Read Beat (...and repeat)

Frances Perkins is one of those figures in history that you need to know more about. Helping in that regard is the latest book from Stephanie Dray, a historical novel called Becoming Madam President.

Published in March 2024, Becoming is the 10th work of historical fiction for Dray who likes to write about revolutionary women, both those involved in the American Revolution and, as in Perkins' case, women whose work was revolutionary.

Perhaps best known as the Secretary of Labor in Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, a position she held for 12 years, Perkins is credited with helping FDR create Social Security. As the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, Perkins drafted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, a bill that banned child labor, established a minimum wage and brought about the 40-hour week.

Dray, who started her research for the book in 2020, said that Perkins credited her grandmother, Cynthia Otis Perkins, with setting her on a course to help others. “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life," said Frances Perkins, often seen as the driving force in the New Deal.

Dray refers to Perkins as the most consequential cabinet member since Alexander Hamilton. Ironically, Dray related that when Perkins and FDR first worked together in New York, the pair didn't see eye to eye. 

“They loathed each other when they first met. She thought he was just a spoiled rotten arrogant jerk. He thought she was a stuffy insufferable blue stocking," Dray said in an interview with Spectrum News.

Perkins, who played such a big role in pushing for worker safety, was at the scene of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, a horrific fire in New York City that took 146 lives, most of them young women employed as garment workers. Doors had been locked at the factory as a precaution against the threat of theft, said Dray. 

Perkins was at a meeting nearby when the fire broke out. "She knew the source because she knew of problems (for workers) that existed there," said Dray. Perkins was witness to the scene of many workers who leapt from the building to their death trying to escape the fire, she said.

Perkins handled her government job with distinction, but what many don't know is that her husband, Paul Wilson, a fellow reformer, suffered from serious mental illness, said Dray. 

"There's a picture of the signing of the Social Security Act in 1935 with Perkins looking over Roosevelt's shoulder right into the camera. The day that photo was taken, she had to leave to look for her husband who had just escaped from an asylum," Dray said.

While acknowledging many marvelous biographies of Frances Perkins, Dray said that the historical novel allowed her to share more of Perkins as a person--not just a government official. Novelists can go where historians rightfully fear to tread, she said.

Jesse Sutanto is a successful writer educated at Oxford and California, lives in Jakarta, and has found her niche: the cozy mystery.

I didn’t know what a cozy mystery was until Jesse explained it. “Nothing truly bad happens to the primary characters. For example, I couldn’t kill off Vera Wong,” she said.

“Cozy mysteries have a lot of standard features,” said Richelle Braswell, a writer who explains some of the many varieties out there in her online essay, “Cozy Mystery Plots.” The stories usually involve an amateur sleuth, no explicit gore and a cute or funny sidekick, Braswell explained.

Whereupon, Braswell proceeds to tick off 17 categories from academic (where the action takes place at a college or boarding school) to travel (allowing the mystery to unfold in multiple locations around the globe). In between, you have cozy categories such as culinary (exemplified by Cheese Shop mysteries by Avery Adams), historical (such as Lady Caroline Murder Mysteries by Isabella Bassett), medical (Travel Nurse Mysteries by Molly Evans), and seniors (African Violet Club Mysteries by Elise Stone that take place in an Arizona Retirement community).

Sutanto’s latest entry in the cozy field is Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man), a follow up to Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, published in 2023. Sutanto said the character of Vera Wong, the 60-something amateur detective, is based on her own mother known to sometimes offer outrageous comments. 

Sutanto, whose grandparents came from China, was born in Jakarta but grew up in Singapore. "My mother was a big influence on me. I didn’t see much of my father who worked in Jakarta at the time,” she said.

Sutanto previously wrote young-adult fiction but said she switched to the mystery genre when she felt “too old” to write for teens.

The author’s writing routine is to “treat it as a day job,” she said. “I allow three days to write an outline, a time when I walk about the house talking to myself about what characters would say and do,” said Sutanto.

“I try to write my books in five weeks. I write 2,000 words a day—usually writing every weekday before lunch time,” said Sutanto, whose family includes husband and two small children. After completing 40,000 words, she checks into a luxury hotel alone for three nights to write 12,000 words a day. “I’ve followed this routine six or seven times,” she said.

