Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush, by Richard Ben Cramer

“George H. W. Bush has a firm idea about holding public office. He tried to do what was right. By the time he held any jobs where the decisions were his, this was an old and outmoded idea.”

While journalism seems to have lost much in 2013, one of its greatest losses this year was in the passing of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Richard Ben Cramer. While he wrote on a range so expansive that it extended from Middle East conflict to the pitcher’s mound at Yankee’s stadium, perhaps his best know book was What It Takes, the Teddy White-style, making-of-the-president story of the 1988 election. In that book, Cramer did a nearly anthropological immersion into the lives of the several Republicans and Democrat contenders. The original manuscript of What It Takes was said to have filled a bathroom in Cramer’s home from floor to ceiling. While the tome was ultimately lifted from the bathroom floor, much of Cramer’s writing was then regrettably left by editors on the Simon & Schuster cutting room floor.

Being Poppy adapts the best of the George H. W. Bush chapters from What It Takes with other observations and anecdotes that didn’t make the first cut, to provide a very enjoyable, short biography of the 41st President of the United States, at least up to the surrender of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. For longtime Bush watchers, like yours truly, there is little here that is new or revealing, only a very pleasant reminder of what a good and decent man George H. W. Bush is and has always been, a man of civic virtue too little in current supply.

While the title Being Poppy is appropriate, an allusion to the nickname he earned in early adolescence when he evidenced in a family tennis math an intense competitiveness reminiscent of his maternal grandfather, Pops, it could just as well been called The Coin of His Person, an expression Cramer uses only in passing way toward the end of the book. Here is a man who has lived a life of extraordinary political accomplishment and service with a seemingly superficial ideology, nominal religious faith and a longstanding lack of interest in the substance of policy, but with an internal gyro that seemed to always guide him unwaveringly toward being a good man and to do the right thing.

Cramer’s direct access to Bush in the preparation of this book is made obvious in the ways his writing so often takes on 41’s helluva regular guy familiarity, as if Bush himself were telling the story. It’s that famous syntax, if one can call it that, that kept Dana Carvey in the SNL line-up. Cramer writes:

“Bush — well, he wasn’t much on the stump. He’d get cranked up, dive into a twisty river of a sentence, no noun, a couple or three verbs in a row, and you wouldn’t know where he was headed — sometimes for minutes at a stretch, while his hands sawed and pulled at the air, smacked the podium, drew imaginary lines and boxes without a name, without apparent reference to what he was talking about, which you couldn’t exactly tie down, unless you caught a key word, now and then like ‘Sukarno,’ or ‘taxes,’ or ‘lib-rull.’

One might say that George H. W. Bush lacked substance or that his approach to life and public service were superficial. It was all just so personal; so coin of his person. Bush has lived a life of ambition without self promotion, competitiveness without cruelty, accomplishment without (heaven forbid) credit-taking. His life has evidenced the true noblisse oblige, the notion that a man who has been blessed is obliged to return such blessing in the form of his service. Though Poppy would never permit you to say so, in him there is much to admire.

Being Poppy may well be a better book on the subject of winning friends and influencing people than Dale Carnegie could have ever hoped to write. George H. W. Bush built a vast network of real, authentic, intimate friendships. He has been a living, breathing, in the flesh, social media app. Much of his accomplishment can be attributed to his selfless investments of the coin of his person in other people. He has lived an other-focused life. When he faced Dukakis in ’88, he and wife Barbara could reach out to the 8,000-plus closest friends to whom they sent Christmas Cards each year. This was not a mailing list or database, but a collection of index cards featuring hand-written notes about real friends they had made, all around the world. At the time, no one could name even Michael Dukakis’ best friend.

Cramer died before completing this book. His wife, Joan, found a note from him that she supposed had been meant to be part of its opening:

“George H. W. Bush has a firm idea about holding public office. He tried to do what was right. By the time he held any jobs where the decisions were his, this was an old and outmoded idea.”

In the run-up to the ’88 election his advisors pressed him to be more specific in defining himself and give people a clearer picture of what he believed in. Cramer writes:

“‘I don’t know,’ Bush said. ‘I don’t get the feeling people want that.’

They argued…but Bush just wouldn’t believe it. Personal quality was his ‘thing.’ He thought people would see it…once they took a look at him.

The fact was, he hasn’t a clue how to define himself. Some people saw him as a moderate…some conservative — that was fine! He didn’t want to rope himself into positions.

