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Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system.

It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements all focused on the red planet. On Broadway, you had the comedy, A Message from Mars.

David Baron, a former science correspondent for NPR whose previous book, American Eclipse, chronicled America’s fascination with the solar eclipse of 1878, takes up the subject of this fascination with Mars in his latest effort, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

Baron came by his interest in Mars through America’s space program. “I was raised on spacemen and Martians. It was on TV that I saw Martians, too,” said Baron, referring to My Favorite Martian, the sitcom that starred Ray Walston and Bill Bixby, and Marvin the Martian on the Looney Tunes that aired on Saturday morning.

The central figure in Baron’s study is Percival Lowell, a Bostonian blueblood who graduated from Harvard in 1876. Lowell sets up an observatory in Flagstaff, Az. and becomes the nation’s leading proponent of life on Mars. 

In 1895, Lowell presented a program of “observations on Mars” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Downtown Boston. Lowell suggested that life on Mars may have had a head start. “Perhaps intelligence, indeed civilization, had emerged there eons ago, in ample time to adapt to the looming water crisis…Irrigation, and upon as vast a scale as possible, must be the all-engrossing Martian pursuit,” noted Lowell.

The question of canals on Mars, shadowy lines on the planet’s surface that appeared to some astronomers, was not a question to Lowell. “The canals are constructed for the express purpose of fertilizing the oases,” he said.

Nikola Tesla is also drawn into the Mars controversy as the inventor sought to communicate with Mars through the wireless (radio) beams he was experimenting with.

Baron noted that H.G. Wells wrote a story for Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1908 called “The Things That Live on Mars,” the apparent result of a meeting between Wells and Lowell in 1906. In the magazine story, Wells rejected his earlier conception of Martians as gelatinous, blood-thirsty monsters on stilts, said Baron. “They will probably have heads and eyes and backboned bodies, and …big shapely skulls,” noted Wells.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Martian craze was the publication of a newspaper cartoon in 1907 of a Martian called Mr. Skygack who comes to Earth to make ironic observations about day-to-day life.

While the scientific community, which always had reservations about Lowell’s observations, provided evidence that Mars was not only uninhabited but as desolate as our Moon, Lowell was a believer of Martians to the end. He died in 1916 when “the animating force of his imaginative mind departed his body forever,” wrote Baron.

Obituaries of the day largely lauded Lowell, noted Baron, adding that the excitement over Mars also inspired future generations. Robert Goddard who developed the concept of rockets said that he first got excited about the concept of blasting off from Earth from War of the Worlds. 

Carl Sagan, the astronomer who opened up the universe for millions on PBS television, and Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction,” also credited the Martian craze for stimulating their interest in space.

Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been.

A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor.

As the first Jewish American artist to win international acclaim, Ezekiel (1844-1917) was a proud American yet lived in Rome for 40 years, said Baskind. Ezekiel never gave up his U.S. citizenship, making frequent trips back to the States to visit friends and family.

Ezekiel was a celebrity artist in his day, honored by U.S. presidents and European royalty, she said.

“Ezekiel felt he should be in Europe to get the proper art education he needed,” said Baskind. The artist spent time in Germany before falling in love with Rome, where his studio became famous in its own right, she said.

Some of Ezekiel’s works have lately become the source of controversy. Several of Ezekiel’s monuments depicting Confederate soldiers were taken down in the early 2020s after the murder of George Floyd, she said. An Ezekiel statue of Christopher Columbus was removed in Chicago, noted Baskind.

But Ezekiel’s Confederate work represented only a small part of the art he produced, she said, pointing to works like the majestic 1876 monument “Religious Liberty’’ in downtown Philadelphia and the large Thomas Jefferson monument on the University of Virginia campus that showcase his skill as an artist.

The UVA campus also displays Ezekiel’s “Blind Homer with His Student Guide,’’ a tribute to the ancient Greek poet. Ezekiel’s works can also be found in several American cities, such as Cincinnati and Louisville.

Among the sources Baskind used in researching her book were Ezekiel’s 638-page memoir, along with private correspondence, and records at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where Ezekiel was a cadet during the Civil War. 

