Books
One day, this page will contain the books I’ve written. Until then, I’ll focus on the books I’m currently reading or have otherwise recently finished. It’s not a full catalogue, but a view into the authors, stories, and characters who inspire me.
Master of the Senate:
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
By: Robert Caro
The third book in Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Master of the Senate was the second book for which Caro won the Pulitzer Prize. (The first one was, of course, for The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.) I read Caro not to prove a point or to try and make myself look smart; on the contrary, reading Caro serves as a reminder on every page of just how little I know! Every paragraph seems a civics lesson in and of itself.
It’s one of the reasons why I picked up Master of the Senate after finishing Means of Ascent, the second book in the LBJ series. What I so admire about Caro is his ability to demonstrate how government actually works, how the work of government actually gets done. And he does this, somehow, without leaving the reader in despair. Maybe it’s his storytelling, maybe it’s his focus on the individuals involved and all their human foibles. Whatever it is, it’s absolutely masterful.
I’m 70 pages in and, aside from the Introduction, I don’t think LBJ has been mentioned once. This might seem strange for a biography about the man, but the history of the Senate that Caro shares sets the stage for what LBJ walked into as a the junior Senator from Texas in 1949. Going back through the institution’s history and its purpose as designed by the Framers of the Constitution, Caro highlights its highs and its lows, its Golden Age and its stasis during the Gilded Age, its failures and its singular triumphs. It all helps me better appreciate its role as envisioned by the Framers - and it is a remarkable testament to their vision for its fulfillment of various functions over the more than 200 years of its existence.
Of course, the writing is incredible. Who else would have thought to tell such a history through the desks in the Senate Chamber?
Brave Companions:
Portraits in History
By: David McCullough
David McCullough is a favorite author of mine. And his Brave Companions: Portraits in History is a favorite book of mine. It’s a collection of essays - and a few speeches - of his from over the years, all of which are suffused with a great deal of history and, for the individuals profiled in the book’s chapters, with a great deal of inspiration.
No chapter is more inspiring to me, however, than the penultimate one. It’s called “Recommended Itinerary” and is the text of the commencement speech he gave to the graduating class of 1986 at Middlebury College. Of course, I’m terribly biased towards this speech, since I would graduate from the same school 25 years later.
In it, McCullough extols the virtues of travel. He encourages international travel, but puts particular emphasis on domestic travel as well. He urges the young graduates to explore their country - our country, the United States - especially its lesser-known places, places like Red Cloud, Nebraska. It’s a small town where Willa Cather lived and came to know an immigrant woman named Anna Sadilek Pavelka. Anna was the basis for Antonia in Cather’s novel, My Antonia.
It’s a reminder that history is not limited to places like Washington and New York, but extends to places like Red Cloud and Antietam and eastern Kentucky. It’s ours for the learning and experiencing.
His closing line is a call to action: “Go with confidence. Prize tolerance and horse sense. And some time, somewhere along the way, do something for your country.”
The Explorers: A New History
of America in Ten Expeditions
By: Amanda Bellows
I’m drawn to adventure stories. And underdog tales. For the light that Amanda Bellows sheds on ten often overlooked explorers - six women and four men - in American history, The Explorers brings both of these elements together in brilliant fashion.
The Albert Bierstadt painting on the cover also caught my eye. His landscapes of the American West are as majestic as his Among the Sierra Nevada, California is grand.
My two favorite individuals highlighted in the book are William Sheppard and Amelia Earhart. William Sheppard was a Black missionary with the Southern Presbyterian Church who worked in the Congo at a time when it was under the thumb of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Indeed, Sheppard’s writings about the violence he witnessed meted out against the Congolese by agents of the Belgian king helped stir public opinion against Belgian action in the Congo. As Bellows’s summarizes: “Sheppard represented a new kind of American explorer at the turn of the twentieth century: one who sought not to conquer Indigenous people but rather to live among them, learn from them, and protect them from colonization’s devastating effects.”
Amelia Earhart embodied the courage, independence, and fearlessness of aviation’s pioneers. Her passion for flight was the sole object toward which her other efforts were devoted. This included working as a social worker at Boston’s Denison House, which Bellows describes as “a Progressive Era settlement house of Chinese and Syrian immigrants.” This single line did what any good book should do; namely, it made me want to learn more about its subject. I found myself fascinated by the interactions Earhart had with immigrant families, and wondered how what she may have shared about flight with them kindled the imagination of children new to this country.
If good history holds up a mirror to the present day, then Bellows’s The Explorers invites us to a Lake Tahoe-sized reflecting pool. Once there, her book encourages us to see the reflection of the surrounding natural world and those who have helped us better understand it in the calm waters of well-researched and well-reasoned narrative.
