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Downton Abbey Ushers in a New Era in Britain

A hearty round of applause goes to Julian Fellowes who knocked one out of the park, yet again.

The second movie spinoff of Downton Abbey hit the theaters a few weeks ago and is being met with mostly favorable reviews.

As of June 17, 2022, “Downton Abbey: A New Era” has grossed $41.6 million in the United States and Canada and $45.5 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $87.1 million

Many passionate Downton followers, including myself, think “Downton Abbey: A New Era” was a better written, more entertaining, offering then the last motion picture.

And as an added bonus, in this second Downton Abbey movie, viewers feast their eyes on a French villa in the south of France. It was Villa Roccabella located about an hour from Saint-Tropez, which features extensive gardens, a heated outdoor pool, yoga deck and a private beach (used in the swimming scene with Tom and Lucy Branson). It was designed in the late 19th century by Hans-Georg Tersling, a Danish architect

I found it remarkable how Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey and the award-winning script writer, weaved its characters so meticulously into a tapestry of compelling subplots, twists and turns all in two hours and five minutes, culminating with Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) assuming the titular head of the Downton estate.

The movie takes place in 1928.

Two topics, in particular, are covered in the movie, which reflects accurately what was taking place in Britain on the brink of the Great Depression: the emergence of talkie films and British societies icy intolerance of homosexuality. In an age of massive fact-checking, viewers of this movie can rest assured “Downton Abbey: A New Era” did get its facts correct. The film, according to historians, was meticulously researched to the point that everything represented in it is grounded in factual events, including its people and technology.

Lady Mary’s (Michelle Dockery) voice is used in order for the production company to transition from a silent film to a talkie.

Photo Credit: BEN BLACKALL/FOCUS FEATURES

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In “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” a production company makes a hefty financial offer to use the Downton estate as a location for a new movie, titled The Gambler. After some trepidation, but knowing they have to repair a leaky roof to the Downton estate, Lady Mary Talbot agrees to the generous financial arrangement. The film, as was customary at the time, was intended as a silent film.

Almost halfway through the filming, the producer and director, Jack Barber (played by Hugh Dancy) gets word from studio execs that the film has to be scratched, because silent films are no longer profitable. After some deft maneuvering, clever strategy, and discussion, Lady Mary Talbot and the director decide to flow with the tide and make the film a talkie so they won’t have to cancel production after all.

The phasing out of silent films in favor of talkies was in fact taking place in Britain in 1928.

According to Laraine Porter, Reader in Cinema History at De Montfort University (Leicester), “1928 was significant for British cinema as it saw the implementation of the 1927 Cinematograph (Quota) Act which obliged cinemas to show a proportion of British-made films in the face of Hollywood's almost total domination.”

The British film industry hit an all-time low in 1926 when only 5 % of films screened in British cinemas were British. American films dominated the market. Films that started silent in Britain and ended as talkies was common around this time. They were referred to as “Goat Gland” films.

Since the British film industry was mired in such weak financial standing in 1928, and now were forced to invest vast amounts of money into talking technology, many of the smaller producers (who invested heavily on silent film technology) went bankrupt.

In 1927, the American produced “The Jazz Singer” represented the first motion picture which featured isolated talking scenes and synchronized dialogue, thanks to sound-on-disc technology.

The big breakthrough in Britain came in November, 1928, when the motion picture, "The Terror" reached British cinemas.

Britain’s transition to talking films came a year after the United States studios. Laraine Porter explained to me that “Britain had an established culture of popular theatre, particularly the Aldwych Farces, and a popular literary heritage which offered ready source material for the new talkies.” “These sources,” Porter explained, “had specific domestic appeal to audiences who also wanted to see and hear their favorite music-hall and Variety stars - like Gracie Fields - in film.” 

In addition, Britain had heaps of engineers and technicians from the BBC to draw from who were proficient in helping studios make the transition from silent to talking films.

Laraine Porter contends that there was “a massive urban working-class ready-made audience who supported early British talkies.”

The Terror, a murder mystery set in an English country house represented the first continuous “all-talkie” to premiere in Europe. It was released by Warner Bros, their second all talkie film. The first was “Lights of New York” also released in 1928.

Actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West) invites head butler, Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier),  to come live with him in America.

Photo Credit: BEN BLACKALL/FOCUS FEATURES

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Another hot-button issue which “Downton Abbey: A New Era” nibbles around the edges at is the topic of same-sex relationships in Britain in 1928.

The dashing Thomas Barrow (played by Robert James-Collier), the head butler at the Downtown Estate, who is gay, develops an attraction to one of the actors filming a movie at the Downton estate, Guy Dexter (played wonderfully by Dominic West). Dexter offers Barrow a chance to live with him in America as his personal assistant and social secretary; a role that is described in the film as a “dresser.” The idea that this would mark the beginning of a romantic relationship between the two is gently intimated in the film. When Barrow agrees and turns in his notice to Lady Mary, she shares his happiness and says, “I wish you all the happiness this cruel world can afford.”

The “cruel world’’ which Lady Mary refers to, is, of course, gays being treated as social outcasts in Britain in the 1920s.

Back in the 16^th century, Britain considered homosexuality a criminal act.

The Buggery Act of 1533, passed by Parliament during the reign of Henry VIII targeted homosexuality for persecution. Sex between men was punishable by death in the United Kingdom. The law, strangely, never affected females.

Not until 1861 was the Offences Against the Person Act passed, which eliminated the death penalty for homosexual acts and replaced it with 10-years of imprisonment.

Things didn’t improve for the gay community in 1885. The Criminal Law Amendment Act not only made male homosexual acts illegal, they could also be prosecuted whether or not a witness was present; meaning, private acts were subject to prosecution. Usually, a handwritten letter suggesting intimacy between two men was all the court needed to prosecute. It was this ambiguously written law that Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, fell victim to in 1895.

It took well into the 20^th century, 1957, in fact, when the Wolfenden Report was issued, which recommended that “homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should be no longer a criminal offence.”

Despite the recommendations from the Wolfenden Report, Parliament took until 1967 to pass the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 in the United Kingdom, which legalized homosexual acts in England and Wales on the condition they were at least 21 years old and the acts were consensual and in private. Penalties were, however, issued for street offenses.

Amazingly, the law was not changed for Scotland until 1980, or for Northern Ireland until 1982.

Despite the severe penalties gays were subject to at the time Downton Abbey, the movie, supposedly takes place, 1928,’’ Patrick Allitt, Professor of American History at Emory College tells me that ‘’we know from lots of literary evidence that [homosexuality] was widespread, particularly among the Bloomsbury Group intellectuals, such as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, J. M. Keynes, and others.”

The Bloomsbury Group were a group of influential English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, bold renegades, who opened the Victorian upper classes eyes to the LGBT point of view, a subject never discussed in Britain at the time, unless behind closed doors. Many point to the works of the Bloomsbury Group which sparked a seismic shift in Britain regarding LGBTQ rights.

According Lucy Delap, Professor of Modern British and Gender History at the University of Cambridge, “1928 was an interesting year as far as same sex relationships were concerned, because of the publication and then prosecution for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” – a Sapphic novel that caused uproar and became iconic for many lesbian readers – but only covertly read of course, in versions smuggled in from France.”

It was in October, 1928, when Virginia Woolf published “Orlando: A Biography,” which today is considered a feminist classic. The book chronicles the escapades of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. The novel was inspired by Woolf’s lesbian lover, the poet Vita Sackville-West. Literary scholars point to this novel as one of the first novels about gender uncertainty.

Not until 1960 were the British reading public able to read an uncensored edition of D.H. Lawrence’s novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

Photo Credit: Philip Jackson/Daily Mail/Rex

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Also in 1928, D.H. Lawrence secretly printed (in Italy) his eleventh novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” about an upper-class married woman, Constance or Lady Chatterley, who is racked with internal torment when she neglects her paralyzed husband (from a war injury) and falls into the arms of a gatekeeper, a member of the working-class.

Because Lady Chatterley was filled with explicit sex scenes and four-letter words, it was banned in the United Kingdom after its publishers, Penguin, were brought to trial under the Obscene Publications Act. Not until March, 1960, did Penguin win the rights to publish the novel in its entirety. Book stores reportedly all over England sold all 200,000 copies on the first day of publication.

1928 (November 11) was also the year that Thomas Hardy, considered to be the greatest English writer, died at his home in Dorchester. He was 87.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a reference book requiring the efforts of 1,300 people for more than 70 years was completed in 1928. The word “Zyxt” was the last word in the final volume of the dictionary.

English poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning were consulted about the meaning of words that appeared in their poems. J.R.R. Tolkien, in fact, was an assistant lexicographer for one year, 1919. At least six editors guided the process.

Politically, 1928 ushered in a new era for women’s voting rights.

It too nearly 60 years of campaigning, but on July 6, 1928, all women over 21 years old finally got the right to vote with the passing of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. Prior to that, a voting act in 1918 gave the vote to all men over age 21 and all women over age 30, tripling the electorate.

On February 15, 1928, British Liberal Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916, H. H. [Herbert Henry] Asquith, passed away at the age of 75. He resigned as leader of the Liberal Party in October, 1926.

Asquith’s finest achievement was the Parliament Act of 1911,which stripped the Lords of any veto over money bills or public legislation and became a landmark piece of legislation in paving the way for representative democracy in Great Britain.

A major medical breakthrough occurred in Britain in 1928, when Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, working in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital Paddington, London discovered, by accident, a mold growing on a dish had stopped bacteria from developing. Fleming’s antibacterial effects of penicillin were described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease."

Fleming published his findings in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology.

Tragically, 1928 was the year of a major flood in London. The Thames flooded a large swath of central London. The high waters were triggered by a depression in the North Sea which sent a storm surge up the tidal river.

The Houses of Parliament, the Tate Gallery and the Tower of London were all overwhelmed with high waters. The slums on the Westminster side of Lambeth Bridge, suffered the worst of it, where 10 of the 14 victims lost their lives. At one inquest, a man named Alfred Harding identified the bodies of his four daughters - Florence Emily, 18, Lillian Maude, 16, Rosina, six, and Doris Irene, two.

Taken together, the Thames flood left 14 people dead and an estimated 4,000 people homeless across London.

The flood of 1928, together with the disastrous North Sea Flood of 1953, inspired the construction of Thames Barrier in the 1970s.

1928 certainly wasn’t a good time for the working class in general, with high unemployment “especially in old industrial areas of northern England southern Scotland and South Wales. It got worse in the financial crisis of 1929-31,” Professor Patricia Thane, Visiting Professor in History at Birkbeck College, London said.

Politically, Conservatives were in power in the UK from 1924 through 1929, which contributed to the working-class plight of low wages and deteriorating economic conditions. Lucy Delap observed that “a Labour government had been in power as a minority in 1924 (briefly), and were to be voted in again in 1929 – so working-class voters were I think quite aware of the new political landscape and the possibility of change. When the second minority Labour government came in 1929, high hopes were dashed by the economic recession, and the government only lasted until 1931.”

So, the title of the movie: “Downton Abbey: A New Era” might not have been referring to a ‘’new era’’ only as it applies to the Crawley family at the Downton estate. A new era, to be sure, could be witnessed all over Britain in 1928 with social and economic conditions, the political landscape, and most certainly with movies and British literature.

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

June 18, 2022

A Look at Abraham Lincoln's Private Reading List

“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
--Abraham Lincoln, September 30, 1859 (Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society).

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I recently devoured author and historian Jon Meacham’s latest, “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle,” a wonderfully written book about the struggles Lincoln faced in his life, from his meager, poverty-stricken upbringing as a youth living in the harsh conditions of rural Indiana and Kentucky through the weighty challenges he confronted as president during the Civil War when the future of the Republic hung in the balance.

What fascinated me most about “And There Was Light” was that even though it was a full biography of Lincoln’s life and struggles, from cradle to grave, Meacham didn’t feel compelled to chronicle every intricate detail of every battle during the war, such as the First Battle of Bull Run or the Siege of Vicksburg. Instead, he focused on the overall morality of the Civil War, especially describing how Lincoln’s religious faith evolved and grew stronger during the most seminal events and challenges of his life.

While reading this magnificent biography, I was struck on the books Lincoln read and most liked during his lifetime; some of the books had such a profound impact on the Illinois “Railsplitter,” their fundamental lessons would, astonishingly, serve him well later in his life when confronted with the scourge of war and eventually as the moral crusader of the 19^th century.

It's been well documented that Lincoln absorbed a great deal of William Shakespeare’s work along with the King James Bible, which many believe helped him to develop the distinctive rhythm and structure of his writings and speeches. Lincoln would often recite out loud sonnets and passages from King Lear and Macbeth. A number of historians have written, for example, that just days before his assassination, Lincoln read loudly from a speech from Macbeth about the death of Duncan the king, which included the line, “after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.”

From an early age, Lincoln was an astute reader of the Bible.

William E. Barton, one of the early twentieth century's most admired writers and lecturers on the life of Abraham Lincoln, once wrote that Lincoln “read the Bible, honored it, quoted it freely, and it became so much a part of him as visibly and permanently to give shape to his literary style and to his habits of thought.”

During his famous “House Divided” speech at the Republican State Convention (June 16, 1858), Lincoln used three biblical references, including, Luke 11:17: “Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert and house falls on house.”

One line from the Gettysburg address (November 19, 1863) is based on the principle of Psalm 91:1” this “Nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom.”

 

Although Lincoln read many of his favorite books well over 160 years ago during the 19^th century, I became curious about how many of these books from his personal library are still considered relevant today in the 21^st century.

Undoubtedly, many of the books cited by Meacham as works most admired by Lincoln’s still resonate today and I’m sure are still widely read; such John Bunyan’s fictional narrative, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” (the author’s dream of the trials and adventures of a man as he travels from his home); the classic travelogue, “Robinson Crusoe,” by Daniel Defoe; and “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine, his influential pamphlet (originally published in 1794) which challenges traditional religion and the legitimacy of the Bible.

Other favorite books of Lincoln might not be as widely read as they were in the 19^th century.

One of the books Meacham mentions that was on Lincoln’s reading list is “The English Reader” written by Lindley Murray, first published in 1799, which contains snippets of prose excerpted from popular pieces of literature, a body of work, with a strong emphasis on the basic principles of elocution and grammar. 

According to William Huntting Howell, professor in the Department of English at Boston University, “it’s pretty safe to assume that “The English Reader” has fallen out of the college English curriculum. “I think that’s partly because,” Howell explained, “the canon has changed a lot since the late 18^th century—the folks that he designates as “the Best Writers” are, if I’m remembering right, mostly out of a now deemphasized Western classical tradition—and partly because of his approach to the material, which stresses eloquent pronunciation over critical engagement; that is, the book wasn’t much interested in inviting the reader to engage critically with the material.”

Another book high on Lincoln’s reading list was “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” by Robert Chamber, originally published in 1844; it brought together various ideas of stellar evolution (that is, how a star changes over time) and the progressive transmutation of species (the change of one species into another). The book became an international bestseller, much of its narrative, however, was strongly blasted by the clergy and eventually by leading scientists who pointed out many flaws in the book. Despite its criticisms, it was an important work, which predated Charles Darwin’s influential “Origin of the Species” by 15 years.

Jim Secord, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, thinks that “Vestiges really was very significant not only for Lincoln but for many Americans of his generation. Its main argument that nebular condensation led to the formation of the solar system and then to the development of planets, species and humans by natural laws is broadly supported by modern science.” “The book's significance,” Secord explained, “really is as the first text in English to develop a broadly evolutionary cosmology that takes into account the findings of scientific geology, astronomy and other sciences.”

“The Life of Washington” by Mason Locke Weems, a biography of George Washington, the Founding Father and first president of the United States, was another book consumed by the young Lincoln. It was first published in 1800 and became an instant bestseller. When the fifth edition of the book was published in 1806, Weems mentioned, for the first time, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree in which readers were led to believe he damaged with a hatchet and then admitted to his father what he had done: “I cannot tell a lie…” His father thanked young George for his honesty and told him his honesty was worth more than a thousand trees. By the 1830’s, the story spread like a wildfire and became imbedded into American culture. Historians today roundly dismiss the cherry tree story as pure fiction, that never happened.

According to Benjamin L. Huggins, Research Associate Professor and Associate Editor of the Pagers of George Washington at the University of Virginia, “Weems's biography was very popular in the 19^th century, but it is filled with invented material and myths, and modern historians consider it completely unreliable. It is never assigned in college classrooms, except as an example in American Studies classes that might study this genre of now unreliable 19^th-century biographies like Weems's.”

It would take quite some time to learn that Weems acquired the cherry tree story from an elderly woman, apparently, a friend of the family, who wanted to remain anonymous, casting a shadow of doubt of its accuracy.

A look at Lincoln’s favorite books indicates he craved expanding his depth of knowledge every chance he got, such as when reading “Aesop's Fables”, or the “Aesopica”, a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE.

The book chronicles 725 known parables, which were told roughly between 620 and 564 BC. Most of Aesop’s fables feature personified animals, which generally have a one-to-one figurative relationship with a vice or virtue with the fox frequently symbolizing cleverness; the hare, agility; the bull, recklessness; the donkey, fatuousness; and the ant, industriousness. Aesop throws these animals into different environments with different combinations and then suggests what effect it has on them in a social setting.

Leslie V. Kurke, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley, said that “by and large, the fables of Aesop are not assigned in the college classroom--though they may still be popular in primary and secondary school curricula.” “I think that occasionally, they're read in Greek,” Kurke points out, “in first-year Greek classes, since they're short and the Greek is very simple.”

In seeking a sharper understanding of 19^th century liberalism, Lincoln liked to read the “Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy,” (first published in 1785), a classic work by William Paley, an English clergyman and philosopher, who attacked the slave trade in the book and the wickedness of slavery in general. The book was considered a significant piece of writing which triggered public attention to the immoral practice of slavery. In the book, Paley additionally developed some of the leading scientific, theological, and ethical ideas of the time, including civil liberties and constitutional government.

Azis Rana, a legal scholar and Professor of Law at the Cornell University, thinks that Paley was “a major philosophical and religious figure for early Americans, given his effort to provide a rational account of the existence of God in keeping with Enlightenment principles.” “Today,” Rana explained, “he is still studied in religious studies and theology programs.  I think he tends to be less commonly found on syllabi in political theory, intellectual history, and philosophy.”

“Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy” was also on the college reading list of Thaddeus Stevens, one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s.

With such a keen interest of American history, it’s probably no surprise to find William Grimshaw’s “History of the United States: From Their First Settlement as Colonies” on Lincoln’s reading list. It was originally published in 1822. Grimshaw was from Greencastle, Ireland and emigrated to the United States in 1815, settling in Philadelphia. He wrote a number of history books, including revised editions of “Goldsmith’s histories of Rome and Greece,” of David Ramsay’s “Life of Washington,” and of Baine’s “History of the Wars Growing Out of the French Revolution.”

His History of the United States was his most celebrated. In his broad sweep of the United States, Grimshaw advanced the idea, among others, that large swaths of territory of the American West should be seized by the United States, an idea which would later become more broadly defined as “Manifest Destiny.”

According to David Gerleman, Professor in the History department at George Mason University, “Grimshaw's book [published 1832] has never been used in any modern classrooms nor should it be. It was written long before history as a discipline or social science was founded, not containing, for example, any source or citation record of any kind.” “Much like Parson Weems' fanciful biography of Washington,” Gerleman further explained, “it is one man's tale of what he thinks the history was and not one grounded in academic fact.”

Gerald Prokopowicz, in the History department at East Carolina University, points out that historians didn’t begin using footnotes or citing their sources until the second half of the 19^th century, several decades after Grimshaw wrote his book.

Of all the books on Lincoln’s personal reading list, arguably, the most well-known is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “Life Among the Lowly” It was a best-seller and second best-selling book of the 19^th century, right behind the Bible.

Stowe, a staunch abolitionist and born into a prominent family of Northern white preachers, sketches the story of an enslaved character, Uncle Tom, described as saintly and dignified, who saves the life of Little Eva, a frail, angelic daughter of a Southern slave owner while being transported by boat to an auction in New Orleans. It more generally chronicles the harsh and punishing treatment of slaves forced to cope with the separation of families after being put up for sale by their masters.

The two volume anti-slavery novel is widely hailed as one of the most influential books of the 19^th century, which brought to light the immorality of slavery to a wider audience; and caused others, who previously remained silent, to publicly speak out against slavery.

Robert S. Levine, a scholar of American and African American Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, tells me that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed still being taught in college classrooms, “though undergraduate students these days have trouble with long works, whether Uncle Tom's Cabin or Moby-Dick.” “As editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature,” Levine says, “I created a 100-page version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the anthology (volume B), which I find very teachable. Some these days find the novel racist and sentimental; others (including myself) see the novel as doing key anti-racist and anti-slavery cultural work during the 1850s.”

Whenever a discussion comes up about Lincoln and his reading of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” historians often cite the famous story, when meeting Stowe at the White House, Lincoln supposedly said, “So here’s the little lady who created this big war.”  Most consider the tale apocryphal, including Robert S. Levine, who says that one of Stowe’s sisters was with her at that meeting at the White House; and according to her, President Lincoln had no idea who Harriet Beecher Stowe was; triggering doubt whether the president read Uncle Tom’s Cabin at all.

A book not mentioned in Meacham’s book is “The Columbian Orator,” which according to Jonathan W. White, professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, appears to have had a meaningful impact on Lincoln.

“The Columbian Orator,” published in 1797, is a collection of political essays, poems, and dialogues collected and written by Caleb Bingham, an educator of late 18^th century New England. The striking body of work includes speeches by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and some imagined speeches by Socrates and Cato, among other historical figures.

In addition to Lincoln, “The Columbian Orator” reportedly served as a source of inspiration for abolitionist, social reformer, statesman, and writer, Frederick Douglass.

I’m sure Lincoln read a great deal of poetry in his lifetime; one of his favorites often cited by historians, including Jon Meacham, is the poem “Mortality” by Scottish poet William Knox. Lincoln supposedly knew the poem by heart and is believed to have once said, “I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is." Knox, a descendant of reformer John Knox, published the poem in a collection called The Songs of Israel in 1824, shortly before his death at age 36. "Mortality" was printed in at least 235 newspapers during the 19^th century.

Another favorite poem of Lincoln’s was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr’s “The Last Leaf,” written in 1831, that explores the fragility of life and the supremacy of hope; and that even in the face of death and despair, there is always something to hold on to.

William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner and biographer, in describing Lincoln’s love of the poem, wrote in 1867: "I have heard Lincoln recite it, praise it, laud it, and swear by it.”

Poet Edgar Allan Poe once described “The Last Leaf” one of the finest works in the English language.

According to David Bromwich, Professor of English at Yale University, “They (“Mortality,” and “The Last Leaf”) are good popular pieces with a fatalism very suitable to Lincoln's mood at most times,” while John Burt, Professor of American Literature at Brandeis University, thinks that these two poems are not widely read today. “I know he learned how to read and speak from The Columbian Orator (which Frederick Douglass also used). And I know he was a careful reader of Euclid, and worked out all the proofs himself.”

So, there you have it.

There weren’t many public libraries, Barnes & Noble bookstores, or ordering books online through Amazon in Lincoln’s day.  Books were largely scarce for the young Lincoln; but he did manage to get his hands on what he could; the books he did find were some of the best literature available; and by and large, it’s safe to assume some of his favorite books served him well up through his assassination in April, 1865.

His was a life well lived; and apparently well-read.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

July 2, 2023

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Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Books (according to historian Jon Meacham)

• “A New Guide to the English Tongue” by Thomas Dilworth

• “Fables” by Aesop

• “Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan

• “The Life of Washington” by Mason Locke Weems

• “Robinson Crusoe” by Danie Defoe

• “An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce” by James Riley

• “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” by Robert Chamber

• “Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin

• “Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind” by Thomas Brown

• “Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy” by William Paley

• “Analogy of Religion” by Joseph Butler (first published in 1736)

• “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe

• “The Psalms” of the Bible (King James Version)--Lincoln’s favorite

• “The English Reader”, an anthology published in 1799

• “History of the United States” by William Grimshaw

• “The Ruins of Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires” by Constantin Volney

• “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine

• “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story is Founded” by Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Poem, “Mortality” by William Knox (Lincoln knew it by heart).

• “The Last Leaf” by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a poem

Additional Resources

What Abraham Lincoln Read: An Evaluative and Annotated List by Robert Bray, Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University

Abraham Lincoln and Poetry (Cambridge University Press) by Faith Barrett (Associate Professor of English at Duquesne University) and edited by Shirley Samuels (Professor of American Studies at Cornell University).

 

Ken Burns Explores Ernest Hemingway: The Man, the Writer, and the Myth in New Documentary

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is at it again.

Monday, April 5, the creator of prize-winning documentaries on the American Civil War, Jazz Music, and Baseball, teamed with director and producer, Lynn Novick, for a new documentary on American literature icon Ernest Hemingway. It will be a six-hour documentary broadcast over three nights.

The film preview promises to smash the man behind the myth and dispel many misplaced notions many have about the American literature legend.

If you talk to enough American literature scholars, you get the sense that many readers don’t even bother to read Hemingway because of the chauvinistic reputation attached to his bull-fighting, hard drinking, multiple marriages (four in all), killing animals for sport, and writing about the scourge of war.

We are, after all, living in the era of the MeToo Movement (the social movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment), a crusade against bullying, responsible drinking habits, and overall--a kinder gentler era than when Hemingway was plying his trade.

Many think the macho image often attributed to Hemingway is unreasonably exaggerated.

Author Gioia Diliberto in her biography of Hadley Hemingway (Hemingway’s first wife), titled “Paris without End,” wrote: "For all his macho posturing, Hemingway at his best wrote love stories that brilliantly charted the emotional nuances in relationships between men and women.” “His great talent,” Diliberto explained, “was in evoking the most intimate moments of longing, and all his fictional love stories flow from the central love story in his own life -- his marriage to Hadley."

Verna Kale, Professor of English and Associate Editor of The Hemingway Letters Project  at Pennsylvania State University, echoing Diliberto’s sentiments, said that Hemingway’s popular success, and the adaptation by fiction writers of his innovations, “obscure how innovative his work was in its time.  He refused to follow political or literary trends, and as a result his work has the kind of longevity that makes him widely read and studied today, and I do believe he qualifies as one of the greatest American writers--not just of novels but of short stories and what we now call creative nonfiction.”

Kale provided a sneak peek into what to expect from the upcoming PBS documentary. “His reputation as a masculine icon and celebrity may have undermined the appreciation of his work,” Kale observed.  “Both the documentary film and the ongoing project to publish Hemingway's correspondence show that he was a complicated person, full of contradictions. The film and his letters show the sides of him that are often overlooked: his sensitivity, his concern for family and friends, his interests in art and music, his commitment to anti-fascism.” Kale did point out that the film hardly sugar coats his character flaws. Hemingway could be “violent, angry, and proud,” Kale said.

Others aren’t so infatuated by the iconic status that Hemingway enjoys.

Writer and public intellectual, Gore Vidal, told political commentator Pat Buchanan in 1984: “I have a very low view of Hemingway; he’s sort of a Field & Stream writer. His gift for publicity propelled him ever forward. He didn’t develop.”

 Later in the interview with Buchanan, Vidal, said “For Whom the Bell Tolls is an embarrassing book which even he came to realize that.”

 Novelist Kurt Vonnegut remarked in 1990, following the rise of the feminist movements, Hemingway is “a little hard to read nowadays.” 

The brawny image of Hemingway wasn’t so pronounced in his novels as it was in the Esquire magazine pieces that he wrote in the 1930’s in which he projected himself to be tough as nails, vulgar, an adventurous outdoorsman, and a hopeless playboy and carouser.

Even in the prime of his career, Hemingway’s contemporaries pelted him with some harsh criticism.

In 1927, writer Virginia Woolf blasted Hemingway’s “self-conscious virility” of his fiction and with what she considered his “excessive use of dialogue.”

British writer Wyndham Lewis in his study of Hemingway (“The Dumb Ox”), faulted the American novelist for creating “stupid and insensitive characters” and of presenting them in a kind of baby talk borrowed from Gertrude Stein. 

While showering him with well-deserved praise for his literary skills, both Woolf and Lewis were highly critical of Hemingway for embracing unrealistically muscular characters by touching on such violent topics as war, boxing, and bullfighting, among others.

Arnold Weinstein, an American literary scholar at Brown University thinks, sadly, that the new age in American society has lessened the importance of Hemingway in college classrooms. I'd wager that English departments at elite universities have relatively little of Hemingway in their courses,” Weinstein told me. “Needless to say,” Weinstein continued; “there's lots of company, and there'll be even more of it as we move ahead, since there is an ever greater, ever angrier awareness of the systemic flaws, blind spots and injustices in American culture.”

Weinstein said that he’s still teaching, but his repertoire of authors is “imploding.” “It’s a pity given that Hemingway’s work with its depths, ambiguities and virtues are under the radar screen.”

Despite the criticism of Hemingway, especially in the 21^st century, living as we are in a more refined society, Suzanne Clark, Professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon, thinks Hemingway “is doubtless one of the great American writers of the 20th century, and he endures, in spite of much sniping at him.”  “Part of the reason why he endures,” Clark argues, “is that his style, which seems so simple, so straightforwardly factual, rewards close reading the way a poem does.  Hemingway seems easy but is after all as complex as the human experience. “ 

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born July 2, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. Soon after graduating from Oak Park High School, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star as a police reporter and feature story writing before venturing off to Italy where he was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I. As an ambulance driver he was badly injured when a heavy machine-gun bullet ripped through his right knee. It was his first taste of war which would permeate many of his works of literature.

The Hemingway canon is vast from cub reporter to feature writer to war correspondent, short story writer, and novelist. But when people discuss Hemingway, they for the most part, center on four novels: “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), “A Farewell to Arms” (1929), “For Whom the Bells Tolls” (1940), and “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952).  Many of his short stories have also been widely hailed as splendid works of literature, including “Big Two-Hearted River,” “The Killers,’’ “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,”

What distinguished Hemingway from his predecessors, especially 19^th century authors were his simple, direct writing style.

“The Sun Also Rises”, was Hemingway’s first novel. It was published in 1926, a piece of fiction about a group of American and English expatriates in Paris, all of whom have suffered both physically and emotionally during World War I.

