Staff Picks: Books
Staff-recommended reading from the
KPL catalog.
An avid history fan, I’m listening right now to a wonderful audiobook version of Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall. It’s a look at the England of Henry VIII, when Henry decided to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, and marry Ann Boleyn. Mantel portrays these turbulent political and religious times through the life of Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell was very much behind the scenes, and powerful. He came from humble beginnings. But he contrived to know the right people and got things done, first for his mentor Cardinal Wolsey, and later for Henry VIII, when Wolsey fell out of favor with the king. Cromwell is not always portrayed in a favorable light; here Mantel has made him a wholly believable and not unsympathetic figure.
Wolf Hall was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and it’s well deserved. Mantel is historically accurate, and the characters and times are fascinating in their detail. Library Journal’s review says, “There will be few novels this year as good as this one,” and I would concur. Author Hilary Mantel was born in England. She studied law at the London School of Economics, and has lived and worked in Botswana and Saudi Arabia, before returning to live in England.
Book
Wolf Hall
9780805080681
What a fascinating look at the relationships between former presidents in The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity.
Harry Truman first reached out to Herbert Hoover as they jokingly decided to form a “Presidents Club” to start the relationship between the current and former presidents.
Relationships and rivalries, some backstabbing and clashing egos are all described. However, all club members, no matter their political party, care deeply about the country and truly understand the challenges that go with the job.
The insights and stories are amazing in this well-written, most readable book.
Book
The Presidents Club: inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity
9781439127704
Most people don't know Howard Thurman (I didn't). You could say he was the John the Baptist to Martin Luther King Jr., the grandfather of African American nonviolence, a Gandhian, Christian, mystic, poet, and preacher.
Howard Thurman's childhood memories: burying his father because nobody else would (whites-only undertaker in their town); listening to the funeral sermon, which "preached my father into hell" because he wasn't officially Baptist. Thus we have the two things Howard Thurman fought against his whole life: Segregation and institutions.
But far more powerful memories sustained him: "The woods befriended me" and gave [me] "a sense of belonging...the ocean and the night gave me a sense of timelessness...death would be a minor thing." Of all the evils swirling around him, he would take solice in the storm and the God of the storm.
Like Tolystoy he became a Christian mystic, making a large distinction between "the religion of Jesus," which "offers me very many ways out of the world's disorders"--and Christianity. He felt God directly in nature, much like Emerson's "Original Experience"; a Chrisitian beyond Christianity: "the things that are true in any religious experience are to be found in that religious experience precisely because they are true; they are not true simply because they are found in that religious experience...this is not to say that all religions are one and the same, but it is to say that the essence of religious experience is unique, comprehensible, and not delimiting." This permeated his relationships: "That afternoon I had the most primary, naked fusing of total religious experience with another human being of which I have ever been capable."
A pivitol point in his life is when the president of his college called them "young gentleman": "What this term of respect meant to our faltering egos can only be understood against the backdrop of the South of the 1920's...the black man was never referred to as 'mister,' nor even by his surname...to the end of his days, he had to absorb the indignity of being called 'boy,' or 'nigger,' or 'uncle'." He was an amazingly disciplined intellectual:
the library was my refuge and my joy…at last the world of books was mine for the asking. I spent hours each week wandering around in the stacks, taking down first one book, then another, examining the title, reading the foreword and the table of contents, leafing through the pages, reading a paragraph here and there, getting the feel of the book and familiarizing myself with writers across centuries who would in time become as closely related to me as my personal friends…I kept certain books in the bathroom. Others I read only during the ten-minute intervals between classes…I would hasten to the next classroom, take my seat, and read until the lecture started.
He advocated for African American rights but, like his friend Martin Luther King Jr., he did so in a wholistic and strategic way: "Thurman would speak about race before white audiences, but on his own terms, and in his own way." He said: "This is always the problem of reformation: To put all of one's emphasis upon one particular thing and when that thing is achieved and the Kingdom of God has not come, then the reformer sits in the twilight of his idols."
After visiting Gandhi, Thurman really got to thinking about how to fix the problem of segregation and race problems in America. As a minister, he thought: how in the world can we tell the government to integrate white and black if our own religion is the most segregated institution in the country? It was embarrassing and wrong. Therefore, he helped create and became the minister of a truly interracial, multiculural church in San Franscisco. This was the legacy of Howard Thurman. Obviously his struggle continues.
