You have before your eyes, gentle reader, the 200th post of my blog about the ten-year reading plan I made for myself. Last June, for the 100th post, I thought first about listing my hundred favorite books, but decided that compiling the list was too daunting a task. In the end I opted for writing a short paragraph on seven of the books I think about the most. Today, I want to write about seven more. The list includes some that are usually considered among the Great Books and some that aren’t, but I love them all and think about them often.
• Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth. This wonderful children’s book has a message: that learning is rewarding because words and numbers carry treasures. I agree with the message, but I love the book most when it demonstrates its message with creative wordplay rather than preaching its message. I rarely hear the phrases “jump to conclusions” or “see things from my point of view” without thinking of Juster’s literal interpretations.
• David McCullough, John Adams. I’ve read this book twice and watched the miniseries, and Adams’s intelligence, courage, and political savvy still astound me. It’s dangerous for me to think about John Adams too much, because he makes me want to fight for the sake of principle and forget the last phrase of the Serenity Prayer. Nevertheless, I do often think about Adams taking John Quincy with him to Europe for several years and homeschooling him in Latin, history, and mathematics. The Adams kids that didn’t get to go with their dad all led tragic lives, while Quincy rose to the Presidency, recognized as perhaps the most educated man in the United States.
• Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist. The best sequence in this classic deals with the phantom of guilt that hovers behind Bill Sikes's head after he kills poor Nancy. Sikes constantly senses someone staring at the back of his head, but can’t see the phantom because it turns along with his head and stays ever behind him. Sikes rolls on the ground on his back in an attempt to smash the looming presence, but to no avail. Brilliant! No matter what anyone says, guilt is not just a feeling.
• François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. This series of novels is crude, crazy, cracked, crabby, crafty, cringeworthy, creepy, crooked, cryptic, creaky, and crusty. But it got me attuned to the power of creative, crebrous lists.
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year. This loving memoir of a Brooklyn girl who grew up a Dodgers fan tells some deeply touching stories: Doris becoming an historian because of her love of keeping score and recreating games for her father, her girlfriend who became depressive because she grew tall, and of course the glorious 1955 World Series, when “next year” finally came to pass. But the most amazing story involves young Doris hearing of a nearby train crash and sneaking out of her bedroom to baptize the dying victims.
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy. One of the funniest books I’ve ever read, Sterne’s classic offers the first-person attempt of the title character to recount every detail of his life. Naturally the attempt fails, but what with all his explanations and sidetracks, Tristram barely even gets to his birth. He tells us that his Uncle Toby often whistles “Lillibullero” when he gets frustrated, so three-fourths of the way through the book, where Tristram himself gets frustrated by his failures to make his autobiography progress, he presents, as a full “chapter,” the score to “Lillibullero.”
• James Michener, Alaska. I’ve known a few teachers who have gone to Alaska for a while because the state pays teachers so well. (They spend a lot of their oil money on education. Imagine.) I’ve been tempted to try it myself a time or two. The last story in Michener’s Michenerian saga tells of a young woman who responds to a job opening in a small Alaskan town above the Arctic Circle, a town that boasts of a new, seven-million-dollar school building (in the 1970s). She moves to her new home and finds everyone kind and helpful and grateful, but when they show her a small two-room schoolhouse made of concrete blocks, she asks about the new, seven-million-dollar facility. Her guide responds, “Do you have any idea how much it costs to ship concrete blocks above the Arctic Circle?”
Showing posts with label Doris Kearns Goodwin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doris Kearns Goodwin. Show all posts
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Selling a Good Book
I had a typical meeting with a graduate student the other day concerning the proposal for his dissertation. He's perfectly intelligent and has plenty of interesting things to say, but somehow he doesn't quite say these things in his proposal. So I tried to help him find a way to begin his book, and in doing so, I brought up the examples of David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
When the four words "John," "Adams," "David," and "McCullough" appeared on the cover of a new book twelve or so years ago, I and a million other people who saw that cover knew immediately that we had to read the book. Yet McCullough still carefully spends time at the beginning of John Adams convincing prospective readers to spend hours of their lives on his efforts. And then the narrative begins with an arresting tableau: John Adams sitting on a horse in a snowstorm somewhere between his home in Braintree and Philadelphia, where he will attend the Continental Congress. The vivid, concrete picture captures the imagination and suggests the significance of the moment as the local farmer travels for the first time to help found a new republic, typifying a time when the scope of many people's political thinking suddenly exploded from the provincial to the national.