In reviewing “The Sun Also Rises,’’ The New York Times wrote “Mr. Hemingway writes a most admirable dialogue. It has the terse vigor of Ring Lardner at his best. It suggests the double meanings of Ford Madox Ford's records of talk. Mr. Hemingway makes his characters say one thing, convey still another, and when a whole passage of talk has been given, the reader finds himself the richer by a totally unexpected mood, a mood often enough of outrageous familiarity with obscure heartbreaks.” “No amount of analysis,” the Times went on to write, “can convey the quality of "The Sun Also Rises." It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. “

By the time he had written “For Whom the Bell Tolls’’ in 1940, Hemingway was considered one of the greatest novelists in American literature if not the world.  In their review "For Whom the Bell Tolls," J. Donald Adams, editor of The New York Times Book Review wrote: “This is the best book Ernest Hemingway has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest. It will I think, be one of the major novels in American literature.” Adams summed up his review of For Whom the Bell Tolls by writing: “This is the work of a mature artist, of a mature mind.”

Ernest Hemingway in Kenya in 1952

Photo Credit:Earl Theisen / Getty

***

Before the publication of “The Old Man and Sea” in 1952, Hemingway spent a great deal of time stowed away in Finca Vigia, Cuba, where he lived from 1939 until 1960. “The Old Man and the Sea” was a novella about a Cuban fisherman and his battles with a giant marlin.

It was a smash success, earning Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the following year, a Nobel Prize in literature in 1954.

In the New York Times review of  "The Old Man and the Sea" on August 28, 1952, Orville Prescott, the primary book reviewer for the New York Times , wrote: “The Old Man and the Sea" is fresh and healthy and the old man's ordeal is moving.”

“But good as "The Old Man and the Sea" is,” Prescott wrote, “it is good only in a limited way. The fisherman is not a well-characterized individual. He is a symbol of an attitude toward life. He often thinks and talks poetically and symbolically and so artificially.”

 After suffering from near fatal airplane crashes in Africa, in 1954, Hemingway’s health plummeted. He began suffering from severe depression, landing him in the hospital, where he underwent electroshock treatments.

Much like his father in 1928, the celebrated American novelist committed suicide on July 2, 1961 with one of his shotguns at his home in in Ketchum, Idaho. He was 61.

Whether Hemingway is still considered a major force in American literature, the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary will undoubtedly answer that question over the next few nights.

Charles Scribner Jr., the longtime head of the Charles Scribner's Sons book publishing company said in a 1982 lecture that “Hemingway’s books were the “foundation stones’’ of the firm’s publishing reputation.”

NOTE: Vern Kale, Associate Editor of The Hemingway Letters Project welcomes viewers of the documentary to the watch party and discussion on April 10, hosted by the Hemingway Society.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

April 3, 2021

Charles Dickens Revisited: 150 Years Later

Portrait Of Charles Dickens is a painting by William Powell Frith

***

Have you wondered how our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens, is holding up after all these years?

2020 marked the 150^th year of his death. The celebrated Victorian novelist died on June 9, 1870 after suffering a brain aneurysm. He was 58, leaving his final novel, Edwin Drood unfinished.

The Dickens canon includes: 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles. Dickens also lectured and performed readings extensively (including the United States), while championing children's rights, education, penal reform, legal reform, sanitation, and public health.

As the conventions of society advance in the 21^st century, some iconic historical figures once widely admired have fallen into disgrace to the point of having their memorials and statutes removed or destroyed for not clinging to 21^st century progressive thinking in previous centuries.

In the United States, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson; along with the original liberal lion, Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, have been scorned for their ownership of slaves.

Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890-1896, Cecil Rhodes is despised for his imperialism and colonization; and may have paved the way for Apartheid in South Africa. In his will, he left sizeable fortunes to Oxford University to establish the Rhodes scholarships to provide places at Oxford for students from the United States, the British colonies, and Germany. Former president Bill Clinton, United States Ambassador Susan Rice, and U.S. Senator Cory Booker, among others, were recipients of Rhodes benevolence.

And in June of this year, the British Bulldog, Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square in London was sprayed over for a couple of days with the phrase “Churchill was a racist.” Many argue Churchill was unsympathetic to Blacks and their struggles for equality. He was also known to have expressed some grotesque racial epithets about not only Blacks, but people from India.

So, as one of the finest English novelists in British literature is being lionized and honored 150 years after his death, I wondered if there are any shocking occurrences of Dickens past that were swept under the rug and only recently have come to light?

Robert L. Patten, Professor (Emeritus) of Humanities and English at Rice University, observed that “Dickens could be vicious, breaking with friends, colleagues, and some of his children—he told one son that it would have been better if his brother had never lived.” “There were times,’’ Patten explained, “especially after the first Indian uprising and the massacre at Cawnpore, when he could be deeply, terribly racist. But his efforts, in periodicals as well as fictions, in speeches as well as philanthropy, to help the poor, the suffering, the abused, the uneducated, to better lives, was massive, sustained, and immensely influential.”

Carolyn Oulton, Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University (Canterbury, Kent, England), said that “people feel disappointed by his [Dicken's] personal failings in ways that they wouldn't in relation to other writers. They also make excuses for him - the endless speculation about whether Ellen Ternan was really his mistress - in ways that would be unthinkable and possibly unnecessary with regard to his contemporaries.”

Dickens marriage to Catherine Hogarth (April, 1836) became irrevocably disrupted when Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress, met Dickens in August, 1857, when he was 45. She eventually became the novelist’s mistress. Catherine and Charles had 10 children together; Catherine also suffered two miscarriages. At the urging of her mother, Catherine Hogarth left Dickens in 1858 as the two of them drifted apart and increasingly became incompatible. Their separation was highly publicized and splashed across British newspapers.

Oulton points out that Dickens was capable of cruelty, but also great loyalty. “He worked relentlessly to make money for relations who had very little claim on him but also cast people off easily if they offended him. He made some dreadful comments about women (most Victorians did), but he also showed them a lot of professional respect. “

In commemorating 150 years since Charles Dickens death, Professor Oulton has mapped the different places the English novelist travelled through London, including the places where he wrote certain novels, such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations.

One critical chapter of Dickens life that remains untarnished 150 years after his death, was his vigorous agitation for improvements in the quality of life for the poor and less fortunate.

He experienced poverty at a young age. His family’s financial plight forced them to move to a poor era of London, Camden Town. At age 12, with his father experiencing mounting debts, the young Dickens was plucked from school and forced to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, a factory which specialized in “blacking,’’ or shoe polish.

 ‘Please sir, may I have some more?’ James Mahoney’s illustration for chapter one of Dickens’s ‘Adventures of Oliver Twist.’ (Image: Public domain)

***

As he progressed into adulthood and began his writing career, Dickens walked his talk.

The trials and tribulations of his impoverished childhood found its voice in many of his novels, including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, and David Copperfield. Oliver Twist, Dickens second novel, is especially renowned for illustrating the harsh life and squalor of the slums of an orphan (Oliver Twist) trying to make his way through the mean streets of London.

Dickens additionally exposed the punishing brutality at an English boys’ school in Nicholas Nickleby (published in 1838). His father served time for debt at the Marshalesa Prison. The humiliation of a debtor’s prison found expression in Little Dorrit.

Remarkably, 150 years after his death, the legacy of Charles Dickens still lives on in the 21^st century.

To underscore Dickens staying power in the 21^st century, Robert L. Patten informed me that on the 200th anniversary of his birth, in 2012, “worldwide celebrations organized by the British Council and the Charles Dickens Museum reached an audience of over 60 million. More new copies of A Christmas Carol were sold that year in Italy than in the United Kingdom.”

Professor Patten has written extensively on Dickens, including authoring the books: "Charles Dickens and His Publishers," and "Charles Dickens and 'Boz': The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author."

George H. Ford, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, once wrote that “since the 1950s, Dickens reputation has risen to great heights, so high that recently there have been more written him each year than about any other author in the English language except Shakespeare.”

What’s more, in any movie database you’ll find at least fifty adaptations based on the books written by Charles Dickens.

Malcolm Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies in the School of English at the University of Kent (Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom), informs me that “the Dickens Fellowship (founded in 1902), to which I belong and whose journal I edit) has branches all over the world.” “Not surprising,’’ Andrew said, “since he himself was/is an inspiration for fellowship: so much of his work was a mission to bring people together, to dissolve class divisions, to reunite families (hence his special concentration on Christmas), and to rejuvenate people's imaginations. On the latter note, one of my favorite quotations of his is this -- about his hoped-for legacy:”

“'I hope I have done my part to make the rising generation "more childish," in rendering them a little more imaginative, a little more gentle, and a little less conceited and hard, than they would have been without me. I desire to do nothing better.”

 As much as the literature of Dickens is still highly revered, Charlie Tyson PhD student in English at Harvard University, cautions, however, that Dickens novels have lost a little steam in college classrooms, mostly because his novels run so long, as many as 800 pages in some cases.

“Teachers,” Tyson tells me, “usually select Hard Times (well worth reading, but not Dickens's best) or Great Expectations. Last year I taught a seminar on "The Queer Bildungsroman" (a Bildungsroman is a coming-of-age novel) in which we read David Copperfield in full; my students loved it, but spending 25% of our semester on a single novel was something of a risk.”

Tyson additionally thinks writers like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, among the Victorian novelists, packs more of a philosophical punch and exhibit more artistic control than Dickens. Still, Tyson contends Dickens “remains one of the best entry points into the classic phase of the English novel. He is especially good to read when you are a child, because he specializes in injustices and cruelties administered to children.”

Thankfully, Charles Dickens has held up reasonably well 150 years after his death. He’s still taught widely in college classrooms both in the United and Britain. His quotes from a Christmas Carol are still widely invoked around the holidays, especially “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.”

And his character flaws are largely dismissed as the antiquated spirit of the age in Victorian society.

Further, during a time when vast amounts of people are experiencing job losses, mounting debt, and financial hardship since COVID-19 ruthlessly struck the world, Dickens novels about suffering, stresses of the less fortunate, while attacking privilege, snobbery, and injustice--rings as true today as it did in the 19^th century.

One of the most tender lines about Dickens and his legacy came from an 1870 New York Times obituary of the English writer and social critic.”

“It is the accidents of life which decide the fate of men. In the lonely places of the earth his books have been unfailing solace to many an exile, and they have shed hope and light in many a sick room, and comforted a many an afflicted heart.”

