Winter Books (Part 2)

Judge a book by its title?

Photo compliments of Clem Onojeghuo

They say, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” The title, it turns out, is quite a different matter. The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title is awarded annually in Great Britain. Not nearly as noted or prestigious as the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has been conferred by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm since 1901 for “a literary work most benefitting mankind;” or the Pulitzer Prize(s) for Literature, which has been given by the Pulitzer Board in New York since 1918 “to an U.S. writer best depicting American life;”or the coveted Booker Prize, which has been bestowed each year since 1969 by a British Investment house for “the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language and published in the U.K.” The Booker presents $63,000 to its winner, the Pulitzer $15,000, and the Nobel $1 million.

Alas, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize bequeaths no money, nor fame to its winners. However, the prize has been dutifully granted for the past forty-six years. That’s more than can be said for The Hatchet Job prize that was given “to the most scathing or critical book review,” which lasted only three years From 2012 - 2014. I was personally let down when the Literary Review announced in 2020 that it would no longer give its Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the “most outstandingly awful scene of a sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” The trustees of the Literary Review decided to relieve the populace from additional bad news during the height of the pandemic…or at least relieve those who routinely read more than a yard sign and actually believed there was a pandemic.

Against all expectations, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize has persisted and on December 6th named its Oddest Book Title of the Year —The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire. The book will take its place amongst the pantheon of other equally unappealing titles such as the Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes; Strip and Knit with Style; Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers; The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today (about which The Economist queried, “What are the antecedents of marmalade? Jam? Oranges? And how many different roles can marmalade really have?”).

Nevertheless, the list goes on. The Economist, from which I mined this sidesplitting article, named its favorite title amongst the forty-six awardees: American Bottom Archeology. Unable to restrain himself, the article’s author concluded the short piece with a line from the great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953): “‘The magic in a poem is always accidental;’ it creeps in unbidden in the gaps between the author and the words and the reader. And what is true of poetry is also, surely, true of American Bottom Archeology” (Judging a book by its title, The Economist, 12-14-2024).

1. The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, by Erik Larson

On the subject of book titles, Erik Larson’s fast-paced history of the growing hostility and eventual attack on a federal fort off the coast of Charleston, SC drew its title from a mid-19th century letter by a West Point professor: “The changing economic forces and the impending decline of agrarianism had unleashed a ‘demon of unrest’ in the South. The demon whispered to the wealthy white Southerners that their days of owning slaves were numbered.” Larson carefully notes the rise of cities and mechanized industry, most notably in the northern states, began to dwarf the economic heft of King Cotton in the southern ones. The decline in economic power coupled with rising criticism of slavery in America and Europe, rankled the pride of wealthy planters. Their notion of states rights was amplified by wealthy southerners’ reading diet of Sir Walter Scott novels. The sentimental English books precipitated the false notion that the seceding eleven states were, in fact, a reappearance of Camelot and the Confederates were warrior knights of a cherished realm — albeit one where there was a slave for every 1.6 citizens.

Even today southerners give two favorite answers to soft-pedal the reason for the Civil War: 1. States rights; 2. The economy. Far from obscuring the reason, both of these answers are correct. They are just not complete. Without question, the overriding reason for the enmity that broke apart the fragile 85-year-old republic was slavery. States rights and the economy were subordinate causes to slavery because slaves were the “engines” of the southern states’ economy, a right the states were adamant to maintain. The attack on Ft. Sumter, the powder keg that ignited the rebellion that would eventually claim 620,000 American lives, was spawned by the mounting abhorrence of the 3.95 million Blacks enslaved in the southern states. This was the demon of censure the South could not put to rest.

Far from a dull record of impending warfare and division, Larson gives voice to three colorful central characters in his history. The first is Edmund Ruffin, the vain Virginia peacock who whips the state conventions of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia into bellicose frenzies. The second is Mary Boykin Chestnut, the wife of a wealthy South Carolina planter, whose 400-page Daily from Dixie scrupulously chronicles the rise of southern militarism from its early glory days to its utter carnage. Finally, Larson gives voice to the commander of Ft. Sumter, Major Robert Anderson. A former slaveholder and southern sympathizer, Anderson nevertheless maintains his vow to uphold the Constitution of the United States and courageously and capably leads his besieged soldiers on that isolated rock far from any support.