Everybody who saw Doris Kearns Goodwin on Ken Burns's Baseball was charmed by her, and everyone charmed by her wanted to read Wait Till Next Year as soon as it came out. But again, the master storyteller spends time at the beginning of her book making the sell. She tells about all the baseball questions she started fielding on her lecture circuit, and she tells about becoming an historian by keeping score while listening to the Dodgers games during the day and recounting the events for her father when he got home from work. Again we get a concrete picture that hooks us and at the same time suggests the significance of the theme of the book.
Good books begin by wooing readers. It's just one of the social graces. You don't go out on a first date, sit down to the table, and launch into your life story beginning with the details of your birth -- not if you want a second date. And books that want to be read don't begin by opening the floodgates of factual detail.
A few days ago I began a good book, one that begins by convincing the reader to continue reading. It makes the sell twice in fact: once through the words of the original author and once through the words of the translator. I've known for a long time that I would read the Church History of Eusebius. I love history. I love ancient books. I love the Church. So my encounter with this book was sealed in fate, and it began with the author and translator convincing me I had made the right decision.
Translator Paul L. Maier begins his introduction by calling Eusebius the father of church history and comparing him to Herodotus. As Maier explains it, Eusebius was the first to write a church history (after the biblical authors), and no one in ancient times copied his effort. As a result, many details and much quoted material are known to us only because of Eusebius. Maier goes on to describe Eusebius' life and his close association with Constantine, to list Eusebius' long catalog of works, and to explain what niche his new translation fills (it abandons the complex ancient sentence structure in favor of smoothly flowing modern English rhetoric). The introduction ends by saying, "Here then is the most important work of the most voluminous extant author, pagan or Christian, of the late third and early fourth centuries: the first history of the church ever written." I finished the introduction much clearer about the significance of the book I was about to start.
Eusebius himself then begins his book with an explanation of its contents and their importance. First he indicates that he will record the most important events in the history of the church and describe the most distinguished leaders in the most famous locations. Clearly the topic is weighty. Then he explains his method of poring through great numbers of documents and humbly indicates his debt to previous authors, pointing out, though, that he is the first to assimilate all this material. And then he begins his history of the Church not with the events of some mundane date but by going outside of time and recounting of the Bible's teaching on the Church's Founder as the preexisting Word and Wisdom of God. Eusebius could not describe a more important subject.
I've read almost half of the book now, and it has not disappointed. I'll have more to say about the contents in a future post.
When the four words "John," "Adams," "David," and "McCullough" appeared on the cover of a new book twelve or so years ago, I and a million other people who saw that cover knew immediately that we had to read the book. Yet McCullough still carefully spends time at the beginning of John Adams convincing prospective readers to spend hours of their lives on his efforts. And then the narrative begins with an arresting tableau: John Adams sitting on a horse in a snowstorm somewhere between his home in Braintree and Philadelphia, where he will attend the Continental Congress. The vivid, concrete picture captures the imagination and suggests the significance of the moment as the local farmer travels for the first time to help found a new republic, typifying a time when the scope of many people's political thinking suddenly exploded from the provincial to the national.
Everybody who saw Doris Kearns Goodwin on Ken Burns's Baseball was charmed by her, and everyone charmed by her wanted to read Wait Till Next Year as soon as it came out. But again, the master storyteller spends time at the beginning of her book making the sell. She tells about all the baseball questions she started fielding on her lecture circuit, and she tells about becoming an historian by keeping score while listening to the Dodgers games during the day and recounting the events for her father when he got home from work. Again we get a concrete picture that hooks us and at the same time suggests the significance of the theme of the book.
Good books begin by wooing readers. It's just one of the social graces. You don't go out on a first date, sit down to the table, and launch into your life story beginning with the details of your birth -- not if you want a second date. And books that want to be read don't begin by opening the floodgates of factual detail.
A few days ago I began a good book, one that begins by convincing the reader to continue reading. It makes the sell twice in fact: once through the words of the original author and once through the words of the translator. I've known for a long time that I would read the Church History of Eusebius. I love history. I love ancient books. I love the Church. So my encounter with this book was sealed in fate, and it began with the author and translator convincing me I had made the right decision.
