Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic

By David Howard

Bicycling executive editor and freelance journalist Howard unravels the tortured provenance of an original copy of the Bill of Rights.In April 1865, souvenir-hunting soldiers from Gen. Sherman's army ransacked North Carolina's statehouse. One came away, probably unwittingly, with one of the 14 original copies of the Bill of Rights, which he carried to Ohio and later sold to the visiting Charles Shotwell for $5. The relic remained in the Shotwell family's hands for more than 130 years, until his elderly granddaughters sold it to the seemingly reputable Connecticut antiques dealer Wayne Pratt for $200,000. Was the manuscript a legitimate spoil of war or, more likely, stolen property whose ownership would be immediately contested should it ever come forthrightly to market? Howard closely follows Pratt's maneuvering to resell the prized document for millions, a story that quickly becomes part history, part mystery, part study in ambition, greed and betrayal—all the predictable passions that surround any great treasure. It gives away nothing to disclose that Pratt's plan came to grief, ending in an FBI sting, with the parchment secured and resting in a Carolina vault. Fully aware of the incongruity between the noble sentiments of the Bill of Rights and the ignoble impulses he so fully explores, Howard introduces us to a remarkably shady land developer, a too-eager lawyer whose wife once headed Bill Clinton's IRS, a bedazzled art dealer whose clients include Teresa Heinz Kerry, startled government scholars, inquiring reporters, tantalized museum officials, covetous governors of two states and clever law-enforcement specialists in stolen art and cultural artifacts. Along the way, the author provides informative asides about the often sleazy art and antiques world, the arcane preoccupations of document specialists, the hypocrisy of major museums and libraries (every bit as eager for distinction as the disgraced Pratt) and the remarkably careless governmental archival practices that, until recently, have placed many of our historical documents at risk.A pleasing combination of skillful journalism and shrewd storytelling.

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Citizen You: Doing Your Part to Change the World

By Jonathan M. Tisch

President Obama's early career as a community organizer has inspired interest in citizen activism across generations and nations, according to Tisch, head of a financial holding company and major funder of a college of citizenship and public service at Tufts University. Tisch issues a call to action to move beyond volunteerism to more active citizenship, including social entrepreneurship and broader social change that involves the government and the private sector. He points to sustaining efforts such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh that funds modest businesses for the rural poor and the Harlem Children's Zone's effort to address systemic issues in providing high-quality education to the urban poor. Tisch also examines new philanthropists, including Bill Gates, who apply a business perspective to addressing global social issues. Most compelling are the profiles of lesser-known individuals: Will Allen teaching city dwellers to become urban farmers to provide fresh fruit and vegetables to "food deserts" and Scott Harrison operating a charity to build filtration systems in developing nations. Tisch offers examples of both institutions and individuals who take seriously the notion that citizens can make massive changes.

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The fall of the house of Walworth : a tale of madness and murder in gilded age America

 by Geoffrey O'Brien. The prestigious Walworth family of Saratoga, N.Y., built a fortune on Judge Walworth's 1830s legal success, only to lose everything after his grandson's nationally sensational 1873 parricide trial, the first test case of New York's new definition of first-degree murder. O'Brien, editor of the Library of America and author of Hardboiled America, uses diaries, newspaper accounts, and court records to create a lively multigenerational family history of ambition, hereditary insanity, and loyalty through the antebellum, Civil War, and Gilded Age eras. Judge Walworth's foppish son, Mansfield, married his stepsister Ellen in 1852 only to systematically abuse her and then periodically discard her for years at a time, including a long separation during the Civil War when Ellen lived in her battered native Kentucky. When Judge Walworth left Mansfield with little inheritance, the moderately successful writer penned explicit death threats to Ellen (now his exwife) and their children, resulting in his unstable 19-year-old son murdering him in 1873. O'Brien effortlessly stitches together the story of two families who intermarry with great potential, only to realize complete disintegration, Oincluding the great Walworth Mansion, which has been replaced by a gas station.  --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival

By Dean King

In 1934, following threats by the Chinese Nationalists to destroy their village in remote southeastern China, 30 women fled with Mao Tse-tung's Red Army. They were not only fleeing certain destruction but the social restrictions of an ancient society that relegated women to menial lives of servitude, poverty, arranged marriage, and bound feet and life prospects. In what became known as the Long March, the army and the women trekked 4,000 miles in one year to forge resistance to Chiang Kai-shek's repressive regime and to find new lives for themselves. Among them were a woman from a distinguished family that was friendly to Mao and another young woman, the daughter of a fisherman, who was given away to pay off debts. The women recall romantic attachments, political awakenings, and service in the army and later in Communist politics. King (Skeletons on the Zahara, 2004) spent five years retracing their trek and interviewing survivors and historians to offer a very human account of an event that has loomed large in Chinese history. Maps and photographs enhance the chronicling of this extraordinary story.

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Quiet Hero: Secrets from My Father's Past

By Rita Cosby

The best-selling author of Blonde Ambition uncovers her father's history as a WWII prisoner-of-war, a situation he found himself in after he joined the Polish resistance against the Nazis as a teen, in a book with archival photos and pictures of artifacts.

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Churchill's Bunker: The Cabinet War Rooms and the Culture of Secrecy in Wartime London

By Richard  Holmes

Hundreds and hundreds of books have been written about Winston Churchill and World War II. Yet we have never before had a complete study of the underground set of rooms in downtown London beneath the Office of Works building near Parliament where, ten feet below the streets of London, Churchill and his closest military and civilian advisers labored during the days and months of intense bombing that London suffered off and on during the war. These Cabinet War Rooms contained the famous Map Room, which daily charted the course of the war as well as eating and sleeping facilities for dozens of full-time staffers who spent weeks without seeing the sun. Holmes, who just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, here gives us a truly remarkable story told with verve and clarity.

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Influence: How Women's Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better

By Maddy Dychtwald with Christine Larson

Dychtwald, a demographer and marketing executive, provides a riveting exploration of female economic emancipation in the 21stcentury as unprecedented numbers of women all over the world are becoming financially powerful enough to stand on their own and tip global power balances: individually, as their attitudes toward money changes; in the home; in the work place; and in society at large, as gender gaps in health and education in even the poorest nations are narrowing. Dychtwald shows how women are upending the status quo in corporate America through this rapid economic shift and offers a welcome, more micro look with her five "money profiles": archetypal ways that modern women relate to their money, how financially self-confident they feel, and what they expect their money to do for them. She provides fascinating glimpses of women from all corners of the globe who are taking advantage of this change, from Uganda to Northern California, and her rousing and well-researched book contains valuable insight into a pivotal movement that holds vast and heartening advancements.

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War Beneath the Waves: A True Story of Courage and Leadership Aboard a World War II Submarine

By Don Keith

A seasoned chronicler of submariners' exploits now tells the tale of a heroic feat of endurance in the fall of 1943, when U.S.S. Billfish endured a 15-hour depth-charging by some uncommonly skilled and persistent Japanese antisubmarine vessels. Further handicapping her was the fact that her captain was better at being a staff officer than he was at the extraordinarily demanding and personal job of leadership required in submarines. Nor was he the only one whose skill or nerve failed to meet requirements. On the other hand, many of the crew rose to fill gaps and bring the ship safe home. Dealing equally with the hardware and the interpersonal dynamics of WWII submarining, Keith will inform and please both the rank newcomer to the subject and the well-read expert on it.

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America's Captives: Treatment of POWs from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror

By Paul J. Springer

In his well-documented survey, Springer (leadership & strategy, Air Command & Staff Coll.) argues that America has improvised and haphazardly managed its treatment of prisoners of war (POWs), from the thousands of British prisoners exchanged on a rank-for-rank basis during the Revolution to the Guantánamo prisoners in legal limbo today. In addressing a predictable problem in ad hoc ways, the United States has reckoned with issues of humanitarianism, military expediency, retaliation, the rule of law, and public perception. Springer uses the Revolution and the Civil War to highlight the difficulties; in both cases one side was reluctant to recognize the rights of POWs for fear of legitimizing the existence of the rebel state, a problem that persists with today's nonstate combatants. Neither Springer nor Doyle is an easy or popular read, but these complementary titles are mandatory for all interested readers, students, scholars, and informed lay persons.

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