In his Introduction, Larson makes an unsettling observation about the specific event that spurred the attack on Ft. Sumter, an event that darkly ties it to our present: the Certification of the Electoral College Votes for Abraham Lincoln:

‘I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place. As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration.’

2. You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America, by Paul Kix

In the early spring of 1964, my grandmother, Greenma, my mother’s mother whom I adored, surprised me with a Friday night bus trip downtown to see the re-release of Gone with the Wind at the opulent Alabama Theater. So grand was the occasion that many of the adult patrons arrived in evening gowns and tuxedos. I recall that Greenma insisted that I wear my Sunday best. What I did not know was this showing of the 1939 epic, Oscar winning film was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. The politics surrounding the cinematic event eluded me as I proudly sat beside my grandmother amongst the lavish gold painted columns and the elite of Birmingham society.

What also eluded me but certainly not those adults seated to my right and left was that less than a year before 973 Birmingham children had been thrown into crowded jail cells merely an eleven minute walk from where we were sitting. Eventually, many of those children would be penned in concertina wire cages at the Alabama State Fair Grounds. For these children, the Civil War that I was wistfully remembering had yet to be fought. How did it come to that? Journalist Paul Kix reveals the racist struggle of my childhood home in his sweeping epic You Have To Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin To Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America.

For all its vile racist crimes and homesick calls for “Dixie” in the mid-twentieth century, Kix recounts that Birmingham was not yet a city during the Civil War. Montgomery, eighty miles south of Birmingham, was the first capital of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis and his free-thinking wife Varina made their home there during the first salad days of secession. Birmingham, on the other hand, was not fully incorporated until 1871. At once, the city quickly became an industrial hub in the South. Exploited by northern investors and corporations, White and Black workmen filled the steel mills and mining operations. A vicious condescension developed amongst the exploited laboring class Whites against Blacks as sort of an antidote to their own lack of self-determination. These feelings were abetted by the burgeoning of the Ku Klux Klan — by 1920 it boasted 20,000 members in the city; the rise of Governor George Wallace — he would carry five states and receive 10 million votes in the 1968 presidential campaign; but most of all by the dynasty of Commissioner and Mayor Bull Connor — who had been the nexus of power in Birmingham since 1937. These factors and personalities combined to perpetuate and escalate racial terror in the city during the 1960s. According to Paul Kix:

‘Birmingham well into the twentieth century had more illiterate people than any other city in the nation and the lowest spendable income per citizen, too. For generations neither the Blacks nor Whites got ahead, serfs to their bosses in Mountain Brook or their bosses’ bosses up north. The Whites couldn’t lash out against their managers and keep their jobs, so they lashed out at Blacks.’

Bull Connor, even though recently ousted from his mayoral office by the more erudite, yet still racist, Albert Boutwell, refused to relinquish his power. Restaurants, hotels, schools, hospitals, water fountains, restrooms — every public service in the city was clearly separated “White” and “Colored,” and the divisions were martially maintained. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, better known as the SCLC and led by Martin Luther King, decided to wage a non-violent war on the segregationist balustrades. King, for his part, badly needed a victory. Months earlier, he and his SCLC were outmaneuvered and embarrassed in Albany, GA. Furthermore, eight years had elapsed since King rose to prominence in the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. Now, younger Black leaders with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were regularly mocking King as “De Lawd,” a cowardly, behind the scenes, soft leader.

In fast-paced and exacting prose, Kix describes how King reclaimed the high-ground once again taking the lead against Bull Connor and his forces, how he was thrown into a wretched solitary confinement cell, and how, in gripping despair, he wrote the Letter from the Birmingham Jail on shreds of newsprint and squares of toilet paper. Kix also describes the cast of heroes who surround King: Ralph Abernathy, his most devoted friend; Wyatt Walker, the inveterate SCLC strategist; James Bevel, the inspirational genius who rescued the Birmingham campaign from an Albany-like fate; and Fred Shuttlesworth, the long-serving, flamboyant heroic pastor of the city.

