Books like Invitation to an Inquest

This 2021 book, the latest in the Rosenberg oeuvre, not only recounts the history of what happened to the Rosenbergs but chronicles past historical accounts. One of the most important legacies of this literature is to remind us how all events are historically grounded. The Schneirs wrote that the Rosenberg trial “was a product of its times, displaying in microcosm many of the prevalent sociopolitical assumptions and preoccupations of the day.” The same could be said of the books by the Schneirs, the Meeropols, and Doctorow, which viewed the Rosenbergs through the sympathetic prism of American progressivism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Sebba also explores the enduring mystery of the “single-minded” Ethel Rosenberg, a “tragic figure” who herself committed no espionage but orphaned her sons rather than naming names or implicating her husband.

This book was written in 1975 by the two Rosenberg children left orphaned after their parents were executed. Relying on Schneir as well as their own research, they also powerfully argued that their parents were innocent. Even though later disclosures would contradict this conclusion, the book is a moving and fascinating document that tells the previously secret story of whatever happened to the two Rosenberg boys—aged 10 and 6 at the time of their parents' death—whose parents had seemingly sacrificed their lives for a political cause. It turns out that the boys had quietly been adopted by a politically progressive New York family, the Meeropols, and then successfully pursued academic careers, gottten married, and had children of their own.

In 1953, a working-class Jewish couple from Brooklyn was executed for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their two young children were orphaned. E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the Rosenbergs is an excruciating examination of these events from the fictionalized perspective of one of those children. Daniel’s point of view—naïve, angry, traumatized—brilliantly illustrates the absurdity and cruelty of American culture when it turns against those who, for reasons of class, race, or religion, have never been fully included in it. I’ve read it a dozen times and still find myself sobbing at the realization of how all the country’s history, all its dreams and delusions about itself and its destiny, were stacked up against this poor pair of nobodies. Their real crime lay in demanding that the United States live up to its ideals, something it has never been able to do.

I grew up believing that the US Government framed and then executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 to whip up anti-Communist hysteria. I was wrong. First of all, Julius was guilty; secondly, it was not the government that framed Ethel, but her own brother, David Greenglass. He did it to save his own skin, for he had passed documents to his brother-in-law (although they proved worthless to the Russians). Also, he wanted to save his wife, who had typed a few things for Julius. Sixty years later he came clean to Sam Roberts. This book is a revelation, an examination of the mind of a sociopath. Like Kim Philby, David Greenglass had no heart, nor pity, nor regrets. 

I love a good spy story, and there are lots of them in this book—all focused on the cabal of spies in British-occupied New York that delivered intelligence to Washington. Here are Hercules Mulligan, the tailor; James Rivington, the printer; the ill-fated Nathan Hale; and a bounty of others.

But my favorite is John Champe, a sergeant-major from Virginia who is recruited for a mission to capture Benedict Arnold and deliver him to the Continental Army for trial (and the inevitable gallows). Rose reveals the intrigue and deception of Revolutionary New York, into which Arnold fled after his treason, and the characters who carried it out.

Joseph Mitchell was the city reporter for the New Yorker for about half a century. This is a collection of his magazine stories. Many of them involve the old Fulton Fish Market, but he also wrote about weird things like dime museums, gypsies, and stag banquets. 

To me, every story in this collection is like a time capsule. This is the book that made me want to write about New York City because it suggests there is a history on every block there worth recording. If you don’t like a chapter or two, then skip to the next one, but I’ll vouch for 80% of this book being the best non-fiction writing that I have ever read (and I practically read for a living).

My favorite gay autobiography. Humorous, explicit, and thought-provoking. Like my story, his is far from a neatly packaged “coming out” story of self-acceptance. He describes some way-out-of-bounds-for-most-people sexual adventures in detail but with no intention to shock or titillate. He is just telling stories he finds interesting, and he is a great storyteller. Not surprising, since he is a celebrated science fiction author.

Always surprising in a quirky way. Example: in the 1950s, he is at an outdoor gay cruising area at night when there is a police raid. It is only as the men flee that he grasps how many were there: hundreds. It is his first sense of being in a large gay male community, and it is empowering.

If you want to understand the struggle Jews like me face in modern America, read this classic novel.

Two Jewish boys—one secular and the other expected to follow in his father’s footsteps as a Chasidic rabbi—grow up in 1940s Brooklyn against the backdrop of World War II and the founding of Israel. It shows the conflict we face between family expectations and assimilating in a country where we don’t feel fully welcome.

This is a novel about Italian immigrants struggling to survive in New York City’s Little Italy during the early years of the twentieth century amid the growth of the Black Hand, the precursor to the American mafia. The book is unique in that most of the characters are the author’s actual ancestors and people with whom they had come into contact during that era. Similarly, the grisly central events described in the story all occurred.

It is beautifully written and filled with fascinating historical details. The characters and the descriptions of places and events come alive on the page. Fabiano includes an extensive Glossary of Italian Terms used in the book, as well as a multi-generational family tree. Elizabeth Street makes for very good reading!

I was volunteering with the Appalachian Prison Book Project when Hugh Ryan’s book came out.

Suddenly, The Women’s House of Detention was everywhere—RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fresh Air, mainstream news—yet Hugh was willing to do a virtual book talk with volunteers in West Virginia who provide books to incarcerated people. The book tells the history of a prison 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and the women and transgender individuals who were incarcerated there because of their gender performance and sexual orientation.

Hugh Ryan lays out how women were arrested for going out at night alone, wearing pants, accepting a date from a man, drunkenness, etc., if they were perceived as the “wrong kind of woman.” The prison stood in Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974, and the experience of women incarcerated there drives home the point that incarceration and punishment of women is not… show more.