 Despite a general lack of awareness about the artist, Baskind said she hopes that more people will come to appreciate Ezekiel's diverse body of work. “Ezekiel is an artist whose work is hidden in plain sight,” she said.

David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car.

Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing how these companies have pursued profit at the expense of the common good.

He details how the industry has covered up the dangers of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund opposition to climate change. Obst considers the future of mobility, surveying how cities—from Taipei to Tempe, Copenhagen to Chicago—are experimenting with forms of transportation that offer alternatives to the dominance of cars.

Do what you can in your own community to secure an area where people can enjoy life without the necessity of an automobile, urged Obst, who’s involved in doing that very thing in his own hometown of Santa Barbara.

When he’s not working on setting up car-free zones in California, Obst is getting college newspapers to work together on sharing stories. “Universities Speak (universitiesspeak.com) is an effort to develop a free college news service. Let’s say the Bradley Scout at Bradley University runs a story. People read it on the campus, and that’s as far as it goes. You send it to us, and we’ll send it across the country. We plan to launch the service in November,” he said.

“I’m 80 now, and my wife asks me if I’m ready to retire. I say no because we’re about to lose our democracy. If we don’t fight now, it will be too late,” said Obst.

When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war.

In Launching Liberty, Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas.

The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ships built to the same exact specifications. Over 2,700 were built between 1941 and 1945. When packed full of cargo, one ship could hold the equivalent of 300 railroad boxcars. That might be 2,800 jeeps or 430,000 K-rations.

Most chronicles how American shipyards — and their workers — rose to the wartime challenge. There were 228,000 workers in U.S. shipyards in December 1940. Less than two years later, 2.2 million worked on constructing ships.

There was a reason for that build-up. The United States was engaged in a two-front war that included both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Forgotten, perhaps, is that in the spring of 1942, just a few months after entering the war, the Allies lost 397 ships. Eighty-two of those ships were sunk off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia.

The heat was on. Along with the increase in manpower--and woman power--came new ideas on setting up shipyards and on building cargo ships fast.

Henry Kaiser, described by Most as "a dynamic builder of highways, dams, and bridges," turned his attention to shipbuilding, having never built a ship in his life before the war. Kaiser and others brought about "the greatest emergency shipbuilding program the world has ever seen," noted Most.

The shipyard brought "poor housewives, farmers, plumbers and Phds, inventors and patriotic handymen, brilliant engineers, hard-driving politicians, and billionaire businessmen" together to build giant steel cargo ships faster than the Germans could sink them," stated Most.

The author humanizes the Liberty Ship story with accounts of individuals like Wilmer Patrick Shea, the Marine corporal who lost an arm in battle but returned to the states to become a one-armed welder in the shipyard along with becoming an advocate of the healthcare program that Kaiser offered workers.

But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Most talks about a blended workforce required for the construction of so many ships. "But it didn't blend easily," he said.

Women and African Americans had to deal with resistance when they joined the shipyard workforce. "Unions were initially dismissive but the barriers did eventually come down," said Most.

Most doesn't gloss over the fact that there were problems in the construction of some of the ships. "The Liberty Ships were a critical component of the war program, but they weren't perfect. They had to be done quickly. They had flaws," he said.

Yet the fact that the S.S. Robert E. Peary, the Liberty Ship constructed in a record four days, carried supplies as the Allied troops were landing on the beaches of Normandy served as inspiration to all Americans, said Most.

If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik.

The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star, have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands.

Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse University Press) focuses on the Montezuma Wetlands Complex in central New York.

"Wetlands are much more than swamps, bogs, fens, marshes, and moors," noted Howard in the book's introduction. "Wetlands help us change the way we think."

The benefits of wetlands have become more pronounced in recent years. Wetlands filter impurities and pollutants from water, protect against wildfires and flooding, and provide a habitat for wildlife.

The National Park Service reports that by the mid-1980s, the United States had lost more than half of its original wetlands to development and agriculture. Additionally, a 2023 Supreme Court ruling has removed environmental protections from nearly half of the country's wetlands, according to Howard.

The New York complex that's the focus of Wisdom of the Marsh supports more than 368 species of fish and wildlife, as well as 242 species of migrating birds, half of which are endangered or threatened. It was in the Montezuma Wetlands area where the bald eagle was successfully reintroduced in the United States after almost being wiped out.

