The Wall Street Journal - 14.03.2020 - 15.03.2020

C12| Saturday/Sunday, March 14 - 15, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Hardcover Nonfiction TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Find Your Path 1 New Carrie Underwood/Dey Street The Splendid and the Vile 2 1 Erik Larson/Crown The MAGA Doctrine 3 New Charlie Kirk/Broadside The Mamba Mentality 4 2 Kobe Bryant/MCD There’s No Place Like Space 5 7 Tish Rabe/Random House Books for Young Readers

TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Unknown Valor 6 3 Martha MacCallum & Ronald J. Drez/Harper Pearls of Wisdom 7 New Barbara Bush/Twelve Oh Say Can You Say Di-no-saur? 8 — Bonnie Worth/Random House Books for Young Readers Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+ 9 4 Suze Orman/Hay House StrengthsFinder 2.0 10 10 Tom Rath/Gallup

Hardcover Fiction TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK House of Earth and Blood 1 New Sarah J. Maas/Bloomsbury Chain of Gold 2 New Cassandra Clare/Margaret K. McElderry Green Eggs and Ham 3 2 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers Dragonslayer 4 New Tui T. Sutherland/Scholastic One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish 5 3 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers

TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK The Numbers Game 6 New Danielle Steel/Delacorte Long Range 7 New C.J. Box/Putnam Fox in Socks 8 7 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers The Cat in the Hat 9 5 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers Dog Man: Fetch-22 10 4 Dav Pilkey/Graphix

Methodology

NPDBookScangatherspoint-of-salebookdata frommorethan16,000locationsacrosstheU.S., representingabout85%ofthenation’sbooksales. Print-bookdataprovidersincludeallmajorbooksellers, webretailersandfoodstores.E-bookdataproviders includeallmajore-bookretailers.Freee-booksand thosesellingforlessthan99centsareexcluded. Thefictionandnonfictioncombinedlistsinclude aggregatedsalesforallbookformats(exceptaudio books,bundles,boxedsetsandforeign languageeditions)andfeaturea combinationofadult,youngadultand juveniletitles.Thehardcoverfiction andnonfictionlistsalsoencompassa mixofadult,youngadultandjuveniletitleswhilethe businesslistfeaturesonlyadulthardcovertitles. [email protected].

Nonfiction E-Books TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK The Splendid and the Vile 1 1 Erik Larson/Crown If You Tell 2 7 Gregg Olsen/Thomas & Mercer The Essential Air Fryer Cookbook for... 3 — Laurie Fleming/Rockridge Medical Medium Celery Juice 4 — Anthony William/Hay House The MAGA Doctrine 5 New Charlie Kirk/Broadside Reading Behind Bars 6 — Jill Grunenwald/Skyhorse Open Book 7 2 Jessica Simpson/Dey Street Educated: A Memoir 8 5 Tara Westover/Random House Start With Why 9 — Simon Sinek/Portfolio Eat for Life 10 New Joel Fuhrman/HarperOne

Nonfiction Combined TITLE AUTHOR/ PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Find Your Path 1 New Carrie Underwood/Dey Street The Splendid and the Vile 2 1 Erik Larson/Crown The MAGA Doctrine 3 New Charlie Kirk/Broadside The Mamba Mentality 4 2 Kobe Bryant/MCD There’s No Place Like Space 5 7 Tish Rabe/Random House Books for Young Readers Unknown Valor 6 3 Martha MacCallum & Ronald J. Drez/Harper Pearls of Wisdom 7 New Barbara Bush/Twelve Open Book 8 9 Jessica Simpson/Dey Street Educated: A Memoir 9 — Tara Westover/Random House Oh Say Can You Seed? 10 — Bonnie Worth/Random House Books for Young Readers

Fiction E-Books TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Long Range 1 New C.J. Box/Putnam House of Earth and Blood 2 New Sarah J. Maas/Bloomsbury The Numbers Game 3 New Danielle Steel/Delacorte Lethal Game 4 New Christine Feehan/Berkley Defending Zara 5 New Susan Stoker/Montlake Romance Coconut Layer Cake Murder 6 New Joanne Fluke/Kensington American Dirt 7 7 Jeanine Cummins/Flatiron Chain of Gold 8 New Cassandra Clare/Margaret K. McElderry Trace Elements 9 New Donna Leon/Atlantic Monthly Blindside 10 1 James Patterson & James O. Born/Little, Brown

