I’ve been a fan of Mallory O’Meara for several books now, and her latest, Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood's First Stuntwoman did not disappoint. The subject of the book is fascinating: the teenage girl who got her start doing horse tricks with Wild West shows in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, moved to Hollywood at the dawn of the movie industry, and spent decades as a stuntwoman risking her life performing all sorts of amazing feats. Equally entertaining is the look at the history of women in Hollywood, which has been largely buried.
O’Meara has a gift for revealing strands of women’s history through books on popular culture. I reviewed a previous book, Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol, here in Nonfiction Views back in 2022, and after you’re done reading here you should make yourself a cocktail and click over to revisit that review. Girly Drinks covered women’s history from prehistoric days up to today, while her previous book, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, also dealt with Hollywood. In that book, we meet the woman who designed the classic monster from the 1954 movie The Creature From the Black Lagoon, only to have her credit for the accomplishment stolen and to disappear from film history for decades.
In today’s book, our heroine does indeed have a long and illustrious career, but once again a major theme of the book is how women have been erased from film history. As O’Meara writes, the very earliest days of filmmaking appealed to the upper classes who were interested in this new technology. But after the rich became bored, the second stage of the film industry was built on entertaining the lower classes. Since the rich and powerful pay little attention to the poor and powerless, there was a tremendous amount of freedom in making movies, including tremendous opportunities for women and minorities.
By 1909, women were working nearly every position in film. They were writers, directors, producers, film cutters, editors, musicians, retouchers, set designers, publicists, casting directors, department managers, title writers, molders, plasterers, etc.
And this:
Would you believe that over a hundred years ago, during the fabled “good old days” that conservative politicians are always trying to wrench the country back to, women were making movies about sexuality, oppression, abortion, and women’s rights? You bet your corset they did.
And this:
According to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, as of 2020, women in the American film industry make up only 17 percent of screenwriters. But between 1900 and 1925, female screenwriters outnumbered male screenwriters 10 to 1. Let’s repeat that, let’s shout it from the rooftops, let’s put a neon sign in Times Square. A hundred years ago, female screenwriters outnumbered male screenwriters 10 to 1. How can a single fact be so absolutely amazing and so absolutely infuriating at the same time.
(Side note: The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film is run by the University of California San Diego, which is facing a hiring freeze and large budget cuts due to loss of federal funding under Trump. At least 50 researchers at the university have received government notices of grant money being cut off. I don’t know if any of this specifically affects the Center for the Study of Women, but we know that under Trump’s DEI crackdown, anything that promotes women’s contributions in any field is a target for suppression.)
Well, once filmmaking started to become a profitable business, the rich and powerful became interested again. Women’s contributions were diminished, and censorship increased.
The book covers a lot of film history as well as feminist history, but always circles back to the fascinating character of stuntwoman Helen Gibson. Gibson left home in her teens to join a Wild West show, where she excelled at trick riding. Still in her teens, she moved to Hollywood to begin her career in movies.
Her very first appearance was in 1915, as a stunt double in new episodes of the hit movie serial The Hazard of Helen
in which a couple of bank robbers hold up the train station and force Helen to give them train tickets. They then lock her inside the attic and board the train. Helen watches from the window and just as the train is about to speed away, she smashes the glass, climbs out onto the steep roof, and with a perfectly timed leap, lands onto the last train car. She crawls along the roof of the speeding train until she gets to the engine. After jumping inside the engine room, Helen tells the crew that they’ve got a couple of bank robbers aboard. When Helen and the crew rush to accost the criminals, they find them about to jump out the window. Helen, however, will not let them escape so easily. She, too, jumps out the window and lands on the ground. Helen proceeds to fist fight both men until the train is halted and the crew can come to help her.
Standing on the roof, feeling the rumble of the oncoming train car, Helen might not have realized that she was about to make history. The moment she jumped, the moment her feet left the shingles, white dress billowing, Helen...became the first ever female stunt double in American film.
And the landing? She nailed it.
Stay tuned, folks, because as our book continues, we will see Helen Gibson perform amazing feats as well as suffer a fair share of financial and personal setbacks. Nevertheless, she continued navigating the ins and outs of the ever-changing Hollywood studio system. She turned 40 in 1932, and was still doing stunts. But soon her time had passed. In some of the great westerns like John Ford’s 1938 Stagecoach, she was just an uncredited extra. Her last film role, also as an uncredited extra, was in another John Ford classic: 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
A famous line from that film is “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” O’Meara does a wonderful job presenting both the facts and the legend.
