Category Archives: Biography

The Second Mrs. Wilson

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Woodrow Wilson, Edith Wilson, President

Woodrow and Edith Wilson

A timely new play at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, especially for political junkies, is Joe DiPietro’s The Second Mrs. Wilson. You may recall that Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke during his second term as President and that, for many months afterward, his second wife, Edith, was in all but title Chief Executive. Detractors called her the nation’s first female president.

This was the time when the treaty ending the appalling First World War was being considered. In Paris, Wilson had helped negotiate the treaty and, back in the States, he campaigned tirelessly for it. He’d been president of Princeton University (and, briefly Governor of New Jersey) before becoming President, so may have had an especially keen appreciation of the nearly 20 million soldier and civilian lives lost, worldwide, many of the soldiers young men who were age peers of those he’d led at the University. In 1919, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, then, on a public speaking tour to promote the treaty, he collapsed.

Edith was his second wife. For nearly 30 years, he’d been happily married to Ellen Axson, but she died early in his first term, a loss that left him devastated. Almost miraculously, it must have seemed, Edith Bolling appeared on the scene and renewed his zest for living.

A two-hour play necessarily collapses and condenses a great many events and emotions, and this play focuses on his love for his new wife and her dedication both to him and his foremost concern: ratification of the Versailles Treaty, which included adoption of the League of Nations. Wilson believed the League was the key to sustained world peace and the avoidance of future conflicts. But with him bedridden, the political forces rose against the League, dramatized in the play through Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Republican opposition, combined with Wilson’s inability to consider any compromise in the legislative language, ultimately denied him this victory.

No one knows how history would have played out had America joined the League, but certainly the country’s post-war isolationism drastically weakened the organization during the period leading to World War II. Although the play is grounded in events of almost a century ago, we see today the problems of intransigent political opposition, when politicians make decisions not on what is best for the people they represent, their country, or the world, but their own political gain.

The play is brilliantly acted by John Glover (Wilson) and Laila Robins (Edith), whom we have seen and appreciated in numerous previous productions. Michael McGrath as Wilson’s aide Joe Tumulty and Stephen Spinella as his long-time colleague Col. Edward House are particularly poignant, facing their chief’s decline. The second act could be somewhat shorter, though Glover’s portrayal of Wilson’s initial extreme disability and the gradual return of functioning is both masterful and deeply moving.

It’s not possible to discuss this play without reference to recent events at Princeton University , where black students have protested the naming of various university units—including the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs—after Princeton’s and the nation’s former president. Wilson supported racial segregation a hundred years ago, when that was Americans’ predominant view. Judging the past by the standards of the present is always problematic, and in this case ignores the tremendous good Wilson—deemed one of the nation’s greatest progressive presidents—contributed to social justice through expanded voter and worker rights and many other measures.

The Second Mrs. Wilson is on stage until November 29.

Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

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Sophie Scholl, Nazis

Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl

Netflix finally sent a movie whose queue we’d been in for years (they must have only a single copy), and wouldn’t you know, it arrived the same week we saw another based-on-a-true-story German-subtitled movie about World War II, Labyrinth of Lies. But you don’t have to wait so long, the entire 2005 Scholl movie is available on YouTube, or you can watch this snippet (trailer).

Sophie Scholl, age 21, her older brother Hans, and several of their friends were students in Munich during the war and participated in a non-violent resistance organization called The White Rose. It was 1943. Stalingrad had just been lost, the Eastern Front was a disaster, and most German military leaders saw inevitable looming defeat. It was in that atmosphere that Sophie and her brother are arrested for distributing anti-war flyers at the university, and the movie focuses on her interrogation by the Gestapo. It doesn’t involve the thuggish violence one might expect; rather, it’s a duel of wits between Sophie and her interrogator, Robert Mohr, as she refuses to name accomplices.

Raised a Lutheran, Sophie’s religious beliefs were the basis for her opposition to the Nazi regime. In addition, her boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel who served on the Eastern Front had written to her about the mass murders of Soviet soldiers and Jews that he had seen. Her final words illustrate the strength of her convictions: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

Although the law and the punishment are clear, what is also clear is that Mohr (played by Gerald Held) comes to respect Sophie’s courage, as played so movingly by Julia Jentsch. You might be tempted to think that when the defendants appear in the People’s Court for their show trial, the court’s President is played too broadly, like a hysterical fanatic. Watch the “extras” that accompany the film—and you’ll see some footage made at the trial. The actor playing the judge got it exactly right. As Roger Ebert said in his review: “Those who know their actions are wrong are often the loudest to defend them, especially when they fear a higher moral judgment may come down on them.” The extras include a lengthy interview with Sophie and Hans’s younger sister, Elisabeth, as well. Today, in Munich and elsewhere, there are numerous memorials to Sophie and Hans and The White Rose.