Once home to the Cayuga Nation, where People of the Great Swamp lived in harmony with plants and wildlife, the area changed once settlers moved in. The native people were forced out, and the great swamp was reduced by diking, farming, and the construction of canals, said Howard.

But Howard and Zalaznik's focus on the Montezuma complex shows how wetlands are now being embraced and expanded. Cornell University professor Eric Cheyfitz and the late William Mitsch of Ohio State University are among the many interviewed for the book who cite the challenges--and benefits--in advocating for wetlands.

Zalaznik's picture of the Northern Harrier Hawk, otherwise known as the gray ghost, flying through the Montezuma complex, is a vivid example of the importance of wetlands.

"Combating climate change is not all about Spartan sacrifice, scarcity, discomfort, and duplicative layers of government oversight," said Howard.

It also involves listening--and understanding--the wisdom of the marsh.

Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country.

The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry.

Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally.

No pre-war congressional investigation ever called film executives on the carpet for failing to identify the threat to this country in the 1930s, an era when “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at a time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” noted the New York Times.

In his book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, Thomas Doherty, a film historian and Brandeis University professor, explains that there were several reasons for U.S. moviemakers to avoid the issue before Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939.

Americans were suffering through the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Jobs were hard to find. People went to the movies to forget their troubles, watching fare like The Wizard of Oz or Fred and Ginger dancing in art-deco apartments, said Doherty.

MGM boss Sam Goldwyn said if you want to send a message, use Western Union, emphasizing Hollywood’s overriding mission was to provide entertainment, Doherty noted.

Other factors impeding a flow of message movies included the film industry’s production code that restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. The Third Reich wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, with German consul Georg Gyssling lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.

Studios also did business overseas, and Germany represented a big European market for U.S. films, said Doherty.

But Doherty said there some outliers, films that did address the dangers that Nazi aggression presented before the mainstream studios finally got around to the subject.

The first film to do so was Hitler’s Reign of Terror, “an oddball quasi-documentary” made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. that was released in 1934, said Doherty, noting that the film contains some striking footage of Vanderbilt on the streets of Vienna and Berlin amid Nazi brownshirts.

A member of one of America’s wealthiest families, Vanderbilt was a globetrotting raconteur who included “a truly bizarre sequence” with the reenactment of an interview between Vanderbilt and someone posing as Hitler. Vanderbilt asks “the money question,” said Doherty: “What about the Jews, your Excellency?”

“The film gets a limited release in 1934. It’s controversial. The German embassy wants to censor it. It doesn’t have much impact. But whatever you say about Vanderbilt, the film is very prophetic,” said Doherty, noting that Vanderbilt points to the militaristic path that Germany was on, predicting war in Europe “in five or six years.”

Hitler’s Reign of Terror gets an exclusive screening at the Peoria Women’s Club, 301 NE Madison Ave., on Oct. 16 in conjunction with the Peoria Area World Affairs Council. The film will be part of a program commemorating Vanderbilt’s speech at the club in 1939.

Doherty cited another independent film, I Am a Captive of Nazi Germany, released in 1936. Isobel Steele, an American journalist and “party girl,” was imprisoned by the Nazis for espionage in 1934. Steele was released, returning to the United States to star in a film of her experience, the first anti-Nazi motion picture to get a production code seal of approval, he said.

The film studios finally weighed in when Confessions of a Nazi Spy was released by Warner Brothers in the spring of 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe. 

Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the public’s right “to control how their thoughts, sentiments, and emotions were published.”

When Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive officer, offered up his own view of privacy in 2009 by saying, “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he was simply channeling an old belief that the devil might call on you when you were on your own. 

But Jenkins doesn’t single out the internet as the lone reason privacy may be under attack in the 21st century.

Reality television has a lot to answer for, she said. Starting back in the 1970s when TV’s Loud family aired their dirty laundry on the air, viewers have seen plenty of petty squabbles and bad behavior over a 50-year period, said Jenkins.

Writing from her home in England, a country with a love of security cameras, as any fan of modern British TV crime shows will attest, Jenkins said privacy concerns over having so many cameras to capture public activity have diminished over the years in the interests of public safety.

