A sympathetic portrait of an extraordinary man.
Love, war, and madness.
Historian Whitmire draws on archival sources, including hundreds of letters, to recount the life of Reed Edwin Peggram (1914-1982), a gay Black Harvard doctoral student whose life was changed decisively by the exigencies of war. In 1937, he set out for Paris, funded by fellowships, where he would attend the Sorbonne and conduct research at the Bibliothèque Nationale to further his graduate work in comparative literature and his aim of becoming a French professor. His intellectual prowess had set him apart even as a child: Raised by his grandmother, a housecleaner, in Boston, he attended the prestigious Boston Latin School and was accepted into Harvard’s class of 1935; although African American students were required to live off campus, Peggram thrived in Harvard’s academic rigor, graduating magna cum laude. He embarked on graduate work at Columbia in 1936 and in Harvard’s doctoral program the following year, when he developed a mad crush on a Harvard junior, Leonard Bernstein—who rebuffed him. Soon Peggram was off to Paris, where he happily settled in: He joined the lending library at Shakespeare and Company, socialized with friends, and fell in love with Arne Hauptmann, a 22-year-old Danish art student. Urged to return home as war erupted, he refused unless he could obtain a visa for Hauptmann, whom he saw as his soulmate. The two men did leave France, hoping to find a safe haven in Florence. Instead, they often feared for their lives. Eventually imprisoned, they escaped when the Allies pushed north into Italy. Running for their lives, Peggram was found by an African American regiment in December 1944 and, suffering a mental breakdown, was finally sent home. His last years, sadly, were a trajectory of decline.
A sympathetic portrait of an extraordinary man.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780593654194
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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