sea Case that Still Has Harvard Talking” that explores some of the key issues.

5. Legal writing is not exactly known for its page-turning qualities. How did you learn to spin such a readable yarn? Are there any particular authors or books that model what you try to do with your writing?

I actually think there has been so much great writing about the law and legal cases. When I was growing up, my parents had a classic two-volume collection by Ephraim London called The Law in Literature and The Law as Literature. One volume was particularly literary writing in the law — opinions, transcripts, and so forth. The other volume was legal subjects written about in great literature — short stories, excerpts from novels, and so on. It’s great, and I read it a lot as a child. I’ve also enjoyed many of the great books about the law — Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice — and so many more.

6. Beyond being just an interesting tale, how do think this story and subject matter can still speak to us? What does it have to say to modern readers?

The moral dilemma at the heart of the book is whether the captain was justified in killing one innocent person, the cabin boy, to save three other people, himself and the other two crew members. That issue is timeless. In philosophy, it is the debate between utilitarians and those who believe in rights-based theories of justice.

The utilitarians say a bad act can be justified if it avoids greater harm — kill the cabin boy to save three lives. The rights-based people say that some acts, like murder, as simply wrong — the cabin boy has a right to live, even if his death could save more lives. This question about utilitarianism is very alive today. If you read the essay I recommended about allocation of ventilators, you’ll see that it applied very directly in emergency rooms in England during the Covid pandemic.

7. Do you have any personal favorite shipwreck books?

There are so many great ones, including some recent ones, like Julian Sancton’s Neptune’s Fortune. But Robinson Crusoe will always be my favorite.

8. More broadly, what have you read and enjoyed lately?

It’s not a shipwreck story — except allegorically speaking — but I’ve been enjoying Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book Regime Change about President Trump’s second term. I was also deeply affected by The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler. I’m currently reading Stefan Zweig’s classic memoir The World of Yesterday, a great writer’s reflection on the world he loved, which was wiped away by the Nazis. I think I need to look around for some more cheerful subjects.

9. Do you have a Mt. Rushmore of history books or authors? (Or a few options, if you can’t nail down four.)

There are so many. I really like books that wrestle with America’s great promise, and the ways in which we fall short. One that is at the very top of my list is J. Antony Lukas’s Common Ground, which I regard as an almost perfect work of history. I am also a huge Studs Turkel fan, and I cannot recommend his majestic oral history Working highly enough. In a completely different vein, I keep finding myself going back to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Pure pleasure. I’m listening to the audiobook (again) now.

Thanks so much for reading! Who would like to see next in my interview series? Let me know!

-Jeremy

Less than two weeks ago, in my review of Eric Jay Dolin’s The Wreck of the Mentor, I wrote:

“No matter how many shipwreck books I read (Endurance, Into the Raging Sea, The Wager, In the Heart of the Sea, The Gales of November, The Perfect Storm . . . ), I can pretty much guarantee I’ll also want to read the next one that comes out.”

Turns out, there’s one that came out in late 2025 that escaped my attention until I interviewed author James Donovan. Adam Cohen’s Captain’s Dinner has everything I need in a book: a shipwreck, murder, cannibalism, and just enough moral philosophy to make you think without bogging the story down.

I was absolutely hooked on this thing from start to finish. Before diving in, though, let’s start with a joke:

You’re welcome.

The Wreck

Similarly to The Wreck of the Mentor, the actual shipwreck featured in Captain’s Dinner occupies a rather small portion of the narrative. That’s just fine, because the rest of it is fascinating. In 1884, Captain Tom Dudley and a crew of three other men were tasked with delivering a small yacht, the Mignonette, from England to its new owner in Sydney, Australia. Even if you aren’t geographically inclined, you’ll know that’s a long voyage. Really long. And this 50-foot boat was not made for ocean crossings.

As the Mignonette was rounding the southern tip of Africa, it encountered a wicked storm and sank. Thankfully, there was a small lifeboat for the men to hop into, which kept them afloat and alive for another few weeks. And that’s where things got really interesting.

The Custom of the Sea

Cannibalism has had a prominent place in survival narratives for as long as humans have existed on this planet. (Even earlier, when you consider cannibalism among animals.) In the most dire situations, it has indeed been necessary to consume human meat and blood in order to stay alive. In many cases, the person being eaten was already dead; in some situations, however, a sacrifice has been required.

On the ocean, where food and water are especially hard to come by, this scenario has not been uncommon. Crews of shipwrecked men would agree (theoretically) to draw lots, with the loser being summarily killed and consumed. This practice came to be known as “the custom of the sea.”

What makes the case of Captain Dudley and the Mignonette unique is that they didn’t follow that custom. When their food was gone and the fresh water (in the form of rain) disappeared, Dudley unilaterally decided that poor Richard Parker, the inexperienced 17-year-old, would have to be killed for the sake of the others’ survival. I’ll let you read the book to learn the details of how that scene transpired.