The system that produces three books a year appears to be working for Sutanto—and her cozy-mystery readers. 

The ancient Maya civilization is known for many things: pyramids, stone sculptures, complex astronomical calculations, a writing system, a rubber-ball game and the subject of anthropologist Dean Arnold's latest book, Maya Blue (University Press of Colorado).

Arnold, an adjunct curator of anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and professor emeritus of anthropology at Wheaton College, has published more than 60 articles about potters, pottery and pottery production.

He has pursued the mystery of what he describes as a beautiful blue pigment that's proved impervious to fading "even after exposure for many hundreds of years in one of the world's harshest climates--the tropical forests of southern Mexico and Guatemala."

"It is one of the world's most unusual pigments," said Arnold, who has been researching the subject since 1965. The color appears on Maya pottery, sculpture, murals, as well as having been used on human sacrifices, he said.

"It is ironic that although the ancient Maya used Maya Blue widely for more than seventeen centuries, modern scientists still have much to learn about it," he said. "Chemists have been trying to figure out why the pigment binds the way it does," said Arnold.

Mayans combined the organic dye indigo with an inorganic clay mineral called palygorskite to create the hybrid material that stands up to attacks by acids, alkalines, and time, itself, he said.

The Mayans may have created the color but its use is evident across a wide area in Mesoamerica, noted Arnold. "If you go to Mexico City to view the remains of Aztec pyramids, you can still see Maya Blue," he said. 

Seeking to unearth the Mayan secret of the pigment has permitted Arnold to visit Mayan sites firsthand. In addition to his research on the Mayan use of color, he's also made a career of studying contemporary people. "I like going back to the Yucatan. I really enjoy the Mayan people. I've made some wonderful friends there," he said.

"I love the food. It's very different from what you find from the Highland Maya area. My favorite dish is frijol con puerco, black beans with pork and spices," said Arnold.

While the book Maya Blue stands as the most thorough analysis of research that's been done on the color to date, Arnold is still on the case, collaborating with associates at the Field Museum. "We want to learn how the Mayans made the pigment," he said.

Add Maya Blue to the mysteries that surround the ancient Mayans. "Even after more than ninety years since the discovery of the unique characteristics of Maya Blue, unraveling the mysteries about the pigment and its constituents requires much more research," said Arnold.

W.E. B. DuBois went on record in 1896 saying that white supremacy significantly warps whites' perceptions and behaviors. Even earlier--in 1890--as a 22-year-old Harvard College student--he called out Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

He outlined the Davis career in a 10-minute speech as one who "advanced civilization by murdering Indians" and participated in the "national disgrace called the Mexican War" before attaining "the crowning absurdity" of his career, heading up the Confederacy, "the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free."

Unveiling the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois on the Problem of Whiteness by Lisa McLeod, a lecturer at Northeastern University in Boston, explores DuBois's views of whiteness as a political and moral issue.

There's a lot to cover with DuBois, an African American who lived to be 95 years old and whose writings about the need for equality for close to a century.

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who credited DuBois as the man who "demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history."

"Slaveholders were convinced that Black people would not work without force, that slavery was their natural condition. DuBois argued that this belief was as certain to southerners as the rising and setting of the sun, and the United States never implemented a widespread reeducation program to correct this or any other misconception regarding African-descended people," wrote McLeod.

"Instead, when southerners rebuilt after the war, they attempted to make Negores slaves in everything but name. This is a shameful and shamefully underreported truth of American history," McLeod noted.

DuBois said the South understood the capabilities of Blacks.  "It is nonsense to say that the South knew nothing about the capabilities of the Negro race. Southerners knew Negroes far better than Northerners. There was not a single slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder," DuBois noted in 1935. 

McLeod presses DuBois's point that it was the duty of white Americans to work against racism for the benefit of all.

Ida Lupino's "problem" was that she constantly found herself the smartest person in the room, noted biographer Alexandra Seros, a Hollywood screenwriter and the author of Ida Lupino: Forgotten Auteur (University of Texas Press).

Lupino was more than a great actress but also a successful director. The Hitch-Hiker, a film made in 1953, is now considered a film noir classic. The fact that a woman directed the movie places when few women directors worked on major film releases places her in exclusive company, said Seros.

