The tremendous achievements of the man who coined the term “underground railroad” are given their full due in the former New York Times journalist Scott Shane’s FLEE NORTH: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland (Celadon, 340 pp., $30). Born enslaved in 1801 in Maryland, Thomas Smallwood gained his freedom in 1830. A decade later, he began orchestrating the escape of enslaved people from Washington, Baltimore and the surrounding areas, Shane writes, not “in ones or twos, but whole families and carriage loads at a time.” Shane estimates that in less than a year Smallwood helped about 150 people slip across the Mason-Dixon line.
Incredibly, Smallwood also wrote a pseudonymous dispatch for an Albany newspaper in which he taunted aggrieved slave owners and first dangled the notion of an “under ground rail-road” as a fantastical joke. “The great blockheads cannot yet account for the mysterious disappearance of their man!” he gloated after one mission. Smallwood’s satirical prose is literary and sharp, and one of Shane’s considerable contributions here is the recommendation of this early stylist to the American canon.
Crucial to Smallwood’s operation was an alliance with a white, Yale-educated abolitionist named Charles Torrey, who had the contacts throughout Philadelphia and Boston to abet Black fugitives. Shane treats this “unusual biracial partnership” with admiration, and sets the ideological and practical nuances of their activities against the career of a notorious slave trader who eventually brought about Torrey’s demise. There have been at least two biographies devoted to Torrey, but Shane is the first to give modern book-length treatment to Smallwood’s triumph, and he does so against a fascinating backdrop of the cultural, political and financial situation in the antebellum mid-Atlantic.
The historian and diplomat Deborah E. Lipstadt has a more complicated task in GOLDA MEIR: Israel’s Matriarch (Yale University, 271 pp., $26), a biography that considers the legacy of Israel’s fourth prime minister, one of only two women to sign the country’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. Meir is still a polarizing figure. A devoted Labor Zionist, she traveled to Palestine in 1921 and quickly became central to the formation of the state, not least for her distinct ability to appeal to American Jews for funds and support as “the long-suffering but absolutely resolute mother who would do anything for her people.”
Yet many still hold her responsible for the disastrous loss of life in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, contend she failed Israel’s Middle Eastern and North African immigrants, consider her antagonistic to feminism and take issue with her brand of unyielding Zionism.
Both reverence and criticism are justified, and Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history at Emory University and the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, is evenhanded in the way she lays out the facts, glossing both failure and success. She describes Meir as “a doer” so committed to Zionism and socialism “that she had trouble acknowledging their shortcomings.”
Lipstadt also raises important questions: “Might some of the criticism leveled against her have been mitigated if she had been a man?” And conversely, “Would American Jews have been as enthralled with her if her first name was David?”
Without becoming waylaid in the well-known events of Israel’s history, Lipstadt offers a distilled, delicate account of Meir’s remarkable dedication to her nation that encourages a learned reckoning with her complex legacy.
Rudolf Diesel was a titan in the age of Edison, Bell and Ford. His eponymous engine was a masterly invention, and he was known around the world when he went missing from a steamship bound for London in 1913. Diesel’s death was officially deemed a suicide, but the novelist Douglas Brunt’s biography THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF RUDOLF DIESEL: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I (Atria Books, 374 pp., $28.99) lays out the possibility of a different fate altogether.
At a time when most engines were powered by burning coal, Diesel sought something better. His great insight turned on the recollection of a pneumatic cigar lighter, about the size of a small bicycle pump, that used compressed air to ignite a stogie. Diesel predicted that if he applied the same principle to an engine, a considerably higher degree of energy efficiency might be harnessed. He built the first model in 1894, and before long his invention was at the center of the arms race between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Winston Churchill for its unique ability to power ships and submarines.
Readers will have to look elsewhere for an extended meditation on the economic and cultural impact of the diesel engine on the later 20th century, but Brunt is very good at drawing out the political tensions that swirled around Diesel during his life. An engine that could run on peanut oil and coal tar put the inventor in the cross hairs of the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. Brunt marshals such pressures into a dynamic detective story, complete with a bag full of cash, overlooked telegrams and a curiously placed hat and coat.
A decade ago, hardly anyone outside of North Korea could identify the current supreme leader’s younger sibling. Yet as Sung-Yoon Lee makes exceptionally clear in THE SISTER: North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World (PublicAffairs, 304 pp., $30), it appears that this woman is not only in line to succeed Kim Jong-un, but is already determining the course of her country.
Given the intense secrecy shrouding North Korean official machinations, the rest of the world must glean what it can about the regime by piecing together clues from afar. Lee, a professor of international politics, an expert on North Korea and an adviser to Congress, is especially good at this. His book is part North Korean history, part close reading of the dictatorship’s decisions, appearances and statements that pulls back the curtain on a little-known figure at the heart of one family’s quest for dominance on the Korean Peninsula.
Since at least 2014, Kim Yo-jong has been directing North Korean propaganda and berating its perceived enemies, and Lee makes the persuasive case that she has “her nation’s foreign policy at her fingertips.” Rarely does her brother make a major state appearance without her at his side, whether it’s at a summit with Donald Trump in 2018 or, that same year, an important meeting with the South Korean president Moon Jae-in. In 2021, Lee writes, she “reportedly ordered several executions of high-ranking government officials for merely ‘getting on her nerves.’” Lee’s book is a timely, important treatment of a dangerous leader, and a sincere warning not to underestimate her.
John Knight holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and runs a small bookstore in New Hampshire.
