Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman
On November 14, 1889, muckraking reporter Nellie Bly left New York City on the first leg of a round-the-world race to beat Phileas Fogg's time of eighty days. Fogg, you will remember, was a fictional character created by French author Jules Verne. Bly would not know until she reached Hong Kong that she was also in a race with a real person, another American writer named Elizabeth Bisland. Bly had three days to get ready, Elizabeth about twelve hours, Bly was traveling east, Bisland west. Bly's trip was funded by her employer, Joseph Pulitzer's The World newspaper, Bisland's by The Cosmopolitan magazine, for whom she freelanced. The two women could not have been more unlike, as the trip was all eager Bly's idea and reluctant Bisland was fairly dropped in it by her editor. Both publications were in it to raise circulation.
This was a time when women were, quote, cherished, end quote out of anything that had anything to do with anything other than marriage and children. Just being reporters put Bly and Bisland beyond the pale
”I have never yet seen a girl enter the newspaper field but that I have noticed a steady decline in that innate sense of refinement, gentleness and womanliness with which she entered it,” observed one male newspaper editor. “Young womanhood,” rhapsodized another, “is too sweet and sacred a thing to couple with the life of careless manner, hasty talk, and unconventional action that seems inevitable in a newspaper office.”
Sweet and sacred Bly, twenty-five, and Bisland, twenty-seven, wrote for a living. Bly was the sole support of her mother and later her sister-in-law and her children. Bisland supported herself and her sister. Bly was an investigative journalist before the job title existed who contrived to report from inside an insane asylum for women, while Bisland wrote book reviews and hosted literary salons in her New York City apartment. Both were feminists and activists, although neither would have described themselves as such, and both went around the world alone, although neither woman experienced any real hardship as each was sent first class at their publisher’s expense.
One of the fascinations of this book is the detail over what each woman packed. Bly carried one small bag
a sturdy leather gripsack measuring at its bottom sixteen by seven inches. In that small space she managed to pack a lightweight silk bodice, three veils, a pair of slippers, a set of toiletries, an inkstand, pens, pencils, paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a flask and drinking cup, several changes of underwear (flannel for cold weather, silk for hot), handkerchiefs, and a jar of cold cream to prevent her skin from chapping in the various climates she would encounter.
Measure that out on your desk. Rick Steves could take lessons. This was deliberate, as Bly
wanted to give the lie to the timeworn notion that a woman could not travel without taking along several pieces of luggage.
and a leading travel writer of the day recommended the female traveler, in addition to a small steamer trunk and a satchel, take another trunk fourteen feet square at its bottom. Bisland in a much shorter time packed a lot more than Bly, and she must have regretted it when the French customs inspector had her clothes strewn all over the deck.
In the end, Bly beat Bisland by more than four days, and returned home to a hero’s welcome. People named daughters, race horses, spaniels and Buff Leghorn chickens after her, musicians wrote songs about her, and manufacturers used her name to sell everything from clothing to school supplies to chocolates. Alas, it didn’t last.
In London, The World’s Tracey Greaves paid a visit to the president of the Royal Geographical Society. “While I can’t see that her trip will benefit the cause of science,” observed the Right Honorable Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff [Really, he could have been named for the purpose.], “...Miss Bly has proved herself a remarkable young woman, and I hope she will get a good husband.”
That’s right, little girl, you did your stunt, now go home and be quiet.
The World published her photograph and everyone knew what she looked like, so there was no going back to her job as an undercover muckraker, and she had no talent at fiction, the only writing job she could get. The revisionist history started in almost immediately, as Americans then as now can’t wait to tear down the legend they have only just built up, and Bly didn’t help things by embellishing the legend herself.
Still, I wonder, would as many women have undertaken to climb the Chilkoot Trail had it not been for Nellie Bly’s showing the way a decade earlier? How much effect did Bly’s circumnavigation of the globe have on the passing of the nineteenth amendment thirty years later? How many "sweet and sacred" little girls played the Nellie Bly Around the World board game and were encouraged to believe they, too, could go round the world? be a doctor? lawyer? Indian chief?
I do have some problems with this book, in particular Goodman's differing attitudes toward Bly and Bisland (He is in love with Bisland and loses no chance to denigrate Bly whenever he can) but highly recommended anyway, not only as a good story but as a you-are-there portrait of the time in which Bly and Bisland lived. How soon we forget how far we have come.