Why should he?

The fact was, he wanted to be President. He didn’t want to be President to do this or that. He’d do…what was sound.”

Movement conservatives like me will say this was Bush’s “Achilles’ Heel,” that he lacked sufficient ideological constitution or even genuine Christian faith; that he was not a man who knew neither what he believed nor why he believed it, making him an easy target at re-election in ’92.

But when you consider his life in full, it is easy to see a man with sufficient faith to offer prayers to God for deliverance from a lonely raft in the South Pacific after having been shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft artillery, or for comfort for himself and his family after the death of his four year old daughter. He was a man of sufficient backbone to be among the first of Nixon’s inner circle to tell the Watergate-disgraced President that he must resign. And though Cramer’s book doesn’t reach far enough into the full life story, he was a President with enough moral courage to be the first post-Vietnam President to commit significant American troops to action abroad as he considered Sadam Hussein’s rape of Kuwait and declared, “This will not stand!” We right-wingers have not given him his due.

I was given this book by my son for Father’s Day, this year. This son and his wife also gave me my first grandson, last year. To this little guy, I’ll be known as “Poppy,” so my consideration of this book promised to be as much instructive as informative. It was. If at the end of my life, or my sons’, or my grandsons’, any of us can be counted half the man George H. W. Bush has been, not so much by way of his success or accomplishment, but in terms of the coin of his person, then ours will have been lives well spent, for our benefits and that of others.

Pater Familias

Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677 and Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 1677-1683, both by Jonathan Scott

“All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”

Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825

As America moved toward the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the septuagenerian Thomas Jefferson had already begun to lament of the nation’s drift from its founding principles. In a notable letter to Henry Lee, Jefferson set out the object of the Declaration citing what he referred to as “the elementary books of public right,” specifically the writing of Aristotle, Cicero, Locke and Sidney.

Aristotle was of course familiar to me as the Greek philosopher who had been the student of Plato and mentor to Alexander the Great. “Youngest Son” is a student of the Late Roman Republic; through him I’ve become increasingly familiar with Cicero, its greatest statesman. While I haven’t read much of or about John Locke, I at least had a working knowledge of his standing as an Enlightenment thinker and “Father of Classical Liberalism.”

But who in the world was Sidney, and why had Jefferson placed him alongside such immortals as a progenitor of public right? Such was my pursuit in the consideration of two dense volumes by Jonathan Scott, Lecturer in History, Victoria University in Wellington, on the life and times of Algernon Sidney, a 17th century republican political theorist and enemy of the British monarchy.

Now, I’m a gluttonous bibliophile who has devoured many a weighty tome with only moderate incidence of indigestion, but I must say that I have found few works more dyspeptic. I really couldn’t in good conscience recommend these titles to anyone other than someone with the most technical interest in 17th century European political affairs and philosophy, or who gains a perverse satisfaction in stubbornly finishing big, arguably important projects simply because they undertook to begin them, as did yours truly. In a style that owes more to Plutarch than Boswell, this author exposes Sidney like a clinician overseeing an autopsy. It’s all there. There just wasn’t much of the corpse that the biographer regenerated for the reader that he might once again walk alongside an hero of a day gone by.

The project was not, however, a snipe hunt. Were I a more proficient student of this period of European history, it would have undoubtedly been an easier read. Still, I love the period and its characters. The Puritans, like John Owen, are here. This book caused me to appreciate, for the first time, John Milton as a political pamphleteer, rather than just as literary giant. William Penn was a close collaborator of Sidney and the republicans until, in exasperation, he left for the New World to start afresh. Though it required tediously machete-ing through 600 pages of often repetitious detail, I believe I do now understand why Jefferson places this particular rabble rouser in his pantheon of liberty.

Algernon Sidney was an English aristocrat and a man of both the Reformation and the Renaissance. He was deeply disrespectful of centralized human authority, whether reposed in a British monarch or a Roman Catholic Pope. He had read deeply of Aristotle and Cicero, the elementary books of public right then extant, and of other political philosophers like Machiavelli and Grotius. Locke was his contemporary and collaborator. He took to arms in the English Civil War and was forever ranked not only as “Colonel” Sidney, but also among the regicides responsible for the beheading of Charles I, a distinction that sent him into years of exile on the continent after his so sought-after English Republic devolved into the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. A generous Charles II ultimately permitted him to return to England during the Restoration, assuming his lessons had been learned and that the cooler head of a more mature Sidney would prevail. Clearly a regal miscalculation.

