Not So Grimm

One of the great things about having a long-term reading list, perhaps the best thing, is that you know you'll eventually get to those books you’ve been meaning to read for years. I had wanted to read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales (in translation, not original-original) for at least fifty years. Well, they got on my reading list, and this month I finally got to them.

My family had a volume of them when I was growing up. I don’t know what happened to that copy, and I don’t know why I didn’t read them as a teenager. But remembering having that book (it had dark green covers and a black spine) makes me pretty sure it was my dad who told me that I should read them “someday” (maybe that’s why I put it off) and that they were much darker than the versions most people know from kids’ books and Disney movies.

I have to say that they weren’t as dark as I had been led to believe. Yes, Cinderella’s sisters cut off parts of their feet in order to make them fit into the slippers, and, yes, Little Red Cap gets eaten by the wolf. But other tales weren’t any worse than that, and I’m sure I had a children’s version at one time that had both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being eaten by the wolf (swallowed whole, thankfully!) and rescued by a woodsman with an axe. (I’m almost certain that that’s where I got the notion, still held proudly today, that in the olden days there were men named “woodsmen” who roamed the forests carrying axes and searching for people to help.) And, really, no tale in the book of original versions is any worse than the American kid’s standard version of “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the parents decide it’s better to lead their children to the forest where they will starve or be eaten by wild animals than it would be to share the family’s scant supplies of food with them.

Tests are common in these stories, usually in the form of peculiar tasks required for breaking spells. Think the princess who has to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name. Most of the time, though, the person being tested doesn’t know about it: the prince, for instance, who kisses the “sleeping beauty” to wake her and her family from a hundred-year sleep. Is this a fairy-tale world, or is it just a slightly magical version of our world, where small actions can cause great effects? (See my post on the Mabinogion from last December.)

There are some morals, too; people don’t always just stumble unwittingly into their fortunes according to arbitrary rules. Many of the tales show two proud and selfish brothers (or sisters) receiving punishment or missing opportunities while the third, humble, generous brother gets the treasure or the girl or both. The moral here is obvious: be humble and generous! Several tell about foolish people who see things in a ridiculous way but get rewarded anyway. This time the moral is, Don’t count out the person who sees things contrary to conventional wisdom. God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.

Sorry I waited so long, Dad. But you were right: I loved them.

My Life Makes Sense Now!

Reading the mutli-volume, multi-author Oxford History of the United States has been quite an adventure. I’ve read seven of the volumes now, and overall I’m quite happy I put this project on my reading schedule. The quality has gone up and down (although it’s been mostly quite high), and the prices have gone up and down (altough they have tended to be low lately). But even with the vicissitudes, as a whole, it’s been a very satisfying and instructive experience.

The most frustrating problem with the adventure is the lag in publication. When I started this Third Decade list, Bruce Schulman’s contribution, covering the years 1896-1929, was scheduled to come out, I believe, in 2016. Great! I wanted to read the volumes in historical order, and Schulman’s would be out by the time I made it that far. But over the years, I’ve seen the expected date of that volume move back and back. Last year, the year I had originally scheduled Schulman, I had to jump ahead and read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear, about the Depression and World War II. By that time, Schulman’s book was scheduled to come out in September of 2024. Soon, I was seeing an ISBN number for it and a page length, and Amazon from Canada and the UK were taking pre-orders. So I thought my reordering would only last one year: just wait until September this year, I thought, and fill in the gap. Alas, September came and went this year, and still no Schulman. I wrote to Oxford Press and got an answer from some nice agent of that company saying that the book would come out in September of 2025. We’ll see.

In any case, I had to change gears again and read one more volume “out of order” (this kind of thing is really only a problem because of my mild-grade OCD). So a few weeks ago I bought the next book in the series, James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations.

I’ve said before that I must have something in common with the Pulitzer committees, because my favorites had all won the prize for history: Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought (2008), James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1989), and Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear (2000). The ones I would put in the second tier were finalists, and the one I really didn’t like is not mentioned on any Pulitzer page. That streak of harmonized opinion broke this year. I had only one complaint about Freedom from Fear: that, since its years witnessed two greatest-in-all-history events that demanded all the attention, Kennedy had no time to dwell on sports, clothing, movies, literature, leisure, etc. Well, today I just finished reading Grand Expectations, and I declare it even better than Pulitzer-Prize-winning Freedom from Fear partly because it did cover lots of cultural details in addition to the traditional historical subjects of politics, war, and economics – even though there was naturally plenty to report in all three of those areas in the years 1946-1974. But sadly, it did not receive a Pulitzer Prize and wasn’t, as far as I can see, even a finalist. Obviously, the committee didn’t know what it was doing in 1996. Poor Patterson had to settle for the slightly less prestigious Bancroft Prize instead. (I think he’s probably pretty happy with that honor!)

I should not neglect to say that the book was well researched, that the prose was polished, that it made both factual observations and subjective interpretations, and that it gave proper attention to the widely varying contemporary views and opinions on McCarthy, Korea, Vietnam, the Great Society, Nixon, and other controversial people, movements, and events. But the thing that made this book stand out to me is that it’s the first history book I’ve ever read in which I appear: the baby boom gets a long section and many mentions throughout the chapters. And many events I remember from when I was a kid – two Kennedy assassinations, the space race, color television, hippies, bombing in Cambodia, the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and more – finally made sense. OK, wrong phrase. Most of those events will never make sense! But I understood them in historical context for the first time, which is to say that I understand much of my childhood and youth in historical context now.

So maybe I have a bias that the Pulitzer committee doesn’t share. But this book was terrific! I hope I actually get to read Schulman’s book next year. (Boy, all those delays don’t give me much hope of it’s being any good.) But if not, I’m happy to say that the next volume in the series, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, was also written by James T. Patterson. So whether my date with Restless Giant happens in 2025 or 2026, I know I’m in for some more good, eye-opening history.