Here Is Where

Starred review from February 11, 2013
Carroll (War Letters) takes readers on an eye-opening and entertaining grand tour of America in this lively exploration of lesser-known or overlooked historical sites. From birthplaces to gravesites and high points to low, from those that inspired inventions to those that sparked change, he leaves no stone unturned or landmark unvisited. Bite-sized chapters focusing on a specific destination as well as Carroll’s own personal journey make this an addictive experience—each entry sheds a little more light on the people and locations we’ve forgotten. The reasons for such obscurity vary, but common threads emerge: these places “evoke shame, they’re inaccessible, the original structure is gone, there’s no funding to mark them, they’ve been overshadowed by other events....” Carroll’s task, “to tackle the larger question of what makes them worth remembering at all,” is thus admirable and illuminating. His accessible and informative style invites readers to join him on his quixotic quest to visit everywhere from Niihau, Hawaii (where an incident sparked the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII), to Hart Island (New York City’s infamous potter’s field) and so much more. Part travelogue, part history, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in America’s past. Agent: Miriam Altshuler, Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency.

March 1, 2013
From the editor of several popular collections of letters (Behind the Lines, 2005, etc.), a down-home account of his travels in search of neglected historical sites. There's no particular rhyme or reason to the places Carroll chose to visit, which range from the tiny Hawaiian island where a Japanese pilot crash-landed after bombing Pearl Harbor to Daniel Boone's grave, which may not actually hold his remains and which gives rise to a long discourse on other famous people who were buried, dug up and buried again elsewhere. This grab-bag approach suits Carroll, whose appreciation of history is sincere but shallow. At one point, in a Cleveland bar that stands on the site of a movie theater whose showing of a risque French film led to the Supreme Court's landmark 1964 ruling on obscenity, the author got into a conversation with a patron "about how boring we thought [history] was growing up." Now that he loves history, the author's strategy for converting others is to make it as unintimidating as possible: He offers chatty descriptions of his journeys and of his guides to the various sites, who were often just amateur historians like Carroll, and he makes eloquent pleas for the importance of such forgotten episodes as the Wyoming race riot that killed dozens of Chinese coal miners in 1885. Still, it's odd that he spends so much time at places where no physical traces remain of the incidents he wishes to commemorate. "The stories, not the physical sites, are what's paramount," he avers, a claim that would be more convincing if it weren't immediately followed by, "and they become more indelibly impressed in our minds when we travel to where they occurred." Since Carroll is a good storyteller and has done an impressive amount of research, his lack of rigor and aw-shucks manner will grate only on readers who prefer a more systematic approach to history. Amiable pop history.

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April 1, 2013
During the Civil War, at a railroad stop in New Jersey, Abraham Lincoln's son was saved from a near accident by John Wilkes Boothe's brother. Historian Carroll had traveled through that spot many times, unaware of its significance; once he learned of it, he wondered how many more such places there were across the U.S. He set out on a journey via car, train, plane, helicopter, boat, and bike to find historically significant places that have long been forgotten. Among his discoveries were a Civil Warera maritime disaster on the Mississippi River that was worse than the sinking of the Titanic but was overshadowed by the assassination of Lincoln two weeks earlier, and the crash-landing of a Japanese plane on the private island of Niihau in December 1941 that led to divided loyalties as Japanese-born residents protected the pilot from Hawaiian natives, even as they learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. From coast to coast, Carroll presents completely fascinating and rambling history lessons, as well as the quirks that account for what goes into the history books and what is left out and later forgotten.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)