Martin Luther King Jr. would listen to him preach in Boston: “He always listened carefully when Thurman was speaking, and would shake his head in amazement at Thurman’s deep wisdom” (192). Don't forget to supplement this book with Howard Thurman's autobiography With Head and Heart.
book
Visions of a Better World
9780807000458
Benjamin Franklin was a paragon of self-taught education. To learn how to write he literally took scholarly articles apart and put them back together (like a type setter would). Abigail Adams had no choice; being a woman in the 1750's, she had to teach herself. Andrew Jackson, an Irish farm kid, grew up in a sort of cowboy environment, open land, the time of the Regulators, no law, British invading and pillaging. His education was honor and violence.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Sojourner Truth was growing up as a slave after the war when Noah Webster was writing his grammar book, arguing for abolition and a national language and education system. But her master could care less about emancipation, so she (literally) walked off to freedom with her one year old baby, living in the woods and finding work to survive. She realized that freedom was another form of slavery, and then became “Sojourner Truth,” a traveling minister and truth-teller like Frederick Douglas (When she met Lincoln he apparently tensed up and called her “Aunty,” as he would his washerwoman).
The boy Lincoln, who was obsessed with reading and mostly self-taught, said “among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand…that always disturbed my temper and has ever since.” This thirst and curiousity made him. Lincoln thought that reading separated him from the Natives. Thocmetony, aka "Princess Winnemucca," a Native "turned American," actually agreed. She grew up surviving, then tried to create a school for her people: "A few years ago," Sarah wrote the parents of her students, "you owned this great county; today the white man owns it all, and you own nothing. Do you know what did it? Education." Her school was to be different; it would not have this motto--"You cannot become truly American citizens...until the INDIAN within you is DEAD"--as the current ones did. It would be culturally integrated. Sadly, it failed and her people were virtually wiped out by the Trail of Tears.
Henry Ford, industrious to the core, had to learn by physically touching the machines (sort of like how Einstien had to visualize math). He thought education gives you a fundamental base, but after that vocational school is best (Booker T Washington might agree). Du Bois represents the beginning of high schools, which were actually created to Americanize the Irish immigrants bringing "discord, immorality, and poverty." Du Bois, a very poor boy with a poor, single, handicap mother, became the black kid that excelled among white kids; he was proving something. A man named Frank Hosmer became his mentor: teacher, president, progressive school reformer--a man who became part of Du Bois's "talented tenth" way of thinking.
Helen Keller is the story of the blind prodigy child. Rachel Carson (environmentalist) was a product of the "Montessori" school movement (back to nature, learn like the Natives). Elvis learned music at a poor, Pentecostal church. In fact, most of these great Americans grew up poor.
So what is the difference between Lincoln, Sojourner Truth and JFK?
Just as Carnegie thought libraries were "the great equalizer" between rich and poor, Horace Mann (founder of public schools) thought "free schools" were going to be the great equalizer. But many Americans were simply left out entirely (Sojourner Truth, Abigail Adams), and even those who could be schooled (Andrew Jackson) weren't schooled the same, as the chapter on JFK's education shows--privileged, private, rich. Even the teenage JFK says "how much better chance has [the] boy with a silver spoon in his mouth of being good than the boy who from birth is surrounded by rottenness and filth. This even to the most religious of us can hardly seem a 'square deal'." Talking about private schools, JFK's classmate said if you weren't "incorrigibly stupid or lazy" you could go to "any college you wanted."
I highly recommend this book. The author interweaves the stories brilliantly.
book
How Lincoln Learned to Read
9781596912908
If you agree with Emerson that "there is no history; only biography," then you will love the way Peterson describes the history of educational reform in American through its major players.
Before Horace Mann there was no State Board of Education, no "normal schools" to teach the teachers, no standard textbooks. After Horace Mann there was. John Dewey, sick of monotonous drilling and memorization, thought that teaching methods must match the student (not the other way around) and that arousing curiosity mattered. Before Martin Luther King Jr. there was black and white schools; after MLK they were mixed. Albert Shanker headed the teachers' rights movement, creating powerful unions. William Bennett used political sway to make school excellence a national issue. James Coleman was disgusted that schools resembled factories, and he thought more school choice was the answer. And last he looks at Julie Young and the potential of Virtual (online) Learning.
It's a gripping story and all the fun is in the details, especially since most of these reformers created unintended consequences, monsters they didn't see coming. And whether they indended or not, schools began as local, small, religion-based, women-taught, extensions-of-the-home. They ended as large, centralized, heavily regulated, state-run giants. The author also makes much out of unions and there tendency to block certain reforms, and you get a sense that the author is coming from a fiscally-conservative republican perspective. This book is fascinating even if you're democrat.
For similar books check out Left Back: a century of failed school reforms, The Little Red School House, Don't Whistle in School, The Underground History of American Education, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: how testing and choice are undermining education.
On segregation, check out Root and Branch and Silent Covenants. On pro-union history, try NEA: the first hundred years; for anti-union, check out Teacher Unions: how the NEA and AFT sabotage reform and hold students, parents, teachers and taxpayers hostage. On school choice, try Voucher Wars andBreaking Free and Rethinking School Choice.
book
Saving Saves
9780674050112
Surviving an earthquake is one thing, but the aftermath is a groundswell in itself. How to you interpret natural disasters? How to you cope with tragedy? On All Saints Day in 1755, when most Lisbonians were in church, a giant Earthquake rocked the city. Then a tsunami. Then a fire. Lisbon was destroyed.
A very Catholic and religious city at the hight of the Inquisition (Shrady describes it as medieval and anti-enlightenment), Lisbon couldn't help but interpret the catastrophe as God's divine wrath, a call to repentance, a punishment for Lisbon's greed. The hell-fire sermons were brought out, dusted off, and shouted from the rubble pulpits.
But of course not everyone interpreted it this way, religious or not. Immanuel Kant (my favorite philosopher), argued it wasn't a moral phenomenon but a natural one. And if you had to read Candide in high school or college, you know that Voltaire took this as the perfect opportunity to expose (with satire) the "optimistic" philosophy of Leibniz and the rose-colored glass of theologians--that with God at the helm we must live in the "best of all possible worlds." Rousseau, criticizing Voltaire, takes a more middle position.
But it was a man named Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo who was on the ground, who rehabilitated the city, and who eventually tried to "enlighten" it. This book is mostly about him. He rebuilds Lisbon, becomes a powerful leader, kicks out all the Jesuits, builds a bunch of universities that teach science (natural philosophy), obolishes slavery, and puts a lot of people to death (not for heresy, but for people who are not with the program). The author describes him as an ambiguous despot, but a despot nonetheless. And for every political push there is a counter-push. Carvalho gets removed, ridiculed, and replaced with a Queen Maria who repeals all his progress. That's European history for ya, right?!
Since this book is more about the history of Lisbon, I recommend this book more for the history aspect, less for the theology/philosophy.
book
The Last Day
9780670018512
Desert Flower is a true story of a young woman’s journey from the Somali desert to the cat walk in New York City. I think most of us would assume this story is about a past practice and we would like to think that what happened to Waris would no longer happen to young women in any country, but we need to be aware that the archaic customs of the past are still very much a plague to the young women of Somalia. The purpose of Waris Dirie’s book Desert Flower was to raise a loud cry to violence, genital mutilation, and arranged marriages. For a few goats and camels elderly men can arrange a marriage to prepubescent girls. Waris felt that she needed to do something to stop the useless suffering of the young women of her country. Waris’ book tells of a little girl trapped as a Desert Nomad, a daughter to be bartered and a strikingly beautiful model. In the movie Liya Kebede does a beautiful job of taking us on Waris’ journey and helping us to see the turbulence a past practice causes.
Book
Desert Flower
0688158234
In my last blog, I talked about a dual biography I had read about Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile, two daughters of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Katherine of Aragon was for quite a while Queen of England being Henry VIII's first wife. In divorcing her, Henry broke with the Pope and Roman Catholic Church who refused to annul his marriage. The woman he took as his second wife was the infamous Anne Boleyn, who ended up being tried for treason and beheaded in 1536, three years (and four pregnancies that failed to produce a male heir) after her marriage to the king. Sister Queens peaked my interest in the Boleyn family and Tudor England and I have decided to explore a few of the many books written about these historical characters.
Now, I thought that my family could be dramatic at times, but it is nothing compared to the Boleyn family! Anne had two siblings, Mary and George, and was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard. Shortly before finishing up Sister Queens, I was browsing the shelf and found a book solely devoted to Mary Boleyn by Alison Weir and decided this is where I would begin my survey of the Boleyn family. According to the introduction, Mary Boleyn has historically been portrayed inaccurately in a number of publications, and even more so in recent fiction works. I have to confess that I didn't know Anne Boleyn had a sister until reading The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory a few years ago. I knew this was a fiction title, but I did draw some conclusions about Mary based on it when I should not have. (This can many times be an issue when reading historical fiction…where does the history stop and the fiction start?) In this book, Mary becomes Henry VIII's mistress and bears him a son named Henry. Well, in real life, Mary really did have an affair with Henry VIII. And did she bear him a son? This we know to be untrue since she did not have a son until years after the affair had ended. Her daughter, however, may have been Henry VIII's illegitimate child. There is no proof that this is actually the case, but Weir provides evidence for this by analyzing different monies and honors that were bestowed on Mary's daughter and her family throughout her life.