After the three remaining men were rescued just days later, they freely admitted what happened on the lifeboat. Nobody had ever been tried or convicted for this type of murder and cannibalism, so the crewmen had no reason to hide their actions.

From Barbary to Human Rights

The problem, for the men of the Mignonette, was that the Victorian Era was changing how the world viewed barbarism, morality, and human rights. The most prominent thinkers and writers, including the likes of Charles Dickens, were highlighting the welfare of children and preaching that humans deserve equal treatment and dignity, regardless of their station in life. That’s a big “duh” for us moderns, but was fairly revolutionary back then.

So Dudley and the others were pretty shocked when they were arrested and tried for murder upon their return to England. The legal case that followed marked a line in the sand, after which human rights would forever be legally enshrined. At its core, the case became a debate between the pragmatic view of human worth and the view that says every life, by its nature, is just as valuable as every other.

Why This Book Matters Today

Shipwrecks and murder and cannibalism always make for compelling narratives, but I really appreciated the unique angle of Captain’s Dinner. It elevated the story from just a grisly tale to one that can still speak to us today — in fact, this case is still taught in law schools. While not exactly the same, similar moral debates could be found during COVID: When ventilators ran short, would they be taken away from older folks and given to younger people? And with the advent of AI the question continues to pop up, like if a self-driving car has to determine the worth of a pedestrian’s life vs. that of its occupants.

Though admittedly not every reader will be as interested as me in discussions of utilitarianism vs. deontology (basically, “the ends justify the means” vs. “there is an absolute right and wrong, regardless of outcome”), the author deftly handles the debate without getting too philosophically detailed. This book is always very accessible because Cohen is just a hell of a storyteller.

Captain's Dinner is one of the best histories I've read this year. If you're drawn to shipwreck stories, or simply love books that force you to wrestle with difficult moral questions, it’s a must-read.

Get the book

Thanks so much for reading. Be good to each other. Don’t eat anyone.

-Jeremy

James Donovan is a best-selling author of American history books, covering a broad range of subjects from the American West to Apollo 11 to World War II.

If you missed my review of his great book, A Terrible Glory, check it out now:

I was glad to be able to interview James about the book, Custer, and some of his favorite American history reads.

1. What first drew you to studying and writing about Custer and Little Bighorn? (For me, simply being in the Black Hills — an incredibly beautiful and underrated part of the country — was enough to want to dive into learning about the people and events of that landscape.)

In 1998, a friend of mine who had written several books of history asked me if I wanted to do a coffee-table book about Custer and the Little Bighorn with him. I had only done a couple small books at the time, and I wanted to tackle something larger, so I said yes, and started reading up on the subject.

I got hooked on the story, which I think is one of the great American sagas, with a fascinating cast of characters on both sides, white and Indian, that is unparalleled. My co-author ended up bowing out of the project, but I finished the writing myself, and found a publisher, Voyageur Press, who agreed to publish it. A coffee-table book by nature can’t be an extensive account of its subject, so the result, Custer and the Little Bighorn, was fairly perfunctory—though I was quite happy with it at the time, especially since it included hundreds of images.

But my experience writing the book, and reading up on the subject, made me realize that there had been quite a bit of new research and analysis on the subject in the previous 20 years—John Gray’s ambitious time-motion studies, Douglas Scott and Richard Fox’s archaeological work and artifact pattern analyses, and Gregory Michno’s reinterpretation of the Indian testimony about the battle. But I couldn’t find a book that had put all these new findings together in a lively narrative history. So I took almost a year to craft a book proposal and found a literary agent who sold it to Little, Brown. I’ll always be grateful to the editor-in-chief there, Geoff Shandler, who believed in it and did a great job of editing the book, A Terrible Glory.

And to your point about that part of the country: I’ve visited the area many times since I began working on that first book, and like you, I fell in love with it.

2. Why do you think the Indian Wars — particularly on the Western frontier in the second half of the 19th century — remain so captivating for authors and readers alike?

If the United States is known for one thing around the world, it’s the Old West—men (mostly) on horseback (mostly), in conflict over many things. It’s a major part of our origin story. And of course there are some great stories and unforgettable characters, too.

3. It’s been 20 years since you researched and wrote A Terrible Glory. Have you kept up with Custer studies? Are there any addendums to this story? How has his reputation changed, for better or worse?

I try to keep up with the new information coming out, but I don’t think there’s a lot. A recent book entitled Custer’s Last Stand Demystified, by Phil Guarnieri and Bill Rini, is the best thing I’ve seen on the battle in a long time. It’s not a narrative of the battle. They address 16 topics and do an exhaustive and enlightening deep dive on each one, and in the process supply fresh and often intriguing answers to questions that have long been open to interpretation.

As far as Custer’s reputation, it’s been eroding for almost a century—since his wife Libbie, who worked hard to burnish his memory for almost sixty years after the battle, died in 1933. A year later a very biased biography about him was published—Glory-Hunter by Frederic F. Van de Water, and the title tells you the tack the author takes. But I do think some of the criticism is unjustified. Some people have turned him into a power-crazed monster who sacrificed his men in his quest for advancement and fame, and that’s just not accurate. Yes, he had a healthy ego, and he could be arrogant, but he had far more friends than enemies; he was quite possibly the most popular cadet ever to attend West Point.

