I first learned about Hurston in the 1990s, when I researched a 1952 murder case she covered for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of America’s leading Black newspapers in the mid-20th century. Since, I’ve read a couple of her seven books, including the poetic “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and essays, including the thought-provoking “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix.”
In 2024, I finally read her biography. I wished I had done it years ago. It put so much of her writings in sharp perspective. Hurston was a trailblazer whose words still resonate nearly a century later.
No wonder many of today’s authors, such as Alice Walker, hold Hurston in such high regard. Boyd brings her to life, much as Hurston brought so many compelling characters and storylines to life over her pioneering 30-year career.
From critically acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd comes an eloquent profile of one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century—Zora Neale Hurston.
A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother, and her 1937 masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a crucial part of the modern literary canon.
Pop culture portrays Nazis as the ultimate bad guys—and for good reasons. From 1933 to 1945, they committed history’s worst crimes against humanity. It’s understandable why millions believe a unique mental disease must’ve inflicted Hitler and his henchmen. But as El-Hai describes in this well-researched nonfiction book, many perpetrators of the Holocaust may have been … normal.
U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley studied 52 high-ranking Nazis, including Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Göring, as they awaited post-World War II trials at Nuremberg. The American captain’s conclusion?
Most were simply ambitious. Subsequent studies, such as the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, appear to back Kelley’s findings, showing nearly everyone’s capable of causing harm to innocent people.
In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Goring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox. The suitcases contained all manner of paraphernalia: medals, gems, two cigar cutters, silk underwear, a hot water bottle, and the equivalent of $1 million in cash. Hidden in a coffee can, a set of brass vials housed glass capsules containing a clear liquid and a white precipitate: potassium cyanide. Joining Goring in the detention center were the elite of the captured Nazi regime--Grand Admiral Donitz; armed forces commander…
They say write what you know, and that’s exactly what Maclean did when he turned 70. He staged his first collection of short stories, which included a novella, in his childhood’s region and era. He captured the western Rocky Mountains’ culture, character, color, nonculture, characters and characteristics during the 20th century’s early decades.
This fictional account remains such a revered classic that it feels redundant to recommend it. Naturally, everyone should read it. It set the standards for elegant, authentic, precise storytelling. I’m unsure why it took me decades to get to it. Now that I’ve read it—the novella, in one sitting—I very much look forward to reading it again and again.
When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs through It to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, "It has trees in it." Forty years later, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture for fly fishing, for the woods and their people, and for the interlocked beauty of life and art A River Runs through It…
Shortly after Israel was created in 1948, it faced the threat of invasion by five well-equipped neighboring armies. Though the United States opposed supplying arms to either side of the conflict, American World War II veteran Al Schwimmer was determined to do whatever it takes to help Israel defend herself.
Schwimmer created factitious airlines, bought decommissioned airplanes from the government, and sent his pilots to pick up rifles, bullets, and fighter planes from the only country willing to break the international arms embargo: communist Czechoslovakia.
Schwimmer and his team risked their lives, freedom, and US citizenship to prevent what they viewed as an imminent genocide. They evaded the FBI and State Department, gained the support of the mafia, smuggled weapons—mostly Nazi surplus—across hostile territories, and went into combat in the Middle East. This book vividly tells the story of this little-known yet historically significant mission.