This award-winning film, directed by Marc Rothemund, was an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%, audiences: 88%.

Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs

(photo: wikimedia)

This Danny Boyle biopic (trailer), with a screenplay by the rapid-fire Aaron Sorkin, may not be to everyone’s taste, but I left the theater feeling both emotionally wrung out and strangely energized. Jobs was a complicated man, a visionary regarding the gestalt of the digital world and the devices we use to interact with it. He was not a genius engineer or a software developer, and he was totally unsentimental (and unsympathetic) toward company products past their prime and the employees who worked on them. He never threw anyone a sop, or agreed with them just to get along. As a result, the movie delivers, as Village Voice reviewer Nick Schager says, “a blistering barrage of combative dialog.”

The decision to focus this movie around three product launches—rather than the endless quotidian details that led up to them—was, I think, brilliant. Emotions were at their peak, expectations were highest, and the parameters of success or failure clearest. No case of the dwindles here. The first launch—of the Macintosh—came shortly after the revolutionary 1984 Super Bowl spot and the audience arrived pumped with expectations. The Mac was overpriced and failed miserably, and Jobs lost his job. The second launch from Jobs’s new company—the NeXT—was another flop. And the third, the 1998 introduction of the iMac? Well, the third time’s the charm. Yes, he was impossibly demanding and ruthlessly critical, but would another personality, making subtle compromises all along the line have achieved as much?

I did not read Walter Isaacson’s eponymous 2011 biography, so was left with some questions about the balance of information presented. It would be obviously impossible to condense all the arguments, recriminations, and flashbacks we see on film into the final few minutes before a product launch—there wouldn’t be time—but that was cinematic license. What I couldn’t assess was whether his daughter Lisa was actually such a significant part of his life, though I understand the filmmakers’ impulse to humanize him through his interactions with her; nor do I know whether Joanna Hoffman was really his conscience over such a long period of time. If so, I bow down in respect to her. The credits do indicate license was taken in fictionalizing some characters and events.

Despite overall positive reviews—Variety calls it “strikingly literate” and “a brilliant film,” the movie is not doing well at the box office. Perhaps this is because the main character isn’t seen as “likeable”—in direct contrast to the Tom Hanks character in Bridge of Spies, reviewed here yesterday. Perhaps Michael Fassbender is not yet a bankable name, and ditto re Hanks.

Certainly the cast was well up to the task. As Jobs, Fassbender is passionate about product and icy about people; Kate Winslet plays the long-suffering Hoffman with the slightest East European accent; Seth Rogen is the passed over Steve Wozniak; and Michael Stuhlbarg, the oft-berated, yet mostly bouncing back programmer Andy Hertzfeld. Jeff Daniels is John Sculley, who replaced Jobs as a more avuncular head of Apple and who, eventually, was fired himself as the company lurched toward bankruptcy. His departure paved the way for the emperor’s triumphant return.

The script includes some of Jobs’s famous aspirational and inspirational quotes. I have one—not used in the film—over my desk. It says “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Words he clearly lived by.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences 79%.

****The Romanov Sisters

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Tsar, Russia, Romanov

Standing: Maria, Tsaritsa Alexandra; seated, Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Anastasia, Alexey, Tatiana

By Helen Rappaport – Prepare to have your heart broken. Like everyone, I knew that the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought a violent end to the rule of the Romanov family and the tsars. I also knew the gruesome trivia that Tsaritsa Alexandra had family jewelry taken apart and the gems sewn into her daughters’ clothing. In July 1918, when the family was led to the tiny half-cellar room where they were shot, at first many of the bullets struck the gems and bounced away, giving the fleeting impression the girls were impervious to them.

Rappaport wrote about that last horrific scene in a previous book, Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs, and she may have wanted to spare us—and herself—from reliving it. In this book, she follows the family right up to its final hours, and I found myself reading more and more slowly, trying to delay the inevitable.

Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia were 22, 21, 19, and 17 at the time of their deaths. The book follows the courtship and marriage of their parents, the births and childhoods, and their maturing to young women through remaining letters diaries, and reminiscences of friends and relatives at the time. The reader comes to know these intelligent, warm-hearted, and lively young women well, and their unnecessary death is devastating.

It’s perhaps inevitable to speculate about a happier outcome. What if Nicholas hadn’t unexpectedly become Tsar at the age of 26? What if he’d been a stronger, more experienced military and political leader, a more flexible one, receptive to the idea of constitutional monarchy? What if their mother had been less withdrawn, chronically ill, and mentally fragile and had fostered—rather than assumed—the love of the Russian people? What if heir Alexey hadn’t inherited the hemophilia gene? Would she not have fallen under the sway of the much-reviled Grigory Rasputin?

Even without any of these circumstances, what if Nicholas and Alexandra had taken one of their many opportunities to leave Russia or at least send their daughters abroad? Eventually, even England’s King George V—determined to keep Soviet Russia as an ally in the war against Germany—withdrew his offer to provide his cousins safe haven.

They girls lives were closely sheltered, and they saw little of life as it existed outside their palaces or aboard the imperial yacht used for summer vacations. Alexandra often dressed them all in long white dresses, and that’s the picture most people had of them: remote, inviolate.

Russia, Romanov

Olga & Tatiana with a wounded soldier

An exception arose during the War, when Alexandra, Olga, and Tatiana trained to be nurses. Alexandra couldn’t reliably fulfill these duties because of her health, but the older two—especially Tatiana—were tireless. They wrapped bandages, dressed wounds, assisted in surgery, cleaned instruments, and did everything they could to aid the wounded soldiers in their care, including raising funds for their hospitals. The two younger girls read to the wounded and wrote letters for them.

These soldiers, like everyone else who met them, repeatedly remarked how natural and unaffected the girls were, how curious they were about the lives of other people. They were not at all like what they expected Grand Duchesses to be or what their popular image was. Rappaport has written a well researched, engaging biography of these brief lives and a century-old crime.

 

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The End of the Tour

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End of the Tour, David Foster Wallace, Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel

Jesse Eisenberg & Jason Segel

In 1996 David Foster Wallace’s 1079-page novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene like a rocket. The publisher’s marketing efforts meant the book was everywhere, but the man himself—shy, full of self-doubt, not wanting to be trapped into any literary poseur moments and seeing them as inevitable—was difficult to read. This movie (trailer) uses a tyro journalist’s eye to probe Wallace during an intense five days of interviewing toward the end of the Infinite Jest book tour.

As a tryout writer for Rolling Stone, reporter David Lipsky had begged for the assignment to write a profile of Wallace, which ultimately the magazine never published. But the tapes survived, and after Wallace’s suicide in 2008 they became the basis for Lipsky’s 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which fed David Margulies screenplay. The plot of the movie is minimal; instead, it’s a deep exploration of character. It may just be two guys talking, but I found it tectonic.

Director James Ponsoldt has brought nuanced, intelligent performances from his two main actors—Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as reporter David Lipsky. Lipsky is a novelist himself, with a so-so book to his credit. Wallace has reached the heights, and what would it take for Lipsky to scramble up there too? Jealousy and admiration are at war within him and, confronted with Wallace’s occasional oddness, one manifestation of which is the attempt to be Super-Regular Guy—owning dogs, eating junk food, obsessively watching television—he isn’t sure what to feel. You see it on his face.

Is Lipsky friend or foe? He’s not above snooping around Wallace’s house or chatting up his friends to nail his story. Lipsky rightly makes Wallace nervous, the tape recorder makes him nervous; he amuses, he evades, he delivers a punch of a line, he feints. When the going gets too rough, Lipsky falls back on saying, “You agreed to the interview,” and Wallace climbs back in the saddle, as if saying to himself, just finish this awful ride, then back to the peace and solitude necessary actually to write. In the meantime, he is, as A. O. Scott said in his New York Times review, “playing the role of a writer in someone else’s fantasy.”

