Tag: Nonfiction FEC (Page 3 of 4)

Author Q & A with Gary Krist

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On July 30, 2018

In History, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 29)

Gary Krist’s fascinating account of the history of Los Angeles during the first three decades of the 20th century puts a highly personal face on the mage-city’s early days through the almost unbelievable stories of three of its most interesting and important influencers in The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles (Crown Publishing).

The stories of engineer William Mulholland, filmmaker D.W. Griffith, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson weave a dramatic and entertaining narrative that reveals much of how the unique culture and personality of today’s Los Angeles evolved.

Krist also authored the bestselling Empire of Sin and City of Scoundrels as well as The White Cascade, along with five novels. HIs work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post Book World, and other publications.

His work has earned honors that include the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and others.

Gary Krist

Born and raised in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan, Krist earned a degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton and later studied in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship. He went on to live in New York City, then Bethesda, Maryland, for more than two decades before returning to his home state of New Jersey–where today, he and his wife Elizabeth Cheng now live in “an apartment in Jersey City right on the river looking out toward lower Manhattan.”

In your most recent books, you’ve written about New Orleans (Empire of Sin) and Chicago (City of Scoundrels). What led you to write about Los Angeles?

I see The Mirage Factory as the third of a trilogy of city narratives, the first two being, as you mention, the books about Chicago and New Orleans. It’s been fascinating to explore how each city grew and developed over time, each one coping with similar issues but in different ways, depending on the particular people and circumstances in each place.

What intrigued me about Los Angeles was the fact that this remarkable urban entity grew up in a place where no city should logically be. The area was too dry, too far from natural resources and potential markets; it was isolated by deserts and mountain ranges and without a good deep-water port. And yet it grew from a largely agricultural town of 100,000 in 1900 to a major metropolis of 1.2 million by 1930. That feat required imagination, not to mention some really unorthodox tactics–including plenty of deceptive advertising–and that’s the story I wanted to tell.

Please explain the title of the book.

The main point I wanted to convey in the title is that, granted, the city being promoted in the early 20th century was at first more image than reality, but eventually the hard work was done to make those mirages real. Since the site of Los Angeles lacked so many of the usual inducements to growth, city boosters trying to convince people and businesses to move to L.A. had to do a little creative salesmanship.

For instance, L.A. was advertised as a blossoming garden in the desert long before it had enough water to sustain that image; but eventually, through an enormous expenditure of creativity, effort, and money, it solved the problem by building the aqueduct. The city was also attracting too little industry; it solved this problem by more or less creating its own brand-new industry–motion pictures–a business literally based on selling images to the public.

So, while some people have interpreted the title too negatively, I see the term “mirage” as having both negative and positive connotations; a mirage, after all, stops being fraudulent when it actually takes physical form and becomes real.

The stories of the rise and fall of the figures you’ve chosen to highlight in this well-documented history of Los Angeles from 1900 to 1930 would probably be deemed almost unbelievable if they were fictional. In The Mirage Factory, you’ve chosen “three flawed visionaries,” as you called them, to tell the story of the city’s growth and cultural development during these years: engineer William Mulholland, filmmaker D.W. Griffith; and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. When you were conducting research for ideas, how did you settle on these three?

I always like to put a human face on the history I’m telling, so I try to focus on a few individuals whose stories allow me to discuss the important issues in a concrete way. these people are not necessarily the most influential figures in a city’s history, and they’re certainly not the individuals who “single-handedly” built the city–cities are always a group effort. But they must in some way be representative of the larger forces that DID build the city.

In the case of The Mirage Factory, I needed individuals to represent the three strands of the story I wanted to weave together–what I sometimes refer to as the water story, the celluloid story (i.e. Hollywood), and the spirituality story.

The first was a no-brainer; Mulholland was the dominant figure in L.A.’s water story for decades, and you really can’t tell the city’s history without him. For the celluloid story, I had a number of possible choices–Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin, or on the studio heads like Adolph Zukor–but ultimately Griffith seemed to be the seminal figure, the person most responsible for taking the motion picture from a vaudeville house novelty to an industry-supporting art form. And as for McPherson, she may seem an obscure choice, since she’s not well known now; but in her day, she was at least as famous and influential as the other two, and she brought a large number of spiritually-seeking people to L.A.

Of course, the fact that all three of these people were fascinating individuals–with character flaws as big as their talents–was a definite bonus for me as a storyteller.

The city’s explosion in population from 1900 to 1930 was incredible, and you state that there were three main migrations to the city: the first being the well-off; the second primarily middle class; and third being those lower socioeconomic status who arrived hoping to become laborers. Tell me about the evolution of the city’s population as the years passed.

One thing that really surprised me when I was researching was how relatively homogeneous L.A.’s population was in the early decades of the 20th century, compared to that of other American cities. Given L.A.’ s current identity as a rich multicultural center, it was astonishing to me that the Los Angeles of the 1900s and 1910s still lacked large Latino, Asian, and African-American populations. That changed, of course, over the 1920s and 1930s, and especially during and after World War II. But until the 1920s, the city was drawing new residents largely from the well-heeled white populations of the Midwestern and Eastern states.

Taking each of the main characters individually, I’ll start with the contributions of Mulholland–an uneducated, self-taught man who would later be recognized as one of the leading engineers in the world. Why was his role so vital to the city’s existence and its future?

Mulholland was a phenomenon–a tireless autodidact with a remarkable memory and a prodigious work ethic who chose to devote his entire life to taking on the technical challenges of his adopted city. Every city should be so lucky. He was chief engineer of the Department of Water and Power, and its predecessor agencies, for decades, during which time he built the city’s water system up from essentially a small network of wooden pipes and open ditches. Really, the conception and construction of the L.A. Aqueduct was only one of his many feats.

The problem with Mulholland was that he began to believe the fastest and most efficient way to get things done was to do it all himself. As a result, he often proceeded without sufficient oversight and input from people who might have had more expertise in a specific area. In the end, that was the character flaw that led to the St. Francis Dam disaster and finished his career.

The role that D.W. Griffith played in the film industry was a major contribution to the city’s growth, providing thousands of jobs. What made his efforts to establish the industry in Los Angeles so successful?

Griffith essentially laid the groundwork for narrative motion pictures by taking many of the techniques being developed in the early years–close-ups, tracking shots, crosscutting–and combining them into a coherent and flexible grammar of visual storytelling. He didn’t invent those techniques, as he sometimes claimed, but he was uniquely successful at blending them to tell a powerful story.

As for turning movies into a major industry, though, it was the extraordinary financial success of his film The Birth of a Nation–as problematic as its racism was and is–that finally convinced Wall Street and the Eastern banks that movies were more than just a cottage industry–that they could be a big business comparable to steel, oil, and textiles.

The story of Aimee Semple McPherson is one I’ve never heard, but fascinating. Her evangelistic leadership played into and strengthened the city’s openness about spiritual matters. How is her influence still seen in the city?

McPherson’s extremely high profile in the 1920s and 30s allowed her to spread the word about Los Angeles as a center of often unconventional spirituality. Her unique combination of a positive and inclusive message with a heavy dose of arresting spectacle, including faith healing, speaking in tongues, dramatic illustrated sermons, and the like, became a powerful attraction for seekers of all kinds.

That legacy is preserved in the continuing relevance of the church she built–the Angelus Temple in the Echo Park neighborhood–and its outreach ministry, the Dream Center, which aids the city’s poor, homeless, addicted, and displaced. And the religion she founded, the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, now has over 6 million members worldwide.

