The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams - REVIEW

by Adam Lazarus

The untold story of the unique fifty-year friendship between two American icons: John Glenn, the unassailable pioneer of space exploration and Ted Williams, indisputably the greatest hitter in baseball history.  

The friendship how, throughout various stages in their remarkable lives, a most unusual friendship formed, flourished, withered, then reinvigorated.

In 1952, celebrity outfielder Ted Williams was called up to active duty in the Korean War. Baseball's biggest name was already an ace pilot, as skilled in the cockpit as he was on the field. John Glenn, already an experienced fighter pilot during World War II, was commissioned with The Marine Corps and had gone through months of training when he petitioned for active duty in Korea. He was a superstar among the officers and pilots who knew him as a superior instructor and great guy.

While stationed in Korea for combat, Glenn requested Williams to fly on his wing. The reluctant, fatalistic, pugnacious Reservist and the eager, optimistic, unflappable active-duty regular Marine would go on to serve together, forging a friendship in battle that would last a lifetime and take them up into the stratosphere, literally and figuratively - from Earth orbit and a long political career for Glenn to world records and global fame as one of baseball's greatest hitters for Williams.

Author Adam Lazarus, who has written narrative nonfiction books on great American icons and the very essence of team successes on the field and off, has written a sweeping epic that pulls from an encyclopedic array of sources, from interviews, papers, military diaries, letters, archives, videos, and papers released through FOIA.

The connection forged between the great hitter and the great aviator would radiate out from their mutual respect. They also shared a keen understanding of their respective gifts, a fierce dedication to the success of the team (whether The Red Sox, the Mercury program, or a military unit), and their rabid pursuit of excellence. They wanted to contribute without any special treatment or fanfare. They also understood their gifts and drive came with a price - fame - and each would handle it differently. Each of them would earn a permanent place in the pantheon of American heroes and become titans in their own right.

They stayed friends right to the end, decades after they had flown together in Korea.

Adam Lazarus is the author of nonfiction books featuring iconic and compelling figures in American history. His previous titles include Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont; Super Bowl Monday: The New York Giants, The Buffalo Bills, and Super Bowl XXV; Best of Rivals: Joe Montana, Steve Young, and the Inside Story Behind The NFL's Greatest Quarterback Controversy; and Hail to the Redskins: Gibbs, the Diesel, the Hogs, and the Glory Days of D.C.'s Football Dynasty. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Kenyon College in 2004 and a master's degree in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006, specializing in journalism.

Kensington Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-8065-4250-8

The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative Hardcover – REVIEW

by Gregg Hecimovich

A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a forward by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story.

In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond “Crafts.” She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity—as Hannah Crafts—to make sense of a life fractured by slavery.

Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of The Bondwoman’s Narrative by examining the lives of Hannah Crafts’s friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.

At once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal, and violence set against the backdrop of America’s slide into Civil War.

Ecco
ISBN-13: 978-0062334732

American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 - REVIEW

by Edward L. Ayers

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.

W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-0393881264

King: A Life - REVIEW

by Jonathan Eig 

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.-and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father-as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Jonathan Eig is the author of six books, including four New York Times best sellers. His most recent book is King: A Life, which the Times called a "the definitive biography" of Martin Luther King Jr. and a book "worthy of its subject." Prior to that, Eig wrote Ali: A Life, which has been hailed as one of the best sports biographies of all time. Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and was a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize. Eig served as a senior consulting producer for the PBS series Muhammad Ali. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN-13 978-0374279295