The movie’s opening scene delivers the fact of the suicide, which by design looms over all that follows, in the long flashback to a dozen years earlier and the failed interview. You can’t help but interpret every statement of Wallace’s through that lens. The depression is clear. He’s been treated for it and for alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. The two Davids walk on the snow-covered farm fields of Wallace’s Illinois home and talk about how beautiful it is, but it is bleak, and even in as jam-packed an environment as the Mall of America Wallace’s conversation focuses on the emptiness at the heart of life. Yet his gentle humor infuses almost every exchange, and Lipsky can be wickedly funny too.

Wallace can’t help but feel great ambivalence toward Lipsky; he recognizes Lipsky’s envy and his hero-worship, and both are troubling. He felt a truth inside himself, but he finds it almost impossible to capture and isn’t sure he has, saying, “The more people think you’re really great, the bigger your fear of being a fraud is.” Infinite Jest was a widely praised literary success, but not to Wallace himself.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%, audiences, 89%.

farm, snow, winter

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)

Movies about Writers

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Dickens, writer

(photo: Alan Weir, creative commons license)

Writers in the throes of creating fiction might appear to be one of the duller conceits for a movie (gazes into distance, writes/types a few words, gazes into distance again, gets up for fifth cup of coffee, writes a few more words, tears hair out). Yet, writers’ lives apart from the actual writing often prove fertile ground for cinema–a combination perhaps of interesting friends and the life disarray that results when your focus is totally elsewhere. Stimulated by positive reactions to the new film about David Foster Wallace, The End of the Tour (trailer), starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, Book Riot has produced a nice list of favorite films about authors.

Several films I’ve seen and would recommend are on the Book Riot list, which includes advice about the number of tissues needed to get through them:

  • American Splendor – about comic-writing genius Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis)
  • Iris – Iris Murdoch (Judi Densch and Kate Winslet)
  • The Last Station – Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren)
  • Miss Potter – Beatrix Potter (Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor)

I’ve missed a number of notable author biopics in the list, including those about Lytton Strachey, Dorothy Parker (although after reading a lengthy biography of her last year, I’ve had enough), Sylvia Plath (three tissues), J.M. Barrie, and C. S. Lewis. Here are a few more enjoyable ones that did not make the Book Riot list:

  • Danny Kaye, Hans Christian Andersen

    Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen

    Bright Star – a rather sweet costume drama about 19th c. poet John Keats

  • Julia – half biopic, half self-aggrandizement based on Pentimento, a memoir by playwright Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) that includes relationships with her lover, detective author Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards, Jr.), and her enigmatic childhood friend “Julia” (Vanessa Redgrave), who IRL probably lived very near me in central New Jersey.
  • Hans Christian Andersen, the musical starring Danny Kaye (1952)—I’ve never forgotten it!
  • Cross Creek – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s misadventures in 1930’s Florida that led to The Yearling (Mary Steenburgen, Peter Coyote)
  • Out of Africa – Danish author Karen von Blixen-Finecke (Isak Dinesen) and her days in Kenya (Meryl Streep, Robert Redford)

Enormous Charles Dickens fangirl that I am, ditto Ralph Fiennes, I have to admit that his The Invisible Woman, a 2013 film about Dickens’s relationship with actress Nelly Ternan is, sadly, ho-hum. But, to end on an upbeat, coming this fall is Trumbo about screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo (trailer) who stonewalled the House Un-American Activities Committee and would not “name names.”

****The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

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graduate

Rob Peace, Yale Graduation

By Jeff Hobbs, read by George Newbern
– This biography, which signals its key irony by the subtitle A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, is an honest and heartfelt tribute to a dear friend. Rob’s many gifts—a brilliant mind, athletic talent, easy social skills, and powerful loyalty to his parents, family, and friends—cry out for a different life path, while the forecast conclusion hangs over the book like a shroud. Nearing the end, the reader wants to go more and more slowly to delay it. Forecast, but foreordained? Hobbs wrestles with this question throughout.

Rob graduated from Yale with a degree in the intellectually rigorous fields of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and Jeff Hobbs was his roommate there for four years. But in addition to studying and working in a cancer research lab, Rob dealt marijuana. He did it mainly, it seems, to relieve his single mother—a nursing home food service employee—of some of her financial burdens. After graduation, he taught for a while, then lapsed into work as a baggage handler at Newark Airport because that job allowed him to fly free all over the world. He fell in love with Rio, visited Seoul, and kept up with a water polo teammate in Croatia. Now in his mid-20s, he continued to deal marijuana, even though the gang-infused streets of East Orange and Newark had become many times more dangerous than in the past.

Although Hobbs recorded the thoughts of so many friends and acquaintances Peace had during his post-college years, he cannot definitively answer the urgent question that so many of them asked Rob repeatedly and urgently, “What are you doing?” A question that is as much unanswered as, perhaps, unanswerable. They saw the growing danger and weren’t satisfied with his typical answer: “It’s all good.”

But it was not. When Rob was a boy his father went to prison for a pair of murders he most likely didn’t commit, and Rob took on the job of looking after his hard-working mother. She sacrificed mightily to keep him into private school, to see her dreams flower with his Yale education then burst when he just somehow couldn’t grab onto a life that would keep him moving forward.

Rob was the son of two entirely separate worlds—a New Jersey ghetto and a privileged Ivy League university. “That one man can contain such contradictions makes for an astonishing, tragic story,” said New York Times reviewer Anand Giridharadas, “but it becomes something more: an interrogation of our national creed of self-invention.” Try as we might, “there are origins in this country of ours that cannot be escaped,” he says, believing the most significant of which may be lack of an intact family.

Hobbs’s prose is unadorned. He’s writing about a friend, after all, and actor Newbern’s narration fits the text well. The clichés Giridharadas objected to in his review are probably not as glaring in the audio version as they would be on the page and, while the writing isn’t lyrical, it gets the job done, building an indelible portrait of so much good forever lost.

Fall Books Already Creating Buzz

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The remainder of 2015 is shaping up beautifully for readers of literary fiction. Lists of forthcoming novels by well-known—as well as new—authors promise a rich season ahead and delightful holiday giving.

Flood of Fire, Amitav GhoshThe Millions has a lengthy list of these, and I’ve picked out just few novels, one book of short stories, and one biography:

  • Flood of Fire: A Novel (The Ibis Trilogy) by Amitav Ghosh – about the first Opium War. I enjoyed his Sea of Poppies, first in this trilogy and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and The Atlantic Monthly calls him “a writer of supreme skill and intelligence.”
  • Fortune Smiles: Stories by Adam Johnson – a collection of six stories, which I would definitely read having found his Pulitzer-winning The Orphan Master’s Son so powerful.
  • The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood – winner of the Man Booker in 2000. Her new book is about “a near-future in which the lawful are locked up and the lawless roam free.”
  • Fates and Furies, Lauren GroffFates and Furies: A Novel by Lauren Groff – delves into the symbolism of Greek mythology to fully plumb the mysteries of a couple’s marriage. Read the opening sex-on-the-beach scene to find out how it all started. Her story “Ghosts and Empties” appeared in the 7-20-15 issue of The New Yorker.
  • Slade House: A Novel by David Mitchell – I’ve read five of his previous novels and enjoyed them all. Slade House began as a story in tweets.
  • Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. If you know her from public radio’s This American Life, you know how funny and smart her social commentary is.
  • The Daughters: A Novel by Adrienne Celt—this “virtuosic debut” is “a gorgeous, riveting story about family, mythology, and curses,” says Book Riot.
  • The Big Green Tent: A Novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya – Russia’s most popular novelist describes what tThe Big Green Tent, Ludmila Ulitskayahe USSR was like in the 1950s and has become “a voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians,” said Masha Gessen’s review in The New Yorker. Sounds dangerous.

Also coming soon are books by an impressive phalanx of well-known writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates, Patti Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Jane Smiley, Umberto Eco, Oscar Hijeulos (posthumously), and Marilynne Robinson.

Love & Mercy

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Love & Mercy, Beach Boys, Brian WilsonGive yourself a refreshing jolt of summer and a heartfelt movie tale befitting its title in this Brian Wilson biopic (trailer). Possibly, some readers will be so post-Beach Boys that name will be meaningless, but not for the rest of us.

Director Bill Pohlad made a couple of interesting casting choices. First, he gave the talented Paul Dano the role of Brian in his 1960s heyday, as his mental stability increasingly wavers. Then, rather than aging Dano for later scenes, John Cusack plays the significantly impaired 1980s Wilson. I went in thinking the two would look nothing alike, and they were even encouraged to develop their portrayals independently, yet, as Variety reviewer Andrew Barker says, “this disconnect (between the two) works, and Cusack’s avoidance of mimicry suggests a man who has lost nearly all lingering ties to the young man he once was.” It turns out to be part of the film’s power.