"Actually The Hitch-Hiker was not straight noir, it was a crime thriller with (Nicholas) Musuraca’s noir lighting. Lupino was actually known for her noir film portrayals, but her directing was full of hybrids," Seros said. 

Lupino was also a television pioneer, stepping into the new medium in the 1950s, stated the author. "(In TV), she went for modernity, like satire, the grotesque, and westerns - she loved experimenting with genre. However, "No. 5 Checked out”, her first big foray into TV, though not her debut, was for Screen Directors Playhouse, a prestigious way to enter a new medium. That show was like a Whitman’s Sampler of all her work, including noir," said Seros.  

"I believe after her film acting work early on, she became exhausted by noir, which was antithetical to social realism, the thematic she really wanted to expose post war," she said.

"(Lupino) was so multifaceted and complex, it’s difficult to talk about her without bringing in many elements from her work and influences from her life. She really was as paradox.  I wanted to understand  who she was, and one can begin to glimpse it in Ralph Edwards' “This Is Your Life, Ida Lupino”, on YouTube. 

. 

Maia Lee-Chin, whose book, Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases (Andrews McMeel), was published last year, got more out of Latin class than I did.

But she admits it didn't just happen. "I was forced to enroll in Latin. I considered dropping the course several times, especially while translating Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico. I couldn't understand his long-winded explanations of wartime strategies, and I had no love for Roman history," wrote Lee-Chin.

"Something changed when I first translated the Aeneid from Latin to English. I was struck by the kinship I felt for Aeneas," she said.

Lee-Chin, a 2021 graduate of Holy Cross College, outside Boston, was the first Black woman to be named a Fenwick Scholar, the school's highest academic honor.

I wish I had known a girl like Maia when I was taking Latin classes all those years ago. But then I was introduced to the subject at Boston Latin School (where I spent the seventh grade), at a time when only male students attended.

Lee-Chin's book, beautifully illustrated by Italian artist Marta Bertello, takes 50 Latin phrases, translates them, and then provides a brief backstory (usually just a few paragraphs) to give a taste of Roman history and a glimpse at the life that flourished behind those turgid phrases.

Take omnia vincit amor, for example.  "Love conquers all" isn't a line from a 60s song but from one of Vergil's poems "that paints an idyllic portrait of rural life in the Roman countryside," noted Lee-Chin.

"It is not the rallying cry modern readers imagine, she stated. It's a warning from a poet (Gallus) on his deathbed: "We cannot defeat love, and so nos cedamus--let us yield to it." 

"Pining over the mistress while she pursues another, (Gallus) embodies the servitium amoris--'the enslavement of love' and his dying words admit his defeat," Lee-Chin said.

We never got stories like that when I was in Latin class.

Another thing, Vergil is supposed to have written just one line of poetry a day. He compiled 10 poems but that output was dwarfed by the 24 books that Homer produced, said Lee-Chin, stating her love for Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey.  

The Washington Post calls Mark Greaney the Tom Cruise of thriller writers. Like the Mission Impossible star, Greaney is on a roll, following in the footsteps of Tom Clancy, the thriller writer whose books have sold over 100 million copies.

Greaney, who said he became obsessed with Clancy’s work as a teenager, co-wrote several books with Clancy before the author died in 2013. While carrying on the exploits of Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan, in several books, Greaney started a successful series of his own in 2009 with Court Gentry, the Gray Man, “a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away.”

“The Gray Man author tests weapons, flies in fighter jets, and is home for family dinner,” noted the Post’s Travis Andrews. Netflix may have brought the Gray Man to the screen with Ryan Gosling in 2022 and has plans for a follow-up but Greaney, 57, just keeps cranking out the books. Midnight Black is the 14th Gray Man novel and he’s already at work on number 15. 

Greaney is down to earth about his success, pointing to the life he enjoys at home with his family and dogs in Memphis. It's the town where he was raised and where his father, Ed Greaney, taught son Mark the importance of keeping track of what’s happening in the world. The senior Greaney was a fixture at the Memphis NBC-TV affiliate for 50 years, including a lengthy stint as news director, 

Mark visits Ireland this year along with plans to go scuba diving and take a firearms course but otherwise, Greaney’s at home rolling out the garbage cans at home, he said. 

