Join us Fri., April 21, 12 pm for lunch at High Cotton (199 East Bay St.), as Paul Starobin discusses his new book Madness Rules the Hours (Public Affairs, hb., 296 pp., $27). Tickets are $31 for the three-course luncheon and talk, or $47 with a signed copy of the book.
In Madness Rules the Hour, Paul Starobin tells the story of how Charleston succumbed to a fever for war. He examines the wily propagandists, the ambitious politicians, the gentlemen merchants and their wives and daughters, the compliant pastors, and the white workingmen who waged a violent and exuberant revolution in the name of slavery and Southern independence. They devoured the Mercury, the incendiary newspaper run by a fanatical father and son; made holy the deceased John C. Calhoun; and adopted “Le Marseillaise” as a rebellious anthem. A portrait of a culture in crisis, Madness Rules the Hour is an insightful investigation into the folly that fractured the Union and started the Civil War.
He grew up in Worcester, Mass. and graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. in 1979. Starobin received a Masters of Science degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1981. He was an international journalism fellow for the Knight Foundation journalism program in 1998. He lives with his wife and two children in Massachusetts.
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