--Bill Lucey

November 15, 2020

[email protected]

Without Books Podcasts Might Be Just What the Doctor Ordered

The American Shakespeare Center (ASC), a regional theatre company located in Staunton, Virginia maintains a popular podcast.

***

There’s been some rarely mentioned downsides to the spread of the coronavirus and the subsequent quarantine, one of the most prominent (to many) has been the closing of many of the nation’s public libraries. Not being able to access the public library has been especially annoying for me.

Before moving into this small apartment I’m living in, I donated boxes, boxes, and boxes of books to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. I just finished David W. Blight’s superb biography on Frederick Douglass (“Prophet of Freedom”) and am currently enjoying Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi’s absorbing history of John Paul II, “His Holiness’’ published in 1996.

After I’m through with that, my reading material gets dangerously thin.

I have a number of friends who engage in these marathon sessions of Netflix, some watching for eight consecutive hours. I do subscribe to Netflix, but I can never imagine watching more than two consecutive hours of streaming without losing my mind.

So, what to do?

Suddenly, I began thinking about podcasts as a possible alternative to books. I must admit, I haven’t really listened to many podcasts, I always preferred reading.

When did podcasts actually begin?

In 2004, former MTV video jockey Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer were credited with creating the first podcast. In 2005, President George W. Bush was the first U.S. President to have his weekly address delivered as a podcast. That same year, “podcast’’ was declared the word of the year by New Oxford American Dictionary.

Also, in 2004, “podcast’’ was used for the first time by journalist Ben Hammersley in the Guardian newspaper on February 11, 2004. 

After doing a little research, I was stunned to learn how popular podcasts have become since 2004. More than one-third of Americans age 12 and over (104 Million) are consuming podcasts regularly, up significantly from 2019, according to Edison Research and Triton Digital.

What’s more, “podcasts now reach over 100 million Americans every month,” Tom Webster, SVP of Edison Research reports.

So, with so many podcasts out there, I thought I would reach out to a number of experts on different subject in order to get some recommendations on the most popular podcasts.

Thankfully, many were kind enough to share their favorites. I list them according to subject.

NOTE: I didn’t try to find podcasts about current events or politics, since most of them mirror each other in reporting the same mundane narratives about President Donald Trump and the economic impact of COVID-19.

 Charles Dickens

• In Our Time Podcast from the BBC. Melvyn Bragg, an English broadcaster, author and parliamentarian, discusses the achievements of Charles Dickens.

• The University of Oxford Podcast features a number of lively scholarly discussions about different facets of Charles Dickens life and works. 

• In 2012, during the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens, The University of Warwick assembled experts from the University and other institutions to explore the genius of Dickens, his real life experiences, knowledge, philanthropy, character-rich novels and the Victorian era, in which he lived.

• Carolyn Oulton, Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers (ICVWW) and Professor of Victorian Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University, has launched a mapping project in which she takes viewers around Kent (England), connecting the places in the South East England county associated with Dickens, such as where parts of David Copperfield were written or the view from the Swiss chalet where Dickens was working on the morning of his death.

William Shakespeare

• The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, an independent registered educational charity based in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, among other undertakings, features a podcast in which Shakespearean experts address a number of compelling topics about the “Bard of Avon,” such as one show in which Professor Sir Stanley Wells discusses how Shakespeare typically wrote a play or what the sonnets tells us about Shakespeare.

Peter Holland, Professor of Shakespearean Studies at the University of Notre Dame, said that Wells lectures are “wonderfully clear and engaging, a joy to listen to, a distillation of a lifetime of studying Shakespeare. “

• Another highly recommended Shakespeare podcast is the Public Theater’s new venture, Brave New Shakespeare: 

James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, who specializes in Shakespeare at Columbia University, explained it to me, “you can listen (in English, Spanish, etc.) to first-rate actors perform a scene or speech from Shakespeare—and then you get to give it a shot yourself, and post your own version.” “I much prefer,” Shapiro says,” recommending that to the more passive experience of most podcasts.”

• The American Shakespeare Center (ASC), a regional theatre company located in Staunton, Virginia  also features a highly recommended podcast for theater lovers. ASC not only focuses on plays by Shakespeare, but also his contemporaries: Ben Jonson, Beaumont the Fletcher, Christopher Marlowe; and works related to Shakespeare, such as James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, and Bob Carlton’s Return to Forbidden Planet.

 Poetry/Literature

• How To Read Podcast  in which each episode is a short conversation – approximately 15 minutes – with a literary scholar who engages listeners with a smart conversation on different themes of literature, attracting readers from the professional to the curious.

• Jacket 2 Podcast is a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation which offers commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics.

• That Book Podcast, hosted by Hannah Weaver and Michael Goldsmith, provides updates on everything everyone’s reading (and NOT reading, side-eye straight to Thrift Books) in lockdown. 

• Being Podcast  Pádraig Ó Tuama  is a poet, theologian, and conflict mediator. He is the inaugural poet laureate of The On Being Project and hosts the Poetry Unbound.He was the former leader of Corrymeela, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. His books include two volumes of poetry, a daily prayer book, and a memoir, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World.

• Charles Olson’s 1966 reading of “Maximus of Gloucester to You,” which one scholar considered the “greatest poem reading of all.” Olson was a second-generation modern American poet inspired by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. 

Music History

Historian, composer, pianist, speaker, and author, Robert Greenberg (a Brooklyn N.Y. native) features a podcast every Monday about different themes of classical music.

Baseball

 Jacob Pomrenke, director of editorial content for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: the 1919 Chicago White Sox,” was kind enough to recommend the following baseball podcasts.

• SABRcast with Rob Neyer, is a wildly popular podcast with timely topics about the national pastime.

• Effectively Wild is updated three times a week; co-hosted by Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer, Sam Miller of ESPN, and Meg Rowley of FanGraphs, with witty banter about various baseball issues, which includes guest interviews.

• This Week in Baseball History, a weekly podcast devoted to the history of baseball, hosted by Mike Bates and Bill Parker, the co-founders of The Platoon Advantage.

• The Infinite Inning podcast hosted by Steven Goldman, former consulting editor of Baseball Prospectus dealing with a number of baseball issues, including topical items in the news.

Other popular baseball pods include:

• David Gardner, a staff writer for Bleacher Report, hosts a unique podcast in which he deals with How to Survive Without Sports.

• Baseball Tonight with ESPN’s Buster Onley

• Girl at the Game  hosted by Gabrielle Starr and NESN’s Alexandra; a podcast by women, but for everyone.

• Mike Safo’s Podcast A New York City police officer who fell in love with Kentucky basketball and hangs with Kentuckians at a UK pub on W. 33 St. (Jack Demsey's). He finds baseball people and asks about their corners, or former corners, of the world.

• Anchor: Writer and freelance journalist Hillel Kuttler hosts ABC’s Athletics Beyond Coronavirus, which features discussions with people in sports about how they’re faring during these challenging times.

• Caught Listening hosted by cancer survivor and sports director of Public House Media, Christian Heimall, who offers listeners a different slice of America’s National Pastime. 

Melvyn Bragg, an English broadcaster, author and parliamentarian, discusses the history of ideas, and explores subjects in culture and science in the “Our Time" podcast by the BBC.

Photo Credit: BBC

***

History

• BackStory hosted by a number of noted U.S. historians, is a weekly podcast that addresses topical events in America, providing listeners with unique perspectives on a particular theme or subject and how many of these events shaped how America is viewed in the present age.

• The Organization of American Historians, an organization founded in 1907 as the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history, maintains a podcast, which features interviews with authors of articles in their journal. As they look into the future and as podcasts become more popular, JAH hopes to include conversations with award-winning authors of books on American history. 

Philip J. Deloria, Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Harvard University, finds JAH’s podcast to be “lively, and certainly off the beaten track in terms of topics.”

• Liz Covert, a historian of early America who practices scholarly history, public history, and digital humanities, primarily as the Digital Projects Editor for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture maintains a podcast, Ben Franklin’s World in which she hopes to connect listeners with the work of professional historians who shed dramatic light on events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.

Covert’s latest episode, for example, deals with the origins of the 11^th Amendment, the first amendment adopted after the Bill of Rights which restricts the ability of individuals to bring suit against states in federal court.

• Whiskey Rebellion, a podcast hosted by Frank Cogliano and David Silkenat who both teach at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. 

In their latest episode, with more than 30 million Americans filing for unemployment over the past 6 weeks, the United States faces unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression. These two engaging historians discuss the history of unemployment in the US, and explore what lessons could be learned.

• The commercial free Ottoman History Podcast , which began in March of 2011, has grown to be one of the largest digital resources for academic discussion concerning the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, which includes contributions from hundreds of experts in the field.

• The Fall of Rome Podcast hosted by history podcaster and writer, Patrick Wyman, is being met with rave reviews, for among things, its clear and smooth-tongued retelling of the historic decline of the Western Roman Empire.

• Wyman also hosts the compelling Tides of History Podcast in which, through different epic events in history, he helps listeners understand our world and how it got to be the way it us.

• Another big hit with historians and history buffs is Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time (BBC) podcast which features gripping discussions with expert guests on a number of topics, including: literature, politics, philosophy, religion, and music.  Bragg is an English broadcaster, author and parliamentarian.

Religion

• Jewish History Matters Podcast: is hosted by Jason Lustig, a scholar of modern Jewish history and culture at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Lustig also serves as executive producer of Jewish History Matters.

According to its website, “looking to American history, European history, the histories of colonialism, science, or philosophy, let alone other topics, we cannot overlook the Jews both as people who played a part in it as well as an important example of the place of minorities in these societies and histories. To disregard the Jews would be to neglect the nuances and complexities of history.”

• Erik Estrada, assistant professor of religion at Texas Christian University, runs a podcast, "Catholic Heritage Show," which is an overview of Catholic history and doctrine. Estrada tells me that “in the future, we will be doing more in studio recordings on various topics in Church history.” Estrada’s wife, Mary Estrada, hosts a podcast titled "Catholic Heritage Spirituality"  which covers the Catholic spiritual tradition from a historical perspective.

• Gabriel Reynolds, Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at the University of Notre Dame, hosts a podcast “Minding Scripture” in which he teams with two other colleagues (one Muslim, the other Jewish) in discussing the Bible and the Qur'an. Reynolds said they generated a great response to their first nine episodes.