Translator Paul L. Maier begins his introduction by calling Eusebius the father of church history and comparing him to Herodotus. As Maier explains it, Eusebius was the first to write a church history (after the biblical authors), and no one in ancient times copied his effort. As a result, many details and much quoted material are known to us only because of Eusebius. Maier goes on to describe Eusebius' life and his close association with Constantine, to list Eusebius' long catalog of works, and to explain what niche his new translation fills (it abandons the complex ancient sentence structure in favor of smoothly flowing modern English rhetoric). The introduction ends by saying, "Here then is the most important work of the most voluminous extant author, pagan or Christian, of the late third and early fourth centuries: the first history of the church ever written." I finished the introduction much clearer about the significance of the book I was about to start.
Eusebius himself then begins his book with an explanation of its contents and their importance. First he indicates that he will record the most important events in the history of the church and describe the most distinguished leaders in the most famous locations. Clearly the topic is weighty. Then he explains his method of poring through great numbers of documents and humbly indicates his debt to previous authors, pointing out, though, that he is the first to assimilate all this material. And then he begins his history of the Church not with the events of some mundane date but by going outside of time and recounting of the Bible's teaching on the Church's Founder as the preexisting Word and Wisdom of God. Eusebius could not describe a more important subject.
I've read almost half of the book now, and it has not disappointed. I'll have more to say about the contents in a future post.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
With Malice Toward None
Some books are on my list not because they constitute great literature but because they are about great themes. And no doubt Ronald C. White's Lincoln's Greatest Speech belongs in this category of less-than-great books about great matters. Lincoln went to his second inauguration riding a tidal wave of victories secured by Grant and Sherman; the war that both sides thought would last only a few days was, after four bitter years, at last truly only days from ending. As White explains, while in these circumstances virtually everyone expected a speech full of self-congratulating celebration and practical plans for Reconstruction, what they heard instead was a confession of national guilt and that rarest of acknowledgments: that God is not a partisan of the victorious. Where Lincoln's second greatest speech situated the events of a great battle in the greater context of the meaning of our country and its example to the globe, the Second Inaugural situated the meaning of our country in the cosmically greater context of the inscrutable will of God. Great matters indeed.
With no malice intended, I offer examples of some of the problems with the mechanics and rhetoric of this book. First, White often uses the linking verb to build the most awkward constructions. He writes, for example, "A vexing question was whether a war begun to preserve the Union could be transformed into a war to end slavery." Having found an excellent verb, he hid it in a participle and built a clunky sentence around the verb was. Much better to say, "The question whether a war . . . could be transformed . . . vexed Lincoln." A little confused about both his grammar and Lincoln's, White calls "with malice toward none" an imperative. Often these slightly awkward, slightly off-center sentences just miss adding up to solid paragraphs, as well, and a larger thread usually occupies no more than two or three of these paragraphs before a horizontal line introduces another chunky idea.
Despite these weakness, though, White makes many excellent points and leads the reader through a deeply emotional, intellectual, and spiritual encounter with these profound words. The first half of the speech, always perfunctory to me before, took on new depth as White located hidden alliteration and assonance and pointed out Lincoln's use of generic terms to keep a reasoned tone, most notably "one party" where he could have said "rebels" or "traitors." But White's analysis of this early portion helped even more where he explained Lincoln's surprisingly frequent use of the passive voice as a way to prepare his point that the human participants of the war were not in fact the effective agents of its course. Capping this line of reasoning, White observes that with the short blunt sentence "And the war came," war changes its role as a grammatical object earlier in the speech to that of grammatical subject, again reflecting and teaching Lincoln's view that people did not control events.
As good as the early analysis is, the book really takes fire in its examination of the second half of the speech. Where Lincoln says that participants on both sides read the same Bible, White stops to explore the place of the Bible in American society at that time and to tell some fascinating stories about how Bibles reached the soldiers, especially those in the blockaded Confederacy, where no publishers of Bibles existed. White also taught me some things about prominent theological issues at the time -- most importantly that no interested person then would mistake belief in God's sovereignty with a philosophy of determinism or fatalism, a mistake commonly made in present-day accounts of Lincoln -- and about Lincoln's relationships and discussions with two very interesting, well-read pastors. And White showed me a totally new angle on the phrase "American Slavery." Where before I had thought that Lincoln used the adjective "American" to distinguish the institution from other kinds of slavery in history, White showed that Lincoln used "American" rather than "Southern" to declare that the blame for the institution rested on the shoulders of everyone in the country, north and south. In this Second Inaugural Address, which White near the end of his book calls a sermon, Lincoln points the people of the United States to God as the only explanation for events, as the only judge of America's sin, and as the only possible ground for healing. In White's best sentence, he says, "Instead of rallying his supporters, in the name of God, to support the war, he asked his listeners, quietly, to imitate the ways of God."