During its early years, Los Angeles was in somewhat of a competition with San Francisco to become a leading and more influential American city, despite its location in the middle of a large desert. Why did L.A. win?

I wouldn’t say that San Francisco has really “lost” the competition, since it remains a hugely vital and influential city, but L.A. has outstripped it in size and, arguably, at least, in worldwide impact. It’s hard to say exactly why that happened, especially since San Francisco had such a long lead on L.A., developing as a city many decades earlier.

In a way, Los Angeles had to work harder. For instance, San Francisco had a superb natural harbor; L.A., on the other hand, had to undertake extensive improvements to make its harbor competitive. San Francisco had the enormous wealth created by the gold rush to jump-start its growth; L.A. had to figure out creative ways to bring investment and population to the city. So maybe it’s a matter of necessity being the mother of invention.

I’m a big fan of yours. do you already have a new writing project in the works?

I’m still in the early stages of research for the next project, but San Francisco attracts me as another, entirely different city whose history I’d like to explore. So maybe my trilogy of city narratives will become a quartet.

The Mirage Factory is Lemuria’s August 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Gary Krist will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the American History panel at 10:45 a.m. at the C-SPAN room in Old Supreme Court Room at the State Capitol.

Long Live Los Angeles: ‘The Mirage Factory’ by Gary Krist

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On July 18, 2018

In History, Nonfiction

by Andrew Hedglin

I fell in love with Gary Krist’s previous book, Empire of Sin: A Story of Jazz, Sex, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, a couple of years ago when I was preparing for a short trip to the Big Easy. The next spring, I caught up on another of his books, City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to a Modern Chicago.

mirage factoryI have come to the conclusion that Krist is the great pop urban historian of today. In lucid, well-researched prose, he tells not of great American city’s beginnings, but the genesis of the idea of that city–what each metropolis has to offer to the culture and popular imagination of this country. He returns this year with The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles.

More so than his previous two books, Krist structures The Mirage Factory around three seminal individuals. Each of these titans contributed to the incredible growth and out-sized influence of L.A that we know today. These three figures were William Mulholland, who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, D.W. Griffith, who helped shaped the motion picture industry and directed its first (albeit highly problematic) blockbuster, and Aimee Semple McPherson, a wildly successful Pentecostal evangelist who helped establish the city as a place for alternative spiritual seeking.

L-R: Mulholland, Griffith, McPherson

L-R: Mulholland, Griffith, McPherson

My favorite sections were about the grit and glamour of nascent Hollywood, but McPherson also lived too interesting a life not to be magnetized by it. And while Mulholland’s sections might be the least enthralling, they are never dry, technical, or impossible to get through. Indeed, there is plenty of land intrigue such as that would inspire the story of Chinatown decades later. And the cataclysmic end to his career has to be experienced in full detail to be believed.

Los Angeles may not have the immediacy of New Orleans to those of us living in and around Jackson, but its story enthralls us because Los Angeles radiates an important portion the American dream: dreaming itself. The ability to remake your fortunes if you can only get there. After all, neither Mullholland, Griffith, nor McPherson was a native Angeleno. Mullholland and McPherson weren’t even from America.

At each turn, Krist emphasizes how these figures made what should not be possible, possible. Sometimes they accomplished this through illusion, such as in movies, or at great cost to those living around them, such as the aqueduct. But Krist is deft at reminding us of our country’s greatness, and the cost of that greatness. I myself thoroughly enjoyed my third trip into a bustling, alive American city at the dawn of the twentieth century with Krist as my guide.

The Mirage Factory is Lemuria’s August 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Gary Krist will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the American History panel at 10:45 a.m. at the C-SPAN room in Old Supreme Court Room at the State Capitol.

Jon Meacham reviews national turmoil in ‘The Soul of America’

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On July 3, 2018

In Culture, History, Politics

By Andy Taggart. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 1)

Already a Pulitzer Prize-winning and presidential biographer, Jon Meacham just made an important additional contribution to the civic and cultural health of the nation.

In The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House), Meacham reminds us that intense political turmoil and dissent are not new to the American scene, and however out of sorts might seem the body politic today, we’re going to come through it just fine.

More timely encouragement can hardly be imagined.

Meacham has made much in his prior best sellers and frequent public appearances of the power of the presidency, for good and for ill. And his keen grasp of American history spread large–he’s currently a distinguished visiting professor of history at Vanderbilt University–instructs his optimism and sense of humor even in the face of what he perceives as poor leadership and bad policy decisions.

Mississippians were the beneficiaries of his good cheer at the 2016 Mississippi Book Festival held at our State Capitol, and he will be returning in August for the 2018 edition.

His newest work is a review of major times of turmoil in the nation’s history, spanning about a generation per chapter. Not surprisingly, the Civil War and its antecedents, aftermath and legacy is his starting point, but what follows might be less familiar reminders of the nation’s resiliency in the face of painful periods of political enmity.

Did you know that a group of wealthy Wall Street players in the early 1930s tried to recruit a retired general from the U.S. Marines to stage a coup against FDR?

Or that the New York Assembly refused to seat five newly elected legislators because they were members of the Socialist Party?

Do you remember ever knowing that an anarchist tried to blow up the home of the attorney general of the United States, but succeeded instead only in blasting himself into little pieces all over the AG’s front yard?

Throughout, Meacham sounds the drumbeat of the soul of America, by which he means the “collection of convictions, dispositions and sensitivities that shape [our] character and inform [our] conduct.”

While it is clear from his writings and many of his allusions that Meacham is a man of personal faith, it is not a religious reference he intends when he writes of the nation’s soul. It is, rather, his conviction, and the witness of history, that there is an inner core that has made America into America and Americans into Americans.

Meacham frankly acknowledges and clearly documents the times that our core has responded to its dark side, when the nation as a body acted primarily out of fear, anger, and or even hatred. but he also revels in the many, and more frequent, examples of how the core–the soul–of America responded to our better angels and moved forward into improved human relations and quality of life, and devotion to causes higher than self-interest.

Often, he notes, significant steps toward the light have resulted directly from the nation’s revulsion at seeing itself at its darkest.

We conducted the affairs of our nation for a century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence as if it were not imprinted on our corporate soul that all men are created equal. To our shame, and as Meacham painfully reminds us, we conducted the affairs of our state for yet another century still ignoring that soul-stirring promise of our nation’s founding.

Now, at the beginning of our third century as a state, may the soul that Jon Meacham also reminds us has responded so often and in so many ways to our better angels be the one that marks our identity as Americans and as Mississippians. And what better way to start on the path of a new century than with a new state flag?

Andy Taggart is CEO of the law firm of Taggart, Rimes and Graham, PLLC in Ridgeland and co-author of Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008 (University Press of Mississippi 2009). His public service has included roles as chief of staff to Gov. Kirk Fordice, president of the Madison County Board of Supervisors and the chairman of the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership.

Author Q & A with Andrew Lawler

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On June 12, 2018

In History, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 10)

Author and journalist Andrew Lawler admits that, from the beginning, he was warned.

Because he had grown up immersed in the story of the lost colony of Roanoke, he expected immunity to the possibility he would get “sucked in,” as a friend put it, to the mystery of what happened to the 115 men, women, and children who landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, in 1587.

Although the settlers were on a mission to establish the first English colony in the New World, they disappeared without a trace while their leader was away on a six-month resupply trip that had stretched into three years. They left only one clue–a “secret token” carved on a tree.