Those of us nostalgically looking for valor in the Kennedy White House will be woefully disappointed by what transpires within the corridors of federal power. At this same time, thousands of Black Birmingham children will dramatically raise our estimation of what lionized deeds the smallest and most invisible of humanity can fulfill, even when their parents failed to step forward when called.

As for me, Kix introduced me to the Birmingham of my childhood that I did not know.

Sculpture by artist Ronald S. McDowell erected in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park, where, in 1963, law enforcement officers turned dogs on non-violent children marchers, some as young as twelve years old.

3. November 1942, by Peter Englund

What would you choose as the most important month of the 20th century? December 1928, the discovery of penicillin? April 1955, the date of the first polio vaccine? November 1963, the Kennedy assassination? July 1969, the first moon landing? Christmas 1991, the end of the Soviet Union? Peter Englund, a permanent member of the Swedish Academy, which determines the annual recipient of the Nobel Prize, would argue November 1942 is, by far, the most important month of the 20th century. November 1942 is the month the fortunes of WWII turned. At the beginning of that November, Hitler’s Third Reich and the Empire of Japan looked unstoppable. By the end of the month, citizens around the world knew it was just a matter of time before the Axis powers were defeated.

During those thirty days, British armor and infantry under General Bernard Montgomery defeated the once-thought invincible Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein, Egypt. U.S. Marines defeated the heavily fortified Japanese forces on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. General Dwight D. Eisenhower earned his first major victory with his amphibious landings of American and British troops in Algeria and Morocco in North Africa. Relentless attacks from Australian military dislodged the Japanese from New Guinea and forced them to retreat to their home islands. The Soviets encircled the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, eventually killing 500,000 Wehrmacht soldiers and imprisoning 91,000.

German soldier’s eyes frozen shut at Stalingrad in November 1942. Photo compliments of History.com.

These events would remain a bloodless bulleted list except for Peter England’s deeply humanizing approach to history. Rather than mechanically report on these epochal battles, he consults the diaries, letters, and journals of individuals directly affected by the raging conflicts in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In all, Englund researches the memoirs of forty individuals — a Soviet infantryman at Stalingrad; an American pilot on Guadalcanal; an Italian truck driver in the North African desert; a partisan in the Belarusian forests; a machine gunner in a British bomber; a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Shanghai; a university student in Paris; a housewife on Long Island; a shipwrecked Chinese sailor; a prisoner in Treblinka; a Korean sex slave in Mandalay; as well as the celebrated French existentialist writer Albert Camus, the most noted Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman, and the winsome English pacifist writer of WWI’s Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain.

Englund’s history throbs with personality, pain, hope, relief, and despair. He brings WWII back to life for citizens who need to come to terms with the human cost of those six interminable years. Because Englund refuses to edit any of the entries he uses, the reader feels as if all forty persons are speaking to him directly. The chorus of them sing out, “Do not forget us. Learn from our experience, lest you forget the agony of what we endured.”

4.The Way of Imagination: Essays, by Scott Russell Sanders

I am a library ruminant (Lat. “chew over again”), wandering the aisles, and “chewing on” a title I find in a dusty corner and then wondering what moved the author to write so many words about an obscure subject. That’s how I came upon The Way of Imagination, by Scott Russell Sanders, professor emeritus at the University of Indiana. I had purposely made my way into a forgotten aisle of the Tobin Library where they keep the mostly unread volumes of collected essays. Sanders’s book caught my eye, and when I opened the book, an essay titled “Useless Beauty” immediately caught my eye. In that chapter, he begins by asking about a nautilus shell: “Why this beauty in a seashell? For that matter why such beauty in a sunset, in a blossom or a birdsong or a butterfly wing, or anywhere at all.” Sanders rapturously admits to an interviewer, “Everything I write is informed by an awareness that we inhabit an exceedingly rare island of life in the vast expanse of largely empty space—a four-billion-year-old globe where we can breathe the air, drink the water, harvest food from the soil, and revel in beauty” (Interview with Tim Hillegonds in Slag Glass City).