Fiction Combined TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK House of Earth and Blood 1 New Sarah J. Maas/Bloomsbury Long Range 2 New C.J. Box/Putnam Chain of Gold 3 New Cassandra Clare/Margaret K. McElderry The Numbers Game 4 New Danielle Steel/Delacorte Green Eggs & Ham 5 7 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers Fox in Socks 6 5 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers Dr. Seuss’s ABC 7 6 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers American Dirt 8 4 Jeanine Cummins/Flatiron One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish 9 9 Dr. Seuss/Random House Books for Young Readers Dragonslayer 10 New Tui T. Sutherland/Scholastic

Hardcover Business TITLE AUTHOR /PUBLISHER

THIS WEEK

LAST WEEK Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+ 1 1 Suze Orman/Hay House StrengthsFinder 2.0 2 2 Tom Rath/Gallup Upstream 3 New Dan Heath/Avid Reader Atomic Habits 4 4 James Clear/Avery The Five Dysfunctions of a Team 5 9 Patrick M. Lencioni/Jossey-Bass The Total Money Makeover 6 6 Dave Ramsey/Thomas Nelson Emotional Intelligence 2.0 7 8 Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves/TalentSmart The Motive 8 3 Patrick M. Lencioni/Jossey-Bass Dare to Lead 9 5 Brené Brown/Random House The Blueprint 10 New Douglas R. Conant & Amy Federman/Wiley

Bestselling Books|Week Ended March 7 With data from NPD BookScan

BYEDWARDKOSNER

T

HEY WERE YOUNGand
restless, with a world
to conquer. Risking their
lives in exotic war zones
and losing their inno-
cence in erotic adventures, they were a
lost generation that found itself be-
tween the great wars of the 20th cen-
tury. They taught themselves how to be
reporters and instructed their fellow
Americans back home about the peril-
ous days that lay ahead.
Each set sail for Europe and Asia in
the 1920s with barely enough money
for passage. With grit, relentless energy
and more than a few lucky breaks, they
became famous foreign correspondents
and bestselling authors. Their bylines—
Vincent Sheean, Dorothy Thompson,
John Gunther and Rayna Raphaelson—
are forgotten by all but the oldest
Americans these days.
Now, they are restored to vivid life
in “Fighting Words,” a group biography
by Nancy F. Cott, a professor of Ameri-
can history at Harvard. Full of evoca-
tive detail, with a sophisticated grasp
of the politics of the time, it reani-
mates a harum-scarum journalistic age
all the more appealing for its raffish
ambition and often misguided idealism.
At the time, Americans got their
news almost exclusively from the
papers. There were more than 2,500
dailies in America, as well as dozens
of magazines. Expatriates could land
freelance work abroad and parlay
that into better assignments that
paid their keep. Thompson snagged a
sensational interview with Hitler in
1931, Gunther got himself psycho-
analyzed in Vienna and then wrote
“Inside Europe,” a runaway best-
seller claiming, among other things,
that Hitler was “a prisoner of infan-
tile fixations.”
One of the virtues of “Fighting
Words” is that it plunges the reader
into the great issues of the era—the
Chinese civil war, Roosevelt’s New Deal,
the Spanish Civil War and the on-
slaughts of fascism and communism,
Chamberlain’s Munich pact with Hitler,
the Hitler-Stalin pact. “Their writings
ranged like searchlights across rising
threats,” Ms. Cott observes of her
correspondents. Retrospect has made
the right reading of these events seem
obvious, but to those in the midst of
history being made, the questions could
be devilishly hard to parse.
The eldest daughter of a Methodist
minister from upstate New York,
Thompson was 27 when she sailed to
Europe in 1920 on the rebound from a
platonic love affair. She scuffled along
with freelance work, then got a by-the-
word deal from the Philadelphia Public
Ledger for articles from war-ravaged
Vienna. Soon, she was a staff corre-
spondent, then Berlin bureau chief.
She witnessed the rise of Hitler,
watched his brownshirts strut in mass

demonstrations and splashed her interview with the Führer—“the very prototype of the ‘Little Man.’” Just a year before he seized power, Thomp- son concluded that he was going no- where. Still, her career flourished. She returned to the U.S. and joined Walter Lippmann as a syndicated columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, held forth with regular radio commentary on NBC and wrote a monthly column in the Ladies’ Home Journal, the biggest magazine in America. Ms. Cott deals as frankly with the emotional lives of her subjects as with their careers. Thompson was a frus- trated 28-year-old virgin when she met a handsome Hungarian intellectual in Vienna. They were soon lovers and then husband and wife. But the marriage faltered. Before long, against the advice of all her friends, she married Sinclair Lewis, the author of “Main Street,” a tempestuous drunk she adored but could live with only pre- cariously until they, too, broke up. Along the way, she startled herself with