He’s a classic example of the American success story—he was the son of a blacksmith who quickly rose to the top through great effort and ability, and married a smart, beautiful high-society woman. He loved her and his family more than anything; as a grown man, he would cry when he left his mother after a visit. But immediately after the battle, there was a disinformation campaign against him that largely worked, due to the simple fact that he was dead and easily blamed; facts were distorted by officers eager to avoid association with such a debacle.

What happened on the banks of the Greasy Grass on June 25, 1876, was a perfect storm of a defeat—just about every single thing that had to go wrong did, and there’s a lot of blame to go around.

4. Your other books feature the Alamo, Apollo 11, and a little-known D-Day mission. Is there a through-line that you return to? What types of stories pique your interest?

After the first three books—on the battles of the Little Bighorn and the Alamo, and on Apollo 11, one editor I know pointed out that they were all about men on the frontier. True, but Nothing But Courage doesn’t fit into that pattern. I only want to take on a subject if I can bring something new to it, and I think I have with each book.

5. What are you reading and enjoying lately?

I like a narrative work of history that reads like a thriller—like these recently published books:

• Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

• The Siege by Ben Macintyre

• The Gales of November by John U. Bacon

• Captain’s Dinner by Adam Cohen

• The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

6. Do you have a Mt. Rushmore of American history books or authors?

That’s a very tough question, and I’m not sure I can answer it . . . But: David McCullough was the gold standard, of course. And Walter Lord—author of A Night to Remember, Day of Infamy, Lonely Vigil, and many other excellent works—was a pioneer in using interviews to tell a riveting story. Finally, Samuel Eliot Morrison, author of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and several other books, was one of our greatest masters of narrative nonfiction. There are many others, of course, but those three should be on any Mount Rushmore of American nonfiction history writers.

Thanks so much for reading! Any authors you’d love to hear from? Let me know!

-Jeremy

• Published: 2008

• Pages (not including notes/index): 398

There’s no history subject more quintessentially American than the study of our Western frontier. From the earliest days of European settlement in America, there was a westward longing and a psychological pull towards new land. Contentment has never been part of our collective psyche. When those white settlers started acting on that longing, conflict with this land’s indigenous groups became inevitable.

Though it’s not a single war in the strict sense, the North American battles between whites and indigenous people, roughly between the 1620s and the 1890s, easily constitute America’s longest-lasting military engagement. One of the most interesting periods of that century-spanning conflict is the tail end, when some incredibly charismatic personalities clashed in a verdant valley in eastern Montana.

You probably know the names Custer, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Little Bighorn. But you may not know the full complexities of the battle that marked the beginning of the Indian War’s final phase.

James Donovan’s excellent book, A Terrible Glory, brings all those characters — and their final clash — into stark relief. Let’s explore.

Setting the Stage

A book like this — and there are many of them — is a challenge to write for many reasons. The context alone of U.S.-Indigenous interactions could take hundreds (if not thousands) of pages. A biography of one of the primary characters is likely easier; there’s a clear start, end, and point of view to keep the story focused. Donovan wisely used the first ~100 pages to set the stage and get us up to speed on the main characters as well as the immediate backstory for both the Plains Indians (largely Lakota) and the U.S. government/military.

On one side stood Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, a Civil War hero and a bit of a dandy whose appetite for glory was matched only by his confidence. Opposing him were two of the most influential Lakota men of the era: Sitting Bull, a spiritual leader whose vision helped unite factious tribes, and Crazy Horse, the brilliant (and also somewhat dandyish) warrior whose courage in battle had already become legendary.

Looming above all that — and above the entire 250-year history of this fight — was a collision of irreconcilable worldviews. The U.S. government sought to force American Indians onto reservations so that settlers and land-grabbers could stake their ownership. Unsurprisingly, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, and others didn’t even understand that concept and simply wanted to preserve their sovereignty and way of life — which, to be clear, included copious warring, land theft, rape, and terrible violence between tribes.

An Inglorious End for Custer

It’s impossible to recap the entire story in a couple paragraphs. It’s simply too complicated and there are too many threads to follow. Plus, a short YouTube video does the trick as well as anything:

The beauty of a good book, though, is that it’s so much more than just a recap of what happened. Donovan’s detailed but propulsive battlefield narration put me right in the middle of that valley.

What stood out from the whole thing was that Custer’s end — the murder and mutilation of 268 United States soldiers, including Custer himself, at the hands of the Plains Indians — was the exact opposite of what he expected and most desperately desired. Custer’s hubris had him believing that no contingent of American Indians could be big enough, strong enough, or strategic enough to defeat even a small group of soldiers. No matter how many history books I read, I’m always amazed at how many defeats and downfalls started with hubris. (Most of them.)

Donovan did an excellent job showing that the battle was almost apples and oranges: the war aims and means for soldiers and Plains Indians was so different as to hardly be comparable — it generally worked in America’s favor, but not always.

