My Favorite Book of 2018

My favorite book of 2018: These Truths by Jill Lepore

My favorite book of 2018 is Jill Lepore's new book "These Truths: A History of the United States." At 960 pages, the book is so good it feels too short.

The most haunting section of the book is on pages 284-5 about the arrival of Charles Darwin's book "The Origin of Species" in America. Darwin’s book was published in 1859; just two years after the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court Case said people of African descent could never be American citizens.

Part of the reasoning in that decision was the belief that races were fundamentally different and, worse still, that all Black people were inferior, the descendants of the Ham, the bad son of Noah.

Henry David Thoreau filled six notebooks as he read The Origin of Species. For abolitionists like Thoreau, Darwin's book was proof that all people really are equal. And all genetic evidence since the discovery of the structure of the genome a century later in 1953 says the same.

Races of Homo sapiens differ very little from each other. More importantly, the definition of a species is the ability to produce fertile offspring. Every race of Homo sapiens on earth can have children with every other race. These children can have more children. We are all one species.

It goes without saying that the South rejected Darwin. Slave owners believed themselves superior to Blacks, and all other non-white races. In defeat, the spread Jim Crow laws across the South to disenfranchise Blacks.

Today, Charles Darwin remains the leading villain of anti-science Evangelicals and other fundamentalists. The Creation Museum in Kentucky links Darwin to every social problem in the last 150 years. But the truth is, Evolution, no matter how it is misunderstood and misappropriated, says we are all one species.

The Creation Museum and other Evangelical history blames Darwin for inspiring Nazis.  The irony is that Nazis, like Creationists, twist science to their own needs. But as to inspiration, Hitler was truly inspired by the Jim Crow South. Hitler did not originally plan extermination. The American South gave Hitler a blueprint for a society with separated races: a master race and inferior races.

Lepore also makes clear that keeping slavery was the cause of the Civil War. She tracks the increase in the price of slaves in the decade before the Civil War and shows that Louisiana and other slaves states wanted to re-open the slave trade to satisfy growing demand for slaves. Following the money shows that slavery was the center of the secessionist states leaving the union. States Rights was a lie told later.

Lepore also tells the story of Quaker dissenter Benjamin Lay. He was a minister during “The First Great Awakening” a religious revival in the 1730s. While the revivals roared through country, Lay preached against those who had faith experience, but kept the slaves they owned. Lay said all who kept slaves were Apostates, they were wasting their time proclaiming religious conversion. The Abolitionist movement began long before the country was founded. Preachers like Benjamin Lay led the fight against slavery that ended slavery in the North. In the South, slave owners found preachers to twist the Bible into a pro-slavery shape just for them.

The book covers all of American history from 1492 to 2017. It says very little about wars, but looks deeply at the history of women, minorities, religion and the social movements of the last 500 years. I am sure I will read it again.

First Book of 2019, "A Tale of Love and Darkness" by Amos Oz

Amos Oz with his parents 

Fania and Yehuda Arye Klausner

Jerusalem 1946

I am reading “A Tale of Love and Darkness” by Amos Oz.  It is his autobiography. The only other book I read by him is "How to Cure a Fanatic" which I bought in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem last year.  Oz passed away just a few days ago, so I decided to read about his life. He has written more than twenty novels and nearly as many non-fiction works.  Just 24 pages into the book, I am finding it magical. I transcribe passages I like so I can remember them and refer to them again. Below is a long and beautiful passage about books and love and life.

To introduce the passage: Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939. His father was a librarian.  When Amos was seven, his father gave him one half of one of the many bookshelves that filled their small apartment. Amos lined up the books by height. When his father came home, he was aghast. Then he was silent.  The passage that follows is beautiful. It is a lesson I learned much later than Amos Oz. As I read the passage I was overwhelmed with the recognition that occurs when I read something and know that the writer and I see some part of the world the same way. Oz writes:

            “At the end of the silence Father began talking, in the space of twenty minutes, he revealed to me the facts of life. He held nothing back. He initiated me into the deepest secrets of the librarians lore: he laid bare the main highway as well as the forest tracks, dizzying prospects of variations, nuances, fantasies, exotic avenues, daring schemes and even eccentric whims. Books can be arranged by subject, by alphabetical order of authors’ names, by series of publishers, in chronological order, by languages, by topics, by areas and fields, or even by place of publication. There are so many different ways.

            “And so I learnt the secret of diversity. Life is made up of different avenues. Everything can happen in one of several ways, according to different musical scores and parallel logics. Each of the parallel logics is consistent and coherent in its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others.

            “In the days that followed I spent hours on end arranging my little library, twenty or thirty books that I dealt and shuffled like a pack of cards, rearranging them in all sorts of different ways.

            “So I learnt from books the art of composition, not from what was in them but from the books themselves, from their physical being. They taught me about the dizzying no-man’s-land or twilight zone between permitted and forbidden, between the legitimate and the eccentric, between the normative and the bizarre. This lesson has remained with me ever since. By the time I discovered love, I was no greenhorn. I knew that there different menus. I knew that there was a motorway and a scenic route, also unfrequented byways where the foot of man had barely trodden. There were permitted things that were almost forbidden and forbidden things that were almost permitted. There were so many different ways.”

Band of Brothers: Book and Video

One of my favorite memories from the 1-70th Armor barracks in Wiesbaden, West Germany, was the night we watched "The Green Beret" starring John Wayne on the dayroom TV.  We hooted, hollered, and threw rolled up socks and popcorn at the TV for most of the two hours. The "Green Berets" may be the worst war movie ever made. As a rule, soldiers make fun of war movies or angrily say, "That shit is wrong...." then explain why.

But not the HBO series "Band of Brothers." Soldiers I knew who thought "Saving Private Ryan" was bullshit after the first 15 minutes or who were shushed making smart-ass comments during the "Hurt Locker" had not one bad thing to say about "Band of Brothers."  In the nine years I served in the Army National Guard between 2007 and 2016, I never heard anyone disparage the 10-part series about Easy Company 2-506th Airborne.

I saw the video several times. I finally read the book. I finished it today. The book is well-written and tells the story accurately, filling in details that could not be easily included in the fast-moving video--like Dick Winters decades-long anger about a trip to America General Taylor (101st Airborne Commander) took during the Battle of the Bulge.  Although the book is very good, the video series is better.

The video follows the book faithfully, but the actors add a dimension the book cannot.  They can give life to the relationships among the men that author Stephen Ambrose can only report.  There is a terrible beauty in the video that only the finest fiction can portray in print.

Usually if there is a book and a movie/video, my recommendation would be read the book first. But in this case, I would recommend seeing the video series first, then read the book to fill in details.

Then watch the video again, which is what I am going to do.