# Permanent link to Rick Steves could take lessons.
The Empty House by Michael Gilbert
Brilliant genetic scientist Dr. Alexander Wolfe drives his car over a cliff one evening in southeastern England, and insurance adjuster Peter Manciple comes along behind to make sure that there is no reason that his firm shouldn't pay out on Dr. Wolfe's very large and oddly written insurance policy. All, as you surely knew, is not as it seems, and mayhem and bloody murder ensue.
Can I get away with using "quiet" to modify the noun "thriller?" Because that's what many of Michael Gilbert's books are, quiet thrillers. He has the endearing habit of elevating ordinary people by way of extraordinary circumstances to heretofore unthought of actions, and after the authorities come gallumphing in to investigate and inquire and pry and explain and justify, our not quite Ordinary Bloke carries on with his life. And then there are the always perceptive comments on Life, the Universe and Everything, and the sly asides that yank you up with a jerk and make you read them twice to make sure he really said that.
Another thing I like about Gilbert is that he doesn't always tie things up neatly at the end. The Empty House's conclusion is more neat than most, but you certainly understand Peter's ultimate decision.
***SPOILER***
Also, I'm not all that certain that Dr. Wolfe is really dead. He's been dead before.
# Permanent link to A quiet thriller
The Famous and the Dead by T. Jefferson Parker
Here, in the sixth and final installment of the Charlie Hood series, Charlie literally wrestles with the devil himself, over the narcotraffickers on the USA-Mexican border, for the lives of his friends, and maybe even for his own soul as well. A very satisfying conclusion, although I'm actually a little spooked at the way he left it.***[spoiler below]
These books are desert noir, a lone hero walking the harsh sands beneath a merciless sun, Sam Spade among the cholla, and always with the hero's past somewhere rearing its malevolent head. Here it shows up up front, on page 36:
The past again, he thought. Barreling right in like it's welcome.
Raymond Chandler Himself would expire from sheer envy.
There is as always great craft, both undercover agent and writer's:
Hood ignored him. Let them come to you, he thought. This was a favorite rule of his old Blowdown boss, Sean Ozburn, a crack undercover agent, always cool and never made: Don't be eager. Ozburn had been the best of them unti mike Finnegan tore him to shreds--mentally, spiritually, and finally physically. Oz's lovely wife, too. All of that, without touching them.
There is so much going on in that paragraph I hardly know where to begin. It illustrates Hood's experience as an ATF agent. It lets you in on a little secret about working undercover. It sets up the villain, and it invokes the reader's sympathy for past (and passed) friends. That, folks, is not an expository lump. Later on:
To Hood, Dale Yorth was the combination of boyish adventurism and deadly adult mission that constituted law enforcement at most levels.
Ever see what cops call a trophy shot, with all the arresting officers grouped around big piles of marijuana bales or bags of cocaine? Reminds me of Holmes -- "Quick, Watson! The game's afoot!" If they didn't enjoy the chase, they wouldn't be in the game, and Jeff captures that here in one sentence.
There is, as always, some great social commentary:
Hood had always thought that, just for starters, ATF had it rough because most Americans liked alcohol, tobacco and firearms, and disliked regulation.
And then we come to Mike Finnegan, the Big Bad. He explains himself to Bradley, the struggle for whose soul has occupied much of the Charlie Hood series:
My partners have all been very, very successful. I try my best to get to them by age eleven, and I have rigorous standards. The single best prognosticator for success as a partnered human being is ambition. This is where everything begins. Second greatest? Appetites--indulged appetites. Third? Perfectionism. I look for monstrous, gigantic egos linked closely to a sense of entitlement and possessing a simple can-do attitude.
[Shudder.] Practical, isn't he? And prescient. And persuasive. And...political, if you want to look at it that way and I don't see how you can avoid it. Jeff has made me believe in the devil in the way no church has ever been able to.
One day, these novels will be read in history classes, in poly sci classes, and maybe in theological classes as well. Highly recommended.
Here comes the SPOILER:
***Although I guess one should never be entirely certain that the lock on the devil's door is unpickable. Myself, I think Bradley's right, he and Reyes and Charlie should dump Mike down Beatrice's mine shaft. Better yet, just back up a cement truck and unload it into the basement.