Of course, what was considered a ghastly defeat for the U.S. military was a rollicking victory for the Plains Indians. But, it was a victory that would lead to their eventual demise. The entire ordeal is a tangle of eventualities and inevitabilities that can make your head spin.

The Lure of the West

Put simply, I can’t get enough American West stories. It’s a landscape I deeply love and its past is chock-full of some of the most colorful characters in our nation’s history. The West was, and still is, a place where America’s worst traits and most vitalizing ideas come to a head. Even if I got a touch bogged down in some of the militaristic details, Donovan did an excellent job setting the scene and capturing the complicated witch’s brew of the people and specific circumstances that led to the gruesome results at Little Bighorn. I have plenty more to read about this battle — A Terrible Glory was my first foray into it — but I can confidently say I’ll be recommending this book as an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the subject.

Thanks for reading. Be good to each other.

-Jeremy

• Published: 2026

• Pages (not including notes/index): 206

No matter how many shipwreck books I read (Endurance, Into the Raging Sea, The Wager, In the Heart of the Sea, The Gales of November, The Perfect Storm . . . ), I can pretty much guarantee I’ll also want to read the next one that comes out. It’s a feeling shared by plenty of readers — especially guys. There’s something uniquely terrifying and thought-provoking about the idea of being in a survival scenario at sea rather than on land — if you can survive that, you've proven your mettle in a whole different way.

You might think that shipwreck stories start to blend together after a while, but they’re all genuinely unique in some way. I can tell you exactly what happened in those books I listed above — even if the circumstances are broadly similar, the ships, the people, and the aftermaths are different enough to be memorable.

A Wreck in the Remote Pacific

In Eric Jay Dolin’s new The Wreck of the Mentor, the shipwreck itself was really just the introduction to the larger narrative. The heart of the story is how this whaling crew encountered, adapted, and survived — or not — landing on a remote Pacific archipelago called Palau. (It’s best known for being the site of 1944’s Battle of Peleliu.)

In 1832, the American whaleship Mentor was in the midst of a multi-year, round-the-world voyage when it wrecked on a reef in the remote reaches of the ocean. They knew roughly where they were, and that contact with indigenous people was their only hope of survival. The problem was that those interactions were impossible to predict. Dolin did an excellent job showing how different groups of people responded to white men on their shores — sometimes they rolled out the red carpet and other times . . . they didn’t. In the case of the Mentor’s survivors (there were 11 at the time of the wreck), there were actually multiple groups of people to contend with at different times.

Over the course of multiple years, the crewmen tried to get back to America, wrecked again on another island, and even ended up in forced servitude. It won't surprise you that far fewer than those 11 men ultimately made it home.

Every time I read a well-done history book, I’m impressed by the complexity of human nature. No situation is predictable and those who survive are those who can adapt and respond when expectations have gone sideways. In any survival story, there’s a blend of luck, skill, and sheer endurance — if the luck has broken your way, a lot of it simply depends on human will, which is always fascinating to read about.

What Worked and What Didn’t

Dolin hits on a lot of different threads in just over 200 pages: the history of Palau, the background of whaling/whalers in this era, previous shipwrecks in the region, white men who survived those previous shipwrecks and lived for decades with the native people . . . at some points, it actually felt like Dolin was digging too much into the context rather than keeping the main story moving (especially since the book is on the short side).

The Wreck of the Mentor wasn’t my favorite book in this sub-genre that I love, but it’s absolutely worth a read if you enjoy shipwreck/survival stories — especially because it doesn’t require much of a time investment.

Further reading: Dolin’s history of whaling, Leviathan, is excellent; Fur, Fortune, and Empire, a history of America’s fur trade, is also high on my list.

Thanks so much for reading. Be good to each other.

-Jeremy

Louis Sachar made an indelible impression on me as a young reader with his absorbing and wonderful children’s novel Holes. I regularly cite it as the story that turned me into an incurable reader. Nearly thirty years later, Sachar has once again left a mark on me.

In 1978, twenty years before Holes hit my bookshelf, Sachar published Sideways Stories from Wayside School. It’s a series of connected stories about an elementary school that was accidentally built sideways — the 30 classrooms are stacked atop each other rather than occupying a single floor.

I had no familiarity with this book until my lovely 8-year-old daughter asked me to read it aloud to her this week. She knew it from school and we recently snagged a free copy of it from . . . somewhere (I can’t keep track of all the places I acquire books). Each story is just a few pages and we breeze through a couple each night.

The story of Bebe, “the fastest draw in Mrs. Jewls’s class,” left me gobsmacked. I was moved by its playfulness and wisdom and I felt the need to share it with all of you. It may just change how you see art, creation, and doing good work — any good work, not just art. It’s especially poignant for the age of AI.

Bebe was a girl with short brown hair, a little beebee nose, totally tiny toes, and big brown eyes. Her full name was Bebe Gunn. She was the fastest draw in Mrs. Jewls’s class.