Strangers and Intimates is sweetly reasonable and pleasantly readable, noted reviewer Rupert Christiansen in the British paper, The Telegraph. “Jenkins respects all sides of an argument or situation without tub-thumping or special pleading. Her conclusion that 'the private realm must be validated and respected as equal to the public' may seem tame and question-begging, but the evidence she offers should set alarm bells ringing, “ he wrote.

T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes.

Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station wagon in 2017. Not just a day trip, mind you, but the length of the route--and back. 

In a few weeks, he’ll leave Chicago to be part of a nine-car convoy of classic cars to cover the route—to L.A. and back—at an average of 35 miles per hour, the typical speed attained on pre-WWII highways, he noted.

The history that Baker provides isn’t just a nostalgic account of a bygone era. Starting in Chicago, the book outlines places of interest, explains how they came to be, as well as how they came to an end. But all is not lost. Some 30 percent of the places Baker describes in the book are still serving food, he said.

Some of the traditions created for travelers on Route 66 carry on. Baker loves the horseshoe sandwich made famous by Joe Schweska in 1928 at the Leland Hotel in Springfield, Illinois. The secret was the sauce, said Baker. “While one cook is engaged in making the sauce, it is helpful for a second person to prepare ham steak, French fries, and toast,” he wrote.

Schweska has long left the scene, but the horseshoe sandwich is very much alive in Springfield today. Yes, the Cozy Dog Drive-in is also included among Baker's Springfield highlights.

Of the 20 recipes that Baker includes, his favorite is the old-fashioned navy bean soup originally prepared at the Bowl and Bottle Restaurant in Chicago, an eating place originally operated by the Fred Harvey Co., the firm that ran restaurants and hotels usually associated with railway travel in the West.

Baker’s listings tend to whet your appetite. Whether it’s the glazed strawberry pie served at Miss Hulling’s Cafeteria in St. Louis or the onion-fried hamburger at Johnnie’s Grill in El Reno, Okla., you want to settle into a booth and wave down a waitress. It’s not always fancy. Baker includes a recipe from the Old Riverton Store in Riverton, Kansas, for a baloney and cheese sandwich, for example.

You learn things in this book, such as the fact that the Black Cat Café in Commerce, Okla., was where New York Yankee star Mickey Mantle hung out as a teen. “It was the only joint in town that had a neon sign,” Mantle recalled.

While California summoned up images of sand and surf, the first encounter inbound Route 66 travelers had with the state was having to traverse a stretch of the Mojave Desert, no simple trek in the days when radiators often overheated and tires were susceptible to the sharp lava rock found in some places, noted Baker, adding that when Glen Campbell drove a 1957 Chevy across the desert in 1960, he tied water bottles to the car’s grill to refill the radiator.

If you’re looking for evidence of Route 66’s legacy when it comes to dining, consider the fact that two of our best-known fast-food operations—McDonald’s and Taco Bell—sprang up on the Mother Road in San Bernardino. Baker provides the details of the early days of both establishments.

Baker doesn’t shy away from identifying the double standard that existed along the road. “You can’t talk about cross-country travel without talking about racism,” he said. Baker points out that African Americans were often denied service at many of the businesses along Route 66 for decades. He mentions places that didn’t discriminate, as well as citing outlets like Alberta’s Hotel & Snack Bar in Springfield, Mo. where Margie Alberta Northcutt Ellis was “always looking for avenues to meet the needs of her African American customers.”

If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting.

For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II.

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows the first conceptualization by European physicists to the destruction that occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the unique powers of oral history is the way that it puts you back in the footsteps and experiences of the people who lived these events firsthand before they knew the outcome, said Graff.

Narrative history often makes events seem neater and simpler than they felt to anyone who was living them at the time, stated Graff. 

Reading through quotes delivered by major players of the time allows readers to feel the uncertainty that existed while the world was at war. 

Once it became clear—to the scientists, anyway—of the potential destructive power of atomic energy, the race was on. Physicists from across Europe, many of them Jewish and fleeing for their lives as Nazi power expanded, came to the United States with the hope that their work wouldn’t be too late—that Hitler wouldn’t get the bomb first.

