Fists of Time

Boston and Books

I am in Boston on business this week and the only sightseeing that I planned was to visit some book stores.  I recall getting a tour of Cambridge from some friends many years ago and marveling at the number of book stores there.  The preponderence seemed natural for the home of Harvard University.  As the years have gone by, though, local book stores in my area have dwindled and died.  That has only enhanced the aura that surrounded the Cambridge stores I'd walked past.  I've already seen the Freedom Trail, Bunker Hill, and other area landmarks.  What I wanted to do this week was some book shopping.

First stop was Raven Used Books.  This store has three solid book shelves on U.S. history, including subsections on Native American, colonial, and African-American history.  A separate bookshelf is filled with biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of cultural figures like Alfred Kazin, or Anthony Burgess's book on D.H. Lawrence.  Especially impressive is Raven's large sections on world history and political science.

Personally, I picked up two books that I have already read but did not own.  Taylor Branch's Parting The Waters is a seminal narrative history of the civil rights movement in the 1950s leading up to the 1963 March on Washington.  (Nominally a 'biography' of Martin Luther King, Jr., this work actually provides a panorama of civil right activism at the time.  After reading James Patterson's Great Expectations this month, I was suprised at how much Patterson relied on Branch's accounts of civil rights battles.)  Merton Dillon's 1966 biography of Benjamin Lundy was a true gem, and worth every effort to visit Cambridge.  Unlike Parting the Waters, this work is out of print and is the only biography of Lundy to appear in the last 150 or so years.  As I wrote last month, Lundy was the subject of some research of mine, and maybe this purchase will prompt me to try to write about Lundy for a popular local audience.

After a stop for the kids at the Curious George store, which has a small but impressive selection of children's books, the next stop on my stroll down Massachusetts Avenue was Harvard Book Store.  Harvard features new and used books.  New books are on the ground floor; while searching for the staircase, I couldn't help but appreciate the impressive selection of new hardbacks, ranging from new academic releases to mysteries and other genre niches.  (I also tried not to disturb the book reading in progress.)  The downstairs used book selection was massive, especially their fiction section, which comprised at least one dozen shelving units.  Like at Raven, I was a little disappointed at the overall selection of U.S. history choices but very impressed at the entire used selection.  I selected David Halberstalm's The Fifties, which should follow Great Expectations rather well.

From Harvard Book Store, I expected a long walk to Central Square, where I stopped for dinner.  On the way back to the Central MBTA stop, though, I couldn't help but notice another used book store.  Unfortunately, Rodney's Book Store was just closing.  Nonetheless, their selection, including an entire subsection on U.S. presidents, and even a sub-sub-section on the Kennedy family, was also impressive.  I'll have to spend more time there on my next visit.

I'm coming back from this experience with ambivalence.  Scrounging for books in the days of dwindling print media, I feel like I'm in a Mad Max movie, hoarding fuel in the wake of apocalypse.  Shouldn't everyone have access to Merton Dillon's biography of Benjamin Lundy?  Of course, that brings up so many other questions, like cultural literacy, the viability of e-books, and the actual availability and cost of e-books.  (See recent blogging by Mike O'Mally and Jon Fea on the latter questions.)  Am I actually hurting the cause of publishing by buying used books, or am I keeping the flame of literacy burning?  I don't have the answer but I can't deny that tonight's book shopping was a fun ride.

MA Colloquium Invitation

I am excited to announce that I was recently invited to speak at the MA Colloquium at George Mason University later this month.  My essay on anti-slavery petitions was selected as a highlight among graduate student research of the past academic year.  This is especially stunning because I graduated with my Master's degree eleven months ago; I'm shocked that the university will have me back.

To speak competently about my essay, I will have to re-visit my long-past writing and research.  This could be the appropriate venue; stay tuned for some blog posts about my work.

Learning, and Recognizing, World War II

Sometimes you read and learn about something, and you can't stop seeing it and hearing it everywhere.  You might not have recognized it before, or it didn't resonate with you, but now you understand it.  That is the way that I feel after finishing Freedom from Fear and finally reading an extensive account of the U.S. experience in World War II.  (See my previous blog post about it here.)

In Freedom from Fear, David M. Kennedy discusses the German U-Boat threat to shipping vessels in the Atlantic Ocean, which resulted in the massive loss of the SS Port Nicholson.  Last week, I read that a treasure hunter says he has evidence to prove he has recovered the wreck.  Kennedy quotes Admiral Ernest J. King, who wrote, two days after that U-Boat attack, that "the losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard... threaten our entire war effort."

Kennedy writes about the troops who parachuted into France ahead of the D-Day invasion.  Days after reading about that, I heard about my town's loss of Bill Bladen, 86, who was wounded after jumping out of an airplane on June 6, 1944 and later in Holland.   According to Kennedy, members of Bladen's 82nd Airborne Division, "mindful of the slaughter of their comrades descending onto the Cotentin on the night of June 5-6, jumped over Nijmegen shouting, 'Remember Ste. Mere Eglise,' and with guns blazing."  (About that age discrepancy: according to a vernacular account I've heard, Bladen lied about his age to enlist.)

And then of course there is Red Tails, the new film dramatizing the experience of the 332d Fighter Group of the USAAF.  This group was an offshoot of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, which "distinguished itself in North Africa and Italy" and caused a "sensation, in both the white and black press."

Is there a name for the phenomenon of noticing things constantly after learning about them?

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Another note about our World War II veterans and Red Tails.  After Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy panned the movie as unrealistic, 91-year-old Tuskegee Airman Henry L. Moore wrote back with an epic rebuttal: "we really could fly them that way."

Oxford History of the U.S. Completism

Every few nights at bedtime, my toddler daughter inexplicably declines my offers to read children's books; instead, she asks for "Daddy's book": the huge tome at my bedside, David M. Kennedy's Freedom From Fear.  (It seems that when she's particularly tired, Kennedy's prose sends her quickly into slumber.)  I don't mind reading this to her every few nights; after all, it brings me closer to fulfilling my quixotic goal of reading every installment of the Oxford History of the United States series.

Although I have only finished two other editions of the Oxford series (McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Howe's What Hath God Wrought), I deeply appreciate how these books synthesize existing scholarship and explain important events in clear prose and concise detail.  (The writing is decidedly above the pre-school level, but actually accessible to adults - the books are often marketed to a general audience.)  Achieving all of those goals requires a delicate balance, but each book in the series consciously strives to fulfill each.

Much of the history in the series is familiar to anyone who took a college seminar in U.S. history, but all of these authors go through a level of detail that is illuminating without being granular.  For example, I certainly knew about the Japanese atrocity known as the Bataan Death March but not how it fit into the U.S. armed forces' maneuvering in the Pacific during the early years of their involvement in the War. (Don't worry - I read this part alone, silently, without exposing my youngster to this depiction of human suffering.)

I have already admitted that this goal of reading every installment is quixotic - I probably have about 5,000 pages of epic history to consume, not to mention all of the other books I want to read.  My unofficial goal is to finish each by the end of 2013.  Check back periodically for further updates.