32 June 20 • 2019
jn

books
arts&life

continued from page 31

A

s a Pulitzer-Prize winning jour-
nalist, biographer and observer 
of social history, David Maraniss 
says he has spent his career “trying 
to understand the forces that shape 
America and to measure individuals 
by the whole pattern of 
their lives.”
He has usually 
focused his sharp 
reporting and research-
ing skills on strangers. 
Now, he turns to his 
late father, trying to 
understand what hap-
pened when his father 
was spied upon by 
the FBI while living in 
Detroit, called before 
the House Un-American 
Activities Committee 
(HUAC), fired from his 
job at the Detroit Times, blacklisted for 
five years and later vindicated. 
A Good American Family: The 
Red Scare and My Father (Simon 
& Schuster) is a personal story and 
a portrait of the McCarthy era. The 
author’
s father, Elliott Maraniss, was 
born in Boston, grew up in Brooklyn 
and left the East Coast to attend the 
University of Michigan, where he met 
his wife. (For their honeymoon in 1939, 
they hitchhiked from Ann Arbor to 
Madison to attend a convention of the 
American Student Union.) Elliott, known 
as Ace, commanded an all-black 
company in the Pacific during World 
War II, loved baseball and his favorite 
essayist was George Orwell. According 
to his son, he was “a newspaperman 
first and foremost” and an American 
optimist. 
David Maraniss has said in a printed 
interview: “The story for the book has 

been slowly building for years, but I 
knew that I would not write it while 
my parents were alive. I finally realized 
the scope of the book when I was at 
the National Archives and saw for the 
first time the original copy of the HUAC 
subpoena of my father 
and of the statement 
he wrote to the com-
mittee that he was not 
allowed to give unless 
he repented and named 
names.”
He explains that his 
father, who died in 
2004, was not falsely 
accused of being a 
Communist, as he was 
one, for a time. Drawing 
on his father’
s essays, 
letters and unclassified 
FBI files, Maraniss cre-
ates a compelling narrative going for-
ward and back in time, and also pres-
ents the stories of George Crockett, 
his defense lawyer; playwright Arthur 
Miller; Charles Potter, an outspoken 
war veteran and anti-Communist; and 
informant Berenice Baldwin, a grand-
mother who was recruited to infiltrate 
the Michigan Communist Party. 
Maraniss, an associate editor at 
the Washington Post and a distin-
guished visiting professor at Vanderbilt 
University, writes of his father with 
respect, admiration and empathy. In 
fact, he was inspired by his father to 
go into journalism. He reflects on what 
it means to be an American, as issues 
of race, democracy and freedom are 
as still timely as ever. This is his 12th 
book, after biographies of Bill Clinton 
and Barack Obama, a trilogy about the 
1960s and other titles.

— Sandee Brawarsky

A Good 
American 
Family/
David Maraniss 

Former Detroiter 
Maraniss Plumbs Family, 
“Red Scare”

LUCIAN PERKINS DAVID

NONFICTION

The detailed story surrounding an 
act of brutal international terrorism 
in 1985, An Innocent Bystander: The 
Killing of Leon Klinghoffer by Julie 
Salamon (Little, Brown) delves into 
the destinies of three families whose 
lives were upended by this event. 
Klinghoffer had boarded a cruise 
ship with his wife to celebrate their 
anniversary and was shot and then 
thrown overboard in his wheelchair. 
Researching the events, repercussions 
and the search for justice, Salamon 
interviews most of the participants 
who are still living, including one of the 
hijackers, and creates a powerful and 
provocative narrative.
Nancy Kalikow Maxwell’
s Typically 
Jewish (Jewish Publication Society) 
provides an original, down-to-earth, 
earnest look at pressing questions about 
identity and culture faced by the Jewish 
community, looking at the way Jews 
live their lives. 
In Edna’
s Gift: How My Sister 
Taught Me to Be Whole (She Writes 
Press) Susan Rudnick, the daughter of 
Holocaust survivors, looks back at her 
family history and the experience of 
growing up with a younger sister with 
developmental challenges. Throughout 
their intertwined lives, Rudnick’
s sister 
has taught her the most important life 
lessons. 
In This Hour: Heschel’
s Writings in 
Nazi Germany and London Exile by 
Abraham Joshua Heschel, foreword by 
Susannah Heschel (Jewish Publication 
Society) is a collection of early writings 
by the great rabbinic figure and import-
ant Jewish thinker, written before he 
found refuge in the United States. The 
pieces — about Jewish education, the 
rabbis of the Mishnaic period, a biogra-
phy of a medieval Jewish scholar, reflec-
tions before the holiday and reflections 
on issues like prayer and suffering 
— haven’
t been previously published 

in English. The foreword by Susannah 
Heschel and notes by scholar Helen 
Plotkin are particularly compelling. 
Mah Jongg Mondays: A Memoir 
About Friendship, Love and Faith by 
Fern Bernstein (JAG Designer Services) 
is the true story of five suburban 
women coming together weekly to 
play an ancient Chinese game, forging 
deep friendship around the table and 
supporting the author through diffi-
cult times. Those who play the game, 
or remember their mothers playing, 
will be touched by this first book by 
Bernstein, who teaches in her syna-
gogue’
s religious school and teaches 
yoga in the preschool.
 
The Spiritual Gardener: Insights 
from the Jewish Tradition to Help Your 
Garden Grow, a first book by Andy 
Becker (Tree of the Field Publisher) 
includes gardening tips, stories from 
the author’
s garden, quotations and 
teachings from Jewish texts and reflec-
tions on the bitterness of horseradish 
and sweetness of raspberry jam and 
more.
In Jerusalem on the Amstel: The 
Quest for Zion in the Dutch Republic, 
Lipika Pelham (Oxford) provides a por-
trait of 17th-century Amsterdam, with 
its prosperous Sephardi community 
during the Dutch Golden Age, when 
the seeds of Zion were nurtured. The 
author, a journalist and documentary 
maker for the BBC and other broad-
casters, also sought out the descendants 
of this community in the present-day 
city.
In The Plateau, anthropologist and 
performer Maggie Paxson (Riverhead 
Books) probes ideas about human 
goodness, selflessness and sacrifice as 
she closely studies an area in south-cen-
tral France, where villagers have a long 
tradition of providing refuge to strang-
ers, particularly during World War II 
and continuing today. 

On God’
s Radar: My Walk Across America is Robert 
Schoen’
s (Stone Bridge Press) account of his journey on 
his own across the country on foot, from the Pacific to the 
Atlantic, across more than 1,600 miles and 14 states. He sets 
out after the death of his 96-year-old father and makes con-
nections in unusual places, finding generosity, compassion 
and some great stories. The book is in the form of a travel 
journal, highlighting his adventures and spiritual pathways.

TRAVEL

