Liberty's Torch by Elizabeth Mitchell, Grove Atlantic '14, $27, 310 pages, ASIN #0802122574. Notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.
You've passed (and hopefully been inspired by) New York harbor's Statue of Liberty, sailing or flying in or out of Manhattan. You've also visited it and perhaps walked to its top as well as viewing TV documentaries on it from time to time. So you may think you know just about all there is to learn about Lady Liberty.
All the more reason to read journalist Elizabeth Mitchell's new book on its history, which may hold a surprise or three in store for you. Here are a few tidbits:
*The Statue of Liberty was not a gift from France. "We have all heard that the statue was a gift from France to America, but that implies that the government of France gave it to the government of America. In fact, the statue was the brainchild of one lone artist, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who went through extraordinary efforts to raise all the funds to build the statue, his masterpiece."
*Americans were very slow to welcome Bartholdi's statue. "Initial fundraising and support was extremely lackluster and it took about 15 years, with the statue completed and assembled in a neighborhood of Paris, before the American citizenry finally began to embrace it."
*Many notable people including Joseph Pulitzer, Gustave Eiffel, and Ulysses S. Grant were involved in Bartholdi's scheme.
---"President Grant met with Bartholdi to offer his support for the project and blessed his plan to use Bedloe's Island as the site of the statue."
--"(Publisher)Joseph Pulitzer raised a large sum of money for Bartholdi's project....by printing the names of all donors, even if they just gave a penny."
--"Gustave Eiffel, the ingenious France engineer, figured out how to create the support structure for Lady Liberty and how she could withstand the extreme changes in temperature and high winds in the harbor."
*Thomas Edison once had plans to make the statue talk. "When Edison introduced the phonograph to the public in 1878, he told the newspapers that he was designing a 'monster disc" for the interior of the Statue of Liberty that would allow the statue to deliver speeches that could be heard up to the northern part of Manhattan and across the bay." However, that plan came to naught.
Author Elizabeth Mitchell is an editor, a journalist, and author of two nonfiction books.
The Invention of Wings -- A Novel by Sue Monk Kidd, Viking '14, $27.95, 369 pages, ASIN #0670024783..
In her latest novel, the acclaimed Sue Monk Kidd's imagination travels to early 19th century Charleston, S.C., where she depicts the difficult life of an urban slave named Hetty "Handful" Grimke'. "The Grimke's' daughter Sarah, possessed of a ravenous intellect and mutinous ideas," writes the author, "has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women."
Those new to Kidd's writing may not be acquainted with her ability to inhabit the characters she depicts. Here's a brief excerpt, displaying Kidd's enviable talents:
"There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was 10 years old. She said, 'Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.'
"My mauma was shrewd. She didn't get any reading and writing like me. Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy. She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, 'You don't believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?
"Those skinny bones stuck out from my back like nubs. She patted them and said, 'This all what left of your wings. They nothing but these flat bones now, but one day you gon get 'em back.
"I was shrewd like mauma. Even at 10 I knew this story about people flying was pure malarkey. We weren't some special people who lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it."
Sue Monk Kidd is the author of the novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair along with several memoirs, including the New York Times bestseller Traveling with Pomegranites, written with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. She lives in Florida.
Identity and the Failure of America -- From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror by John Michael, UMinn. Press '14 paperback. 301 pages, ASIN #0816651442.
English professor John Michael has divided his narrative into three parts: 1) "Failed Virtues," including "Jefferson's Headache: Race and the Failure of a Benevolent Republic (and) Ahab's Cannibals: Vicissitudes of Command and the Failure of Manly Virtue;" 2) "Failed Sympathies," including Lydia Maria Child's Romance: Cosmopolitan Imagination and the Failure of Gender Reform (and) John Brown's Identities: Nat Turner (and) the Fear of Just Deserts;" and 3) "Failed Judgment," including Emerson's Activism: The Trials and Tribulations of an American Citizen (and) Douglass's Cosmopolitanism: American Empire and the Failure of Diplomatic Representation."
From the back cover:
From Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls, justice has been at the center of America's self-image and national creed. At the same time, for many of its peoples -- from African slaves and European immigrants to women and the poor -- the American experience has been defined by injustice: oppression, disenfranchisement, violence, and prejudice.
"In Identity and the Failure of America, John MIchael explores the contradictions between a mythic national identity promising justice to all and the realities of a divided, hierarchical, and frequently iniquitous history and social order. Through a series of insightful readings, Michael analyzes such cultural moments as the epic dramatization of the tension between individual ambition and communal complicity in Moby Dick, Ralph Waldo Emerson's antislavery activism, and Frederick Douglass's long fight for racial equity.
"Focusing on exemplary instances when the nature of the United States as an essentially conflicted nation turned to force, Michael ultimately posits the development of a more cosmopolitan American identity, one that is more fully and justly imagined in response to the nation's ethical failings at home and abroad."
Author John Michael teaches English and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He has written two previous books.