• On Being, a Webby Award-winning public radio conversation and podcast, hosted by Krista Tippett, which examines what it calls the, "animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live?"

Online Courses

• Yale University offers free online courses taught by the university’s most distinguished scholars, which includes a full set of class lectures on video, a syllabus, suggested readings, exams, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and as an audio-only version. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided. Some of the courses offered include: “Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner,” “Financial Markets (2008),” “The American Novel since 1945,” “Roman Architecture,” and the “Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877” taught by Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David. W. Blight.

• Gresham College Lectures offers free videos of their scholars teaching courses on a number of subjects, including history, arts and literature, religion, law, and a host of other disciplines. Gresham College was founded in 1597 and has been providing free lectures within the City of London for over 400 years.

COVID-19:  Historic Background of Contagious Diseases

 Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600 Podcast which takes a sharp look at the impact of epidemic diseases on western society and culture from the bubonic plague to HIV/AIDS and recent experiences of SARS and the swine flu. This podcast is hosted by Frank Snowden, professor of history at Yale University, who has previously published: “Naples in the Times of Cholera”(1995) and “The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962” (2006).

Snowden’s lectures were delivered 10 years ago, but as Keith Wrightson, a Yale historian who specializes in early modern England, tells me, “they were never more relevant.”

• History of Now Podcasts  on the history of epidemics, state regulation and other issues hosted by Christopher Clark, Regius Professor at Cambridge, and author of "The Sleepwalkers:  How Europe Went to War in 1914" (among other books). 

• Inside Stories: COVID-19  A terrific podcast in which listeners are asked to share their stories related to COVID-19.

China-U.S. Relations/Culture

• The Harvard on China Podcast a world leading center on China is hosted and produced by James Evans and edited by Liza Tarbell at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

• Founded in 2010, the Sinica Podcast is dedicated to discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policy makers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

May 4, 2020

 

All Time Favorite Novel: A Survey

 

How’s your summer reading going?

With social media running amok, and cold, heartless, political divisiveness invading our television sets, the likes to which we’ve never seen before-there’s no better feeling than cracking open the covers of a new book and getting far away from the maddening crowd.

In case you haven’t noticed, PBS has launched a new series, “The Great American Read” , in which they have surveyed Americans readers, asking them their favorite novel.

The series returns on September 11 with seven new episodes, culminating in the finale on October 23, where America’s Favorite Novel will be announced, following months of the public voting.

And for those who think reading books has become obsolete and gone the way of public pay phones and video rental stores, surveys have shown, thankfully, that not to be the case.

According to a Gallup Poll , more than one in three (35 percent) are heavy readers, reading 11 or more books in the past year, while close to half (48 percent) read between one and 10 and just 16 percent read none.

Additionally, among those who read at least one book last year, the vast majority say they most often read printed books, at 73 percent. About one in five most often read electronic books, while only 6 percent mostly experienced books in audio form.

And why wouldn’t book reading still be in vogue?

Ever since the 18^th century, particularly Victorian literature, novels had replaced poetry and drama, as it began to depict the lives of the middle class, and downtrodden, struggling with their morality and circumstances.

Small wonder, then, that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often hailed as the first novel. The story of the shipwrecked sailor on an un-inhabited island on the Coast of America, Crusoe survives by self-reliance and hard work, embodiments of the Protestant work ethic, common themes that began to run through a number of narratives at the time.

On the other side of the Atlantic, American writers like Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884) and Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953) would expand upon Defoe’s picaresque, that is, a series of loosely connected episodes.

Set in a Southern antebellum society, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a biting satire on racist attitudes, among people and places along the Mississippi River and the hypocrisy of a civilized society.

The Adventures of Augie March depicts a poor Jewish boy in Chicago during the Great Depression, lacking any ambition, but through a series of comical episodes of steps and missteps, succeeds nonetheless. The novel explores some misguided assumptions about the typical American success story and what is the better path toward happiness.

Scholars have pointed out that the works of Samuel Richardson (Clarissa, 1748), Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones, 1749), reflect the evolving society, a reading public (with greater literacy rates), a greater sense of scientific discovery, calls for democratic reforms with growing economic independence, and a strong Protestant ethic.

"The novel," Miriam Bailin, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Washington University in St Louis, argues, " can't be separated from its material history as well as its expanded readership in all classes.  Paper got cheaper, modes of printing got faster, and sales were not by subscription as in the past but distributed increasingly by booksellers and made available to borrow from proprietary libraries (kind of like Blockbuster was for movies). "

Making books more affordable for a growing reading public was certainly the brainchild of Sir Walter Scott (who published three-volume novels) and made them affordable to the general public by making them available for purchase in monthly installments.

Sub-climaxes, or serial novels, leaving the public on the edge of their seat until the next installment was ingeniously employed with great success by Charles Dickens, when he published ``Pickwick Papers'' in 19 monthly installments in 1836-37. In England, the periodic installments cost a mere shilling, making fiction affordable to a new class of readers.

George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray also published novels in serial form; as did Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James in America.

The 19^th century, of course, ushered in the age of industrialization. Literature began to follow suit with works of realism with characters who weren’t necessarily heroes but depicted the challenges they faced in a cold, unsympathetic world, such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a seminal work, many argue, which lit the match that sparked the American Civil War.

The 20th century is largely carved up into two phases of literature--modern literature (1900-1945) and contemporary literature (1945 to the present), also referred to as postmodern with characters questioning the existence of God, challenging the political and social conventions of the age, and the supremacy of the human reason on a variety of topics from the Great Depression to Hiroshima, the morality of war, up through communism and racism.

As Alfred Bendixen so succinctly wrote in the Blackwell Companion to the American Novel   "In the last 20 years, the literary landscape has been enriched by the work of African-Americans, Latina/a, and Asian American writers who have moved the novel into a fuller engagement with some of the basic contradictions at the heart of American democracy, the conflict between the ideals of the society devoted to freedom, equality, opportunity, and the realities."

To get a sense of the reading tastes of book lovers, I reached out to some individuals, to ask them their all-time favorite novel. What follows is a list of responses.

• "A tie between All The Kings Men" (Robert Penn Warren) and The Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)."

—Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of The New York Times

 

• "Gone With The Wind" (Margaret Mitchell) and "Debt of Honor" (Tom Clancy).

—Kellyanne Conway, American pollster, political consultant, and Counselor to President Donald Trump.

 

• "It would be a tie between Proust and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. But then there is Don Quixote, War and Peace, much of Jane Austen, Middlemarch, and Joyce’s Ulysses. For USA, the choices have to include Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and several by Faulkner. ‘’

—Harold Bloom, American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.

 

• "Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry). But this was hard to say. His characters are so real you weep for them. I know I sound a little purple but I mean it.”

—Rick Bragg, author, journalist, former New York Times reporter, and currently a writing professor at the University of Alabama. He also writes a column for Southern Living.

 

• “The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald). I re-read it every summer, along with his stories: Winter Dreams and Rich Boy.”

—Jill Abramson, former New York Times Executive Editor and currently Senior Lecturer in Harvard's English Department

 

• "The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky); second would be American Pastoral (Phillip Roth)

—Alan Dershowitz, American lawyer, legal analyst, and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

 

• “Impossible question but probably Dickens Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) followed by A Fine Balance ( Rohinton Mistry). American novel would be Angle of Repose ( Wallace Stegner).”

—Anne Sebba, British biographer, writer, lecturer and journalist.

 

• "Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain).”

—James McPherson, American Civil War historian and Professor of American History (Emeritus) at Princeton University.

 

• “The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Chris Matthews, political commentator and talk show host for Hardball with Chris Matthews, on MSNBC.

 

• “The Great Gatsby” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

—Pat Buchanan, political commentator, author, and syndicated columnist.

 

• "The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne). The novel that defines what America is"

—John Sutherland, Newspaper columnist and author. Currently, an Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.

 

• "Charlotte's Web"( E.B. White).

—Sarah Lyall, journalist, former New York Times London correspondent, and currently a writer at large for the Times.

 

• "Favorite American novel is Moby Dick (Herman Melville).”

—Niall Ferguson, British historian, political commentator, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

 

• "Gone With the Wind (Margaret Mitchell). No contest. "

—Sally Quinn, author, journalist, who writes about religion at The Washington Post.

 

• "Moby Dick (Herman Melville) and Middlemarch (George Eliot).

 —Stephen Greenblatt, Author, American Shakespearean and literary historian at Harvard University.

 

• "In addition to The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), A Separate Peace (John Knowles), Charlotte's Web (E.B. White), The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx) and The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen).

 —Amy Walter, American political analyst, and national editor of The Cook Political Report.

 

• "The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald).”

 —Thomas Pavel, literary theorist, critic, and novelist currently teaching at the University of Chicago.

 

Facts about Novels and Novelists

• The pop song, topping the charts in the U.K and U.S., "Total Eclipse of the Heart," (1983) written by Jim Steinman and sung by Bonnie Tyler was inspired by Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights.

• Charles Dickens slept facing north, believing it would improve his writing.

• The coining of the word “cliff-hanger” is credited to Thomas Hardy. In the novel, " A Pair of Blue Eyes," published in Tinsley's Magazine, Hardy depicts one of the protagonists, Henry Knight, as hanging off a cliff.

• Edith Wharton was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

• “All’s Well That Ends Well,” was the original title for Leo Tolstoy's epic novel before settling on “War and Peace.”

• Mary Shelley experienced a number of dark and foreboding events leading up to the publication of Frankenstein (1818), her Gothic masterpiece of horror that may have added an extra layer of darkness to her writing: "Her father disowned her after she became pregnant out of wedlock, her first child was premature and died shortly after birth, her elopement with Percy Shelley basically made her an outcast in society, her half-sister committed suicide (as did Percy Shelley's first wife, to whom he was married when he was starting his relationship with Mary)"; this according to Ashley Carlson, Associate Professor of English at the University of Montana Western

• The earliest recorded use of the word "baseball" in an English novel is in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey written in 1798-1799.

• George Orwell's Animal Farm was banned in the Eastern Bloc countries until the collapse of communism in 1989.

• The Starbucks Coffee chain derived its name from Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick. Starbuck is a crew member on the ship.

• In addition to Ernest Hemingway committing suicide by a gun shot, so did his physician father, while his sister, Marcelline, and brother, Leicester, committed suicide by drug overdoses.

• When it was published in 1925, The Great Gatsby sold a disappointing 21,000 copies, less than half of sales for ``This Side of Paradise’’ and ``The Beautiful and Dammed,'' It wasn’t until April 24, 1960 that The New York Times wrote: ``It is probably safe now to say that it [The Great Gatsby] is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction.’’

• Arthur Conan Doyle was a trained ophthalmologist and opened up a practice on upper Wimpole Street in London. With no patients, not one, he had plenty of time to write short stories, about a detective, Sherlock Holmes, based on Doyle's time in medical school where the autopsy of a body or corpse was conducted like a thorough investigation. His stories were originally published by Strand Magazine.

• In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

—Bill Lucey

[email protected]

July 26, 2018

 

 

Ernest Hemingway: Book Review

 

American biographer and author, Mary Dearborn, turned out a masterful biography on Ernest Hemingway, American novelist, short story writer,  beginning with the launching of his celebrated writing career as a young precocious reporter for the Kansas City Star (including foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star) through winning a Pulitzer Prize (1953) not long before his suicide, killing himself with his favorite shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Tragically, ending his life the same way his father did.

In between some of his greatest novels, "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," we learn Hemingway developed a writing style all his own: direct, simple, clear, and natural, all tools of the trade he learned as a young journalist.

We also learn away from the typewriter, Hemingway was as volcanic as his writing about shark attacks in the "Old Man and the Sea." When he died, he was on his fourth wife, he was abusive to them all, unfaithful to be sure, and a walking time bomb to those who surrounded him. As he got older, his health failed him more and more, attributable mostly to soaking his brain with excessive amounts of alcohol, compounding his manic-depressive state.

He was a harsh critic of his peers as well, directing poisoned arrows on the works of his contemporaries, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (once his drinking companion) and Gertrude Stein.

But through it all, Dearborn cleverly shows how Hemingway in his prime was a prodigious novelist, who wrote with such clarity and precision about topics near and dear to his heart, namely, bull fighting, African safaris, the ravages of war, and fishing in the sea, among others.

Hemingway once told a young writer, “never write about a subject he didn’t know inside and out.”

As evidence of “Papa’s” rich body of work, this American literary giant knew the inner-workings of great many subjects.

--Bill Lucey

November 13, 2017

Suggested Reading List for Donald Trump

“The Book Hunters”

— Collier’s magazine, 1909

 

He lacks the required temperament, he’s too erratic, a loose cannon, a walking time bomb, he lacks integrity and exhibits time and again poor judgment.

These are just some, but certainly not all, of the character deficiencies attributed to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for U.S. president, and the reasons most cited by his critics for not voting for him in November.

And yet there’s still one more deficiency not often discussed.

Trump rarely reads books. He’s too busy, he claims. He has never read a presidential biography.

The real estate mogul told The Washington Post that he reaches the right decision “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

If Trump truly wants to “Make America Great Again,” you would think he would have a voracious appetite for the written word and learn from the great masters who occupied the Oval Office over the years.

Occupants such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, all exhibited strong reading habits.

Though largely self-educated, Lincoln, who didn’t have access to many books growing up, elevated his use of the English language largely through the Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare.

Even when he was in the White House, the “Rail Splitter” was often heard citing Shakespeare phrases to Cabinet members. When he first entered the White House in 1861, one of his first actions was to check out a stack of books from the Library of Congress on military strategy, so he could prepare for the rupture of the approaching Civil War.

Theodore Roosevelt, who was no bully, but knew how to operate a bully pulpit to advance his agenda, was known for swallowing books. TR read a book a day, sometimes more, according to historians.

Much like Lincoln, Millard Fillmore, the last Whig president (1850-1853), was largely self-educated and developed a lifelong passion for reading books. In 1846, Fillmore helped found the private University of Buffalo (which today is the public State University of New York at Buffalo), and he served as the first president of the Buffalo Historical Society.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were well known for their extensive home libraries. Adams devoured Greek classics and, even when his eyesight had gone toward the end of his life, he had one of his nurses read to him.

In 1814, when the British invaded the Library of Congress, they burned all the books. Jefferson was quick to donate his entire book collection to the LOC, which comprised 6,487 books.

John F. Kennedy developed a strong liking to spy thrillers, including the works of Ian Fleming (James Bond). Kennedy was additionally drawn to the works of Ernest Hemingway.

Kennedy cited Winston Churchill's “Marlborough: His Life and Times,” a four-volume, million- word biography about John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, as one of his all-time favorites, along with John Buchan’s memoir “Pilgrim’s Way.”

Similar to Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt loved detective stories and reportedly took 50 of them with him to the Tehran Conference in 1943. At the time of his death, FDR was reading “The Punch and Judy Murders,” a mystery novel by American writer John Dickson Carr.

Even George W. Bush, often derided as an unlettered philistine, reportedly read 186 books between 2006 and 2008, a vast majority of them dealing with history and biographies. In an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, Karl Rove, Bush’s White House senior advisor and deputy chief of staff, wrote “that in the 35 years I've known George W. Bush, he's always had a book nearby.”

Considering Donald Trump has up to this point, largely shunned books (save for his own), I often wondered what books would be recommended to him if he had reached out to others.

Carlos Eire, professor of history and religious studies at Yale University, says that since it seems that Trump has already read Niccolò Machiavelli's “The Prince,” despite his disclaimers about book-learning, “I would recommend that he read ‘The Twelve Steps of Humility and Pride’ by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (12th century).”

Eire additionally shared with me his own theory of this dysfunctional presidential season. He strongly believes Hillary Clinton is paying Trump to run, and that he'll end up as secretary of the Treasury in her administration. “I think Hillary is paying him $10 million for every outrageous statement,” Eire said.

Chris Matthews, political commentator and host of MSNBC's “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” says he would have recommended “Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship” by Jonathon Meacham, while Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times and currently senior lecturer in the English Department at Harvard University, recommends “Lincoln,” a masterful work by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Herbert Donald.

American lawyer, jurist, author and Harvard Law School scholar Alan Dershowitz thinks The Donald should get back to the basics of many American civics classes by reading the Federalist Papers and the U.S. Constitution. And he can chase that, Dershowitz recommends, with Doris Kearns Goodwin's “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” and Robert Caro's masterful four volumes of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” (with Volume 5 still in the works).

Richard Bensel, professor of government in American politics and political economy at Cornell University, recommends “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Irish statesman Edmund Burke. Bensel recommends the book so strongly that he thinks Trump should suspend his campaign until he has finished it.

Robert W. Gordon, Chancellor Kent Professor Emeritus of Law and Legal History and professor (adjunct) of law at Yale Law School, believes Trump has a very short attention span, so it's unlikely that he would actually read any of these books, but he nonetheless would benefit from dipping into “two 20th century presidents who were like him in that they were born to wealth and had big egos and big ambitions —  but unlike him had a huge curiosity to learn about the world from books and informed people like scholars and experts —  I'm thinking of Edmund Morris' three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt (the last volume, Theodore Rex, deals with TR's presidency) and of James MacGregor Burns' biography of Franklin Roosevelt (Volume 1, ‘The Lion and the Fox,’ about the New Deal, and Volume 2, ‘The Soldier of Freedom,’ about FDR in World War II).”

Darrin McMahon, professor of history at Dartmouth College, in sharp contrast with other colleagues, thinks the Republican nominee might be better served reading some of the Russian classics, particularly Leo Tolstoy's, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the story of a wealthy and successful man who has spent his entire life amassing a fortune and climbing the social ladder without much regard for anything else. “But when illness presents him with the immanence of his own death,” McMahon explains, “he is forced to confront the superficiality of his life so far, and to ask deep existential questions about the choices he has made and what is truly of worth.”

“A little bit of such honest soul searching might do Mr. Trump some good,” McMahon said.

Paul Kennedy, professor of history and director of the international security studies program at Yale University, isn't confident, even if asked, Trump would read any books he recommended. So the next best thing, Kennedy thinks, would be to buckle Trump into a chair and force him to listen to Winston Churchill's speeches and radio broadcasts during World War II. “If Trump used even one-50th of the language,” Kennedy said, “it would be an improvement.”

Susan Pedersen, professor of British history at Columbia University, thinks Trump would benefit mightily by reading “Politics as a Vocation,” an essay by German economist and sociologist Max Weber. “A brilliant short essay,” Pedersen said, “on the kinds of attributes and cast of mind required for the ‘politician of responsibility’ —  that is, the politician interested in accomplishing real things in the real world, and who is therefore willing to consider the unintended consequences of actions, and to compromise to achieve something rather than focus on an unachievable best.”

Interestingly, Pedersen said that Bill Clinton once told her great, recently deceased colleague (and historian of Germany) Fritz Stern that Weber's `Politics as a Vocation' was one of the pieces that had most greatly influenced him.”

Finally, British historian and professor of history at Harvard University Niall Ferguson, employing his trademark sardonic wit, suggests “A Little History of The World” (1935) by Ernst Gombrich, a book that uses only words and concepts that children can understand.

So, there you have it.

If The Donald really ever gets serious about cracking the books, he has plenty of quality reading material from which to choose.

Happy reading!

-Bill Lucey

[email protected]

August 10, 2016

 

Best Locations for Summer Reading

Block Island RI is considered a ``reader's paradise.''

Photo Credit: The Inn at BlockIsland

 The Mark Twain House-The Billiard Room, possibly the first ``Man Cave.''

Photo Credit: John Groo/The Mark Twain House & Museum

 

With the official start of summer (June 20) less than a month away, many are making vacation plans.

For those planning literary vacations; or are just looking for a peaceful site to engage in some quiet reading, there are a number of possibilities.

Walden Pond, the lake in Concord, Mass. and the destination transcendentalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau made famous after living on the northern shore of the pond from 1845 through 1847, where he outlined his philosophy of life, politics, and nature in his masterwork, ``Walden’’; or, ``Life in the Woods’’ (1854) is certainly a strong possibility.

In order to get a better sense of other ideal settings for summer reading, I asked some literary scholars, where they consider the perfect spot.

Nancy Armstrong, Professor in the English department at Duke University, said she goes to a solitary beach house in Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, with views out into Nantucket Sound, "the site of mental health and good reading."

Nantucket Sound, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean and the waters surrounding the Cape and Islands are famous for their natural beauty and abundant, diverse, and unique wildlife. The Sound typically draws over six million visitors annually to Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.

James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at Columbia University and the author of a number of books, including, ``The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606,'' encourages lovers of literature to head for the New-York Historical Society in June, where one of the surviving First Folios of William Shakespeare's plays will be on display in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of England's national poet.

The Society will collaborate with the 92nd Street Y and The Public Theater, to share Shakespeare’s first published scripts of his 36 most famous plays (first published in 1623)—including Hamlet, Macbeth and As You Like It—the First Folio will be on display at the New-York Historical Society for six weeks, beginning June 7.

According to Shapiro, ``it’s a once in a lifetime chance to get close to a volume that has changed the course of literary history.’’

John Williams, Associate Professor of English at Yale University, recommends a journey to Hartford, the capital of Connecticut, to pay a visit to the Mark Twain House and Museum.

Beginning in 1874, Samuel and Olivia "Livy" Clemens (Twain's real name) took up residence at the mansion on Farmington Avenue. It's here where ``Twainiacs’’ can see for themselves the bed where Mark Twain read and smoked, and the billiard room (the original man cave, according to some) where America’s most celebrated author and humorist wrote the ``Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’’ ``Life on the Mississippi,’’ `The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' and ``A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,’’ among others.

The mansion is where Twain's daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis in 1896 at the age of 24, the same year he declared bankruptcy.

Twain (away on a European lecture tour) and his wife, so distraught over their second child's tragic death, never returned to the Hartford home. It was sold in 1903.

Sometimes, great minds think alike, especially among literary scholars.

Such is the case with Nicholas Dames, Professor of Humanities in the department of English and Comparative English at Columbia University and Elizabeth Taylor, Co-Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program and Senior Lecturer in the English department at Brown University who both favor Block Island, RI as a perfect setting to dip into your favorite books.

In particular, Dames thinks Block Island is ``a great place to read Edith Wharton and other novels of manners of the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century,'' while Taylor considers it a ``reader’s paradise,'' with an excellent library, 40 percent conserved land, walking trails, ocean views everywhere, giving it a magnificent 19th century feel.

According to Block Island's Chamber of Commerce website, its population climbs from 900 to an estimated 12,000 people in the summer; and has been named “One of the 12 Last Great Places in the Western Hemisphere” by The Nature Conservancy.

Occasionally, the best things in life are right in your own backyard.

Maura Spiegel, Senior Lecturer in Discipline in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City, said she loves reading on the subway. According to Spiegel, one of her students ``wrote much of her dissertation on the Long Island Railroad —traveling the length of L.I. —never getting off.''

Other local favorites of Spiegel include Central Park during the week (especially watching small children with their nannies) and Morningside Drive, above Morningside Park, which has benches that remain in the bright sunshine until late in the day. 

Away from the Big Apple, Spiegel said her favorite place to read is Maine, on an island if possible.  ``The breezes are sweet and swirling, and you can sit for hours as the light changes and the sail boats drift by.''

Much like Spiegel, Michael Gamer, Associate Professor in the department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, likes reading on his own turf.

University of Pennsylvania Library, especially the 6th floor, which houses the Furness Collection and the reading room for special collections is a favorite spot for Gamer; as is the upstairs bar of West Philadelphia’s Fiume (just above Abyssinia restaurant at 45th and Locust), ``especially early in the evening, with a seasonal ale.''

American poet Cleopatra Mathis and Professor in the English department at Dartmouth College, where she is also director of the Creative Writing Program, highly recommends the outer beach of the National Seashore in Provincetown, Mass.

It’s this small coastal resort town located at the extreme tip of Cape Code in Barnstable County, where, according to Mathis, ``there aren't many people or diversions, unless you count the piping plovers and random beach critters. Otherwise, a cabin in the woods somewhere, preferably near a pond.''

During the year, Provincetown consists of 3,000 residents; but in the summer the population balloons to as many as 60,000.

And just so there is no eastern bias when it comes to ideal places to read, Thomas Austin Graham, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, recommends spending time in Big Sur, located along Scenic Highway One approximately 150 miles south of San Francisco and 300 miles north of Los Angeles.

Graham believes the big selling point of Big Sur is the opportunity for lovers of literature to make themselves a cup of coffee and browse through books at the Henry Miller Memorial Library (48603 Highway One, 35 miles south of Carmel-by-the Sea), which is an arts center, bookstore, and performance venue, in honor of the late writer, artist, and Big Sur resident, Henry Miller.

Brooklyn NY native Henry Miller (1891-1980) lived in Big Sur between 1944 and 1962 and was best known for revolutionizing the fictionalized autobiography, including Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936) and The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy (1965).

In all honesty, probably spending a vacation, anywhere, without a television or access to the Internet would be a perfect setting for fruitful reading.

But at least now you have a menu of options in the event you want to venture away from your front porch.

Enjoy the summer; and happy reading!

Bill Lucey

[email protected]

May 23, 2016

Journalists Reveal Favorite Shakespeare Quotes

I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t send out a belated birthday wish to William Shakespeare, the English poet, playwright and actor, and widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.

The ``Bard of Avon'' was born, or at least is believed to have been born in Stratford-upon-Avon (a market town and civil parish in south Warwickshire, England) on April 23, 1564, St. George's Day, England’s National Day, which celebrates the feast of St. George. There’s no official record of Shakespeare’s birth; all we do know for certain is that he was baptized in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford on April 26, 1564.

Remarkably, 450 years later, Shakespeare still lives with us in our everyday language, whether through the written word, spoken word, or in our catchphrases recited at the office water cooler or splashed across our favorite social media sites.

Just consider some everyday words we use of Shakespeare: ``Eventful’’, ``countless’’, ``horrid’’, ``besmirch’’, ``impede’’, ``rant’’, ``excellent’’, ``lonely’’, ``well-read’’, ``survivor’’, and ``unpolluted.’’

Trying to nail down exactly how many words Shakespeare coined became a difficult task; more difficult than I would have thought. Seth Lerer, Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego in ``Inventing English: A Portable History of Language,’’ wrote that Shakespeare coined nearly 6,000 new words.  Bill Bryson, author of ``Shakespeare: the World as Stage,’’ on the other hand, argues Shakespeare coined 2,035 words. The discrepancies and different figures, cited by a number of authors-goes on and on.

Suffice it to say, Shakespeare was a ``prolific word coiner’’ as Barbara Wallraff, author of ``Word Court’’ and ``Your Own Words’’ wrote in the American Scholar.

As any Renaissance scholar will tell you, Shakespeare exhibited a deep reverence for Latin poetry with a natural flair for coining new words by combining the already-existing Latin and Greek roots that he knew by heart, such as ``baseless’’, ``dishearten’’, ``dislocate’’, ``impartial’’, ``indistinguishable’’, ``invulnerable’’, ``lonely’’, ``metamorphosis’’,`` monumental’’, ``premeditated’’, ``reliance’’, ``sanctimonious’’ and ``submerge.’’

Taken together, over a 20 year period, Shakespeare wrote more than a million words of poetry and drama, including 38 plays and 154 sonnets.

American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University (and author of more than 30 books), Harold Bloom, once wrote: ``That unlike other writers and artists, William Shakespeare was able to eclipse all writers who preceded him and to dominate all writers who have followed him.’’

No small feat.

Just think of the phrases that originated from the pen of Shakespeare: ``To be cruel to be kind; `To back a horse’’; ``To breathe one's last’’; ``To play fast and loose’’; ``To be in a pickle’’;  ``A foregone conclusion’’; ``Better part of valor is discretion’’; `Not a mouse stirring’’; ``Brevity is the soul of wit’’; `We have seen better days’’; Now is the winter of our discontent’’; `There is no virtue like necessity.’’

Whenever I hear of a city editor or executive editor of a newspaper being dethroned, or a baseball manager or head coach of a football team being issued a pink slip; or learn the sacking of Larry  King’s successor, I often think of Shakespeare’s insightful line: ``Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’’  (King Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, SC. 1, l. 31).

So, since 2014 marks the 450^th year of Shakespeare’s birth, I thought I would reach out to some journalists to find out their favorite line or phrase from the works of England’s celebrated poet and dramatist.

What follows are some responses which came flying back.

 

• ``A little touch of Harry in the night''

-Henry V, Act 4, Chorus, l. 47

-Tina Brown, award-winning journalist, editor, author and currently founder and CEO of Tina Brown Live Media.

 

• ``The quality of mercy is not strain'd.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.''

-Merchant of Venice Act 4, SC. I, l. 182.

-Chris Matthews, American political commentator and host of ``Hardball with Chris Matthews’’ on MSNBC.

 

•  ``We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’’

King Henry V, Act 4, Sc. 3

-Patrick J. Buchanan, American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician, broadcaster, and former senior advisor to three U.S. Presidents.

 

• ``The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.''

-As You Like It, Act I, Scene 2.

-Sam Tanenhaus, American historian, biographer, journalist and writer-at-large for The New York Times

 

• ``Our doubts are traitors

And make us lose the good we oft might win

By fearing to attempt.''

-Measure for Measure, Act I, Scene 4.

-Alan Dershowitz, American lawyer, jurist, author, and political commentator.

 

• "Men must endure

Their going hence even as their coming hither.

Ripeness is all."

-King Lear, Act 5, Sc. 2, l.9.

-David Ignatius, prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and best-selling author of ``Body of Lies’’ and ``The Increment’’, among others.

 

• ``O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,

Whose double bosoms seem to wear one heart,

Whose house, whose bed, whose meal, and exercise,

Are still together, who twin, as 'twere, in love.''

-The Tragedy of Coriolanus, Act 4, Scene 4.

-Michael Riedel, Theater columnist for the New York Post and co-host of the weekly talk show Theater Talk on PBS.

 

• ``I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;

For now hath time made me his numbering clock:

My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar

Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,

Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,

Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.

Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is

Are clamorous goans, which strike upon my heart,

Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans

Show minutes, times, and hours.”

-Richard II, Act 5, Scene 5

-Kara Swisher, Co-CEO, Revere Digital; Co-Executive Editor, Re/code; and Co-Executive Producer, The Code Conference.

 

-Bill Lucey

[email protected]

April 28, 2014