History

In this provocative and deeply researched work of history, Akst takes readers into the wild, heady, and uncertain times of America on the brink of a world war, following four fascinating resisters -- four figures who would subsequently become famous political thinkers and activists -- and their daring exploits: David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Dwight MacDonald, and Bayard Rustin. The lives of these diverse anti-war advocates--a principled and passionate seminary student, a Catholic anarchist, a high-brow intellectual leftist, and an African-American pacifist and agitator--create the perfect prism through which to see World War II from a new angle, that of the opposition, as well as to show how great and lasting their achievements were.

The resisters did not stop the war, of course, but their impact would be felt for decades. Many of them went on to lead the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the two most important social stands of the second half of the twentieth century. The various World War II resisters pioneered non-violent protest in America, popularized Gandhian principles, and desegregated the first prison mess halls. Theirs is a story that has never been told.

In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet--and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder, however, did not come without warning--in fact, it had been foretold.

In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the president's fascination with Spiritualism, and to demonstrate how it linked him, uncannily, to the man who would kill him. Abraham Lincoln is usually seen as a rational, empirically-minded man, yet as acclaimed scholar and biographer Terry Alford reveals, he was also deeply superstitious and drawn to the irrational. Like millions of other Americans, including the Booths, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, suffered repeated personal tragedies, and turned for solace to Spiritualism, a new practice sweeping the nation that held that the dead were nearby and could be contacted by the living. Remarkably, the Lincolns and the Booths even used the same mediums, including Charles Colchester, a specialist in "blood writing" whom Mary first brought to her husband, and who warned the president after listening to the ravings of another of his clients, John Wilkes Booth.

Alford's expansive, richly-textured chronicle follows the two families across the nineteenth century, uncovering new facts and stories about Abraham and Mary while drawing indelible portraits of the Booths--from patriarch Julius, a famous actor in his own right, to brother Edwin, the most talented member of the family and a man who feared peacock feathers, to their confidant Adam Badeau, who would become, strangely, the ghostwriter for President Ulysses S. Grant. At every turn, Alford shows that despite the progress of the age--the glass hypodermic syringe, electromagnetic induction, and much more--death remained ever-present, and thus it was only rational for millions of Americans, from the president on down, to cling to beliefs that seem anything but. A novelistic narrative of two exceptional American families set against the convulsions their times, In the Houses of Their Dead ultimately leads us to consider how ghost stories helped shape the nation.

Who among us hasn't read Hamlet, listened to the Fifth Symphony, gazed at the Mona Lisa, or marveled at the three laws of physics and the Theory of Relativity and been struck with the same simple question: how on Earth did they do it? Where did these masters draw inspiration to produce some of the most stunning achievements in human history? Were their brains wired differently than ours? Did they have special traits or unique experiences that set them on the path to greatness? Genius is a broad and elusive concept, one that is divisive and hard to define--and gravely misunderstood. There are "ordinary" geniuses who achieve remarkable feats of brilliance, as well as "magicians" (a term James Gleick invoked to describe Richard Feynman) who make an outsize impact on their given field. But highest among them are transformative geniuses, those rare individuals who redefine their fields or open up new universes of thought altogether.

These are the masters whose genius Bulent Atalay decodes in his engrossing, enlightening, and revelatory book. No, Atalay doesn't have a road map for how we might become the next Einstein or Leonardo, but his revolutionary study of genius gives us a stunning new lens through which to view humanity's most prolific thinkers and creators and perhaps pick up some inspiration along the way.

At first, it seems that transformative geniuses don't follow any sort of topography. Their prodigious output looks effortless, they leap from summit to summit, and they probably couldn't explain exactly how they went about solving their problems. They might not even recognize themselves in the ways we talk about them today. Atalay argues that these heroes fit more of a mold than we might think. As evidence, he rigorously dissects the lives, traits, habits, and thought patterns of five exemplars--Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, and Einstein-- to map the path of the transformative genius.

How did Beethoven, who could not perform basic multiplication, innately encode the Fibonacci Sequence in his symphonies? Is it possible that we understate Shakespeare's poetic influence? How did Leonardo become equally prolific in both the arts and the sciences? How did Newton formulate the universal laws of physics, the basis of so many other sciences? And what prompted TIME Magazine to declare Einstein, a man whose very name is synonymous with genius, the "Individual of the 20th Century"? With great clarity and attention to detail, Atalay expertly traces how these five exemplars ascended to immortality and what their lives and legacies reveal about how transformative geniuses are made

With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers's rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?"

Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.