As he returned, the very combustibles that first ignited the English Civil War were once again gathering heat beneath the surface of events. A succession crisis loomed as Charles II’s heir, his brother James, was widely suspected to be a surreptitious Catholic and part of yet another “popish plot.” But of greater concern to Sidney were endless offenses of “arbitrary government” in which a self-interested sovereign continuously imposed his will on a people who had been asserting their consent since 1215. Drawing not only on the philosophy of Aristotle, Cicero, but primarily on The Bible, Sidney condemned monarchy as an illegitimate form of human government. Liberty was the state in which man was created. Reason was an endowment given him to know God and His will. Man must therefore be at liberty to pursue both God and the good that He so intends.

While his political thought drew more solidly on scripture than any other source, he nevertheless posed a challenge to that Augustinian view that human government existed principally to restrain mankind from its native impulse to sin. According to Scott, “For Sidney, as for Milton, political liberty represents the God-given opportunity for fallen mankind to rule itself in accordance with Reason rather than sin, and so in accordance with the nature of God rather than the devil.”

Man’s use of his Reason in this manner creates a “motion,” a return by God’s creatures toward their original nature, the nature from which they are fallen. “At the very least,” says Scott of Sidney’s view, “it allows individuals possessed of these qualifications for eternal life to separate themselves from the sins of others.” It is quite easy to read the long passages from Sidney’s Civil Discourses excerpted herein and see why it was so easy for Jefferson and the other framers to assert a Creator’s endowment of unalienable Rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It was Sidney who first argued so eloquently for the justice of rebellion in opposition to tyranny.

Sidney would have been well-familiar to Jefferson, Adams and the other framers, as he became a martyr to these principles. His incendiary Discourses, not to mention his fingerprints all over a plot to stir a Scottish rebellion, led him to the gallows. After paying a customary gratuity to the executioner, he offered prayers, “…glorifying thee for all thy mercies…that at last thou has permitted me to be singled out as a witness of thy truth.”

May we be so evidently grateful were we to be asked to pay such a sacrifice to tyranny and persecution in our own day.

Pater Familias

West With the Night by Beryl Markham

Remarkable.  That is the word I must use for the memoir of Beryl Markham, West With the Night.  My husband and I recently had a discussion about the word remarkable.  It literally means “worth a remark”.  The life of Beryl Markham, is not only worth remarking about, it is a truly extraordinary life, shared by an exceptional storyteller.

West With the Night is not a true autobiography. As the introduction by Sarah Wheeler indicates, we learn nothing about much of what we would expect to find in a biography, such as education, romances or marriage.  Wheeler tells us that Markham was married no less than three times and rather renown for her dalliances, but none of this in the memoir, and that was, for me, refreshing.

What this book does do is demonstrate the superlative storytelling and writing gifts of a truly extraordinary woman.  Apparently, according to the introduction by Wheeler, not all of the events described are completely true.  This is a startling, and somewhat disturbing revelation as you begin a memoir, but I can truly say that as soon as I began reading, I did not care if it was all true.  Markham’s writing (or possibly the ghost writing of one of her husbands) is so good it doesn’t matter if every detail or every story unfolded exactly as she describes. Markham makes reading about her life an adventure of the best quality, and enough is clearly true to forgive her for a little license here and there.

Markham was born in 1902 in England, and as a toddler moved with her divorced father to Kenya where he established a mill farm that earned enough income to permit him to raise and train race horses. As Sarah Wheeler says, “Like Out of Africa, Karen Blixen’s poetic memoir, West With the Night is a hymn to a continent.” Beryl lived and loved the African experience. Through Beryl’s descriptive powers, we feel the climate, we see the terrain, we imagine ourselves experiencing Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Markham was a young girl, literally, raised among the young boys of the local tribes. She learned to hunt game with a spear, she lived and thrived among wild animals of all kinds including surviving an attack by a lion, and she grew up riding thoroughbred horses, ultimately becoming a respected trainer as a young adult.

Still, the African experience, in an of itself, was not enough for this adventurous woman.  Beryl Markham was fated to become an adult at the very time that man literally took wing.  She meets a young pilot in the bush and her heart is captured by the mystique of flight. Under the instruction of this adventurous pilot, Beryl earns her wings and begins life as a Nairobi-based pilot delivering medicines and goods, rescuing wounded, carrying passengers and cargo, and most of all, scouting elephant herds for hunting safaris. Eventually, she flies to Europe, and ultimately becomes the first pilot–male or female–to fly West With the Night from England to North America.