The question of their fate still haunts historians and archaeologists, and Lawler’s own literal journey to examine the ominous expedition resulted in his new book, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. What he found, he concludes, offers fresh understanding as to why this mystery is relevant in today’s America.

Lawler is also the author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? and is a contributing writer for Science magazine and a contributing editor for Archaeology magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and other publications.

When did you first develop an interest in the lost colony of Roanoke?

Let’s just say that I had no choice. As a child growing up in southeastern Virginia, not far from Jamestown, there was no escaping history. Figures like John Smith and Thomas Jefferson were regularly mentioned at the dinner table.

On our annual beach trip, my family went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This was back in the days when the only nightly entertainment was bingo and a dance hall. The third option was to see The Lost Colony, the three-plus-hour outdoor drama in the buggy woods of nearby Roanoke Island. We sat on hard wooden benches amid the mosquitoes as the organ blared, Indians danced, and sweating English soldiers marched around in breastplates.

It is one of the longest-running plays in American history, and it certainly seemed never-ending to me as a child. Written in the 1930s and performed ever since, it told teh story of the three voyages to the Outer Banks by the English in the 1580s, culminating in the arrival of the final group that today we call the “Lost Colonists.”

There was just enough action to keep a kid interested–plenty of sword fights, fireworks, and firearms going off. But what really fascinated me was the end, when all the settlers go marching off into the woods, hungry and ragged but singing bravely. Then it was our turn, as the audience filed out down the dark path to the parking lot. This was the very place where the Roanoke colonists vanished, and when I was small, that visceral quality of getting lost here struck me with terror. I was relieved to crawl into the back of the station wagon.

As a teenager, fascination replaced the terror. I devoured everything I could find about the colony, reading first-hand accounts and poring over John White’s beautiful watercolors of the Native Americans. But since there was no new evidence to solve the mystery, there seemed nothing fresh to say. Then a few years ago I ran into a British archaeologist while covering a conference at (The University of) Oxford for a magazine. When he told me that he was digging on Hatteras Island, I knew immediately what he was after. Then I found out another team was hard at work digging at another site where the colonists may have gone. Finally, there were new clues emerging. It was a chance to see a childhood mystery solved. Once again, I was hooked.

It seems, from some things mentioned in your book, that you took somewhat of a literary risk by writing The Secret Token. Did you ever doubt that you were doing the right thing?

Andrew Lawler

At first, I was plain embarrassed. I’d spent more than a decade covering the devastating cultural heritage tragedy still unfolding in the Middle East–the looting of the Iraq Museum, the Taliban efforts to wreck Afghan statues, and the ongoing destruction of ancient sites in Syria. Writing about a few dead Elizabethans seemed almost absurdly irrelevant. And when I brought up the “Lost Colony,” more than one historian smirked. It was all so wrapped up in cheesy pop culture, and most serious academics gave the entire episode a wide berth.

I thought I would just do a quick online story, but then it turned into a full-fledged magazine story. Then I realized that I was amassing so much material that it had to be a book. I’ve learned that when I have sinking feeling in my gut–the “Oh, no, anything but that” feeling, then I have hit on the story that I have to tell.

There are many theories about the fate of the English colonists who were never found. In your opinion, which one is the most outlandish? Most reasonable?

My personal favorite is that the colonists turned into zombies that are still out there in those spooky Roanoke woods. Alien abduction is another. Of course, there are can’t -be-proven theories–that they sailed away on their small ship and drowned. We know now that  a severe drought afflicted that time period, and some argued they starved to death. But when you look at later “lost” Europeans, most of them simply deserted to or were captured by Native Americans. As Benjamin Franklin noted, few wanted to return, even if they were taken by force. This was what I call colonial America’s dirty little secret.

So, it seems pretty obvious that if you are hungry and don’t know how to survive in a strange environment, you will find people who know what they are doing–and in this case, that was the local Native American population. Eastern North Carolina was filled with thousands of people who thrived in villages and towns, planting crops while also gathering plants and hunting animals. The English didn’t land in a wilderness. So, most historians who have studied the Roanoke voyages agree they did what most of us likely would do–hang out with the people who could make sure you were fed, kept warm, and protected from enemies. In return, they had skills the Indians wanted, like how to make metal implements.

You traveled to Portugal to research the life of the pilot Fernandes. What was the most important thing you learned on this trip, and did you travel to other places for research?

This was a crazy effort to track down a bizarre rumor. The private papers of the Roanoke navigator Simao Fernandes were said to have surfaced in Portugal. A couple of American historians had tried and failed to verify the story, which promised to rewrite our entire understanding of the voyages, and I couldn’t resist the challenge. After running around Portugal and Spain pursuing every lead, I came up empty-handed. But as was always the case with following what seemed a dead end in this tale, I stumbled into something unexpected and important.

In this case, I found that Fernandes was not the villain he was portrayed to be, and that, in fact, he was quite possibly the real mind behind the entire project. He knew and understood the emerging global economy better than any Englishman of his day. And since Roanoke laid the foundation for Jamestown and all other English efforts that followed, you could say this obscure Portuguese pirate played a central role in launching both the United States and the British Empire.

You wrote that “In a nation fractured by views on race, gender, and immigration, we are still struggling with what it means to be American.” Explain in what ways gender issues are tied to this story.

A woman writer named Eliza Lanesford Cushing coined the term “Lost Colony” and made Virginia Dare a folk sensation in the 1830s. This was a moment when women’s magazines first appeared, and women writers like Cushing finally had outlets for their work. But American history at that time was exclusively about men, Betsy Ross being the exception proving the rule. Women were portrayed as bit players in Jamestown and Plymouth when they appeared at all. Men got the credit for “taming the wilderness.”

All we know about Virginia Dare was her name and when she was born and baptized, but her status as the first English child born in the Americas gave women a stake in the origin story of the United States. The Virginia Dare stories, though almost wholly fabricated, became wildly popular among women in the 19th century. They finally could see themselves in the drama that led to the nation’s founding.

Is there any hard evidence that the English settlers “chose” to adopt the Native American lifestyle, as some have suggested?

If they wanted to live, the settlers had to become Native Americans. When Europeans first arrived on the North American coast, they didn’t have the skills to survive, even when their ships regularly brought supplies. They depended on trading their goods with the locals for food. Without the indigenous peoples, all the early European settlements almost certainly would have failed.

Finding hard evidence for Lost Colony assimilation, however, is tricky. If they became Native American, would Jamestown settlers 20 years later have recognized them? Probably not. There certainly are hints that when John White came back in 1590, three years after leaving for England to get supplies, he was watched by people–perhaps including assimilated Lost Colonists who dreaded boarding a cramped and stinking ship for a long passage back to gloomy and plague-ridden London. But I pieced together circumstantial bits of evidence to make a what I think is a compelling case that the Elizabethans became Algonquian speakers–and that their most likely descendants ended up in a most surprising place.

Why is the story of the Lost Colony relevant today?

There are moments in the life of our nation when what it means to be American becomes hotly contested. This was true in the 1830s, when an influx of German and Irish shook up the majority Anglo-Americans. Certainly, during and after the Civil War we differed on whether African Americans could or should be full citizens.

A century ago, we decided women should be able to vote, though at the same time we didn’t generally considers of Italians or Jews to be “white.” In each of these periods, the story of the Lost Colony served as a fable reflecting these tensions. So it is today, with groups like Vdare Foundation warning whites about the dangers of being outnumbered by non-European immigrants. So, I can’t think of a more relevant story in today’s climate.

Do you have ideas in the works for an upcoming book?

