As a native of the Bay Area and having once covered Baltimore politics as a journalist, I thought I knew everything about Nancy Pelosi, from her political roots in Charm City to her political ascent in San Francisco. But reading Ball’s excellent biography, I realized quickly that I knew less than I thought. Ball’s dispassionate reporting (which includes interviews with Pelosi) left me even more admiring of Pelosi’s extraordinary rise from housewife in the Mad Men era to the nation’s first woman Speaker of the House. Ball explores and explains the discipline, energy, tenacity, and sheer political skill required on Pelosi’s part, especially as she constantly confronted double standards as a woman. As flattering as the portrait is, it is not a whitewash but a rich portrait of an historic figure in American politics.
This is a fast, fascinating and terrifying read. Donald Trump’s dysfunction has been on display for over three years and I’ve always wondered what makes someone so damaged and insecure. This book helps explain the family dynamics that set this process in motion for Donald but also for the other siblings, particularly the family namesake, Freddy, Mary Trump’s father. It has to be seen as a courageous act to go against such a domineering set of siblings, one currently the U.S. President, who ultimately acted together to disinherit Mary and her brother. The Trump base will not like this book but I found it mesmerizing.
Author of Ambiguous Lives and Homelands and Waterways, Adele Logan Alexander taught for eighteen years at George Washington University. Princess of the Hither Isles (Yale, $30) draws on her extensive scholarship as well as on her own family history to tell the story of Adella Hunt Logan (1863-1915), a pioneering activist for social justice—and Alexander’s grandmother. Born to a white father and free woman of color in a Georgia family whose lineage also included Cherokees, Logan started teaching at age sixteen, before getting a scholarship to Atlanta University; by 1883, she was
on the faculty of the Tuskegee Institute, where she became the institution’s first woman librarian and formed a close friendship with Booker T. Washington. An advocate for equal education and universal suffrage, she wrote for The Crisis and The Colored American and was part of a circle of reformers that included Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois. While her efforts ultimately led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Logan suffered a breakdown and, just after Washington’s death in 1915, committed suicide. Alexander recounts her life with vivid historical insight and keen psychological acuity, doing justice to one of the many courageous women of color too often omitted from accounts of the suffrage movement.
