NONFICTION
The Liberty Bell, by Gary B. Nash, $24
It is an unlikely central character for a book — a silent, 258-year-old bell. Yet in “The Liberty Bell,” a biography of our nation’s “nearly sacred totem,” Gary Nash provides a stirring historical account of the icon that is America’s “Rosetta Stone or . . . Holy Grail.”
Nash describes the bell’s journey in 1752 from England to Philadelphia and its centuries-long ascension to fame as a harbinger of freedom. The bell gets its name from its inscription, which comes from the Bible’s Book of Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty Thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof.”
Originally cast by the venerable Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the bell was to be placed in a tower above the statehouse in Philadelphia, but it broke upon arrival. Local artisans recast it, and in August 1753, the bell tolled for the first time to summon members of the legislature.
Nash addresses myths surrounding the bell, including that it pealed after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 (false), that it was nearly scrapped for junk (true) and that it cracked in 1835, when it rang out to announce the death of Chief Justice John Marshall (false. Nash asserts it more likely cracked in 1843, when it rang for the anniversary of Washington’s birthday that year).
Nash spares no detail, including fascinating anecdotes — both Confederate President Jefferson Davis and civil-rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have stood in its presence — and bizarre asides: A best-selling T-shirt in the City of Brotherly Love reads, “I came to Philly for the crack.”
Nash is a UCLA history professor, and the book reads like an archaic college lecture, but his subject is surprisingly interesting and well-deserving of the attention.
NONFICTION
The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America, by Charles J. Ogletree, $25
The reversal in the title of this book — the presumption, of course, is supposed to be one of innocence — has to do with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., on July 16, 2009, in Cambridge, Mass., after a neighbor alerted police to what she thought might be a break-in.
Other salient facts: The house broken into was Gates’ own — he had forced his way in because the front door was jammed; he is a Harvard professor; and he is African-American. President Barack Obama commented on the incident, accusing the Cambridge police of acting “stupidly” and then inviting both Gates and the cop to join him at the White House for what became known as the Beer Summit.
Ogletree, who teaches law at Harvard, represented Gates in the controversy, and by his own admission, “The Presumption of Guilt” has an agenda: to place his client’s case in the context of the racial profiling that is often the lot of black Americans.
Among the examples he gives is a practice that held sway in Maryland during the 1990s, when police were trying to intercept crack cocaine on its way through the state: “Police reports indicated that 70 to 75 percent of people searched on I-95 were African-Americans, even though African- Americans represented only 17 percent of those driving on the highway and only 17 percent of traffic violators.”
After Robert Wilkins, a member of a prominent black family, complained, the state agreed to modify the policy.
The book ends with a long catalog of those who have been subjected to racial stereotyping. Among the complainants are actor Lou Gossett Jr., who won an Oscar only to be offered what he considered “derogatory” roles; and the incumbent attorney general, Eric Holder, who recalls being stopped while driving in the 1970s, when he was a college student, by a police officer who told him to open the car’s trunk because “he wanted to search it for weapons.”
