There is no more beloved historian working today than Doris Kearns Goodwin, and not just because of her much-admired books, including Team of Rivals (the source material for Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis), No Ordinary Time, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. In person, she is gracious and self-effacing, with a warmth that shines through in this book, a memoir as much about her late husband, Dick Goodwin, as it is about her. She centers her account in the 1960s, when Goodwin worked for J.F.K. and L.B.J. and she, too, began working for L.B.J. Lyndon B. Johnson himself became a source of conflict, since she stayed with him after Goodwin had grown disgusted with him. The author offers much insight into the personalities and conflicts of those years, but the most poignant passages are about her husband’s illness and final days. He died in 2018 at age 86, with his wife’s hand on his heart.
Today, we pick up all sorts of social cues on how to act by watching TV shows and movies and TikTok, but how did Americans in the early decades of our country learn to adapt and communicate with each other? Andrew Burstein brilliantly explores that question by delving into letters, diaries, and newspapers between the founding of our nation and the Civil War, discovering, among other things, a penchant for political satire and puns, fears of ocean travel, and a tendency to mythologize men such as Nathan Hale and Christopher Columbus. But nothing quite had the power of connecting people back then as poetry, which could strike a common emotional chord. Longing for Connection is revelatory and utterly absorbing.
There are cat lovers, and then there was Caleb Carr, who grew up around cats and had his life changed when he adopted Masha, an unruly Siberian Forest cat, from a shelter. For the next 17 years, the two were pretty much inseparable. Carr, who wrote The Alienist, had his unfair share of physical ailments, and Masha proved to be precisely the medicine he needed. He was just as good for her, including after her encounter with a bear near where he and “Mashie” lived in upstate New York. Carr was a beautiful and persuasive writer, and so, by the end of the book (and Masha’s life), the reader cares a great deal about both of them and is even envious of the bond they shared. Carr died of cancer last week.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL