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Bonus photo I can’t resist sharing of the time I got to ride on the roof of a train. No stunts, however, unless you include ducking when the train passed through tunnels. The train was the Devil’s Nose route in Ecuador, and in 1988 they still allowed you to ride on top as the train made its way down a long series of steep switchbacks, but that ended when in the early 2000s, well, a Japanese couple was decapitated while riding on top of the train. Maybe just riding it was a stunt after all.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America, by Joe Kloc. A deeply personal nine-year account of the lives of the “anchor-outs”—an unhoused community living off the California coast on abandoned boats—that explores the struggles and resilience of those surviving on the fringes of society.
In the wake of the financial crisis, the number of anchor-outs living in Richardson Bay more than doubles as their long-simmering feud with the wealthy residents of Marin County—one of the richest counties in the country—finally boils over. Many of the shoreline’s well-heeled yacht club members and mansion owners blame their unhoused neighbors for rising crime on the waterfront. Meanwhile, local politicians accuse them of destroying the Bay Area’s marine ecosystem and demand their eviction. When the pandemic breaks out, a slew of city and regional authorities heed the call: they seize and crush the anchor-outs’ boats, arresting dissenters as they dismantle one of the nation’s oldest unhoused communities.
- Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It, by Andre M. Perry. Perry draws on extensive research and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Ranging from property, business, and wealth to education, health, and social mobility, Black Power Scorecard moves across the country, evaluating people’s ability to set the rules of the game and calculating how that translates into the ultimate means of power—life itself, and the longevity of Black communities. Along the way, Perry identifies woefully overlooked areas of investment that could close the racial gap and benefit everyone. "Black Power Scorecard is a must-read. It is engaging, analytical, and presents common sense solutions, looking at homeownership, business creation, family formation, and geography as either forces for good, which will enhance Black self-determination and power, or as the means of stripping wealth from Black people, along with their voices and votes."
—Dorothy Brown, author of The Whiteness of Wealth
- Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality, by Deborah N. Archer. The success of the Civil Rights movement and the fall of Jim Crow in the 1960s did not mean the end of segregation. The status quo would not be so easily dismantled. With state-sanctioned racism no longer legal, officials across the country—not just in the South—turned to transportation infrastructure to keep Americans divided. A wealthy white neighborhood could no longer be "protected" by racial covenants and segregated shops, but a multilane road, with no pedestrian crossings, could be built along its border to make it difficult for people from a lower-income community to visit. Highways could not be routed through Black neighborhoods based on the race of their residents, but those neighborhoods’ lower property values—a legacy of racial exclusion—could justify their destruction. A new suburb could not be for "whites only," but planners could refuse to extend sidewalks from Black communities into white ones. “Deborah Archer offers an unsparing assessment of how twentieth-century transportation decisions have harmed Black communities, drained Black wealth, and shredded cohesive Black enclaves across the country. It is a quintessential example of how systemic racism affects contemporary Black economic vitality, richly documented and explained by Archer.” — Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
- The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West, by Shaun Walker. More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “illegals.” Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, as well as archival research in more than a dozen countries, Shaun Walker brings this history to life in a page-turning tour de force that takes us into the heart of the KGB’s most secretive program. I reviewed one of Patrick Strickland’s earlier books,The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, here in Nonfiction Views back in 2022. It doesn’t appear to have come out on paperback, and the hardcover is currently unavailable, which is too bad because it is very timely still. The audiobook is still available thought our affiliate Libro.fm.
- Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, by Jessica Slice. Despite evidence to the contrary, nondisabled people and systems often worry that disabled people cannot keep kids safe and cared for, labeling disabled parents “unfit,” but disabled parents and culture provide valuable lessons for rejecting societal rules that encourage perfectionism and lead to isolation.
Blending her experience of becoming disabled in adulthood and later becoming a parent with interviews, social research, and disability studies, Slice describes what the landscape is like for disabled parents. From expensive or non-existent adaptive equipment to inaccessible healthcare and schools to the terror of parenting while disabled in public and threat of child protective services, Slice uncovers how disabled parents, out of necessity, must reject the rules and unrealistic expectations that all parents face. She writes about how disabled parents are often more prepared than nondisabled parents to navigate the uncertainty of losing control over bodily autonomy. In doing so, she highlights the joy, creativity, and radical acceptance that comes with being a disabled parent.
- You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece, by Patrick Strickland. In 2012, Greece’s far-right political party the Golden Dawn were building a significant street presence in Greece. Over the previous decade they had grown from a tiny group of neofascist brawlers to a formidable vigilante force responsible for multiple murders, street fights and shootings.
On the eve of the 2012 election one of their candidates said that the “knives will come out after the elections.” And the knives did come out. Golden Dawn became a significant parliamentary presence and used it as a platform to escalate their terror campaigns against migrants and leftists across the country. They also became an inspiration for far-right groups across Europe and the Americas.
- What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, by Malcolm Harris. Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?
In What's Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What's Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns. “In What’s Left, Malcolm Harris has written a repair manual for life on our rapidly warming planet. It’s smart, practical, and it will change how you think about our collective future.”—Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First
- The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement, by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue. October, 1997. Late one night in Fairbanks, Alaska, a passerby finds a teenager unconscious, collapsed on the edge of the road, beaten nearly beyond recognition. Two days later, he dies in the hospital. His name is John Gilbert Hartman and he's just turned 15 years old. The police quickly arrest four suspects, all under the age of 21 and of Alaska Native and American Indian descent. Police lineup witnesses, trials follow, and all four men receive lengthy prison terms. Case closed.
But journalist Brian Patrick O'Donoghue can't put the story out of his mind. When the opportunity arises to teach a class on investigative reporting, he finally digs into what happened to the "Fairbanks Four." A relentless search for the truth ensues as O'Donoghue and his students uncover the lies, deceit, and prejudice that put four innocent young men in jail.
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Now, the People!: Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In summer 2024, France stood on the brink of a far-right takeover. But the disaster was avoided thanks to a New Popular Front of parties headed by long-standing left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. It won the most seats in the snap parliamentary elections, running on a radical, progressive, inclusive agenda, in large part inspired by Mélenchon’s presidential programme. Now, the People! details his vision of revolution in our time.
In this book, Mélenchon embarks on a survey of human history from its earliest moments to the crisis-ridden present. He outlines his vision for a new strategy for radical parties to reach the highest levels of government and peacefully transform the capitalist system: a citizens’ revolution.
- The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines, by Jonathan Horn. For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops whose fate he insisted on sharing even when it meant becoming the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese. In The Fate of the Generals, bestselling author Jonathan Horn brings together the story of two men who received the same medal but found honor on very different paths. "One of the very best World War II books in many years! In The Fate of the Generals, Jonathan Horn weaves together brilliantly the story of two senior generals faced with excruciatingly difficult decisions that no American commander should ever have to make. Distinguished by spellbinding prose and exceptional research, The Fate of the Generals restores Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright to his proper place in history beside Douglas MacArthur. A great read!" —General David Petraeus
- In Blood, Flowers Bloom: A World War II Story of Valor and Forgiveness Across Generations, by Samantha Bresnahan. How do we remember war? How do we forgive? In Blood, Flowers Bloom illuminates one of the last untold stories of World War II, the common act of soldiers, sailors and Marines taking their enemy's possessions after victory. This is the story of a single Japanese battle flag found among the belongings of a long-passed American WWII veteran, originally belonging to a Japanese soldier. In telling the story of this flag, and its journey from battle in the Philippines to a shed in upstate New York, award-winning writer, Samantha Bresnahan reveals the way in which objects represent generations of trauma, imperialism, and memory. "In Blood, Flowers Bloom connects the dramatic personal stories of a handful of U.S. and Japanese soldiers and their families during and after horrific battles of the Pacific War. Simultaneously heartbreaking and deeply restorative, the book is filled with moving details that bring each character, battle, and scrap of memory to life. It offers renewed understanding of how that war was waged by military leaders but fought by millions of young men, illuminates the legacy of trauma and loss on both sides, and demonstrates the power of deceased soldiers’ personal belongings, left behind on a battlefield, to create intimate, cross-cultural connection and healing on both sides of the Pacific." —Susan Southard, author of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
- The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam, by Vinh Nguyen. With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat were Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished. Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for the story of his father. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To come to terms with the past, Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for decades in broken hearts and guarded silences. The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and the lives that could have been.
- Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life, by Dan Nadel. Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic, as iconic as Walt Disney or Charles Schulz. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, a curator and writer specializing in comics and art, shares how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact. More than just a biography of an iconic cartoonist, Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America.
- In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, by Heather Christle. On a recent visit to London's Kew Gardens, Christle’s mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather's own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager. Her private, British mother’s revelation—a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship—propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother's past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family's "birthday hill" in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.
- Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery, by Mark Synnott. Only a few hundred vessels have ever transited the Northwest Passage, stretching through Canada’s north from Maine to Alaska—and substantially fewer have completed the treacherous journey in a fiberglass-hulled boat like Polar Sun. But Mark Synnott was determined to add his name to the list, and in doing so, also investigate a 175-year-old mystery, that of what happened to the legendary captain Sir John Franklin and his crew aboard the legendary HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. In this pulse-pounding travelogue, Mark Synnott paints a vivid portrait of the modern-day Arctic like you’ve never seen before. With human-caused climate change warming the region twice as fast as any other part of our planet, Synnott offers a fresh and exciting look at the journey itself, but also of the history of the land and the people who live there today. At the same time, he searches for the tomb of Franklin, who, along with his entire 128-man crew, perished after their ships became trapped in the ice near King William Island.
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