A star-packed series based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand sees a Nantucket wedding derailed when a body washes ashore at the Winbury family compound the morning of the planned ceremony. As crisp as their linens are, it seems the well-heeled Winburys are hiding some dirty laundry, setting up a late-summer whodunit in Hilderbrand’s trademark New England milieu. Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Eve Hewson, and Dakota Fanning headline. Thursday, Sept. 5, Netflix

by Anthony J. Kaye and Gregory P. Downs

Nat Turner’s role in America’s struggle over slavery is such that “few names carry such a weight of both heroism and shuddering fear,” said David W. Blight in the Los Angeles Times. In 1831, inspired by religious visions, the 31-year-old laborer-preacher led a small band of other enslaved people to revolt and kill roughly 55 white men, women, and children in southern Virginia. Most of what we know today about Turner’s life and his role in the largest slave uprising in U.S. history comes from The Confessions of Nat Turner, a transcription of jailhouse interviews that became a best-seller after Turner’s execution. Gregory Downs, completing work begun by his late fellow historian Anthony Kaye, now offers a portrait placing Nat, as they call him, within the tradition of biblical prophets. It’s a framing long ignored by academia, but one that fits the highly religious era of the rebellion.

Though deeply researched and “richly informative,” the book doesn’t offer a comprehensive portrait, said Walton Muyumba in The Boston Globe. “This is a problem endemic to the subject,” since the authors are skeptical that even The Confessions of Nat Turner is an accurate representation of Nat’s voice. To put Nat’s actions in context, Kaye and Downs set him alongside biblical warrior-prophets such as John of Patmos and Joshua, and in league with contemporaneous Black Methodist leaders such as David Walker, whose writings “implored Black people to initiate a global war against slavery.” Raised a Methodist, Nat was intelligent, literate, and so devout and prone to visions that many around him believed him a prophet “intended for some greater purpose.” After slaveholder Samuel Turner died in 1822 without freeing Nat, the young man was shuffled between other Turner family homes. Meanwhile, his visions grew more intense, and, after believing he saw a sign in an 1831 solar eclipse, he plotted the revolt, motivated both by his prophetic imagination and “personal rage about his continued enslavement and the sale of his wife and son.” 

Kaye and Downs succeed in lifting Nat Turner “out of received history, amplifying his individuality,” said Jim Kates in The Arts Fuse. But their book is “so focused on his immediate religious environment that it neglects the broad setting.” We’re told little of how the plantation system worked, or about the crackdown on Black literacy and worship that followed the revolt. Still, Nat Turner, Black Prophet is “a significant addition to our understanding of antebellum Black history,” even as it extends a tradition of its subject’s life being relayed “almost exclusively” by white writers.

The entrepreneur who became Famous Amos

As a talent agent in the early 1970s working with artists like Dionne Warwick and the Temptations, Wally Amos went to meet record company execs bearing chocolate-chip cookies he made from his beloved aunt’s recipe. “Pretty soon everybody was asking for them,” he said. Spotting an opportunity, he switched careers to open his own store, Famous Amos in Hollywood. That first outlet spawned dozens of franchise stores and became a national brand sold in supermarkets, and by 1981 the business was bringing in $12 million a year (about $42 million in today’s dollars). If the cookies’ homemade taste and lack of artificial ingredients were part of the appeal, so was Amos himself, a pioneering brand ambassador known for his Panama hats, colorful shirts with a kazoo in the pocket, and upbeat banter. He chatted with everyone—even the cookies. “I talk to them, you know,” he once said, “encourage them with things like, ‘Now bake nice.’”

He was born in Tallahassee, where his father worked for the electric company and his mother was a house cleaner, said The Washington Post. When they divorced, he moved to Harlem at age 12 to live with his aunt. “Inspired by her baking skills,” he took cooking apprenticeships in high school but felt that white students were given “better opportunities.” He dropped out and joined the Air Force, then took a mailroom job at the William Morris talent agency. After rising to become its first Black agent, he left to start his own agency in Los Angeles in 1967. The job was all-consuming, and he baked at night to “relieve stress,” said The New York Times. Buoyed by the love for his cookies—and investments from former clients like singer Marvin Gaye—he opened Famous Amos on Sunset Boulevard. Opening day “drew thousands,” and within years he “was a household name,” appearing on the cover of Time.

Amos “struggled as a businessperson” as he expanded, said The Guardian. He began selling off his equity stakes, and in 1988 sold out to a private equity firm for $3 million. Moving to Hawaii, he “went on to sell baked goods under other names,” including Uncle Wally’s Muffin Co. and the Cookie Kahuna. He never equaled his early success but didn’t seem bothered. “Being famous is highly overrated,” he said in 2014. “I am fortunate that, through all the ups and downs that I’ve experienced, I still make a cookie that tastes good.”