She could draw a cat in less than forty-five seconds, a dog in less than thirty, and a flower in less than eight seconds. But, of course, Bebe never drew just one dog, or one cat, or one flower. Art was from twelve-thirty to one-thirty. Why, in that time, she could draw fifty cats, a hundred flowers, twenty dogs, and several eggs or watermelons. It took her the same amount of time to draw a watermelon as an egg.

Calvin sat next to Bebe. He didn’t think he was very good at art. Why, it took him the whole period just to draw one airplane. So instead, he just helped Bebe. He was Bebe’s assistant. As soon as Bebe would finish one masterpiece, Calvin would take it from her and set down a clean sheet of paper. Whenever her crayon ran low, Calvin was ready with a new crayon. That way Bebe didn’t have to waste any time. And in return, Bebe would draw five or six airplanes for Calvin.

It was twelve-thirty, time for art. Bebe was ready. On her desk was a sheet of yellow construction paper. In her hand was a green crayon. Calvin was ready. He held a stack of paper and a box of crayons.

“Ready, Bebe,” said Calvin.

“Ready, Calvin,” said Bebe.

“Okay,” said Mrs. Jewls, “time for art.”

She had hardly finished her sentence when Bebe had already drawn a picture of a leaf.

Calvin took it from her and put another piece of paper down.

“Red,” called Bebe.

Calvin handed Bebe a red crayon.

“Blue,” called Bebe.

He gave her a blue crayon.

They were quite a pair. Their teamwork was remarkable. Bebe drew pictures as fast as Calvin could pick up the old paper and set down the new — a fish, an apple, three cherries, bing, bing, bing.

At one-thirty Mrs. Jewls announced, “Okay, class, art is over.”

Bebe dropped her crayon and fell over on her desk. Calvin sighed and leaned back in his chair. He could hardly move. They had broken their old record. Bebe had drawn three hundred and seventy-eight pictures. They lay in a pile on Calvin’s desk.

Mrs. Jewls walked by. “Calvin, did you draw all these pictures?”

Calvin laughed. “No, I can’t draw. Bebe drew them all.”

“Well, then, what did you draw?” asked Mrs. Jewls.

“I didn’t draw anything,” said Calvin.

“Why not? Don’t you like art?” asked Mrs. Jewls.

“I love art,” said Calvin. “That’s why I didn’t draw anything.”

Mrs. Jewls did not understand.

“It would have taken me the whole period just to draw one picture,” said Calvin. “And Bebe would only have been able to draw a hundred pictures. But with the two of us working together, she was able to draw three hundred and seventy-eight pictures! That’s a lot more art.”

Bebe and Calvin shook hands.

“No,” said Mrs. Jewls. “That isn’t how you measure art. It isn’t how many pictures you have, but how good the pictures are. Why, a person could spend his whole life just drawing one picture of a cat. In that time I’m sure Bebe could draw a million cats.”

“Two million,” said Bebe.

Mrs. Jewls continued. “But if that one picture is better than each of Bebe’s two million, then that person has produced more art than Bebe.”

Bebe looked as if she was going to cry. She picked up all the pictures from Calvin’s desk and threw them in the garbage. Then she ran from the room.

“I thought her pictures were good,” said Calvin. He reached into the garbage pail and took out a crumpled-up picture of an airplane.

Bebe walked outside into the playground.

Louis, the yard teacher, spotted her. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going home to draw a picture of a cat,” said Bebe.

“Will you bring it to school and show it to me tomorrow?” Louis asked.

“Tomorrow!” laughed Bebe. “By tomorrow I doubt if I’ll even be finished with one whisker.”

Each story in the book is a delight. If you haven’t read it yet, now’s the time.

-Jeremy

We’re halfway through 2026! Somewhere around the summer solstice, I like to take stock of my reading year: what were the highlights, lowlights, trends, gaps, etc. This year, I made the family participate as well. Here are everyone’s favorites so far.

JEREMY: My reading year has been heavily marked by diving into the vast world of Star Wars books. I’ve read about 15 this year, including some adjacent non-fiction titles. Brian Jay Jones biography George Lucas: A Life was a compelling, eye-opening look at the creator of the franchise; Lost Stars by Claudia Gray mixed coming-of-age, romance, moral complexity, and adventure. I really enjoyed both of them.

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere was also on my shortlist, along with my re-read of The Dog Stars.

JANE: Amity Gaige’s Heartwood was a favorite for both of us earlier in the year and has steadily held its place. It combined an outdoorsy survivor tale with an intense, unpredictable mystery, and added a lot of beautiful psychological depth and insight as well. Great stuff.

GRAHAM (11 years old in a week): Seemingly out of left field (for me), the eldest kid picked one of my favorite YA books of all-time. I hardly even knew he read The Giver, let alone enjoyed it, outside of a passing mention that his class went through it towards the end of the school year. Excellent choice, son.

