In the fabled Wild, Wild East, it was a time when men were men and women were women. The men were dashing characters to whom honor was more than just a word. The women wore hoop skirts under which they smuggled coded messages across enemy lines.

A typical family of those bygone times had neither television nor radio. A usual evening's entertainment was to read aloud from some classic book, with eager ears grasping at the unfolding story.

Yes, in those days, there was no cable television.

Izola Forrester describes those pioneer days well, in her book, This One Mad Act (Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1937). She is the daughter of Ogarita Booth, an off-off Broadway touring actress who had as her father the great actor, John Wilkes Booth.

Ogarita Booth traveled under names such as Ogarita Mills and Ogarita D'Arcy. (Before the days of cable TV and motion pictures, there were more jobs available for actors and actresses.) Her photograph is included in her daughter's book, and this editor has fallen in love with Ogarita Booth.

Ogarita Booth was brave; in the photo, circa 1885, she wears a brooch containing a photo of John Wilkes Booth, her father. (The climate of public opinion was not favorable to her father at the time.)

Unfortunately, Ogarita died of pneumonia not long after her mother, Izola Martha, died of a broken heart. Izola Martha pined for her disappeared (but not dead) husband, John Wilkes Booth. She faded away in a lonely mansion, in wind-swept Connecticut.

But in 1859, Izola Martha was a teen beauty, swept off her feet by the cavalier, 20-year-old swashbuckler, John Wilkes Booth. They eloped and were married by a preacher, awakened in the wee hours to perform the ceremony. The couple then dashed off in their carriage to honeymoon romance, in Edwin Booth's deserted seaside dwelling.

Her passionate, wildly talented husband belonged to a secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle. John Wilkes Booth lived his life in a big way: famous actor and Confederate spy, he was larger than life and devil-may-care, onstage and off. And Izola Martha herself was a wild Spanish beauty, full of passion, rhetoric, and daring. Under her husband's tutorship, Izola Martha learned the spy trade.

Her husband, the wandering actor, had promised his own mother he'd never serve as a Confederate soldier. But his membership in the secret society drew him, nonetheless, like a moth to the flame. As the Civil War dragged on, John Wilkes Booth became more involved, through the Confederate Secret Service, in the drama of those long-ago days.

It's all there, in his grand-daughter's book -- the best, most understanding description of those times that this editor has yet to come across.

Booth's grand-daughter, Izola Forrester, was determined to track down the real story; she spent a lifetime in scholarly pursuit of the romantic couple, John Wilkes and Izola Martha -- and of the post-1865 John Wilkes Booth -- unflinching in her quest. And she succeeded. In her book, This One Mad Act, Izola Forrester bypasses, overwhelms, and trounces the fake historians of the 20th century, who turn to boredom the explosive controversies of the past.

It's all there, but Izola Forrester did not foresee the functional illiteracy of her countrymen, in these, our own times. She unwisely foresaw that late 20th-century Americans could and did read books.

Too bad. Because her book is a masterpiece.