I’m drawn to the ancient tales that seem to define how we see the world today. Right now, I’m spending time in the Middle East exploring the source of religious tension there. Few places on Earth are so driven by old stories, particularly those that many see as God-given.

Andrew Lawler will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 13, to sign and read from The Secret Token. The Secret Token is Lemuria’s July 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Jon Meacham

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On June 5, 2018

In Culture, Politics

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 3) and digital web edition

A Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, biographer and frequent news commentator, Jon Meacham addresses the political and social divide America faces today by examining its “soul”—and he offers a calming reminder that, just as the nation has faced tough times in the past, it can overcome the current rancor.

soul of americaIn his newest title, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Meacham reminds Americans of protectors Abraham assuredly said were on our side—he called them “the better angels of our nature”—and they have surely seen rougher times than we now experience, the author declares.

Meacham examines the people and times that facilitated turning points in American history, and he contends that “hope over fear” will, as it has in the past, guide the country through the present tumult.

Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham

Among his New York Times bestsellers is American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, for which Meacham won the Pulitzer.

A former executive editor at Random House, Meacham is a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor at Time, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians.

He lives in Nashville with his wife and family and serves as a distinguished professor visiting professor at Vanderbilt University.

As a writer, you are known as a presidential historian. How did that role become yours, as you began to consider and write about so many American presidents?

As John Kennedy remarked, the presidency is the “vital center of action,” so the stories of the office and of the human beings who’ve held it are inherently important and typically interesting. If you live politics—and I do—then you kind of naturally gravitate upward to writing about the presidency.

Your new book takes a deep look at what you call the “soul” of America, and you define that “soul,” of a person or of a country, as being “the existence of an immanent collection of convictions, dispositions and sensitivities that shape the character and inform conduct.” This is an interesting concept that you describe as “ancient and perennial.” Could you explain it more simply, and why it is so important?
I think that’s pretty straightforward: the soul is our essence, whether we’re talking about a nation or a person. Some impulses are good; some are bad. Every moment is thus shaped by whether the better instincts triumph over the worst.

In The Soul of America, you examine what you believe to be the threats of the Trump presidency, and you make the case that America will “overcome” this period, as it has during previous hard times the country’s past. What do you believe are the biggest threats America faces under the Trump administration?

We have a president who eschews the conventions of power and declines to conduct himself with the dignity and the restraint we’ve come to expect. That’s his choice; he won, so he can do as he likes. But issuing threats about the legal system, or bullying people, or insisting that he’s right all the time and that any criticism of him is “fake” has the capacity to erode trust in our already-fragile institutions.

You examine great points in American history when the country “righted” itself and pulled through difficult times, but it always came at a great price. What do you think America needs to make that happen again?

I think we need to listen to each other more and be willing to acknowledge when the other side has a point or gets something right. And we have to remember that progress and prosperity in America tend to come when we favor the free flow of people, of ideas, and of goods. Openness isn’t a weakness; historically speaking, it’s a sign and a cause of economic and cultural strength and health.

I don’t remember a time when we as Americans haven’t heard every day that we are at a point in history in which politics is more divisive than it has ever been—and that trend, if it is one, doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Is it possible for America to become unified again?

Of course, it is. We were more divided in the 1850s and fought a war in the 1860s. The Klan was a national force in the 1920s. Joe McCarthy divided us in the 1950s. And Southerners know how violent and fraught things were after the Brown decision and well into the 1960s.

Mississippi is a state that voted for Trump by a large margin in the 2016 presidential election. What would you say to those voters about their agreement with some of his policies?

There’s plenty to agree with. As with other presidents, though, there’s also plenty to be skeptical about. He’s imperfect; be honest about that and work to encourage him to reach out beyond his base of support. Because I promise you this: history rewards presidents who govern for all, not just for those who vote for him.

Why was the 1916 painting by Childe Hassam Rainy Day, Fifth Avenue chosen for the cover of this book?

Because it’s a beautiful rendering of a patriotic moment and speaks to the hope of a nation that for all its flaws remains what Lincoln called the “last, best hope.”

You write about women’s suffrage, child labor and Jim Crow laws, etc. Most decent people today realize that those laws needed to be changed. One hundred years from now what causes or existing laws do you think may meet the same fate?

It’s less about specific laws today and more about the ladders to the middle class. We’ve got to find a way for more Americans to prosper and pursue happiness without unreasonable levels of fear about the future.

Your next book will be about James and Dolley Madison. Why did you choose this couple, and why are you writing about both?

Because they were a true team serving the ideals of America at a crucial and contentious time.

John Meachem will be at Lemuria on Thursday, June 14, at 12:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Soul of America. He will also be at the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, August 18, in conversation with Karl Rove.

Author Q & A with Rick Bragg

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On May 2, 2018

In Southern Cooking, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 29)

With equal parts love and humor—not to mention brutal honesty—Southern storyteller extraordinaire Rick Bragg tackles a topic he admits he never thought he’d have the courage to swallow: food. And good Southern cooking.

Fortunately for his readers, the release of his latest volume, The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table, (Knopf) has proven that old-fashioned Southern fare is indeed in good hands.

“I’m not a cook,” the Possum Trot, Alabama, native is quick to say, but in this 490-page “food memoir,” he lets the stories of “his people” and their hilarious and sometimes heart-wrenching circumstances do the stewing and stirring.

best cook in the worldBut mostly, it’s a tribute to his mother, 81-year-old Margaret Bragg, whose skills in the kitchen, he says, are still unmatched. This is a woman who never—not once—used a cookbook, a written recipe, a measuring cup or even a set of measuring spoons to put a meal on the table. Her skills came from oral recipes and techniques that go back generations—some even to pre-Civil War days.

Included are recipes for 74 Southern “soul food” dishes he says it took all of a year to convert into written form under his mother’s guidance.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and a journalism professor at the University of Alabama, Bragg is a former New York Times reporter and the recipient of a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University. A regular contributor to Garden and Gun, his previous books include All Over But the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, and My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South, among others.

Your new book is a “food memoir” and tribute to your mother, Margaret Bragg, who never used a recipe or owned a cookbook. Since you admit you are not a cook yourself, how did you get the idea to write this book, and why was it so important to you?

One of the reasons I did the book was because my mom had a heart attack, then developed cancer and had two years of chemo. When she first got sick about five years ago, her kitchen was just different when she was gone. When she’s home, the kitchen usually smells like bacon grease and that wonderful Red Diamond coffee. When she was gone it smelled more like lemon dishwashing detergent. Even the cold cast-iron skillets had a different smell.

I had tried before to cook her pinto beans and ham bone, and her beef short ribs, but it didn’t taste like hers. She never, never let us boys (Rick and his two brothers) in her kitchen when we were growing up. We’d have coal dust on us, or a live frog in a front pocket of our overalls. None of us learned any cooking from her.

I asked her where the recipe was written down for beef short ribs and she said, “I’ve never written down any recipe,” and I knew that. I’ve never seen her standing over a written recipe.

I love writing about food, something I do quite a bit, and every part of this book was always about the stories of people with my blood.

All of the recipes in this book come from stories—stories about fist fights or leaving a landlord in the middle of the night—because that’s how we live around here. And you would just remember the food that was there when it happened. The story about the time Sis, my mother’s father’s cousin, shot her husband in the teeth, and what that had to do with her chicken and dressing, is pure “writer’s platinum.”

I just thought I’d like to write these things down. I thought, “Why not? Do a book about food, and set recipes in it.”

