Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the Washington Post

Reviewed by Annette Gordon-Reed
Wednesday, February 22, 2009; Washington Post

PASSING STRANGE

A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

By Martha Sandweiss

Penguin Press. 384 pp. $27.95

If you drop the name Clarence King to almost any group of Americans today, it is unlikely they will have heard of him. This was not always so. During the final decades of the 19th century, King strode across the national scene as the scion of a prominent family and a Yale-trained geologist who mapped the American West. When he published a collection of vivid essays about his exploits, "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada," the book was an instant hit. King gained further fame when he exposed a fraudulent scheme to sell interests in diamond fields whose purported value was greater than all the silver and gold in Nevada's celebrated Comstock Lode. By proving that the fields had been artificially "salted" with precious gems, he halted investments in the project, forestalling the economic bubble that would certainly have formed around it. For this he was nicknamed the King of Diamonds. "We have escaped, thanks to God and Clarence King, a great financial calamity," one newspaper editorial said.

King often inspired such talk. He was a close friend of the writer Henry Adams and the diplomat John Hay, both of whom thought him the most talented man of their generation. Although he was born in Newport, R.I., to an old and distinguished family -- a paternal ancestor came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 and his mother could trace her ancestry back to signers of the Magna Carta -- King had little money for most of his life. Instead, he cobbled together income from government appointments, writing projects and loans from rich friends to support himself as a gentleman scientist.

But there was another side to King that neither the public nor his glittering friends knew, a side that Martha A. Sandweiss explores with great sensitivity, insight and painstaking research in "Passing Strange." The title of this immensely fascinating work provides a broad hint: King lived a racial double life. It would be hard to imagine a man more "white," meaning a man who was more thoroughly steeped in the privileges available only to whites of his class during the Gilded Age. But he was also secretly married to Ada Copeland, a black woman who had been born a slave in Georgia. Even more astounding, she knew nothing of his life as Clarence King. Indeed, she did not even know that he was Clarence King. From the day they met in Manhattan in 1887 or 1888 until 1901, when King died, she knew him as "James Todd." When they married in 1888, she became Ada Todd. And when their five children were born over the next 13 years, their last name was Todd, too.

For the rest of the review, click here.

Anthony Kronman, author of EDUCATION'S END, quoted in the New York Times

In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth

By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, February 24, 2009

... Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said. But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown.

In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

For the full article, please click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE featured in St. Louis Today

'Passing Strange'


By Harper Barnes
February 19, 2009

Over the centuries, countless Americans have "passed" in one way or another. Indeed, as Martha A. Sandweiss suggests in "Passing Strange," her intriguing tale of lovers crossing racial lines in the late 19th century, the ability to become a new person is part of the promise of America. Usually, the move is to a higher social status.

What was remarkable about Clarence King was that he, in effect, "passed downward." A prominent Caucasian Ivy Leaguer from the Eastern establishment, he also pretended for 13 years to be an ordinary African-American Pullman porter, and apparently he did it for love.

It seems extraordinary in today's world of tabloid journalism and Google images that a man as prominent as King, a celebrated New York geologist, author, explorer and gadabout, could get away with the charade for so long, particularly in the same city where he dined at exclusive clubs with such celebrated friends as writer Henry Adams and statesman John Hay.

One reason, Princeton historian Sandweiss points out, is that newspapers and periodicals of the time were, on the whole, sparsely illustrated; King's relative celebrity did not extend to mass-market portraiture.

And it was a long way, in more ways than one, from Midtown Manhattan to the Outer Boroughs of New York. That is where "James Todd," the African-American identity that King assumed in order to marry slave-born nursemaid Ada Copeland, lived with his wife and their five children.

One of the book's more revealing aspects, at least for someone who has done historical research on African-Americans, is the wealth of biographical material available on King and the paucity of it for Ada Copeland. This underlines the fact that, for decades after emancipation, blacks were almost invisible to recorded American history.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Ronald Green, author of BABIES BY DESIGN, featured on Boston Today with Emily Rooney

Ronald Green Discusses Babies By Design
February 12, 2009


To watch Ronald Green discuss his book, click here.

Op-Ed piece by David Blight, author of A SLAVE NO MORE, published in Boston Globe

Lincoln and the former slave
By DAVID W. BLIGHT
Boston Globe, February 12, 2009

TODAY, on Lincoln's birthday, I will be in Cohasset - 98 percent white and mostly affluent - to honor the life of one of its own who was neither. John Washington was a former slave who settled in Cohasset long after the Civil War, and is buried in Woodside Cemetery. We might never have known who John Washington was were it not for the discovery of a narrative he wrote about his struggles to free himself from slavery, which came to light in 2003.

In this season of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, we would do well to remember the ways African-American slaves felt their own connections to the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln described that document as "the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the 19th century." John Washington could not have agreed more, and he played his own small part in bringing it about.

On April 18, 1862, in Fredericksburg, Va., Washington, an urban, literate 24-year-old slave, escaped across the Rappannock River to the safety of Union lines. In a scene that suddenly threw the meaning of the Civil War into bold relief, an officer asked Washington about Confederate forces and conditions in strategic Fredericksburg. Washington had "stuffed his pockets with rebel newspapers" and distributed them to his interrogators. They were puzzled at Washington's intelligence and his fervor; one asked him if he wanted to be free. Washington answered loudly, "by all means!" In his narrative, the intrepid Washington remembered the moment: "Dumb with joy, I thanked God and laughed!"

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE selected as New York Times "Book of the Times"

New York Times Book of the Times
New York Times, February 4, 2009

Sometimes One Man Can Live Two Lives
By Janet Maslin

“Passing Strange” tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists’ imaginations. It exposes the bizarre secret life of a well-known historical figure, but that secret is its least sensational aspect. The secret was hidden in plain sight until Martha A. Sandweiss, the deductive historian who pieced together this narrative, happened to notice it. Her great accomplishment is to have explored not only how the 19th-century explorer and scientist Clarence King reinvented himself but also why that reinvention was so singularly American. Best of all are Ms. Sandweiss’s insights into what King’s deception and its consequences really mean.

Clarence King has often been written about by historians, but mostly in academic books about the mapping and geological exploration of the American West. He also turns up in biographies and literary histories, since he moved in glittering circles and was once widely held in high regard. He was called “the best and the brightest man of his generation” by one close friend, Secretary of State John Hay.

Hay went even further: “This polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.” Another admirer put it this way: “The trouble with King is that his description of the sunset spoils the original.”

King was a blond blueblood from Newport who distinguished himself at an early age. He traveled West in the 1860s, found work with the California State Geological Survey, helped to map the Sierras and became geologist in charge of the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar luminary in both New York and Washington. But his early years of roaming were just a prelude to what seems to have been a permanently rootless state.

Or so it seemed to his friends, who became used to his unexpected absences and thought of him as a perennial bachelor. Their impressions of him went no further. What they did not know was that when King was not living in various clubs and hotels, he was married and the father of five children. He was deeply devoted to his wife, Ada, a black woman 19 years his junior. This blue-eyed man, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, had successfully cultivated the impression that he was black too.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss, author of PASSING STRANGE, featured on the Diane Rehm Show

Martha A. Sandweiss discusses Passing Strange

February 11, 2009

Clarence King was a famed explorer, scientist, and hero of late nineteenth century history. But the blue-eyed and fair-skinned King also led a secret double life passing as a black man. A historian examines the secret King only revealed on his deathbed to his black wife of thirteen years.

To hear the interview click here.

Martha Sandweiss, author of PASSING STRANGE, featured in Vanity Fair

Martha A. Sandweiss Reads from Passing Strange


By Vanity Fair
February 6, 2009

For decades, Clarence King lived a charming, public life. The notable white geologist and writer, who had helped map the American West, divided his time between White House dinners and social gatherings at Manhattan's most elite clubs. But in this excerpt from the new book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (The Penguin Press), historian Martha A. Sandweiss reveals the riveting secret King kept from his family—and the world—and only disclosed on his deathbed in 1901: Clarence King lived a double life as a black man, James Todd.