Reese Witherspoon lookalike Elizabeth Banks plays Melinda, the woman who finds something to love in the damaged, middle-aged musician. But her efforts are thwarted by his psychotherapist—pill-pushing Dr. Eugene Landy, played to a diabolical T by Paul Giamatti (with hair). Wilson’s dad, who shows no redeeming paternal instincts, is played by Bill Camp. It’s worth knowing that the real-life Brian Wilson generally agrees with these portrayals.

The opening sequence is played on the California beach in super-saturated color, with redder surfboards and bluer ocean than was ever possible. The beautiful closing credits feature the real Brian Wilson singing the 1988 song that gave the film its title.

Audio and visual evocations of the 60s, like the movie’s poster above, are effective without feeling artsy and indulgent. I particularly enjoyed the documentary-style music sessions with members of The Wrecking Crew (who provided practically unknown backup for so many musical groups of the 1960s), as they helped Wilson translate the music in his head into some of the most innovative performances of the era for the album Pet Sounds. “To capture the artistic process in this way is extraordinary, and in many ways unprecedented,” said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News, with much credit due writers Oren Moverman and Michael A. Lerner. Atticus Ross’s mashup of Wilson’s music creates a terrific soundtrack.

Critics have been quick to praise this movie’s avoidance of the trite formulas employed in so many movies about entertainers. I didn’t read up on Wilson beforehand, so that the movie could surprise me, and it was authentically tense and totally engaging. Don’t jump up when it ends. You’ll want to see what happened to several of the principals.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating 90%; audience score 91%.

***The Autobiography of Black Hawk

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Black Hawk, American Indian

Black Hawk (wikimedia from: History of the Indian Tribes of North America)

By Black Hawk, narrated by Brett Barry — This short book—the full title of which is Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation, Various Wars In Which He Has Been Engaged, and His Account of the Cause and General History of the Black Hawk War of 1832, His Surrender, and Travels Through the United States. Also Life, Death and Burial of the Old Chief, Together with a History of the Black Hawk War—was the first autobiography of an American Indian leader published in the United States and therefore something of a phenomenon when it appeared in 1833.

Black Hawk was born in 1767 on the Rock River in Illinois, as a member of the Sauk (Sac) tribe, which at that time populated lands east of the Mississippi River, in Illinois and Wisconsin. His reminiscences were edited by a local newspaper reporter, J. B. Patterson, and recount Black Hawk’s experiences with the French, the British, the American settlers, and other tribes.

What turned him against the Americans was an 1804 treaty, which an unauthorized group of Sauks signed, that unilaterally gave away their lands, providing American settlers the legal right (as if such niceties mattered) to appropriate them, and forcing the Indians to resettle to the west.

I found by that treaty, that all of the country east of the Mississippi, and south of Jeffreon [the Salt River in northern Missouri, a tributary of the Mississippi] was ceded to the United States for one thousand dollars a year. I will leave it to the people of the United States to say whether our nation was properly represented in this treaty? Or whether we received a fair compensation for the extent of country ceded by these four individuals?

Because of this opposition, Black Hawk fought with the British during the War of 1812. Twenty years later, when he was 65 years old and after a trail of broken promises, he led a band of Sauk warriors against settlers in Illinois and Wisconsin in the 1832 Black Hawk War.

Eventually, he was captured and gave up the warrior life. He traveled extensively in the United States on a government-sponsored tour, marveling at the size of the major cities, the railroads, the roads. In his attempts to negotiate with military leaders, provincial governors, and even the Great Father in Washington, he interacted personally with many of the leading politicians and military men of the day. President Andrew Jackson (a major character in NPR reporter Steve Inskeep’s recent book about another betrayal of the Indians) desired that Black Hawk and other chiefs see these sights, in order to convince them of the might of the United States.

Black Hawk provides his point of view quite clearly and compellingly. To no avail, of course. According to the University of Illinois Press, “Perhaps no Indian ever saw so much of American expansion or fought harder to prevent that expansion from driving his people to exile and death.” His prowess as a warrior chief is now honored by the U.S. military, which has named several ships after him, as well as the Black Hawk helicopter.