History Book Club

Freedom Rider, friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dick Gregory’s vice-presidential running mate, legal defense at Wounded Knee, survivor of the Jonestown Massacre—Mark Lane has been inspiring social consciousness, influencing history makers, and inciting controversy for more than six decades. In Citizen Lane he tells the story of his remarkable life, demonstrating how a single dedicated individual can fight for the underdog, provoke the establishment, and trigger change. From the streets to the courtroom, he has been on the front lines in the events that shaped a generation in opposition to government excesses and war. Icons of the American political and social landscape appear throughout his narrative as Lane's cohorts and companions and as his vicious opponents. Radical leaders embraced him; the FBI and CIA tried to destroy him. No one who dealt with him had a neutral reaction to his forceful, opinionated, larger-than-life persona. Entertaining and enlightening, this autobiography confirms that one person can make a difference and change the lives of millions by holding to his principles regardless of the consequences.

Revealing the story of the reopening of the case of the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing of 1963, this insider’s account divulges the ins and outs of the investigation led by detective Ben Herren of the Birmingham Police Department and special agent Bill Fleming of the FBI. For more than a year, they analyzed the original FBI files on the bombing and activities of the Ku Klux Klan, then began a search for new evidence. Their first interview—with Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry—broke open the case, but not in the way they expected. Herren and Fleming unearthed lost evidence and convinced long-silent witnesses to tell their stories. With tenacity, humor, dedication, and some luck, the pair encountered the worst and best in human nature on their journey to find justice, and perhaps closure, for the citizens of Birmingham.

In the early morning hours of December 8, 1969, hundreds of SWAT officers engaged in a violent battle with a handful of Los Angeles–based members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). Five hours and 5,000 rounds of ammunition later, three SWAT team members and three Black Panthers lay wounded. For the Panthers and the community that supported them, the shootout symbolized a victory, and a key reason for that victory was the actions of a 19-year-old rank-and-file member of the BPP: Wayne Pharr. Nine Lives of a Black Panther tells Pharr’s riveting story of life in the Los Angeles branch of the BPP and gives a blow-by-blow account of how it prepared for and survived the massive attack. He illuminates the history of one of the most dedicated, dynamic, vilified, and targeted chapters of the BPP, filling in a missing piece of Black Panther history and, in the process, creating an engaging and hard-to-put-down memoir about a time and place that holds tremendous fascination for readers interested in African American militancy.

A forgotten heroine of the women’s rights movement is rescued from obscurity in this biography of Caroline Norton, a respected poet, songwriter, and socialite whose 1836 adultery trial rocked Victorian England. When George Norton accused his wife of having an affair with the British Prime Minister he sparked what was considered “the scandal of the century.” Though she was declared innocent, the humiliated George locked Caroline out of their home, seized her manuscripts, letters, clothes, jewels, and every penny of her earnings, and refused to let her see their three sons. This detailed account of the Norton “criminal conversation” trial sheds vivid light on the desperate position of women in male-dominated Victorian society and chronicles Caroline’s lifelong campaign to establish legal rights for married and divorced women, allowing them to inherit property, take court action on their own behalf, and in effect establishing them for the first time as full-fledged human beings before the law. Figuring into this fascinating story are Norton’s friend and confidante Mary Shelley, longtime admirer Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Queen Victoria, and other literary and royal heavyweights of the day.