Current events are a part of the geopolitical thrillers that Greaney specializes in. The War in Ukraine is a factor in Midnight Black as Court Gentry seeks to sneak into Russia to rescue his lover who’s imprisoned there. “I listen to a one-hour podcast every day detailing troop movements in the battle between Russia and Ukraine,” he said.

Greaney opens his latest novel at a bar in the Ferentari district of Bucharest where Gentry nurses a Carpathian single malt whiskey, contemplating how to get the jump on five would-be assassins who look to do him harm. Such is the life for a Gray Man novel. “I haven’t been to Bucharest but I’ve been to the Balkans and I needed a place to start the book,” he said.

Greaney’s prolific pace—he figures he’s averaged a book-and-a-half a year over the last 15 years—isn’t slowing down this year but Greaney figures he’ll eventually fall back to "just" producing a Gray Man novel every other year. That will allow him to do other things such as adding to one of the other literary streams he started, the Armoured series with Josh Duffy as the main character.

His writing routine usually has him heading out to his backyard office each morning. Greaney said he also sometimes likes to work at the coffeeshop near Memphis University where he’s surrounded “by young people who don’t know or care who I am.” 

As much as the 150,000-word books, themselves, Greaney is proud of the fact that he’s come up with the biting titles of most of the books he’s written. With the author’s name in bold headlines at the top, book covers tend to only have room for a two- or three-word title. “The title’s not an add-on. It helps me write the book when I know the title,” he said. 

Having a successful series hasn’t made writing easier, said Greaney. “The books are getting harder to write. You have to be sure you’re not trotting over ground you’ve covered before,” he said.

Note to Mark: come up with another drink in Gray Man 15 now that you’ve used Carpathian single malt whiskey.

Kimberly Kay Hoang, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, traveled over 300,000 miles, conducting hundreds of interviews to trace the flow of capital from offshore funds in the Cayman Islands, Samoa or Panama to holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Her book, Spiderweb Capitalism, reveals how some of this money finds its way into risky markets in Vietnam and Myanmar.
"Not only was getting access to wealthy individuals around the world highly challenging, but then trying to connect the dots of their relationships with one another in tangled and layered webs felt like being caught inside a 3D maze with no clear way in or out," Hoang noted.
Those relationships are explored closely as Hoang details her field trips with financial professionals to look at proposed developments in as-yet-undeveloped parts of Vietnam or Myanmar.
To succeed in making money in Asia you need to master the art of "playing in the gray," she was told. The gray being the territory between the legal and illegal.
Making risky investments requires careful planning, repeated visits to the scene and a clear understanding of taxes and payments that might be involved to get the deal done, she said.
Hoang illustrates the global nature of spiderweb capitalism with her interview with a developer who shares his own background: "I am Korean, educated in America, living in Hong Kong. My company is domiciled in Samoa and my investments are in Vietnam."
The developer told Hoang that everything he was doing was legal. "The Pritzker family set up these structures, one of University of Chicago's biggest donors," he added.
The information provided about Vietnam is particularly interesting. The country has come a long way from the war-torn nation of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, it's a country of 95 million people with a growing middle class, noted Hoang, whose parents were among that country's "boat people" who escaped capture in the 70s.  

“It’s a new world when it comes to journalism. That prompted Patrick Ferrucci, the head of the journalism department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, to go out and see how that world has changed.

The Organization of Journalism offers a profile of six different business models that now bring folks the news or sports, as the case may be. There’s the St. Louis Beacon, a digital nonprofit,  and the Defector, an employee-owned cooperative focusing on sports and culture. The Colorado Sun, a startup led by former Denver Post employees, and the Athletic, a sports site purchased by the New York Times in 2022, are also reviewed along with two “legacy” newspapers, the Boston Globe and Denver Post.

Each model has pros and cons, noted Ferrucci, who has no misconceptions about the daunting task ahead regarding news-gathering in the digital era. “We are living in scary times for journalism,” he notes. That can also be translated into scary times for readers or want-to-be readers, many of whom are deprived of the variety of the daily paper they once knew.

The subtitle of Ferrucci's book is "Market Models and Practice in a Fraying Profession. The choice of "fraying" to describe the present state of journalism reflects his awareness of the changes that have been wrought in the digital age.