# Permanent link to Charlie Hood jousts with the devil. And wins?
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin
Not to be confused with Samuel Johnson, who wrote the dictionary, which I always do. No, this book is a biography of Samuel Pepys, who wrote the Diary. An up-from-nothing country boy, Pepys' abilities and high-placed relatives put him at the center of English history for the last half of of the 1600's. He witnessed the execution of Charles I, rose high in Cromwell's administration, turned his coat when Charles II was restored to the throne and rose even higher, and then backed the wrong horse when Charles II died and James II took only four years to whistle his throne down a religious wind of his own making. Pepys, the last man in the world to end his life as a Jacobite, does, out of loyalty and a stubborn determination to turn his coat no more.
This is the best kind of biography, not only the life of the man himself but of the time and place as well. Tomalin wisely relegates the Diary to it's own section, the years 1660-1669. In the prologue, she writes
The shamelessness of his self-observation deserves to be called scientific.
and then places his words alongside the narrative of those years.
The Diary, with its tumbling stream of information, is a reminder that the moods and demands of daily life easily blot out politics. Lack of cash was a more pressing problem for Pepys than any possible change of regime...
Tomalin isn't above inserting the occasionally acid and always enjoyable editorial comment, either.
Almost the first advice Pepys got when his promotion was known was from a sea captain telling him how to fiddle his expenses by listing five or six non-existent servants when he went on board and claiming pay for them all. It made an interesting introduction to the workings of the navy.
Tomalin shows a masterly hand at drawing comparisons between that time and this, as well. On Major Harrison being hanged, drawn and quartered for treason:
Pepys, in one of his most famous formulations, wrote that Major-General Harrison looked "as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition."...Pepys did not devote the rest of his day to higher thoughts any more than one of us, turning from famine or child murder on television, remains sombre an hour later.
Due to his high office and connections at court Pepys' had a front row seat to all the goings-on, and as secretary to the British Navy a not inconsiderable hand in affairs himself. On every page you aren't bumping into royalty, you stub your toe on someone out of the Who's Who of British science and literature, John Milton, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and many more. In the meantime, through Pepys' eyes we singe our eyebrows on the Great Fire of London, and fear for our lives from the plague. It's a marvelous you-are-there.
Highly readable, highly recommended.
View all my reviews on Goodreads.And I found a map of the Great Fire of London on Wikipedia. I have walked those streets, all unknowing.
# Permanent link to And so to bed.
[written for Mystery Scene Magazine's "Writers on Reading" column, February 2013 issue]
I was raised on a 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. In port, at low tide, it was a forty-two foot climb up an often ice-encrusted ladder to get to the library, but if you’re a born reader and an icy climb is the only way you can get to the library, you climb.
The Seldovia Public Library was one room in the basement of city hall. It was open once a week, on Monday nights, for three hours, seven to ten. Because there were so few books, each patron could check out only four at a time. Susan the librarian started me on Nancy Drew.
I read all the Nancy Drew Susan had in short order, and then I read everything else on her shelves. Because I was a kid on a boat, I was always looking for stories about other kids on boats. Eventually, Susan found me a copy of The Lion’s Paw by Robb White.
It’s World War II. Fifteen-year old Ben’s father is lost at sea in the Pacific. Penny and Nick are siblings on the lam from the orphanage that would split them up. They stow away in Ben’s sailboat, the Hard A Lee. Ben’s uncle is going to sell it, so Ben, Penny and Nick decide to run away on the Hard A Lee together.My favorite kind of book is a how-to book. You can’t put enough detail into a book about how someone lives their life or does their job or falls in love or commits a crime to suit me. The Lion’s Paw is a how-to book. How to run away. How to sail a boat. How to be a captain. How to be crew. How to hide a sailboat in plain sight. How not to wrestle an alligator.
How to go on a quest.
There is that one book every writer can point to as the story that inspired them to tell their own. The Lion’s Paw may be the first book I ever read where I looked at the author’s name on the cover and wondered, “Who is this guy? How does he know all this stuff?” and more importantly “Did he write anything else?”
He did, and I read it all. And then I started writing my own.
And it is finally again in print. Buy it here. I promise you won't be sorry.
# Permanent link to How not to wrestle an alligator.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
I was going to leave this book starless, because if there is any truth in me I can't say I enjoyed it, but it is a very well written. A painfully realistic grunt's eye view of the war in Vietnam, I'm still cleaning the shit out of my ears.
