John Lewis: A Life
David Greenberg ’90
Simon & Schuster, $35
Reviewed by Alex Beam ’75
It’s an event when a great life can be celebrated in a great biography. David Greenberg clears that high bar in his definitive story of John Lewis, the lifelong civil rights crusader who died in 2020. It’s hard to discern which is more engaging—the legendary life, or the quick-paced, clear-eyed biography.
Lewis, a farm boy from Pike County, Alabama, was first arrested trying to desegregate a department store lunch counter in Nashville, Tennessee. He was twenty years old. One year later, as one of the original Freedom Riders, Lewis suffered the first of many severe beatings at the hands of white supremacists, in Rock Hill, South Carolina. A state trooper’s club fractured his skull on “Bloody Sunday” as he tried to lead a protest march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama.
Yet Lewis soldiered on. He was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at age 23. Two months later, he addressed the 250,000 participants in the 1963 March on Washington, just before the keynote speaker, Dr. Martin Luther King.
Most notably, while the civil rights movement took on an increasingly militant tone, Lewis never abandoned his commitment to nonviolence. A disciple of Mohandas Gandhi, Lewis clung to his vision of a “beloved community,” a racially integrated world “of justice, a community of love, a community at peace with itself.” Lewis lived long enough to see manifestations of his cherished vision. In 2009, Elwin Wilson, who battered Lewis when he tried to desegregate the Rock Hill bus station, was so moved by the inauguration of Barack Obama that he traveled to Lewis’s office in Washington, DC, to apologize. The two men hugged. “I forgive you,” Lewis—then a twelfth-term Georgia congressman—told the 72-year-old Wilson.
Time magazine included Lewis in its 1975 cover story, “Saints Among Us,” but Lewis never claimed to be a saint, and this is no hagiography. In a no-holds-barred 1986 congressional primary battle against his longtime friend and colleague Julian Bond, Lewis (reluctantly) played the “drug card” against his opponent, helping to ensure his election. Speaking the truth with love, Greenberg drolly chronicles Lewis’s transformation from “icon” to “rock star” status, abetted in no small part by Lewis’s penchant for self-promotion.
James Baldwin summarized Lewis best in a 1976 fan letter: “I love and admire you very much, stocky little brother. . . . You’re a survivor and a very honest man.”
Alex Beam ’75 is the author of Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers.
__________________________________________________________________
Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English
Ben Yagoda ’75
Princeton University Press, $24.95
Reviewed by Sylvia Brownrigg ’86
Within the “chattering classes”—a great Anglicism discussed in Ben Yagoda’s highly entertaining new book—is a subpopulation of language nerds: people who help make bestsellers of books about punctuation, or grammar, or style. If you are one of these, as I am, and if you also travel often between the UK and the US, you too will find a book called Gobsmacked! irresistible.
More than just an amusing annotated list of origin stories, however, from which a reader might pluck his or her favorite vivid English phrases, like “it all went pear-shaped” or “done and dusted,” Gobsmacked! is an intriguing cultural history of British speech and writing and its influence on the vocabulary of American journalists, novelists—and regular people. Yagoda, an English professor, offers countless tidbits as he adroitly traces (with the help of online archives, Google’s “Ngram Viewer,” the OED, and a smattering of quotes from William Safire) expressions that began in war or in empire, or were once distinctly regional. “Posh” originated in the British military; “dicey” was Air Force slang; “ginger” as a color originally referred to roosters.
As the title suggests, the book tells the parallel stories of adoption in the US. In an earlier time, British English was used only by “Anglomaniacs,” in H. L. Mencken’s eyerolling term, but according to Yagoda, the “westward flow” of idioms from Britain to North America started speeding up in the 1990s and has only accelerated with a global, Internet-aided lexicon. Drawing from his own long-maintained blog called “Not One-Off Britishisms” and the online conversations it has generated, Yagoda is a friendly, knowledgeable guide, with an ear for the insult (he canvasses the knob, the pillock, and the wanker) and a whole chapter devoted to food and drink words. But his conclusion is reassuring: “American English and British English remain distinct dialects, with little danger of being homogenized into a boring sameness.”
Sylvia Brownrigg ’86 is author, most recently, of The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found.
__________________________________________________________________
Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America
Rebecca I. Davis ’98, ’14Phd
W. W. Norton & Company, $35
Reviewed by Randi Hutter Epstein ’90MD
On March 25, 1629, a Jamestown, Virginia, court convened to decide the fate of a servant accused of bedding a maid. At issue was not just premarital sex, illegal then, but the gender of the accused, who went by both Thomas and Thomasine Hall. Hall claimed both genders (or “sexes,” in the terminology of the time). In a stunning move, the judge concurred. Except he sentenced Hall to don male and female attire simultaneously—trousers, shirt, bonnet, apron. “Hall was legally unsexed,” writes Rebecca Davis in her lively and scholarly book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America. “They could not marry and thus could not have licit sexual relations at all.”
Davis, in this remarkable broad sweep of Americana, interrogates how the private became public and how cultural norms shaped by racism and sexism determined what was acceptable and legal. Her book is divided into three parts. In the ironically titled Establishing Order, covering 1600 to 1870, Davis describes the disordered legal system that permitted white landowners to rape slaves and the stereotypes that affected women. Part Two, Redefining Sex, spans 1840 to 1938 and examines debates about sexual identity. The last section, Solving Sexual Problems, extends from 1938 to 2024. Covering so many topics in one part (abortion, AIDS, changing cultural norms) allows the readers to appreciate the myths and prejudices that shaped current attitudes. Fierce Desires is an ambitious book that accomplishes what Davis set out to do, to demonstrate “how fiercely Americans value their desires and what they are willing to do to defend them.”
Randi Hutter Epstein ’90MD is writer-in-residence at the Yale School of Medicine.
loading
Print
Email