a febrile liaison with a beautiful Hun- garian artist named Christa Winsloe. Jimmy Sheean—who used Vincent as a byline—led with his heart, too. A gangly redhead from a small Illinois town, Sheean was a closeted homosex- ual who first fell in love with a man as a student at the University of Chicago. After a stint on the tabloid New York Daily News, Sheean signed on with the Chicago Tribune in Paris. Over the next decades, he chased stories across Europe, the Middle East and China. For his greatest scoop, he shaved his head, donned Arab garb and joined a mule train to reach Muslim rebels fighting for independence in North Africa. He barely escaped with his life, but his dispatches were a sensation. In Pales- tine in 1929, he presciently predicted that the indigenous Arabs and the Zion- ist Jews trickling into the Holy Land would never get along. Sympathetic to the left, Sheean turned freelance to escape the objec- tivity expected of staff correspondents for American papers. In China, he pro-

moted the faction aligned with Moscow after the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists from his forces. Sheean never really made it as a novelist, but his 1935 memoir, “Personal History,” was a bestseller. That same year, the 36-year-old Sheean suddenly married a 20-year-old girl. He pronounced marriage “the perfect state” and nine months later was a father. Barely six months after that, he had a devastating nervous breakdown. Recovered, he desperately wanted to cover the Spanish Civil War but was beaten to itby Ernest Hemingway. “You stay here and be comfortable, kid,” Hemingway gibed. “I’ll go to Spain for you.” Rayna Raphaelson, the flame-haired daughter of a middle-class Jewish fam- ily in Chicago, had a bleeding heart to match Sheean’s, but while his life was a giddy ride, hers was an express to disaster. In 1923, at 27, with no journalistic experience, she sailed to China— “the biggest struggle that is taking place in all the world”—leaving behind

Fighting Words

By Nancy F. Cott

Basic, 403 pages, $32

a failed marriage. She had palled around with a left-wing crowd in col- lege and soon lost her heart to the communist faction of the Kuomintang collaborating with Chiang to unify China. Like Thompson, she had fallen in love on the rebound—to Bill Prohme, a divorced San Francisco newspaperman, who promised to follow her to China. Thus began a six-year adventure in which Raphaelson and Prohme dedi- cated themselves to the pro-communist Chinese leadership, taking low-paid writing and editing jobs to advance the cause. With the Russians booted out of China in 1927, Raphaelson headed to Moscow, escorting Madame Sun Yat- sen, the widow of the founder of the Kuomintang, who sided with the communists. There, she struggled to find

work and began to suffer from excruci- ating headaches. Thompson and Sheean were also in Moscow for the celebra- tion of the 10th anniversary of the Bol- shevik revolution when Raphaelson died, likely of encephalitis. She was 33. John Gunther was a journalistic dervish and the most successful of the group. Born and reared in Chicago, he graduated from the University of Chicago a year after Sheean and worked as a reporter and correspon- dent for the Chicago Daily News, then as a crack European desk editor for the United Press. Like Sheean and Thomp- son, he was in Europe as war broke out. But he made his name and for- tune writing a series of stupendously successful, fact-crammed “Inside” books: The “Inside Europe” formula— “Guntherizing,” as the New York Times had it—was repeated for Asia, the U.S., Latin America and Africa. His love life was frenetic, too: He had a long secret affair with the wife of one of his clos- est colleagues, squired around a young socialite nicknamed Bubbles and the actress Miriam Hopkins, and was a regular at a chic New York bordello named Polly’s. His most enduring work turned out to be a memoir, “Death Be Not Proud,” about the death of his teenage son from a brain tumor. Gunther stayed active until his death in 1970. Thompson and Sheean’s careers faded as they aged, and their lives ended in Europe, where they had made their fame. Thompson died of a heart attack in Lisbon in 1961, Sheean of can- cer in Italy in 1975. Stars in their time, they witnessed and shaped history in careers that would be impossible to match in today’s media whirlwind.

Mr. Kosner, the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the New York Daily News, is the author of a memoir, “It’s News to Me.”

Explaining the World

ROVING AND INTREPIDPassport photos of, clockwise from top left, Rayna Raphaelson, Vincent Sheean, Dorothy Thompson and John Gunther.

BASIC (4)

A biography of four American reporters abroad as they chronicled the perilous period between the wars.

BOOKS

‘There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.’—DOROTHY THOMPSON

The Wall Street Journal - 14.03.2020 - 15.03.2020

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