To hear Martha Sandweiss read from her book click here.

James Galbraith, author of THE PREDATOR STATE, featured in Fortune Magazine

James Galbraith picks up the argument for government intervention where his father left off. His prescription: Spend now, spend a lot, and spend some more.


By Pat Regnier
February 4, 2009

(Fortune Magazine) -- Until about Sept. 20, 2008, the day Henry Paulson asked Congress for a $700 billion blank check, most of us probably thought we had a decent layman's grasp of how the economy works and how it grows.

Something like this: Buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace and strike their best bargains. Those may not always turn out to be perfectly fair or wise, but consumers generally know better than the government. Growth comes from the efforts of savers and entrepreneurs, so taxes on them must be kept low. Few argued about this stuff. Liberals just wanted to put a bigger social safety net underneath the markets; conservatives, not so much.

Now that all hell has broken loose, none of that seems obvious anymore. Consumers and businesses know what's best for them? Allow us to introduce the erstwhile homeowners of San Diego and Las Vegas, and the MBAs of Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Lehman Brothers.

The conventional wisdom about economics is up for grabs right now. We're not speaking here of the conventional wisdom in the economics profession - that moves pretty slowly, and is anyway less wedded to a caricature of infallibly rational markets than most people think. We mean the assumptions that lawmakers, businesspeople, journalists, and educated voters use when they talk about economic problems. Ideas that had been banished to the dustbin are suddenly back on the table, and last year's gadflies now seem as if they were ahead of the curve. Exhibit A: James K. Galbraith, go-to economist of Nation magazine-style liberalism, unabashed market skeptic, and rock-ribbed Keynesian since before Keynesianism was cool (again).

For the rest of the article, click here.

Marlene Zuk, author of RIDDLED WITH LIFE, essay in New York Times

The Evolutionary Search for Our Perfect Past
By MARLENE ZUK
New York Times, January 19, 2009

Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol.

Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like “10,000 B.C.” are popular because they appeal to our sense that life used to be more in sync with the environment. A recent cartoon shows one of those evolutionary progressions — ape to man walking upright to man slouched over a computer — with the caption “Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong.”

Maybe our woes arise because our Stone Age genes are thrust into Space Age life. That beer gut? It comes from eating too many processed carbohydrates; our bodies evolved to eat only unrefined foods, mainly meat, and we get out of kilter veering from our ancestral diet.

Food allergies and digestive woes? We, like other mammals, aren’t meant to consume dairy products after weaning. When politicians fall from grace after committing adultery, some commentator will always point out that such behavior has evolutionary roots: weren’t the best procreators alpha males with roving eyes?

In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called “paleofantasies.” She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to nostalgia for the very old days as a touchstone for the way life is supposed to be and why it sometimes feels so out of balance.

As an evolutionary biologist, I was filled with enthusiasm at first over the idea of a modern mismatch between everyday life and our evolutionary past. But a closer look reveals that not all evolutionary ideas are created equal; even for Darwinians, the devil is in the details. The notion that there was a time of perfect adaptation, from which we’ve now deviated, is a caricature of the way evolution works.

First, when exactly was this age of harmony, and what was it like? Scavenging, or eating the carcasses of dead animals left by (or stolen from) predators like lions, was probably replaced by active hunting and accumulation of wild plants about 55,000 years ago, and agriculture seems to have begun a mere 10,000 years ago. We did a lot of different things during each of these times.

How much of the diet during our idyllic hunter-gatherer past was meat, and what kind of plants and animals were used, varied widely in time and space. Inuits had different diets from Australian aboriginals or Neotropical forest dwellers. And we know little about the details of early family structure and other aspects of behavior. So the argument that we are “meant” to eat a certain proportion of meat, say, is highly questionable. Which of our human ancestors are we using as models?