Beryl Markham is an adventurer extraordinaire. She is a remarkable Aviatrix at the dawn of flight. She is a storyteller of the highest quality. Markham’s wit and sense of humor delight on every page. Sara Wheeler’s introduction shared that Ernest Hemingway recommended this book to a friend, saying, “This girl…can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers…I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.” Hemingway said it better than I, but I couldn’t agree more.

Grandy

Sarah Osborn’s World, The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America, by Catherine A. Brekus

Well-written biographies of Christian saints fascinate me.  Entering into the day-to-day lives of real people who loved the Lord most and best, and tried to live each day to glorify him, gives me inspiration and strength in my own life.  Of course none of the subjects of Christian biographies are perfect, and that is part of what makes them so interesting.  Every person battles personal sin, weakness, fear and doubt,  just like we all do.  But a Christian saint who has made enough of an imprint on his or her time to be memorialized by others has learned things along the way that are important to know. So when I received Sarah Osborn’s World as a Christmas gift last month, I was eager to dig in.  I was not disappointed.

Let me begin by saying that I share Sarah Osborn’s reformed protestant faith, and the author, Catherine Brekus, apparently does not. I will admit, I had concerns about whether Brekus would be able to present fairly Sarah Osborn’s belief and experience.  I am glad that I set those concerns aside and pressed on.  Though she does not share all of her subjects beliefs, Brekus writes objectively and very empathetically, and truly seems to capture the essence of Sarah’s life, beliefs and responses to her experiences. Brekus’ respect and even affection for Sarah flow through the narrative.

Though few today have heard of her, Sarah Osborn was one of the most charismatic evangelical leaders of her time–and this was the time of Whitefield and Edwards. (Osborn heard Whitefield preach, and later in life, her pastor was the brother-in-law of Jonathan Edwards.) It was the time of the American Revolution.  It was the time of burgeoning Enlightenment ideas. Brekus does a masterful job of illuminating how all of these strains of thought converged together to contribute to the birth of a new country. That said, the bulk of the work centers on the life of Sarah Osborn, which Brekus presents after painstakingly pouring through a memoir and the two thousand or so surviving pages (of an estimated 15,000) of Sarah’s diaries and letters.

Sarah was born in England in 1714 and moved to Boston in 1723,  settling in Newport, Rhode Island a few years later. Her parents were very pious, and apparently very strict. Still, it is also clear that Sarah was strong-willed and could be defiant. In her memoir, she remembered herself as a “sinful, disobedient child and rebellious youth” and she recounted periods of great despair–even to the point of contemplating suicide. Her struggles both with belief and with the realities of a very hard and poor life are painful to read. But when a despairing young girl truly seeks Christ, he is gloriously found. While her faith waxes and wanes a bit in the early years, Sarah grows to have a seemingly unshakable trust in a Sovereign Lord who indeed works all things–even the very hardest–for the good of those who love him.

Osborn was widowed from a young husband, left with a newborn, and a few years later married a much older man (with three sons) from her church whom she initially hoped would help lift her and her son from poverty. Over the years, even as desperate poverty persists, Sarah comes to be devoted to her husband, though she, by founding a private school, was to be the primary provider of the family all her life. Tragically, she loses her only biological (apparently unbelieving) son when he is just twelve, and her journey through that ordeal reveals much about her faith and character.

Though poverty stricken, working full-time as a teacher (and later boarder of students and others), as cook and homemaker, as the leader of the Female Prayer Society, all the while ministering to the other poor and needy of her church and community, what Sarah loves to do most is write.  She finds time most days to keep a journal, often writes letters to friends, and in her late twenties even composes her own memoir. All of her writing is devoted to her own faith journey and to glorifying the Lord.

