Books like Chief Bender's Burden

I found This Tender Land, a tale of four orphans adrift on the Mississippi River in 1932, to be heartwarming, memorable, and compelling.

This slice of history—the years surrounding the depression, I knew little about—I learned next to nothing of this in school and Kreuger makes the time, settings, and conditions come alive.

This story has echoes of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn but with its own compelling story and time. This novel followed Krueger’s other book, which won the Edgar Award and which I also loved. But I enjoyed this story even more with its complex characters and even more compelling narrative.

I’ve read and deeply admired nearly everything Erdrich has written, from Love Medicine to The Roundhouse. Erdrich’s language is always incantatory, and her stories are full of magic, landscape, and history. But this one is my absolute favorite. Even the title is amazing!

The story moves back and forth across the decades, and characters shift and transform before your eyes. Erdrich reminds me of Faulkner or even Homer; though deeply rooted in the lives and experiences of the Ojibwe communities of eastern North Dakota, Erdrich’s novels have a timeless, mythic feel. 

A master of nonfiction crime writing, William Swanson uses his W.A. Winter pen name for fictional works, including this 2022 book that clung to my thoughts weeks after the last page. Based loosely on a Minnesota crime spree in the 1950s, Winter takes readers into the mind of Joe Lavoie—the wheelchair-bound lone survivor of three brothers who engaged in a shootout with police in 1953. Set in 1991, 38 years after the crippling police gunshot, the taut writing takes you into Joe’s mind and explores his dysfunctional family on what turns out to be his last stand.

This quirky 1966 memoir comes from a Chicago couple who traded in their big-city careers for a cabin at the end of the Gunflint Trail in Minnesota’s remote northeastern Arrowhead country. She had been a top-notch metallurgist—fiddling with a new way to temper steel for farm implements at International Harvester’s research lab near Chicago. He had been an art director for a textbook publisher. No one thought they’d make it through one Minnesota winter but they endured for 17 years on the edge of the wilderness and write soothingly about their new lives amid nature.

Nathanson (like me) faced the dilemma of writing biography when the subject declines to be interviewed. His approach showed me the way. The availability of digital newspaper databases has opened up enormous possibilities for research, and Nathanson took advantage of them to provide color, detail, and analysis on a grand scale. The many dozens of reporters and newspaper writers who covered Dick Allen wrote game accounts, opinion columns, and feature stories that informed, inspired, and entertained contemporary readers. They watched the games from the vantage point of the press box, peppered the players and managers with questions in the clubhouse afterward, and often rode the buses and planes with the teams. They had a level of access that is the envy of historians, and Nathanson greatly profited from their work.

Scottoline, a former big-firm litigator, has created Benny Rosato, the founder of an all-female firm of defense lawyers, as the master of the world of courts and jails. In Mistaken Identity, however, Benny defends an unexpected client—“Alice Connoly,” who is Rosato herself, a double claiming to be a long-lost twin. What follows raises the question of why (as the mysterious defendant asks) Alice is in jail while Rosato is free, secure, and successful. In a way, Mistaken Identity is a feminist version of The Trial--a fever dream of that same hellish world that Kafka saw beneath K.’s feet--the law, supernatural and inhuman, that waits to devour the innocent and the guilty alike.

Washington, our first president…Mr. American Freedom himself—was not just a slave owner but a slave hunter. What was his problem, I wondered, as I read about how he and his wife positively obsessed over re-capturing Ona Judge, a woman who escaped from their bondage.

They spent years, money, and some political clout tracking her down and trying to drag her back. They had plenty of other enslaved people! They weren’t short of money! As I read this wild tale of courage and cruelty, I got the message…the Washingtons knew that if a slave could flee the President of the United States, it would demonstrate the hypocrisy of trying to found a nation on liberty that, uh,…..held men, women and children in bondage.

My spoiler for you: They failed. Judge never returned to the Washingtons and lived to tell her own tale about the ugly history of American freedoms. Dunbar’s book… show more.

I love learning new things about people, places, and things I think I know everything about.

For example, I live in Philadelphia, a city I call “freaky for Franklin,” but I still learned more about good ol’ Ben in this book. In fact, every chapter of this book contained at least one “I never knew that! That’s so cool!” moment.

The book covers the city’s 300+ years in existence, but there are plenty of stories about people and places crucial to the nation’s founding. The book’s format makes it easy to skip around to subjects you’re most interested in the moment.

Jim Murphy is a respected historian with a seemingly endless supply of new historical information.

Gangsters of Capitalism covers a part of US history that is often deliberately overlooked by Americans, because it clashes with our national myths about ourselves. Katz follows US imperial history from the very end of the 19th century through to the middle of the 20th century, by following the life and career of Smedley Butler, a man who served in the marines for so much of this history. Gangster of Capitalism is in the top five of my favorite books that I have ever read. Katz’s ability to weave a personal biography with sweeping history and how that history still affects us all in the present is superb. 

This may be weird, but stay with me: I’m fascinated by the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793. The disease and its aftermath shaped modern-day Philadelphia. 

Anderson’s story centers on 16-year-old Matty. When residents of means, including George Washington and his cabinet, fled crowded downtown Philadelphia, Matty could not. I felt her fear and confusion when it seemed like the epidemic would never end. I was frustrated with her when her plans to get away went awry.

We modern readers know that the fever, spread by mosquitoes, would stop being a problem in November when it was too cold for the insects to survive. Those living in the moment did not.