Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2014: The real story of Lady Liberty doesn't come close to what Americans have been taught. The Statue of Liberty wasn’t designed as a symbol of freedom; it began life as a sculpture of an Egyptian slave. It wasn’t a "gift" from the French; it was an orphan in need of a home. Elizabeth Mitchell's myth-busting Liberty’s Torch is a hoot of a story packed with entertaining cameos by Victor Hugo, Ulysses Grant, Thomas Edison, and more. At center stage is the maddeningly egotistical artiste Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a snobbish boor who disliked America and her "subpar" people. Yet, through persistence and will, he found a home for his statue in New York Harbor and wooed newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer into raising money for the pedestal on Bedlow's Island, a former military fort. (One of Pulitzer's fund-raising contests yielded the poem by Emma Lazarus that’s inscribed on the statue's base: "Give me your tired, your poor...") After nearly twenty years of construction, with the artist using his mother as the model for the statue's face, Liberty--by far the tallest statue in the world, at over 300 feet--was unveiled to near unanimous adoration on October 28, 1886. Relying on Bartholdi's diaries and letters, Mitchell reveals the unlikely truth behind a sculptor’s obsession becoming a nation's icon. --Neal Thompson