Markings
By: Dag Hammarskjöld
I didn’t know much about the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, before picking up this book. I had some vague awareness of his death in a reported plane crash in Africa and knew about the Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza across 1st Ave from the UN headquarters building in New York.
In reading Markings, however, I came to learn not only about the man but also about the spirit that animated his being. Published posthumously, the book is a collection of journal entries and notes to himself that he left over the years, like a near modern day equivalent of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I also find that it reverberates with echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, “Self-Reliance.”
Line after line, page after page, year after year is a testament to the humility, the introspection, and the discipline Hammarskjöld sought to instill in his life. Take this line, for example: “you have to be severe with yourself in order to have the right to be gentle with others.”
Or this one: “All first-hand experience is valuable, and he who has given up looking for it will one day find - that he lacks what he needs: a closed mind is a weakness, and he who approaches persons or painting or poetry without the youthful ambition to learn a new language and so gain access to some else’s perspective on life, let him beware.”
The book is also suffused with a Christian theology that served as a great source of strength for Hammarskjöld. And which, in reading it, reminded me of the possibility to live out religious principles in a world that sometimes feels hellbent on undermining them.
The Lords of Discipline
By: Pat Conroy
I’m hesitant to write about The Lords of Discipline, in particular, and Pat Conroy, in general. Such is Conroy’s impact on me as a reader. I never inhabited a book like I did this one when I first read it in high school, or when I re-read it a few months back.
I suppose part of that is because there are few literary characters with whom I relate so much as I do this book’s protagonist, Will McLean.
If I had kept a journal while in college, I could only have hoped to capture what Conroy did in the following self-reflection of Will McLean: “At the time I only knew that I did not see things exactly as my classmates did. Something was different about me, and I suffered because of that difference. But I did know this: In my senior year I was beginning to learn how to discriminate between an idea that was for me and one that was for all the rest.”
Or this riposte from Will, in response to being egged on by a classmate about his not wanting to fight in Vietnam: “I have despised a whole segment of the human race and I’ve never seen one [a communist].” This was a very relatable line growing up in post-9/11 America, when it was easy and accepted and expected to despise all those people “over there” who were lumped together with 19 hijackers who took orders from an unelected leader. Or those people here, in the United States, who looked or spoke or practiced a religion like “them.”
Being able to recognize that disparity between accepted generalization and individual investigation is the key. Indeed, you can’t supplant perception with experience if you don’t first have the awareness to think that such a gap between perception and experience can exist.
It’s about seeing for one’s self rather than accepting unchallenged attitudes. It’s about thinking for one’s self rather than accepting the prevailing sentiment.
And it takes guts to do that, guts like Will McLean exemplifies in this wonderful book.
Citizens of London:
The Americans Who Stood with
Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hours
By: Lynn Olson
To borrow a phrase from “Good Will Hunting,” this is a book that’ll blow your hair back. Having read Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile some years prior to reading Citizens of London, I had some context for the London Blitz and the strength of the British people. What I didn’t have an appreciation for, though - and what Olson’s book helped me understand - was the role that individual Americans helped to play in strengthening the U.S.-British bond and, with it, helping to turn the tide in the war in Europe during World War II.
Olson focuses her book on three Americans, “the most important Americans in London during the war’s early years” - the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, John Gilbert Winant; London-based CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow; and the administrator of the U.S. Lend-Lease program with Britain, W. Averell Harriman.
In a telling note, Olson mentions how Winant and Harriman regularly informed the White House about “not only the resolution and valor of the British people but also the crucial role that ordinary citizens were playing in the conflict.” What Winant and Harriman did for President Roosevelt, Murrow did for the American people.
In a telling episode, Ambassador Winant walked the streets of a burning London on the night of April 16, 1941, when Nazi air raids killed an estimated 1,100 citizens of London. He walked the streets to offer whatever help he could give people. Here was an American ambassador, with bombs falling, sacrificing his personal safety to lend a hand to those who needed it.
As Olson notes, “For many Britons, Winant’s presence on the streets of London during the horrific April 16 attack, and in the raids to come, was the first tangible evidence that Americans did indeed care what happened to them.” At a time when the United States was not yet in the war (the attack on Pearl Harbor was eight months away), this must have been a welcome message for the steadfast British - indeed, for all those who sought to oppose Nazi tyranny.
Such individual actions by individual people helped bring two allies closer together, when prevailing opinion in one wanted to remain uninvolved in the war and prevailing opinion in the other (spurred on by their Prime Minister, Winston Churchill) centered on the selflessness of sacrifice amidst an existential struggle.