WILLA (8 years old): The middle kiddo’s reading has been all over the board this year, but there’s been a constant as of late: constant re-reads of Vera Gosgol’s Be Prepared. Seems we have another one in the family who can’t resist an outdoorsy coming-of-age story. Good for her.

BO (5 years old): Willa has been reading to Bo a couple nights per week (so cute!) and apparently he has really enjoyed Super Pancake. I had no idea. Seems fun though!

Your turn! What’s been your favorite read of the year?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

It’s time, once again, to chat about our favorite reads of the previous month.

JEREMY: David McCullough gets the nod for the second month in a row; after a few months, I finally finished his magisterial Truman. Great stuff. On the fiction side, I re-read Tolkien’s The Two Towers. As good as ever and LOTR as a whole remains one of my all-time favorites.

JANE: My wife was riveted by Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. The reviews have been fairly mixed, but Jane thought it was well done from start to finish and she tore through this story of a time-traveling tradwife.

GRAHAM (almost 11 years old): Our eldest really enjoyed Project Nought by Chelsey Furedi, a debut graphic novel that includes a bit of time travel. Cool.

WILLA (8 years old): Ever since our family stayed in Moss Landing, California (near Monterey) for a vacation a couple years ago, the middle kiddo has been obsessed with otters. We saw dozens in the wild and it was awesome. So it was really fun to read Odder together; Katherine Applegate weaves together a really creative story and Moss Landing even makes an appearance. I highly recommended this one as a family read.

BO (5 years old): Towards the end of Bo’s school year, local Duluth illustrator Jordan Sundberg visited his class to read a new book she illustrated called Northwoods Lullaby (written by Mary Casanova). It’s beautifully done and Jordan is a talented, delightful human — we own a number of her prints. Grab a copy for any little ones in your life!

Your turn! What was your favorite May read?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Hello, readers! In today’s edition, I’m giving you short and sweet reviews of the handful of books I read in the last month. I also did some writing for the Art of Manliness (my day job) . . .

• Homemade Yogurt: Cheaper, Better, and Easier Than You Think

• A Field Guide to Common Edible Plants

• How to Use an Elevator Like a Gentleman

. . . as well as for Dad of All Trades (the ~100 subscriber newsletter I write with with my buddy ):

• Maypocalypse Now (essay by Jonny)

• Enough With the Subscriptions (essay by me)

To the books!

Subscribe now

This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum

I flew through this mystery/thriller as eagerly as just about anything else I’ve read this year. Mega successful podcasters Benny and Joy (best friends, not lovers) are on the cusp of a media deal worth millions. But then Joy goes missing, old secrets come out of the woodwork, and nobody can be trusted to be telling the truth. Told in alternating chapters of character POVs and Joy’s unpublished memoir, Crum weaves together the past and present in a way that’s incredibly compelling, even if it ends up a touch outlandish by the end. I loved this one and am recommending it far and wide to mystery fans!

The Searcher by Tana French

I really enjoy Tana French but hadn’t read her for about a decade before grabbing The Searcher this month. Kicking off a trilogy featuring Cal Hooper, a Chicagoan ex-pat in rural Ireland, this book typifies a slow burn mystery. We don’t even find out the central plot until about 100 pages in. That doesn’t always work, but French is such a good writer that I had no problem getting to know the characters and landscape before settling into to the meat of the story. There are some great twists, a satisfying ending, and it’s all very believable — I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

After taking a few months off from my Pulitzer Project, I dove back in with Junot Diaz’s 2007 prize-winning novel. Woof — I did not like this one. It was really horny (culos and tatas everywhere) and really bleak, which made for a very strange combination. I actually didn’t mind the writing style (which is why I finished it), but I hated the story. Your mileage may vary, of course, but this lauded book was not even close to my cup of tea.

History Matters by David McCullough

I’ve been a huge fan of David McCullough for most of my adult life. He had a way of making history come alive in a way that few other historians could match. I’m finally reading (and loving) Truman, a biography that many folks consider his masterwork. While slowly making my through it (I’m about halfway now), I decided to also read his small collection of essays called History Matters. It offers lovely chapters on the importance of history and storytelling, McCullough’s favorite authors and books, some writing tips, and more. If you’re a fan of his, it’s well worth reading.

Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes

I really enjoy smart comedy — stand-up and sketch shows (SNL, Key & Peele, etc.) have always been part of my media diet. And comedian memoirs, when done well, are so easy to listen to, especially because they’re almost always narrated by the author. Unlike other types of celebrities, successful comedians are generally good writers and storytellers; it’s kind of a core part of their job. So I wasn’t at all surprised by how much I enjoyed Pete Holmes Comedy Sex God — I think he’s one of the smartest in the biz. I was surprised, in a good way, by much philosophy and spirituality Pete got into. For example, I didn’t expect to find the great Richard Rohr in this book. Great stuff, but probably only if that mix sounds fun to you like it did to me.

Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

Many authors in recent years have taken a niche topic and used it to explain how that thing has had an outsized impact on world history. Salt, soccer, maps . . . and now tuberculosis. It makes for a compelling cover description, but I’ve found it doesn’t always work as tidily as the author hopes. John Green is obviously passionate about tuberculosis and gives readers an interesting history of the disease and its treatments. I just wasn’t as convinced or as eager to keep reading as I was hoping; this one was more in the 3-star range for me.