The title comes from what each soldier carried on patrol into the jungle.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity...Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations...Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney...Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament...As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet...Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
The narrative goes back and forth in time, before, during and after the war, and although the author refers to himself by name, he cautions the reader repeatedly not to believe everything he says, and that the truth isn't really the point anyway.
I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
The creepiest story is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," when a soldier manages to bring his stateside girlfriend to the war, and she takes to it a lot better than anyone could have imagined. But the story that sticks to me most is "On the Rainy River," when Tim gets his draft notice and takes off for six days. He thinks he's going to Canada, but
I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
Not an easy read, but worth it.
# Permanent link to I’m still cleaning the shit out of my ears.
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson
This is one of those books that only underscores how little I know. I knew about Newton, sure, I'd even heard that great line of Pope's ('God said Let Newton be! and there was light.') but I certainly didn't know that after thirty years at Cambridge Newton got a patronage job at the Royal Mint and pretty much personally hauled the British nation back from the brink of bankruptcy, and further, acted in the capacity of criminal investigator (squee!) in chasing down counterfeiters.
Reading this book is like eating a really long, really good dinner sitting next to a really good raconteur who knows all the fun facts about Newton and his time. Herein, you discover that the story about the apple was not, in fact, apocryphal, and that
In 1943, at a dinner party at the Royal Society Club, a member pulled from his pocket two large apples of a variety called Flower of Kent, a cooking apple popular in the 1600s. These were, the owner explained, the fruit of one of the grafts of the original at Woolsthorpe. Newton's apple itself is no fairy tale, it budded, it ripened; almost three centuries later it could still be tasted in all the knowledge that flowed from its rumored fall.
Eating of the fruit of the the tree of knowledge. Really, I just have to give another [squee!].
They were crowd sourcing back then. Yes, they were:
...how glorious it would be if gentlemen of England rose from their beds and made similar observations all over the country, building a picture not just of local conditions but of the varieties of climate throughout the realm...Hooke published his meteorological call to arms in the journal of the Royal Society...
You'll find out why coins are ridged around the edge instead of smooth, that counterfeiting flourished in spite of a freely applied death penalty (always supposing you didn't have L6,000 to buy a pardon), that Newton spent twenty years trying to turn lead into gold, which had everything to do with his determination to prove the existence of God, and then refused to take communion from the Church of England before he died.
Newton and indeed all science, or natural philosophy as it was called then benefited by the explosion of print media at that time. Anyone with an axe to grind and a few schillings could print a broadside and see it circulated, including William Chaloner, a coyner (counterfeiter) who wrote a broadside attacking bad practices inside the Mint and actually succeeded in getting the ear of the Parliamentary committee that oversaw it. He came way too close to getting a job inside the Mint itself and proved to be Newton's biggest foe. Chaloner, who got his start with sex toys, faked coins of every denomination, the first Bank of England notes, lottery tickets, you name it, if it served as legal tender, Chaloner made a copy and sold it.
He was very careful about never distributing any of the fakes personally, farming that out to friends and associates, and therein his downfall, because
Like any street cop in history--and unlike any other fellow of the Royal Society or Cambridge don--[Newton] would have to wade hip-deep into London's underworld.
And wade he does. He even has himself appointed a justice of the peace so as to solve problems of jurisdiction over London's seven counties, and then, like any good natural philosopher, he starts gathering data.
Most of London's coiners did not grasp the danger this strange new Warden posed. The documents Newton didn't burn [and the story behind that involves torture, extralegal, shades of extreme interrogation], all written between 1698 and 1700, reveal the almost unfair contest between the Warden and those who tried to trade in bad money.
You get the feeling that Levenson feels a little sorry for those hapless counterfeiters, because Newton?
Always gets his man.
Highly recommended, and a quick read, too.
# Permanent link to God said, Let Newton be! and there was light.
Mousetronaut: Based on a (Partially) True Story by Mark Kelly
The sweetest little picture book, about Meteor the Mouse, one of a rodent team of, uh, mission specialists on board a space shuttle mission who saves the day. At the end Kelly includes an afterword with a brief history of NASA and lots of fun details about travel in space.
