Swanson, James L.

views updated

Swanson, James L.

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: University of Chicago, graduated; University of California at Los Angeles, law degree.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Washington, DC. Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins Publishing, 10 E. 53rd St.,New York, NY 10010.

CAREER:

Attorney, historian, and author. Heritage Foundation, former senior legal scholar at Center for Legal and Judicial Studies; Cato Institute, former senior fellow in constitutional studies; U.S.International Trade Commission, former assistant to the chair; United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, former clerk for chief judge Douglas H. Ginsburg; Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, former special assistant. Member of advisory committee of the National Abraham LincolnBicentennial Commission.

MEMBER:

National Book Critics Circle.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Moot Court Distinguished Advocate Award, UCLA School of Law.

WRITINGS:

(With Karen Essex) Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend, additional contributions by Bettie Page, General Publishing Group (Los Angeles, CA), 1995, reprinted with foreword by Bettie Page, 1998.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of (novel), Pacific Trade Winds (Mukilito, WA), 1999.

(With Daniel R. Weinberg) Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution: An Illustrated History, Arena Editions (Santa Fe, NM), 2001.

Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer,William Morrow (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Weekly Standard, Washington Times, and American Heritage. Founding editor, First Amendment Law Handbook; former editor-in-chief,Cato Supreme Court Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Attorney James L. Swanson is also a novelist and researcher in pop culture history. A Lincoln scholar, he is a historian whose work has focused on the notorious band of conspirators, and the infamous murderer, who were responsible for the death of Abraham Lincoln. In Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, Swanson "writes a meticulously detailed account of Booth's assassination of Lincoln and what the actor-turned-assassin did in the days following the shooting," commented reviewer Katherine Krog in the Miami Herald. "Swanson's prose never soars, but his narrative is filled with the telling details wrought of good research." Unfolding a narrative that USA Today reviewer Richard Willing called "a rattling good read" and "a surprisingly suspenseful one," Swanson tells about the events leading up to Lincoln's assassination, the deed itself, and particularly the exhaustive search for Booth and his allies in the days following the killing. Swanson "lets Booth's flawed, flamboyant character push the tale along," Willing noted, resulting in a portrait of a "diabolically fascinating Booth, neither a cat's-paw in a Confederate government plot, as Lincoln's contemporaries believed, nor the ego-driven loner" he sometimes seems to be from modern perspectives. Although some critics have remarked that Swanson's focus on Booth glorifies the notorious assassin, Legal Times contributor Tony Mauro observed that Swanson's work instead "humanizes actor Booth and his quest for one last dramatic triumph" in a world that had changed so dramatically for him. Entertainment Weekly reviewer Benjamin Svetkey further remarked: "Swanson's book does one other thing no textbook ever could: He makes the characters in this great American tragedy actually seem human. Even Booth comes across as viscerally real, especially to anyone familiar with those who still practice his curious profession."

With the earlier work Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution: An Illustrated History, Swanson and collaborator Daniel R. Weinberg offer a comprehensive collection of reprinted primary source material covering the trial and execution of the conspirators in Lincoln's assassination. The material includes more than two hundred contemporary newspaper front pages, wanted posters, letters and correspondence, pamphlets, woodcuts, and more than three hundred photographs of John Wilkes Booth and his collaborators, four of whom (Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the U.S. government), were hanged for their role in Lincoln's death. Thomas Mallon, writing in the Wilson Quarterly, called the work a "weirdly handsome pictorial recreation of the conspirators' hooded imprisonment, military trial, and, for four of the eight, quick execution." The book "manages to transcend its immediate historical importance to become something artistically unique," observed aPublishers Weekly reviewer. In the immediacy and close-up humanity of the photographs and other materials, "we see hints of how the assassination and its aftermath were lived by its participants, behind the screen of sensationalism," commented Andrey Slivka in the New York Times Book Review.

Swanson has also published works other than those about Lincoln. With Karen Essex he explores the life and career of one of the early queens of soft-core men's magazines and stag video reels in Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend. Page was an extremely popular and ubiquitous pin-up model in the 1950s whose popularity waned but was never completely extinguished, even today. She combined a beaming smile, a curvaceous body, and an intermingled, even paradoxical sense of the innocent and illicit to create an image that entertained many men of a previous generation; her images have become archetypal in late twentieth-century pop culture. Swanson and Essex provide biographical information on Page, plus interviews, anecdotes, and reproductions of numerous photographs. "What lifts her photos above the blankness and the deadness of so much porn and pseudoporn is the stubborn, exuberant persistence of a self, the irreducible core of a personality shining through," commented Margaret Talbot in the New Republic.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Photo, January-February, 2002, Jack Crager, review of Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution: An Illustrated History, p. 73.

Booklist, January 1, 2006, Gilbert Taylor, review ofManhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, p. 36.

California Bookwatch, May, 2006, review ofManhunt.

Entertainment Weekly, February 10, 2006, Benjamin Svetkey, "Booth Be Known: In Manhunt, James L. Swanson Details the Dramatic Search for Lincoln's Murderer," p. 138.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2005, review ofManhunt, p. 1270.

Lancet, April 6, 2002, David Sharp, "The Physician and Lincoln's Murder," review of Lincoln's Assassins,p. 1259.

Legal Times, April 24, 2006, Tony Mauro, review ofManhunt.

Library Journal, January 1, 2006, John Carver Edwards, review of Manhunt, p. 135.

M2 Best Books, February 13, 2002, "Time-Travellers Meet Sam Spade in The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of."

Miami Herald, February 22, 2006, Katherine Krog, "Manhunt: Details Bring to Life Booth's Assassination of Lincoln."

New Republic, September 8, 1997, Margaret Talbot, review of Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend, p. 29.

New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2002, Andrey Slivka, "A Media Event," review ofLincoln's Assassins, p. 23; March 19, 2006, Dwight Garner, review of Manhunt, p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, October 29, 2001, review ofLincoln's Assassins, p. 48; December 12, 2005, review of Manhunt, p. 51.

USA Today, February 9, 2006, Richard Willing, "Manhunt a Rousing Good Read," p. 06D.

Washingtonian, February, 2006, William O'Sullivan, "Lincoln and Lovers," interview with James L. Swanson.

Wilson Quarterly, spring, 2002, Thomas Mallon, "Catching the Conspirators," review of Lincoln's Assassins, p. 112.