One of Brekus’ real accomplishments is to give such an intimate portrait of Sarah and her faith, while at the same time illuminating the influences of the Enlightenment–both on the American spirit and on the religious traditions of the day–including evangelicalism.  While I might not draw all of the same conclusions as did Brekus, it was interesting to consider how changing thought in the secular world certainly influenced the thinking of all of the people of the time. For example, Enlightenment thinking spurred humanitarian thought.  Here’s a brief example of the kind of contextual backdrop Brekus weaves throughout the narrative:

“…a humanitarian was a religious skeptic (perhaps even an atheist) who viewed happiness as the greater good, while an evangelical was a fervent believer in Christ’s resurrection who wanted nothing more than to glorify God.  Humanitarians wanted to abolish suffering; evangelicals thought suffering could be redemptive. Humanitarians believed that humans could make the world a better place; evangelicals insisted that progress was impossible without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Humanitarians imagined humans as essentially good; evangelicals saw them as fallen and sinful.

Also fascinating is the development of Sarah Osborn’s evolution in thinking on the slave question. We see the seeds of the abolition movement beginning in evangelicalism at this time, but it is a surprisingly slow beginning. Early evangelicals were able to justify slavery, even as they evangelized slaves. One of Sarah’s greatest contributions to the spreading of the Gospel was the evangelical meetings held in her home, open to anyone and largely comprised of slaves and free blacks. For several years 500 or more came every week (on different days) to these meetings.

When not more than a handful of women had been published on any subject in America, Sarah permitted a personal letter she wrote, which became titled:  The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity to be published (anonymously). Ultimately, her writings and a biography by her pastor Samuel Hopkins (Edward’s brother-in-law) became an inspiration for many-men and women alike– who wanted to grow in their faith and trust in God. This biography and Sarah’s own writings give a wonderful window into times and the life of the amazing woman so many of the faithful held in such esteem.

The theme of freedom was rife throughout the politics of the time–both in the political revolution and the question of slavery–but for Sarah Osborn, throughout her life, true freedom would always be found in her Savior, Jesus Christ. This is a fascinating and inspiring book for any who are interested in American history, the reformed evangelical movement or simply desiring to grow in personal faith.

Grandy

Millard Fillmore, by Robert J. Scarry

Several years ago, I began an ambitious reading project to consider the definitive biographies of each of the American Presidents, committing to read them in the order in which they served. I can’t recall when I began. I suspect it’s now been a decade, and I have only made my way through thirteen of them. The remaining thirty-plus biographies and my own life expectancy are in a foot race with one another.

A Yale professor of history writing for American Heritage in 1988, observed, “Even to discuss Chester Arthur or Millard Fillmore is to overrate them.” While Fillmore is often relegated to the weak-kneed, timid triumvirate of pre-civil war Presidents, including his successors Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, what reading Scarry’s fine if often hagiographic biography of the thirteenth President evidences, as have the biographies I have thus far considered, is that no one occupies the Presidency without possessing personal qualities sufficient to earn them the respect, favor and approbation of their fellow citizens. Fillmore being no exception.

His story is not unlike Lincoln’s and so many other’s whose humble origins give weight to the maxim, “In America, anyone can grow up to be President.” His birthplace, too, was a log cabin. He was cradled as a baby in a sap sling in the untamed woodlands of central New York, the setting of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Like Lincoln he lacked formal education, but was a zealous autodidact with a life long love of books. Also, like the Rail Splitter, he read the law and established himself through industry as a respected advocate before the local bar, and ultimately an obvious candidate for public service.

Scarry’s Fillmore is presented as being among those types who ascend to national prominence by simply being decent and honorable public servants. McKinley, Taft, Coolidge and Ford come to mind; men seemingly without burning ambition or lust for power. Just good men. Fillmore also seemed to be able to play successfully the rough and tumble, high stakes game of New York politics without being too tightly torqued to the political machines of his day; “mavericky,” like Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, or seriously like John McCain.

Long maligned by historians as a dull and colorless figure, he nevertheless held his own amidst the personalities of his day. He was both Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and Speaker of the House in a day when giants like Clay, Webster and Calhoun roamed the land. His role in shaping the Tariff of 1842 was central and important to America’s early economic progress. It is most doubtful that an ineffectual milquetoast could have enjoyed an ascendancy during such trying times. His subsequent service as Comptroller of New York State, a position then almost as powerful as Governor, established him as a big vote-getter in a battleground state, and propelled him on to the national stage with Zachary Taylor on the Whig ticket in 1848. Old Rough and Ready’s unexpected death in 1850 caused Fillmore’s succession to the Presidency, making him only the second veep to have been thusly called.

In fairness, his three-plus years as a successor President are probably underrated. He preserved the Union. His foreign policy was sure and forceful. He achieved budget surpluses every year in office, while advancing valuable public works: telegraph lines, canals, railroads. His administration was one of the few concluded without hint of corruption or scandal.