Because your mom never uses measuring cups or spoons, you literally had to convince her to come up with the recipes included in the book. Was that a hard sell, since she says in the book, “A person can’t cook from a book”? And it must have been time-consuming creating recipes for so many dishes she knew by heart. How did you go about it?

There are two leather chairs in my momma’s living room. She sat in the one on the left and I sat in the one on the right. I leaned close to her to talk about how much of what would go into the recipes, and it took For. Ever.

To her, there is no “half cup of flour.” She would say “just get a good handful” or “a real good handful.” A tablespoon to her means the big spoon in the kitchen drawer. Or she would say use a “smidgeon” or—my favorite—“some.” It really didn’t matter the quantity of ingredients in the recipes. It’s the process. You have to leave a lot of it to common sense.

It took, probably, a solid year.

I’ve been asked if we tested the recipes in the book. My ambition was to share some of the stories of the food, and some recipes, as best I can. That, and not poison anybody.

This book is not about your typical “cookbook” type of food—there are no restraints on the use of fat (often in the form of lard), or sugar, eggs, meats or other rich ingredients that have lost some favor over the past few decades. What kind of readers and cooks do you hope will be drawn to this book?

First of all, it’s not a cookbook. If people are buying it just as a cookbook, that’s not the point. What I hope happens is that people will enjoy the true narrative, the history.

I’m not a cook and I’m not a cookbook writer. This was a chance to write about where the food came from. I hope that what people in the Upper East Side (of Manhattan), London, Connecticut and everywhere else will enjoy is the narratives, and see the value of the food.

Your mom insists she is a “cook”—not a chef. Please explain what that boils down to.

A chef expects to be called “chef,” and his underlings have to refer to him as such. A cook doesn’t care what you call him or her. It’s not about pride, but pretentiousness.

There is a great deal of family history in The Best Cook in the World—not only unique, but humorous! Tell me about the process of putting these stories together.

We didn’t have to cobble the stories together. A lot of times the food would spark the story, like the chicken and dressing story. There were recipes I wanted to put in there, but I just didn’t have a good story—like peanut butter pie, fresh garden vegetables and Aunt Juanita’s peanut butter cookies. Now, commodity cheese, I have a great story. Or Ava’s tornado story—I’ve wanted to include that story somewhere for 15 years, and this was my chance.

Among the recipes that are included, what are some of your favorites—and have you, or will you—cook them yourself?

Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg

I can cook a mean biscuit, but I usually won’t if I can get some good store-bought ones. I make red eye gravy with ham and grits—the good kind. A chocolate pie sounds like something I could do.

I don’t have the patience my momma has, and I can’t make any of it taste like she does.

One of my favorite things she made us was fried pies—but she recently told my brother Sam and me that she never made that. She had forgotten. That was the reason to do this book.

Rick Bragg will beat Lemuria on Friday, May 4, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table. The Best Cook in the World is a 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Edition Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Brian Castner

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On April 18, 2018

In Adventure, History, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 15)

For a man who never intended to be a writer and admits that he “stumbled into it,” Brian Castner’s work has landed on solid footing thus far.

disappointment riverHis newest book, Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, follows his own bold journey to retrace a 1789 expedition whose leader had hoped would finally unlock a North American passage to Asia–and change world trade forever.

Castner’s original goal of becoming an engineer got sidetracked years ago, and after a successful Air Force career that found him detonating bombs on a regular basis, the Iraq War veteran returned home to find that writing would become his tool to work through lingering stress from his military years.

His previous books include the memoir The Long Walk in 2012 (a New York Times Editor’s Pick that was adapted into an opera); and the nonfiction All the Ways We Kill and Die in 2016. His journalism and essays have appeared in Esquire, Wired, VICE, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others.

How did your engineering background lead you, in a roundabout way, into your writing career?

Brian Castner

Brian Castner

I grew up in Buffalo, New York, went to Marquette University in Milwaukee, and majored in electrical engineering. I was never a good engineer, though. I got good grades, but I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think like other engineers. But the engineering degree was a means to an end, because I had an ROTC scholarship, and wanted to get into the Air Force to be an astronaut. I’ve always wanted to explore–the further out, the better! Obviously, that didn’t work out, but writing has let me travel the world.

I’ve always liked to read, and as a kid I wrote a lot, in middle school and high school. Even in college, I tried to escape engineering a bit, and studied a semester in Oxford, reading philosophy, history, and English. I even took a playwriting class. But I never considered a career in writing. I didn’t think it was a job that contemporary adults really did. I didn’t know any authors until I became one. I stumbled into it.

You served three tours of duty in the Middle East, working as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer (a bomb squad tech) in the Air Force and winning a Bronze Star. When you returned home, you spent a good while readjusting to civilian life, and fed your adventurous side by working as a river guide. When you decided to retrace Alexander Mackenzie’s 1,100-mile exploration in 1789 of a river he hoped would finally uncover the “Northwest Passage” in northern Canada, how did your family (your wife and four sons) react, and why was it so important to you to make this dangerous journey?

I did struggle returning home, a story I tell in The Long Walk. River guiding really helped me find peace in the tumult–when you are in the middle of the rapid, you have to be totally present, to think about nothing but your line–that is, your safest path through the water–and the water itself. I have a calm feeling in the whitewater and it gave me a safe way to chill out and readjust to home life.

For this trip, I don’t have a good answer to what drove me. I find it to be an urge, a base instinct. I had always wanted to take a long journey like this, walking or canoeing, months in the wilderness. When I came upon Mackenzie’s story, I was entranced by the narrative, but also by the possibility of taking the journey myself, to write a better book. It fulfilled a long-held desire, and that it was Mackenzie’s journey I was retracing is a matter of scholarly research and serendipity.

A few of my four sons wanted to come with me; my wife put the kibosh on that. I also invited her along, for at least a section, but she smartly demurred. They know me, know why this trip excited me. And the good news is that as I get older, the fernweh [wanderlust] seems to be fading. At least a bit.

Disappointment River alternates between the detailed stories of your journey and that of Alexander Mackenzie, a fur trader who knew that his success in finding a Northwest Passage–a trade route through North America that would provide a direct channel to the East–would not only secure his place in history, but would ensure his fortune as well. Why did you decide to tell both stories?

Because these are the kinds of stories I most like to read, a blending of forgotten history and travelogue. But also, one story didn’t make sense without the other. On the one hand, I’ve had enough internal voyages of discovery. I didn’t need to take a long canoe trip to find myself. I needed an external goal and finish line, and retracing Mackenzie’s path provided that. At the same time, if I just told Mackenzie’s story, I think most readers would have an obvious question: I wonder what this land is like now? That Mackenzie encountered fierce pack ice at the end of his journey, and I suspected I would find open ocean, lent another bit of symmetry to the trip.

On your own journey, you worked out a plan that allowed four of your friends to jump in and accompany you, one at a time, via small airports along the way. Their travel schedules dictated that you were allowed little time to rest along the way. Tell me how having these friends join you–and the schedule you were forced to keep–influenced your trip.

As I write in the book, I had no interest in doing a psychological experiment on myself, to see if I could do the trip by myself; it was always about finding the right people to go with me. At first, I hoped to get one friend to do the whole trip, but no one had the time. Doing four friends, and rotating the flights, was a matter of necessity. I think it had benefits in the book, though–a variety of characters for the reader to get to know.

The tight schedule did produce some anxiety, but…pretty early on in the trip, you realize how small and powerless you are against the might of the river. So, I worried before the trip, but during it, you simply make the best time you can and realize how much is out of your control. The cold, wet, heat, thunderstorms, bugs, and hunger drove us as much as a schedule. I wanted to finish the trip, succeed, and get home to my kids.