Graff noted that sometimes the story of the Manhattan Project tends to center only on the Los Alamos outpost. The war was won by the vast industrial effort that went into the bomb’s creation, said the author. Just as important as the New Mexico lab where the first bomb was detonated were “secret cities” developed in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., sites where thousands worked on developing the materials needed to create an atomic reaction, he said.

As a native Vermonter, Graff compared the process of converting 4,000 pages of quotes and notes down to 500 to making maple syrup. “You just boil and boil,” he said of the editing process involved. When all the boiling was done, you’re still left with some 500 voices to relate the process, both scientifically and militarily, that brought about the bomb.

The oral history approach empowers the reader with the ability to skim at record speeds, choosing to skip passages at will to get to later developments. However you tackle the work, there’s a lot of history to consider. Graff said the atomic bombs represented the final part of a fierce U.S. bombing campaign that included that single night in March 1945 when 100,000 people died in the firebombing of Tokyo, the most destructive single day of a war that killed so many. A total of 66 Japanese cities were firebombed in U.S. B-29 raids before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s a section of the book devoted to the transport of the bomb. The U.S.S. Indianapolis, a cruiser back in the States for repair after a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, carried off the mission but was sunk by a Japanese submarine four days later. Of the nearly 1,200 on board, only 316 survived. The survivors spent four days and five nights in the water. Graff includes two quotes to close the chapter: “The Indianapolis was the last major ship to be lost during the war and the greatest single disaster in the history of the Navy,” said Col. Kenneth Nichols.

“If the Indianapolis had been sunk with Little Boy (the bomb) aboard, the war could have been seriously prolonged,” said Luis Alvarez, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist.

As for his next project, Graff said it wouldn’t be an oral history or cover an aspect of WWII. Right now, he’s leaning towards writing about the preservation of history in this country. “As America approaches its 250th anniversary, its history is under attack right now,” he said.

When you get through reading America America by Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, you have to wonder what might have been when it comes to U.S. policies regarding Latin America over the years.

Grandin figures that Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes in Latin American countries between 1961 and 1969. He goes into great detail outlining U.S. involvement in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Brazil.

While U.S. officials are interfering with Latin American governments, many of the rest of us in this country are ignoring the countries and people south of the border.

All too often, it’s portrayed as a region plagued by economic instability, drug cartels, and death squads. The Trump Administration, after all, is going to great pains and expense to stress the region’s problems.

Grandin received the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth, his previous book about the U.S. frontier, and the relentless drive that pushed people west. But an all-out surge to take over territory isn’t the way it worked in South America.

Grandin details centuries of turmoil, bloodshed, and diplomacy in Latin America that have shaped the laws that govern the modern world. Despite the struggles and slaughter of millions over the years, Latin America clings to a social democratic tradition, principles worthy of the United Nations.

Grandin writes that Latin America has helped develop the notion that nations have common interests and that cooperation is preferable to competition.

The United States hasn’t always been the imperialist meddler. Grandin recalls Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” in the 1930s and 1940s, a period that involved mutual respect and admiration. 

FDR’s VP Henry Wallace (replaced by Truman for the 1944 election) talked about raising the wages of the common man on his triumphant swing through Latin America in 1943. “(Latin Americans) didn’t think Roosevelt would run in 1944. They thought Wallace was going to be president,” said Grandin.

Instead, the postwar period brought the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Latin America got left out when it came to the billions the U.S. was spending around the world. If South American countries wanted private capital, they needed to assure investors that it was safe to do so, said Marshall. 

As a result, Latin American regimes turned oppressive. Dissent was stifled. By 1950, nearly the entire region of Latin America was ruled by brutal men,” noted Grandin, citing dictators such as Batista (Cuba), Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Duvalier (Haiti), Odria (Peru), and Somoza (Nicaragua). “All were faithful to the U.S.,” added Grandin.

Mexico. With its strong commitment to sovereignty, it plays a central role in the history that Grandin relates. “Mexico’s Constitution was the world's first social democratic constitution, the first constitution to recognize not just individual rights, but social and economic rights. The right to dignity, to a pension, health care, and education,” stated the author.

Grandin also had praise for Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman president of Mexico. “She has the support of 60 percent of the population. The people love her,” he said.