#AmReading – A History Trio

The upside of the Great Quarantine of 2020 has been that I’ve read a lot of books. At the end of the year I went on a history binge. It’s one of my favorite categories under normal circumstances, so I had lots of time to dig in.

So, let’s start the year with three for the price of one.

Two stories about “Trials of the Century”. Which, per usual, are forgotten today.

“The Last Pirate of New York : A Ghost Ship, A Killer and the Birth of a Gangster Nation” by Rich Cohen takes us to the true Original Gangster of New York. It begins just before the Civil War, with a blood drenched “ghost ship” in the harbor of New York. Albert Hicks was one of the last men hung for piracy in the United States. He was also a career criminal whose crimes stretched across the continent and into South America and the Pacific. Through robbery and planned mutinies, it’s possible that he killed hundreds of people. With the piracy of the ship A.E. Johnson, including the murder of the captain and crew, Hicks stepped into the big leagues. His trial was a sensation which ended with the jury out for a total of seven minutes. Guilty and sentenced to hang, Hicks dictated his life story, which became a best seller.

Cohen does a brilliant job working through the facts and the fiction that have grown around Hicks. He is a legend in the crime world of the city. Outside of that world, his name is forgotten. It’s a story worth reading.

Rating – **** Recommended

Forty years later, the new century arrives with another “Trial of the Century”. Harold Schechter takes us through the facts in “The Devil’s Gentlemen – Privilege, Poison and the Trial That Ushered In the Twentieth Century”. Here we step out of the underworld of New York and into high society.

Poison kills the wrong person, and the son of a revered Civil War general is the suspect. Roland Molineux hated Harry Cornish. Their battle field were the posh men’s athletic clubs of the day. At least two people would die, Molineux would face trial twice, both cases filled with intrigue and sexual scandal. The publishing giants of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer pulled out all the tabloid stops to make it the story of the year. It destroyed lives, family reputations, and professional careers. It would also set a judicial precedent on the rules of admissibility of evidence.

Schechter offers a careful, scholarly telling of the story, but still offers some quality storytelling at the same time. This Gilded Age scandal holds its own more than a century later. This kind of historical true crime is his specialty and he delivers here.

Rating – **** Recommended

The third book today moves into the middle of the Twentieth Century. “A Spy Among Friends – Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal” by Ben Macintyre takes on the greatest spy story of the Cold War. Philby betrayed family, friends and country. A star in British intelligence, he had been a Soviet asset since college. MacIntyre had access to his personal papers and never released files from the British intelligence services. The book offers a view of the spy from a different direction than before. The image of Philby that emerges is even less sympathetic than ever before, if that’s possible. Nothing mattered to him except serving Russian intelligence. The stunning thing about the story is that he nearly became the head of British counterintelligence, the people tasked with tracking down spies! It would have been the greatest espionage coup of all time. As it was, they would send him to head the intelligence machinery contacts with the U.S. in Washington, D.C. Once under suspicion, he would be exonerated once before his final unmasking.

If you love stories of real life espionage, you must be familiar with Philby’s story. If you know it already, you will find a new slant on the story here. A fascinating read.

Rating – **** Recommended