In the book, you speak often of the difficulties you faced–several serious run-ins with storms and high winds, high waves, and, at times, even hunger. You often mentioned the stress, exertion, filth, heat, and mosquitoes–and how it took a toll on your mind and body. Did you expect it to be this difficult? Of what were you most fearful? What did you miss the most?

I expected it to be physically taxing, and I knew how to patiently endure the weather and hunger. But I wasn’t good at predicting how mentally challenging the monotony was. I didn’t know I would be so bored, for such long stretches–the view never changing, the sun never changing, the food never changing, nothing more to talk about, just paddling through a constant now. That tedium was the biggest challenge.

My biggest fear was not bears or weather or waves, honestly. It was getting injured or sick. I had a big med kit with a lot of drugs, like cipro, but fortunately, I never needed it.

I missed a lot of things on the river, especially my kids. But all the modern conveniences, the thing I missed most was darkness. The ability to draw the blinds and make a dark bedroom. It felt so good to sleep in darkness.

As you traveled north, you were able to get a sense of the cultures and lives of the people in these tiny villages. What did you discover about their hopes and fears?

I had read a lot on the struggles in northern indigenous Canada: poverty, alcoholism, suicide. But I was unprepared for the reality of it, the casual public intoxication at all hours, the pervasive want. Of course, I met wonderful generous people, who took me into their homes and told me stories of living on the land in the traditional way. But they talked about the alcohol and poverty, too, all the time. I didn’t have to bring it up–there is no way to avoid it. There is just a pervasive hopelessness–the traditional ways are hard. Please rid yourself of any romance now–living off the land is hard and dangerous work, a hard life. No wonder the young people are not clamoring to take it up, not when they know all about modern life on satellite TV. But what replaces it, in these tiny villages in the North? The pipeline? Tourism? There is not much answer now.

For reasons I’ll let readers discover, Mackenzie believed for the rest of his life that his voyage to find the Northwest Passage was a “spectacular failure”–but he could never know the truth. His book about it became a worldwide bestseller, and he received much affirmation. What do you think his greatest achievement was?

I think his greatest…achievement is that he never lost a man or woman on his expeditions. This was hardly an assured thing. Voyagers died in the rapids all the time. Attack by the indigenous tribes was a real threat–the next expedition to follow Mackenzie down his river, in 1799, was ambushed and wiped out. John Franklin followed Mackenzie’s route in 1819, and his party resorted to cannibalism. Despite the hazards of the whitewater, violence, and starvation, not a single person died on his great journeys in 1789 and 1793. In retrospect, that is remarkable.

What did this experience help you learn about yourself? Would you do it again?

After this trip, I feel like I have nothing left to prove. Even to myself. Maybe especially to myself. That might sound funny, since I have survived other crucibles that are supposed to impart that feeling–in EOD school, 30 of us started and only three finished. But I had never taken a long wilderness journey like this before. And I feel like I’m good now–if I never hike the Appalachian Trail, I’m fine.

I wouldn’t do a trip like this again, not without my wife and some of my children. There is nothing hiding behind the next spruce tree that is more important than them.

Do you have another book or idea in thew works at this time?

I have started my next book, and it will be published again by Doubleday. But I hesitate to say too much, lest the ideas and inspiration slip away into the ether. I can say this, though: it is nonfiction, history, a story of the North, and I do have to take a backpacking trip into the mountains. Yes, my sons go, too!

Disappointment River is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Francisco Cantú

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On April 9, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Culture, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print and online editions (April 8)

When Francisco Cantú decided to join the U.S. Border Patrol as a new college graduate in 2008, he expected the work to be tough, but after four years, the realities of the job forced him to examine the morality of his duties–and a gut check told him clearly: “It’s not the work for me.”

line becomes a riverIn a memoir about his duties with the patrol, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead Books), Cantú recounts the physical and emotional toll the experience took on him, and his growing angst about what really happens in the desert to those who attempt to cross.

Written in three parts, the book describes his training and introduction to the brutal field work; his transfer to a desk job in the intelligence division; and his personal involvement in the case of an undocumented friend who got caught up in the legalities of crossing the border.

A former Fulbright fellow, Cantú was a recipient of a Whiting Award for emerging writers in 2017. His work has been featured on the This American Life radio/podcast and in Best American Essays, Harper’s, Guernica, Orion, and n + 1.

He received his MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. When he’s not writing, Cantú coordinates a research fellowship that connects MFA students with advocacy groups active in environment and social justice issues in the borderlands; teaches at the University Poetry Center; and tends bar.

When you decided to pursue a career as a U.S. Border Patrol, you knew it would be a tough job–that you would be “fetching dead bodies from the desert” in 115-degree heat, and you were cautioned by one of your early trainers: “You will be tested.” What inspired you to seek employment as a border patrol agent?

Francisco Cantú

Francisco Cantú

When I first began to consider signing up for the Border Patrol, I was 22, about to graduate from college. I had become completely obsessed with the border during my studies in international relations, but began to feel that much of the book learning and policy work I had been doing was disconnected from the realities of the landscape and culture that I had known growing up. At the time, the border patrol began to seem like one of the only ways to really be out on the border day in and day out, to see the hard realities of the place.

I joined hoping to be a “force for good” within the agency, imagining I might spend several years in the patrol and then become a policy maker or immigration lawyer equipped with insights that had eluded everyone else. I knew I’d see awful things, but I imagined that I’d be able to just be an observer, not a participant, that my sense of morals and ethics would withstand the numbing forces of the institution. It was incredibly naïve.

Understandably, when your Mexican-American mother heard of your plans to work as a border patrol agent, she feared for you life and your psyche, worried that it would change you in hard ways. Throughout the book, there are episodes of her offering advice and reflections about your work. Looking back, do you see some wisdom in her words now that you didn’t see then?

From the very beginning, my mother sensed the risk I was running of becoming lost. She had spent her career working for the federal government and warned me how it is impossible to step into an institution without it repurposing your energy towards its own ends. I wish I’d listened to her more–like many young adults I thought of myself as infallible.

My mother was the only person in my life that was still holding me accountable, reminding me of the reasons I had given for joining. She was one of the only tethers connecting me to who I was outside of the job. I don’t know if I would have come out of it in the same way without her.

Your book is filled with references to frequent disturbing dreams that haunted your nights. You also suffered from teeth grinding and lack of sleep during your stint as an agent. What did you make of these episodes?

At the time, I pushed them away. But looking back on it, these dreams were the only thing in my life, other than my mother, reaching out to tell me that something was wrong, that I was not alright. It’s alarming to think of how plainly violence and dehumanization was manifest in my dreams and how it correlated with becoming numb to it through my work. I would dream, for example, of dead bodies, of people I had arrested returning to me. I once dreamed that I was in the desert surrounded by people without faces. The longer I ignored the dreams, the more jarring they became. I realize now my nightmares were alarm bells, calling me back to my sense of humanity, calling my attention to something that had been violated.

Your days as an agent were filled with encounters with immigrants headed north, determined to enter the U.S. at almost any cost. Some were drug dealers or worse, but most were just looking for honest work. You admit there were times you would work with desperate people at points along the way, often in miserable circumstances, and you would soon forget their names. Did you feel like you became desensitized to the violence and despair of many of these people?