But the difficulty with using our hunter-gatherer selves as icons of well-being goes much deeper. It is not as if we finally achieved harmony with our environment during the Pleistocene, heaved a sigh of relief and stopped.

Instead, evolution lurches along, with successive generations sometimes unchanged, sometimes better suited to their surroundings in some ways but not others. At any one point, adaptations take place: individuals who can endure heat or cold or famine leave more offspring than their less hardy counterparts. But there is no one point when one can say, “Voilà! Finished.”

Did our cave-dwelling forebears feel nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal? Were hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from a lion was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: after all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don’t get cancer.

You might argue that hunter-gatherers were better adapted to their environment simply because they spent many thousands of years at it — much longer than we’ve spent sitting in front of a computer or eating Mars bars. That’s true for some attributes, but not all. Evolution isn’t the creaky old process we used to think it was. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that the rate of evolution can be fast (sometimes blindingly so) or slow, or anything in between.

Marlene Zuk is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are.”

For the full article, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE nominated for New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009

New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009: High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
New York Public Library, February 5, 2009

Alongside Jane Mayer and Robin Wright, Peter Gosselin's High Wire was selected by the New York Public Library as a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009. Winners will be announced on May 6, 2009 at a reception at the library.

To see latest updates, including other nominees, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in Columbia Journalism Review

Reviewed by Elinore Longobardi
Wednesday, February 4, 2009; Columbia Journalism Review

PASSING STRANGE

A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

By Martha Sandweiss

Penguin Press. 384 pp. $27.95

Passing Strange is one of those books with precisely the right title. It is indeed a story about passing, in every sense of the term, and historian Martha Sandweiss tells it with a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s verve. More specifically, it is a story about a white. nineteenth-century scientist and explorer, famous in his day, who both hobnobbed with the most prominent figures of his era and created a second, secret identity for himself as a working-class black man. In a word: strange.

Shockingly—at least from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, with all of its peering eyes—the twain never met. Not, at least, until the prominent white man who passed as an obscure black one was on his deathbed. Knowing just this much, the reader will be asking a good many questions, chiefly variations on the basic How? and Why? Sandweiss rewards us with answers. Not to every question, of course, given the number of details that have slipped between the cracks of time. Still, the author builds the solid framework of two lives: that of Clarence King, the explorer, and Ada Copeland, the black woman he loved, married, and all the while deceived.

The story of King and Copeland, who lived together as James and Ada Todd, is a blessing for a curious, talented writer like Sandweiss. Not only are its details fascinating in and of themselves, but they advance a larger social understanding. By tracing the curves and improbable intersections of two extraordinary lives, Passing Strange offers a fresh look at the racial and cultural landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

For the rest of Elinore Longobardi's review, click here.

James Galbraith, author of THE PREDATOR STATE, guest on KCRW's Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future

Thursday, February 5, 2009; KCRW News

Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future

Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future (12:07P)

The President and the Congress are prepared to break records for government spending, with consequences for America and the rest of the world. The stimulus package is supposed to move fast enough to have immediate impact, but not so fast that it's reckless or wasteful. The House bill calls for prohibiting foreign steel and iron from infrastructure projects. The Senate version being debated this week goes further, with few exceptions to the requirement for American-made goods and equipment. Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, call that "protectionism." Could such provisions lead to foreign retaliation? Do other elements advance the Democrats' social agenda, rather than focusing on creating jobs. What should be the long-term objectives? Can past levels of growth and prosperity be restored or will Americans have to tighten their belts permanently?

To listen to Stimulating the Economy, click here for the podcast.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN nominated for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Artists Awards 2008: The Book of Getting Even
Barnes & Noble, February 3, 2009

Alongside Zachary Lazar and Gin Phillips, Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even was selected by Barnes & Noble as a fiction finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award for 2008. Featuring notable judges such as Kate Christensen and Suzanne Finnamore, winners will be announced on March 4, 2009 at a private awards ceremony.

To see the full list, click here.