During my first flight in 2001, there were eighteen mice on board. All of them, with one exception, clung to inside of the mesh during the entire mission. One mouse, smaller than the rest, seemed to enjoy the experience and effortlessly floated around the cage. The story of Mousetronaut is inspired by that mission. We all watched him as he enjoyed the feeling of being weighless. I started to think about that mouse and what it would be like to have him as part of our crew.
The illustrations are just marvelous (lovelovelove the one of Meteor squeezing in between the control panels to get the key, and the one of him in his space suit), and you know the details are right. Any kid of any age will enjoy this book, and more importantly, no adult will be bored with having to read it 9 times in a row to his kid.
# Permanent link to One mouse, smaller than the rest…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, July 5, 2010]
So I'm sitting here bawling because John Adams just died. It doesn't seem to matter that it happened 182 years ago.
The best biographers understand that a biography is not only a history of the title subject but a time machine to the time in which he or she lived. Having read David McCullough's John Adams, I now feel like I was in the room when John (look at that, we're on a first-name basis) rose in Congress to speak in support of the Declaration of Independence, like I was sitting at Abigail's elbow when she wrote to him wherever he was, Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, London. There are so many great word pictures, like the one of John helping to repel boarders when his ship came under attack crossing the Atlantic, told this time in the words of the ship's captain.
And Abigail. Has there ever been such a woman? Has there ever been such a partnership? It's almost enough to make me believe in marriage.
Of course it helps that John and Abigail both were such indefatigable correspondents (they weren't happy that they were so many times separated but we sure lucked out) and such amazingly good writers. The quality of their writing, as well as that of their multitude of other correspondents is certain to leave you wondering where the hell that ability went.
McCullough's organizational skills in plucking just the right phrase from just the right letter are astonishing, and his own prose doesn't suffer by comparison, either. A glorious, you-are-there book.
# Permanent link to John Adams just died, dammit.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 8/23/2010]
Patrick at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego is my connection for good fantasy and good science fiction. (He posts reviews here.) This year he got me hooked on military sf, space operas, the kind of novels that span light years as well as decades, where fates of galactic empires hang in the balance and it all comes down to the decisions of one man or woman in the captain's chair of a space carrier facing impossible odds. The battles rage up and down solar systems and in and out of hyperspace and even if you're a card-carrying pacifiist you can't help but thrill to the might and majesty of it all.
In Jack Campbell's
Lost Fleet series beginning with Dauntless, a war has been raging between the Syndic and the Alliance for more than a century, and in a perfidious bit of treachery the Syndic has killed the Alliance fleet's combat officers. Ah, but then the Alliance rescues Captain Black Jack Geary from the cryopod he's been adrift in ever since the last battle he fought a hundred years before. Since, after they wake him up, he's the most senior officer in the fleet, he takes command, and over six novels leads the lost Alliance fleet home.
John Scalzi's Old Man's War is the direct descendant of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. At age 75 John Perry leaves earth to join the Colonial Defense Force. In return for a new young body, one specially upgraded for battle, John and his peers will fight the alien races who are in competition with the CDF for new planets to colonize. John's got a smart mouth and a grunt's-eye view and he is very good company through a plot that just keeps throwing new stuff at you, and then throws some more. A must read.
Right now I'm tearing through David Weber's Honor Harrington series like a dreadnought through n-space. Think Horatio Hornblower with Pip for a pet. In On Basilisk Station, the first of this now 12-novel series, Captain Honor Harrington, Royal Manticore Navy, and her ship Fearless are assigned to picket the galactic transfer port Basilisk. Smart, principled, courageous, the aptly-named Honor cleans up the mess left behind by the last captain, including but not limited to a planetary insurrection and an enemy invasion. The characters are great, the plots brobdingnagian, but the detail of the setting is these novels' greatest strength. You feel like you're one of Honor's crew and you will both cheer and cower during the battle scenes.
Addendum on June 24, 2013:
And THEN I discovered Tanya Huff's Valor series all by myself. Confederation Space Marine Master Sergeant Torin Kerr battles her way across the galaxy, in spite of a novel-to-novel realization that the war the Confederation is fighting is not anything like it seems. I won't spoil it, but these books, five so far and I hope there will be more, are funny, smart, and real enough to smell the powder. You get the feeling that real marines talk and act and fight just like this (okay, absent the aliens), and the books might just give you the warm fuzzies that people like Torin stand between us and threat every day.
# Permanent link to Military SF