Provable facts about Mary Boleyn are few and far between. We do not know when Mary and the King's affair took place, how long it lasted, how it started, why it started, or how either person felt about the affair. Our main proof that it happened comes later in the years after it had ended when Henry was trying to cover his bases and make sure his marriage to Anne would be considered legitimate. Only two letters remain written in Mary's own hand, and compared to her well known sister, she is not often mentioned in other sources. Another hypothesis Weir spends time considering is the idea that Mary may not have been mistress to just one king, but two! In addition to Henry VIII, there is some evidence that she may have also been the mistress of Francis I, King of France. Her embarrassed family tried to keep this a secret as well as keep Mary in the shadows for much of the rest of her life, according to Weir, which may be why we have so little contemporary information about her.
Truthfully, I am not sure I gained much concrete knowledge from this text. There is so little verifiable information on Mary Boleyn. This does not, however, mean that I didn't enjoy the book. This is a very well researched book in which Weir pokes holes in many past assumptions historians have unfairly made about Mary. Weir does a good job holding up Mary, giving her the benefit of the doubt where she has simply been critically judged and pigeonholed in the past. As a woman of the court in Tudor England, she had little control over her life but exercised her strength when given the opportunity. My favorite part of the book is when Weir talks about Mary's second marriage. William Stafford was "below" her status but she married him in secret for love rather than familial gain. In a letter to her sister, then queen, and King Henry VIII she writes, "So that for my part, I saw that all the world did set so little store by me, and he so much, that I thought I could take no better way but to take him and to forsake all other ways, and live a poor, honest life with him…For well I might a had a greater man of birth, and a higher, but I ensure you I could never a had one that should a loved me so well". As you can see from this short snippet of the letter, Mary is unapologetic and unwavering. She took a huge risk in her second marriage, and paid consequences for it, but she held strong to the marriage and husband she had chosen. This is how I will choose to remember Mary Boleyn.
Book
Mary Boleyn: the Mistress of Kings
9780345521330
You never know when or where you'll find a book recommendation. I was attending a memorial service for a friend's mother, when one of the speakers mentioned The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. My curiosity was peeked.
The story takes place shortly after the end of WWII and is told through a series of letters. The main character is Juliet Ashton, a writer looking for a new story. She becomes friends with the Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society members and goes to visit them.
The story tells about how the islanders survived the occupation. All of this is told to Juliet as she becomes friends with the islanders and finds out how the literary society came to be. I had no idea that the Channel Island's had been occupied during the war. Yes, sort of a war book, with sad moments, but also with great humor.
book
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
9780385340991
Wait a minute: has violence declined? The first 361 pages argue that it has. A significant decline since records began; all forms that can be measured: murder, rape, war, etc. You might be thinking: wait a minute, World War I, World War II?! This is where you might disagree with what Pinker means by "violence has declined". He means the rate has declined, not the total number of people dying from it. A war that killed 2 million people back in the 8th Century, Pinker says, is much worse than a war that killed 2 million people nowadays, because there was less people then (it killed a larger percentage of the world back then). Get it? So taking the world population in consideration, Pinker is definitely correct that the rate of violence has gone down (all his graphs show a steep decline from top-left to bottom-right). In other words, if hypothetically you could pick any time period to live in, you may want to pick now because overall you have the least probability of dying from violence (unless you get dropped in Wash. DC!).
Another piece of his argument is to say that many forms of violence have been simply eliminated; no more witch burning, no nukes have been used, no great powers have fought since 1953, slavery has almost been eliminated, and so on. There's a whole new moral consciousness, caused by numerous developments (social, political, economical)--it's not that human nature changed.
Some people are a little worried about Pinker's arguments because they sound "old fashioned"; a little "arrow-of-history-ish" (history is pointing us towards some goal) which has a bad track record; or they sound a little ethnocentrist (civilized people are way better than primitive people who live in a state of war constantly); or a little democracy-biased. Plus I bet some historians are saying "who does this linguist think he is!" He is aware of these concerns, which is part of the pull to read the book (and watch his youtube videos).
Whether you have reservations or not, this book is an enormous endeavor, an audaciously large project that I cannot help but appreciate as such. It's part of a new trend to "mathmatize" history, using numbers to tell the story. I am amazed that one man could write on so many topics, pulling from so many sources. And it helps that Pinker is a master at writing good sentences that flow. There are hundreds of talking points. If you like history and evolutionary psychology, I recommend this book especially (oh did I mention it's really long?).
book
Better Angels of our Nature
9780670022953