Where you live probably dictates how much local news is put on your plate these days. Ferrucci said that Boulder, Colo. has more news available to the public than when he moved there 10 years ago. The resources of a well-to-do community and the presence of a large university make that possible. Other parts of the country aren’t so lucky.

Ferrucci’s research—he interviewed employees at every stop—illustrates how the journalism scene has changed. In comparing the Globe and Post, both papers with pedigrees, Ferrucci said the Boston model, owned by billionaire John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, was now positively regarded as a “writer’s paper” by many in the Globe newsroom. 

That’s not the sentiment Ferrucci perceived from those interviewed at the Post, a paper bought in 2011 by Alden Global Capital, the so-called “hedge fund vampire,” a company that reduced the Post newsroom of 300 down to 70 and moved the paper from a historic downtown building to a site outside the city in 2018. While the Post still does good work, many of its employees feel they’re shortchanging readers because they don’t—can’t—cover the state like they once did, said Ferrucci.

The Globe has also changed its focus: Instead of covering suburban Boston as it once did, Ferrucci said the paper goes after Boston stories but also recognes the changing news scene. With the Providence Journal in decline, the Globe has beefed up staffing to cover Rhode Island more closely and, as a result, is building a subscription base there, said Ferrucci.

One of the points the author makes in speaking with Steve Tarter is that universities may be more important than ever in the development of journalism. “We’ve always had journalism schools,” he said but the present situation where many different business models now vye for acceptance requires the understanding once found in the nation’s newsrooms now diminished in size. 

Speaking of newsrooms, that’s Ferrucci’s next project: a look at the places that have spawned so much journalism in the past.

You already know about the local news crisis. The proof is probably not in your hands with the demise of so many newspapers. The terms “ghost paper” (a publication with an old masthead and little else) and “news deserts” (areas without local news coverage of any kind) are part of the vernacular these days.

Communities have had to be inventive to replace the local news they once took for granted, says Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston and co-author of What Works in Community News with Ellen Clegg, a former editor on the Boston Globe.

Kennedy may be optimistic about some efforts made to restore local news but the problem remains a growing national crisis, he said. Some 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005 in this country, most of them weeklies, said Kennedy, suggesting that even with hundreds of start-ups launched in that time, what’s come online has not replaced news provided in the past. 

The real solution must come from folks at the community level, he said, citing examples such as The Colorado Sun, a digital startup founded by 10 former journalists from the Denver Post, a paper decimated by hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital. “The Sun has now grown to a staff of two dozen people that makes it one of the largest news organizations in the state. They’re now looking at going beyond Denver to provide coverage in rural areas outside the city,” he said.

"There’s also MLK50: Justice Through Journalism in Memphis, Tenn., a non-profit investigative project formed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But they decided to keep going. They’ve since won awards and secured grants,” said Kennedy. The Daily Memphian has also been formed, providing news in that town missing from the Gannett-owned Commercial Appeal.

"We love non-profit news but there's only so much philanthropy out there," he said. What Works in Community News examines about a dozen projects in nine parts of the country. While approaches differ, the one thing they have in common is dedicated leadership at the local level – entrepreneurial journalists initiating new business models on the fly, said Kennedy, who mourns the loss of so many weeklies.
 
Weekly publications have traditionally served as the beating heart of community journalism, covering local government, schools and neighborhood issues – plus weddings, births, deaths and youth activities that draw neighbors together, he said.

But Kennedy points to positive action taken in Bedford, Mass., a small town (population 14,000) outside Boston (not to be confused with New Bedford, the state’s old whaling port). Bedford was once home to a newspaper called the Bedford Minuteman, a once-robust weekly downsized by its corporate owner, GateHouse Media, which later merged into Gannett, the U.S.’s largest newspaper chain.

Three members of the League of Women Voters who had been monitoring local government and reporting back to the membership asked themselves: Why not write this up for the benefit of the public? That was the beginning of The Bedford Citizen, a news project featured in our book, said Kennedy. "Over the years, the nonprofit website has grown from an all-volunteer operation into a professional news organization, funded through initiatives ranging from voluntary membership fees to an annual glossy guide filled with advertising and mailed to every household in town, he said.

Today, the Citizen has a full-time editor, a part-time reporter and paid freelancers alongside a contingent of unpaid contributors, said Kenndy, noting that The Minuteman faded away and was