Absolutely. The normalization of violence is a central theme of this book. That moment you mention, when I realized I had forgotten the names of a pregnant woman and her husband that I’d arrested only hours before, is one of those moments I think of all the time, because I think that’s the first step in dehumanizing someone–forgetting their name, the thing that makes them an individual. It’s a small form of violence, and, looking at that–all the big and small ways we become desensitized to violence and despair–that was one of the principal things that led me to write after I left the job.

It felt like one of the only ways to truly grapple with what I’d been part of. I became interested not only in interrogating the ways I had normalized violence in my own life, but in examining how this also happens on a much broader level, how entire societies and populations normalize violence, especially in the borderlands.

The book includes a great deal of the history of the border situation, along with reflective pieces by other writers whose point of view you deemed relevant. How did you choose these pieces, and why did you add them?

Early drafts of the manuscript included some history of the border, but I was actually given permission by my editor to include even more outside research, to really look at how this border came to be what it is. That was exciting to me–it opened the door for me to include different kinds of work that had influenced my thinking about this place: writing from Mexican poet Sara Uribe, novelist and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza, as well as citations from primary documents like the U.S. Boundary Commission Reports from the 1800s.

The purpose of including such a wide spectrum of research was to encourage an interrogation of borders: most people who don’t live near one would probably tend to think of the border as a political or physical line separating two countries. But part of living in the borderlands is being constantly presented with different manifestations of the border and seeing all the different ways it is thrust into people’s lives.

Why did you ultimately quit your job as a border patrol agent?

I accepted a Fulbright Fellowship to study abroad. There were several reasons I applied for it, and one of them, I’m sure, was to subconsciously provide myself with a way out of the job that didn’t represent a defeat, that represented a path ahead. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that I had finally started to break down.

Once I left the Border Patrol, I realized that I didn’t get any of the answers I had joined looking for–I only came away with more questions, and the border only seemed more overwhelming and incomprehensible. My turn toward writing was a way of accepting that, of surrendering to the act of asking questions that might not have an answer.

The final third of the book is devoted to the story of José, a friend you met after your border patrol years who became trapped in Mexico after returning to his native home to visit his dying mother. José comments at length about the difficulties of trying to cross the border to return to his family, and he places much blame on the Mexican government for its corruption and lack of aid and support for its own people; while chastising America for its seeming inhumanity in attempting to turn them away. Do you have a sense of what could or should be done to resolve, or at least ease, the crisis?

I remember José explaining to me that as a father there is literally nothing that he wouldn’t endure to reunite with his children. It’s hard to really grasp the significance of somebody saying, “It doesn’t matter how hellacious an obstacle is, I will overcome it to be with my family.”

José explained to me that he respects the laws of the U.S., but his family values supersede those laws. Our rhetoric encourages us to think of people like José as criminals, but under those terms, it’s impossible for me to look at his actions as criminal. I think most of us would do the same in his situation.

I think we have to end the de facto policy of “enforcement through deterrence,” which is something you don’t hear our policy makers talk about in any of their discussions about immigration reform. By heavily enforcing the easy-to-cross portions of the border near towns and cities, we’ve been pushing migrants to cross int he most remote and deadly parts of the desert, weaponizing the landscape.

Hundreds of deaths occur there each year, and those are just the ones that get reported. Around 6,000 and 7,000 migrants have lost their lives since the year 2000. Even last year, the administration bragged that crossings were down to their lowest level in more than 14 years, but what you didn’t hear is that migrant deaths actually went up from the year before, not down. So even though less people are crossing the border, the crossing is becoming more deadly.

I see this as a complete humanitarian crisis taking place on American soil, and I don’t see our country acknowledging these deaths in the way we should. We don’t read their names, we don’t memorialize them, we don’t mourn their deaths. That’s unacceptable. We have to understand these numbers, first and foremost, as representing individual people, individual lives.

Francisco Cantú will be at Lemuria  tonight, Monday, April 9, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Line Becomes a River. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Canoeist creates part history, part travel memoir in ‘Disappointment River’

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On March 27, 2018

In Adventure, History, Nonfiction

By Boyce Upholt. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 25)

disappointment riverThe modern explorer has to live with a simple truth: there is nowhere left that has not already been observed. Though that disappointment can also be a gift.
In 2016, the writer Brian Castner canoed the length of the Mackenzie River, the longest in Canada. He was—quite intentionally—following in the footsteps of the river’s namesake, Alexander Mackenzie.

In 1789, the Scottish explorer traveled its length in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. I’ve read about Mackenzie before, but somehow no image of the man and his history has ever stuck. In Canada, meanwhile, Mackenzie is a minor national figure, the namesake for not just the river, but schools and towns.

A few years after his river quest, Mackenzie successfully crossed North America east to west, beating Lewis and Clark by more than a decade. (The American explorers carried a copy of Mackenzie’s book as a guide.)

The result of Castner’s trip is Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, a rollicking read that, in alternating chapters, sets the writer’s adventures against Mackenzie’s expedition.

The remarkable geography of that river—which, like Castner, I will henceforth call the Deh Cho, in deference to the indigenous people who knew it long before Mackenzie’s “discovery”—are reason enough to read this book.

The Deh Cho, the thirteenth-longest river in the world, is the northern answer to the Mississippi, and drains a basin almost nearly as large. Wide and turbid, it winds past mountains, through tundra, across vast Arctic swamps. Inuit and Dene villages hug its shores.

For most of us, I have to think, this river is terra incognita. It’s rarely mentioned in the news, and impossible to observe on Google Street View. As Castner puts it, it’s “a place you have to see in person if you want to see at all.”

But Castner’s words are the next best thing, and they will be a delight to any armchair explorer. Frankly, I found the river more compelling than Mackenzie himself. Castner spends nearly half of the book getting us up to speed on the explorer—his youth, his rise in the fur trade, etc.—and it’s all well-told and useful.

But it’s something of a relief when Mackenzie finally embarks on the Deh Cho; now Castner can, too. His taut descriptions of his travel are by far the book’s highlight.
But both stories are necessary, as the book’s strongest message is delivered in its comparisons. Mackenzie, at the mouth of Deh Cho, found a wall of impenetrable ice. Thanks to a changing climate, Castner finds none at all. The river’s wildness persists, but today it’s pockmarked with gritty towns devoted to extracting oil and metals from the earth.

Mackenzie wouldn’t blink these such developments. He was, in Castner’s words, “the product of an age”: explorers in his era weren’t seeking wilderness adventure; discovery, for them, was a way to drag commerce and capitalism forward in the world.

Castner, meanwhile, knows he’s discovering nothing, except maybe himself. But that humility is freeing. Every acre of land on this continent has been known to someone, and for thousands of years. The only story left for explorers is the one most worth telling: why and how a place so vibrant can be overlooked by so much of the world.

Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer based in the Mississippi Delta. He is at work on a nonfiction book about the Mississippi River, and a novel about the aftermath of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Brian Castner will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 28, at 5:00 to sign and read from Disappointment River. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

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On February 28, 2018

In Civil Rights, Law, Nonfiction, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 25)

Nationally known reporter/blogger Radley Balko and the University of Mississippi School of Law’s Tucker Carrington, who is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project, have devoted their careers to investigating and helping to overturn wrongful convictions for inmates who have been unjustly imprisoned in this country.

cadaver kingTheir new book, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South, exposes their findings of how “institutional racism and junk forensic science” and the actions of Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and dentist Michael West of Hattiesburg teamed up to bring many false convictions against Mississippi defendants for nearly two decades. They highlight the cases of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, who spent a combined 30 years in jail for murders they didn’t commit, before being exonerated in 2008.