Lincoln's words themselves I would consider great literature. You can read the entire speech in about three minutes at this site. Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals offers a moving, enlightening, entertaining -- and impeccably written -- parallel biography of Lincoln and his rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860: Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and William Seward. My favorite book about Lincoln is the little-known Lincoln's Melancholy, written by Joshua Shenk and given to me by the most perceptively kind student I've ever had; I'm not sure how she knew I would love it, but she did. I agree with White that the most recent biography of Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald, disappoints in its insistence that throughout his life Lincoln ultimately remained passive in the face of forces beyond his control. As much as Lincoln and the Civil War interest me, I have never read even part of Sandburg's monumental biography. Sandburg made a one-volume condensation; I should put it and the biographies by Oates and Thomas on my reading list -- for the third decade.
With no malice intended, I offer examples of some of the problems with the mechanics and rhetoric of this book. First, White often uses the linking verb to build the most awkward constructions. He writes, for example, "A vexing question was whether a war begun to preserve the Union could be transformed into a war to end slavery." Having found an excellent verb, he hid it in a participle and built a clunky sentence around the verb was. Much better to say, "The question whether a war . . . could be transformed . . . vexed Lincoln." A little confused about both his grammar and Lincoln's, White calls "with malice toward none" an imperative. Often these slightly awkward, slightly off-center sentences just miss adding up to solid paragraphs, as well, and a larger thread usually occupies no more than two or three of these paragraphs before a horizontal line introduces another chunky idea.
Despite these weakness, though, White makes many excellent points and leads the reader through a deeply emotional, intellectual, and spiritual encounter with these profound words. The first half of the speech, always perfunctory to me before, took on new depth as White located hidden alliteration and assonance and pointed out Lincoln's use of generic terms to keep a reasoned tone, most notably "one party" where he could have said "rebels" or "traitors." But White's analysis of this early portion helped even more where he explained Lincoln's surprisingly frequent use of the passive voice as a way to prepare his point that the human participants of the war were not in fact the effective agents of its course. Capping this line of reasoning, White observes that with the short blunt sentence "And the war came," war changes its role as a grammatical object earlier in the speech to that of grammatical subject, again reflecting and teaching Lincoln's view that people did not control events.
As good as the early analysis is, the book really takes fire in its examination of the second half of the speech. Where Lincoln says that participants on both sides read the same Bible, White stops to explore the place of the Bible in American society at that time and to tell some fascinating stories about how Bibles reached the soldiers, especially those in the blockaded Confederacy, where no publishers of Bibles existed. White also taught me some things about prominent theological issues at the time -- most importantly that no interested person then would mistake belief in God's sovereignty with a philosophy of determinism or fatalism, a mistake commonly made in present-day accounts of Lincoln -- and about Lincoln's relationships and discussions with two very interesting, well-read pastors. And White showed me a totally new angle on the phrase "American Slavery." Where before I had thought that Lincoln used the adjective "American" to distinguish the institution from other kinds of slavery in history, White showed that Lincoln used "American" rather than "Southern" to declare that the blame for the institution rested on the shoulders of everyone in the country, north and south. In this Second Inaugural Address, which White near the end of his book calls a sermon, Lincoln points the people of the United States to God as the only explanation for events, as the only judge of America's sin, and as the only possible ground for healing. In White's best sentence, he says, "Instead of rallying his supporters, in the name of God, to support the war, he asked his listeners, quietly, to imitate the ways of God."
Lincoln's words themselves I would consider great literature. You can read the entire speech in about three minutes at this site. Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals offers a moving, enlightening, entertaining -- and impeccably written -- parallel biography of Lincoln and his rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860: Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and William Seward. My favorite book about Lincoln is the little-known Lincoln's Melancholy, written by Joshua Shenk and given to me by the most perceptively kind student I've ever had; I'm not sure how she knew I would love it, but she did. I agree with White that the most recent biography of Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald, disappoints in its insistence that throughout his life Lincoln ultimately remained passive in the face of forces beyond his control. As much as Lincoln and the Civil War interest me, I have never read even part of Sandburg's monumental biography. Sandburg made a one-volume condensation; I should put it and the biographies by Oates and Thomas on my reading list -- for the third decade.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)