Thanks for reading and be good to each other. Until next time,

Jeremy

It’s time, once again, to chat about our favorite reads of the previous month.

JEREMY: I’m finally reading David McCullough’s Truman (which will surely be a favorite in a month or two) and decided to pair it with his short and delightful collection of essays called History Matters. Loved it. McCullough’s books are an American treasure. I also really enjoyed Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere — great space action, touching romance, and oodles of heart.

JANE: My wife enjoyed the unique premise and solid execution of Tiffany Crum’s debut thriller, This Story Might Save Your Life. She especially appreciated the unforeseen ending, which feels especially rare these days.

GRAHAM (10.5 years old): Our oldest continues to tear through YA mysteries at a prodigious clip. Very Dangerous Things by Lauren Munoz was his favorite this month. In his words: “It was a really exciting mystery and I kept wanting to read it!”

WILLA (8 years old): The middle kiddo has discovered Shel Silverstein, and I am here for it. That dude rocks, and going through A Light in the Attic together in just a handful of nights was a delight.

BO (5 years old): Nature school keeps the youngest kiddo very well-verse in what’s going on in the natural world. He’s noticed the birdies coming back for spring, so it makes sense that Lucy Cousins’ Hooray for Birds was a favorite this month.

Your turn! What was your favorite April read?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Hello, readers! It’s been a while. In this edition of the newsletter, I’m giving you quick hits about what I’ve read in the last 5-6 weeks and which hasn’t already been featured. Let’s get right to it!

Subscribe now

—FICTION—

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Most of the women I know have read some Taylor Jenkins Reid books; most of the men I know have not. Well, let me say to those men: read her books! Taylor is a damn good storyteller. I started with Atmosphere simply because I can’t resist a NASA story, especially on the heels of the wildly successful and inspiring Artemis II mission. Atmosphere has tense space action, a touching romance story, and a lot of great relational psychology. Loved it.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

I’m not generally into “cozy” sci-fi or fantasy — nice stories with low stakes — but the heart of this novella by Becky Chambers gets into themes that I can’t resist: What is it that makes us human, what is it that gives life meaning and fulfillment, and how should we spend our days in light of those answers? Through conversations between a tea-slinging monk and a friendly robot, Chambers guides readers into a gentle fable that explores these ideas. A lovely, life-affirming story all around.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

I’ve long been a fan of the Green brothers, but until this month I hadn’t read any of Hank’s books. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing has a fairly silly premise: a young tech employee, memorably named April May, makes a video about the sudden appearance of a statue in New York City. Turns out, similar statues popped up all around the world and they have physical properties that should not be possible. Alien contact, online life, the perils of fame and wealth, deep friendship — the stakes are both high and low, and Hank balances humor with earnestness in a very satisfying way. Excellent book!

A Simple Plan by Scott Smith

I only recently learned that A Simple Plan, the fantastic 1998 movie, was actually adapted from a 1993 novel of the same name. I’ve come to really like rural thrillers, so I decided to give this one a listen — and I thoroughly enjoyed it. First-person narration always works well on audio, and it’s a classic story about greed and how the best laid plans can quickly crumble. There were some pretty ridiculous plot points, but I never struggled to keep going. If you want a slippery slope of a thriller, this is a good one.

Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn

Star Wars fan boys tend to loooove Timothy Zahn’s dozen or so books featuring Thrawn — a blue-skinned Imperial admiral who routinely outsmarts his opponents. While the original trilogy from the 90s gets more adoration, I started with a newer trilogy, published between 2017 and 2019. They were . . . fine. As a character, I actually found Thrawn rather one-dimensional, and the plots were a bit convoluted for me. By the end of the trilogy, I found it to be a bit of a slog to finish.

—NON-FICTION—

Ordinary Time by Annie Jones

This was a really nice little book, mostly chronicling Annie’s experience as a bookshop owner in the small southern locale of Thomasville, Georgia. It’s also about small town living, what it means to be rooted, and the joys of ordinary life. Ordinary Time wasn’t a life-changing read, but I rather enjoyed it — it would pair especially well with a nice cup of coffee on the porch.

This Vast Enterprise by Craig Fehrman

I *loved* Craig’s 2020 book, Author in Chief, so when I found out he had a new one coming about Lewis and Clark, I knew I had to get my hands on it ASAP. Given how impactful Lewis and Clark’s explorations were to the field of American history and science, there are surprisingly few books about their long expedition. Stephen Ambrose’s page-turning Undaunted Courage graced many a dad’s bookshelf in the 90s and 00s; This Vast Enterprise is just as compelling and does a much better job covering the context and scope of their journey, particularly in regards to the numerous other people who played a major part in their story. A must-read for any fan of American history.