The book makes the case that Mississippi’s criminal justice system deserves serious scrutiny and investigation itself if it is to fairly and accurately dispense justice and spare innocent lives.

Radley Balko

Radley Balko

Balko, a longtime opinion journalist (now for the Washington Post) and an investigative reporter, writes and edits The Watch, an opinion blog that covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

Carrington is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project and Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Its mission is to identify, investigate, and litigate actual claims of innocence by Mississippi prisoners, as well as advocate for systemic criminal justice reform.

Tucker Carrington

Tucker Carrington

Prior to coming to Ole Miss, Carrington was an E. Barrett Prettyman fellow at Georgetown Law Center, a trial and supervising attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and a visiting clinical professor at Georgetown.

He writes frequently about criminal justice issues, including wrongful convictions and legal ethics. His work has appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, The Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, and the Mississippi Journal of Law.

How and why did you two come to collaborate on writing this book?

Balko: One of us called the other–we can’t remember which way that went–shortly after I had an op-ed on Haybe published in the Wall Street Journal. Tucker had just started work at the Mississippi Innocence Project in Oxford and was a little overwhelmed at what he had already seen. Over the years, we discussed these cases often as he litigated some of them and I wrote about some of them. As two of only a handful of people at the time who knew the full extent of what was going on, I think we commiserated a bit. Eventually we realized that a book was really the only way to tell this story with the thoroughness and attention to detail it deserved. By that time, we had both immersed in this stuff for nearly 10 years, so it just sort of made sense to write it together.

Carrington: We met shortly after I moved to Mississippi in 2007. It just so happened that Radley was working on the Corey Maye story (involving the 2001 shooting of Maye, a Prentiss police officer) and called me at my new office at the law school. I think he just wanted to reach out and make contact. From there our paths crossed in one way or another–in the main because he got interested in forensic science issue in the courts–and my practice began to feature exactly those types of cases. We each had ideas about recounting this decades-long episode–and we each slugged away at it separately: Radley in multiple pieces over the years, me through some law review pieces and litigating cases. Ultimately, we decided to join forces for a book.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the stories of how Brooksville, Mississippi, residents Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks were falsely accused of murders and served a combined 30 years in prison until their release was navigated with the help of the Innocence Project. Their convictions had come largely due to policies that allowed Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and Dr. Michael West, a dentist from Hattiesburg, to become wealthy through a corrupt legal system. Please explain how their “partnership” developed and came to make such scenarios like this possible for so many years.

Carrington: Their partnership developed because the infrastructure and incentives were in place for it to develop. They–and others–just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Had they not, someone else would’ve filled the vacuum–maybe not in precisely the same way, but similarly, as has occurred in other jurisdictions.

Instead of a independent, salaried, fully funded medical examiner office, Mississippi mostly went without one for two decades. That was combined with an anachronistic coroner system, an effort on state and federal levels to crack down on a perceived increase in violent crime and an embrace of the death penalty, as well as a spate of new and novel forensic disciplines that gained acceptance without significant scientific inquiry and rigor.

Finally, reviewing courts found themselves constrained by cynical legislative “fixes” to the “endless” appellate process, especially for those sentenced to death. The ultimate result was a recipe and perfect storm for what came to pass in Mississippi that we recount in the book.

What are the national implications for this book? While it makes the case that “poverty and structural racism” accounted for much of Mississippi’s abuse of a system that relied on autopsies and local coroners’ reports to get away with racial injustice, Mississippi has not stood alone in such discrimination.

Balko: The problems of dubious forensics, structural racism, and the coroner system of death investigation are definitely not unique to Mississippi. And even Hayne and West occasionally testified in other states, particularly Louisiana.

I think the main difference is one of scale. For example, we note in the book that in the 1990s, Texas medical examiner Ralph Erdmann was doing an annual number of autopsies in rural counties across the state that legal experts at the time called astonishing. It became a national scandal, and Erdmann became a poster case for forensics gone amok. Erdmann was doing about 400 autopsies per year. For most of his career, Hayne did at least 1,200. Some years he topped 1,500. He admitted that at least one year, he did more than 2,000. He had a hand in 70 to 80 percent of the homicide cases in the state for nearly 20 years.

The other big differences is that in most other states, once the malfeasance was discovered, there was some effort to assess the damage done and review the cases that may have been affected. Some of those efforts were more thorough than others. But in Mississippi, state officials have refused to conduct any such review of Hayne and West cases.

Tell me about the important role that the “junk science” of bad forensics has played in the outcomes of so many jury decisions in America. It seems that this problem has, to some degree, been a constant in our country’s criminal justice process. Why is that?

Balko: It really comes down to the fundamental differences between law and science. We want to use science in the courtroom, because at times it can help us discover the truth. But science is an ongoing process. Theories can and are tweaked, revised, or even shown to be wrong. The law–and by extension our courts system–values certainty and precedent. We still haven’t quite figured out how to reconcile these differences. So, for example, we’ve delegated the important job of keeping bad or fake science out of the courtroom to judges. But judges of course are trained in legal reasoning, not in scientific analysis. So, they haven’t been very good at it.

This tension between law and science for a long time alienated much of the scientific community from the criminal justice system, creating space for fields like bite mark matching, hair fiber analysis, tool mark analysis, and others to assist police and prosecutors in solving crimes and winning convictions. These fields have the veneer of science, but were never subjected to the rigorous testing and review of the scientific method.

It wasn’t until the rise of DNA testing–which was developed in scientific labs–that we began to see that these fields weren’t nearly as accurate and foolproof as their practitioners claimed. Over the last decade or so, the scientific community has shown more interest in criminal justice and has begun subjecting some of these fields to real scientific testing. They’re finding that many of these disciplines have little to no grounding in science at all. But because our courts tend to put a premium on finality and precedent, it has been really difficult to get them to apply the lessons we’ve learned from DNA testing–that these fields aren’t scientifically reliable–to a much larger pool of cases where DNA isn’t a factor.

In his foreword to your book, author John Grisham, who serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project in New York, laments that actual wrong conviction estimates range from 2 percen to 10 percent of the millions of cases tried each year–amounting to staggering numbers that can never be accurately determined. He said getting these people out of prison is “virtually impossible.” What do you say?

Carrington: He’s correct. In the vast majority of these types of cases, evidence that could lead to an exoneration never existed–because, for example, DNA was not collected  and/or present to begin with–the cases are old, witnesses have disappeared, forgotten their accounts, died, and so on. Also, most cases in the criminal justice system plea. And as a result, there can be very little in the way of a record, including an investigative record that would lead to new evidence of innocence.

What do you hope this book will accomplish?

Balko: Mississippi needs to conduct a thorough review of every case in which Hayne or West testified. They need to look not only for cases in which one of them gave scientifically dubious testimony, but any case in which their testimony may have nudged a jury one way or the other. Because forensic pathology can be subjective, even testimony that was within the realm of acceptable science could contribute to a wrongful conviction. Preferably, the review should be conducted by an outside entity, and should include input from forensic pathologists and scientists, not just judges and lawyers.

I’d also hope the book can serve as a warning to be skeptical of claims from forensic disciplines untested by science, particularly emerging disciplines. The courts have been far too quick to embrace new fields of “expertise,” and far too slow to correct the damage done when science later shows those fields to be fraudulent.

Carrington: I’d simply add that we also hope the books ets out what can happen when the wrong incentives are offered up in the criminal justice system. We can learn from this going forward. Or we can continue to ignore and risk finding ourselves in this predicament again at some point in the future.

Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington will be at Lemuria on Thursday, March 1, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

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