The book presents a rich picture of American expansion, invention and international stature in the post-Jacksonian period. Among its interesting subplots were Fillmore’s unsuccessful attempt to return to the White House in the Election of 1856 as the nominee of the nativist, anti-papist, strict constructionist American Party, reflecting hints of the constitutionalist fringe on our contemporary political landscape. Also intriguing is the author’s consideration of Fillmore’s social life after he became a relatively young widower immediately following his presidency. Even his historical critics concede him to be one of the most handsome men to have occupied the Presidency. Victorian language in correspondence shared between Fillmore and several notable female contemporaries, including noted social reformer Dorthea Dix, leaves both researcher and reader unsure of whether Fillmore was simply a very kind gentlemen or a most accomplished Lothario.

1850 was momentous year for a man to become President of the United States. Henry Clay’s omnibus Compromise of 1850 had been unbundled by Stephen A. Douglas and passed in component parts including the Fugitive Slave Act, empowering federal marshals to cooperate with Southern slaveowners in the recovery of runaway slaves. The new President Fillmore, passionately devoted to the preservation of the Union, signed the Fugitive Slave Act, thus earning him the reprobation of Northern abolitionists without reciprocating affection, at least in the form of political capital, from southern constituencies.

Do the times makes the man, or do men make the times? This is one of the great questions of the study of history. Had Fillmore not cooperated in executing The Compromise of 1850, it is quite reasonable to speculate that the Civil War may have been fought a decade earlier, before the Northern states had amassed another ten years of population, industrial capacity and financial wherewithal. Who knows?

Had there not been a Millard Fillmore, maybe there wouldn’t have been an Abraham Lincoln.

Pater Familias

Groucho: The Life & Times of Julius Henry Marx, by Stefan Kanfer

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx

Celebrity biographies ordinarily command little of my reading attention. With so many books to read, and so little time in which to do so, I haven’t been willing to afford much time to retracing the already well-publicized exploits of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the illustrated biography of Betty White or the shining legacy of Elizabeth Taylor, all recent best sellers. But when a fellow bibliophile commended to me Stefan Kanfer’s Groucho, I caved entirely out of respect for my friend’s judgment of a good read.

Kanfer does very, very well with narrative non-fiction. It is book to be enjoyed as much for the writing as it is for its subject. The late Elton Trueblood once told me, “Every person has a story to tell.” Kanfer tells Groucho Marx’s story with scholarly discipline, good humor and the kind of appeal to the imagination that permits the reader to be transported delightfully to different places and times.

Groucho is a story of 20th century America. West European Jews immigrate to America. the daughter of a ventriloquist and harp player marries a aspiring tailor in New York City. Show business is in her genetic structure. Minnie Marx, as stereotypical a domineering Jewish Mother as the art of stereotyping might yield, like a force of nature prods and pushes her five sons Leonard, Adolph, Julius, Milton and Herbert into show business careers. Taking a ride in the popularity of a turn of the century comic strip entitled “Sherlocko, the Monk,” the boys adopt the stage names by which we remember them: Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo — The Marx Brothers.

For those with an interest in the evolution of media an pop culture, this is a fascinating story as it follows the brothers along a transcontinental vaudeville schedule, back to Broadway, to Hollywood and the all-new motion picture “talkies”, to radio and finally to TV, each representing alternately the next new, new tech thing. It is also almost a pillar-to-post of 20th century America history viewed through the cockeyes of one its most notable jesters: Ellis Island, Roaring 20’s, Great Depression, two World Wars, booming post-war prosperity, cultural revolution, Vietnam, Watergate and more, all backdropped by Broadway, Hollywood, studio and network moguls, and manifold other jesters, musicians, divas, mobsters and occasionally starving artists.

All that said, as is often the case of with many comic geniuses, it is a sad story. The biography of a entirely worldly man living a nearly nine-decade life of insecurity, dependent on the applause of others as much as he was oxygen. For as many laughs and smiles he engendered in others, Groucho Marx was an essentially lonely, misanthropic man who never truly knew the joy of a good marriage, though he ventured three times, and who died alone estranged from wives and children, abused and swindled by a nefarious caregiver.

Still he was Groucho.

“The garbage man is outside.”

“Tell him we don’t want any.”

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don’t know”

“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll make an exception.”

&c., &c., &c.