The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg

Brad Stulberg has become one of my go-to authors and recommendations in the field of psychology and self-improvement. It’s a genre I tend to avoid, honestly, but his stuff cuts through the clutter and, mercifully, avoids the bloated page counts you often find when authors wax on and on about the same things. This book offers a fresh take on the idea of excellence; Stulberg’s best moments are when he encourages a strong self-examination about “shitty flow” (losing time and attention in the algorithm) and when he talks about the power of earnest enjoyment.

Thanks for reading and be good to each other. Until next time,

Jeremy

Happy Friday, readers!

This week I’m (metaphorically) visiting Los Angeles — a city I’ve never actually been to in person. I know plenty of people who love the place, but honestly I don’t even have a desire to visit. Based on what I’ve read about LA, it’s mostly a seedy, murdery place full of awful, fake people (I’m joking, of course (sort of…)). Regardless of your feelings re: the City of Angels, the books featured today are great.

Before we jump in, be sure to subscribe to a newsletter that I’ve recently taken up co-writing with my best pal Jonny: The Dad of All Trades.

Dad of All Trades

A newsletter for people who have lots of interests--from sports and DIY to technology and comics--but zero time

By Jonny and Jeremy

Every other week we bring you a short essay and a handful of interesting links. And that’s about it! It’s free and you’ll never be sold anything. You probably don’t have extra room in your inbox, but if you do, we (maybe) won’t let you down.

To the books!

A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper

The cast: A concierge of illegal goods and services for the ultra wealthy. A defense lawyer who works with some less-than-savory characters. A live-streamer who hunts down the most sordid scenes he can find in LA’s dark underbelly.

The crimes: a powerful Hollywood producer is exposed as a pedophile, women start turning up brutally murdered, and some very powerful people are sure their wealth will protect them.

These threads are separate at the start — first, we have to get to know the characters and understand the foundation of the plot. With fast-paced, sometimes even staccato sentences, Harper quickly gets us up to speed. In addition to the humans, the city of LA itself becomes a starring player too. In any dark noir, the setting has to feel real and gritty; Harper knocks it out of the park on that front.

Working from three perspectives is not easy, especially when they don’t obviously connect right away. But Harper astutely manages these different voices and weaves them together at just the right time. It makes for the kind of satisfying result that makes you go, “Ah, that’s how this all fits together.”

The title of this book is certainly accurate: there’s a lot of hard-to-stomach violence in these pages. But it all serves the larger purpose of the story — and for what it’s worth, I think it’s better to consume this kind of content in book form vs. in a visual format on a screen.

Harper is definitely working in the vein of violent but wildly compelling authors like S. A. Cosby and James Ellroy — both of whom showed up in the acknowledgements. There was also a lot of Thomas Harris’s influence to be found in this story. Jordan Harper had been on my to-read list for a long time and I’m glad I finally dove in with A Violent Masterpiece. I’ll certainly be reading more of him.

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn

Note: This slightly edited review was originally published in 2022.

Jeff Guinn is one of my favorite non-fiction writers. Within the first dozen pages of any of his books, you can tell he’s a master storyteller. In Manson, he shares the story and cultural context of how Charles Manson became a household name in 1969.

Guinn covers Manson’s life in its entirety: his rocky childhood and shockingly early entry into a life of crime, his multiple lengthy stays in correctional facilities, his foolhardy dreams of becoming a famous musician, and, of course, his descent into murderous cult leader.

And, as the subtitle promises, Guinn covers the “Times” too: What was it about the America of the 1960s that allowed all the players in this story — from the murderers and victims alike — to end up where they did on August 9th and 10th, 1969?

All of Guinn’s books have been 5-star reads for me and this one was no different. It’s a must-read if you’re at all interested in true crime or the cultural history of the ‘60s.

Unlike the characters in this week’s books, please be good to each other.

-Jeremy

It’s time, once again, to chat about our favorite reads of the previous month.

JEREMY: Brian Jay Jones’ biography of George Lucas is sticking with me; beyond the Star Wars origin story, there’s a lot about Hollywood history, creativity, and the business + art of making movies. (Read my review here.) Jane and I both really enjoyed Heartwood on the fiction side. It’s fast-paced, but not at the expense of well-developed characters. Great stuff. (Read my review here.)

JANE: Given that she’s a physical therapist at a sports-focused clinic here in Duluth, I was not surprised that Jane enjoyed Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education. This memoir / manifesto pushes against diet culture, embraces strength training, and offers a balanced approach to modern health and fitness.

GRAHAM (10.5 years old): I read The Tale of Despereaux aloud to the older kids and we all really enjoyed it. Kate DiCamillo combines clever writing, a unique story, and unforgettable characters. A modern classic for a reason.

WILLA (8 years old): The middle kiddo is blasting through the Junie B. Jones series by Barbara Park. Her favorite this month was First Grader (at last!). The stories have held up well in the last decade or two.

BO (5 years old): As we do every handful of months, we’ve cycled back into some Pete the Cat books. His Four Groovy Buttons is among the least offensive in the series, thankfully.

Your turn! What was your favorite March read?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now