Nearing eighty, Russell is not only captivated by the inherent beauty in nature, he also believes the functional beauty revealed by nature may guide humanity through the ecological challenges before us. Across the world, deserts are expanding, glaciers are melting, wildfires are increasing, violent storms are continuous, and the protective atmosphere is weakening. If Sanders ended with that dark list of observations, his voice would be added to the loud chorus of doomsday prophets. Instead, the sage professor believes that human beings can emulate the evolutionary inventiveness of nature to find a way out of our impending environmental collapse. Imagination is humanity’s remedy for the crisis. Sanders declares that through imagination completely unthought of objects can be invented, and through imagination the strangle hold of the status quo can be broken. No Pollyanna, Sanders admits that humans can use our seemingly endless trove of ingenuity for good or bad. Our efforts will either save or condemn the earth, “We are at once wonderfully creative and tragically destructive. We build cities, write symphonies, invent religions, send probes into space; but we also wage war, clear-cut forests, destabilize the climate, pollute rivers and seas, and drive countless other species to extinction.”

Our imagination also leads us to look at our world in new ways. My favorite story in the book recounts Neurologist Lewis Thomas’s (1913-1993) decision to write his 1974 National Book Award study, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. Lewis was enamored by the photos taken in 1968 by Apollo 8 Astronaut Bill Anders of the earth as a “blue marble.” From those photos Lewis’ imagined the connectivity of all life on earth — from the largest objects to the smallest, from a Sperm Whale to a microbial cell for instance. The book has been named one of the most important non-fiction books of the 20th century. Sanders admits an impulse similar to Lewis’s drives him to continue writing into his eighties: “I wish to imagine my life afresh. As a writer, I begin an essay with a willingness to be changed by what I write. I do not set out to deliver something I already know, but to inquire into the unknown, to dive into confusion in search of greater clarity.” What if all Americans set out with a determined willingness to be changed by what we read, hear, and discover? If so brave, what kind of world could we bequeath to our grandchildren?

5. An Elephant in the Garden, by Michael Morpurgo

In the same way that I amble through the Tobin Library, I often scroll through the free book offerings in my Libby App. A Kindle or iPad is especially convenient in the evening so I can read during the wee hours without disturbing Kay. Searching for a nighttime read a week or so ago, I came upon an irresistible title, An Elephant in the Garden. The electronic version of the book was available and with a “click” it appeared on my Kindle’s screen and for free no less. I was two chapters in before I realized the book was written for a youth audience, but by that time, I was hooked by the story and could not retreat.

I was impressed by the book’s clear, concise, Hemingway-ish prose, as well as the author’s ability to tell a rollicking story. Only later did I uncover the mystery that the writer is (Sir) Michael Morpurgo, who has penned a highly touted bevy of children’s books, to include War Horse, adapted for the screen by Stephen Spielberg. A child of WWII, Morpurgo and his brother, like C.S. Lewis’s Pevensie children, had to be evacuated from London to Northumberland to escape the terrors of the Luftwaffe’s Blitz. The result of Morpurgo’s traumatic childhood experiences, to include woefully dark chapters spent in boarding schools, led him to write books that bring history alive for youth. War Horse portrays the horrors of WWI through the eyes of an English farm boy and the horse he loves. An Elephant in the Garden brings the struggle of WWII alive for youth as well, yet through the perspective of German children and a young elephant they adore.

The setting is Dresden, but the story begins in a nursing home. A nurse must pull a weekend shift in a nursing facility, which necessitates her bringing her son Karl with her to work. Toward the end of her shift, the nurse and her son end up at the bedside of Lizzie. The bed-bound woman is quite taken with Karl. She hands him an old military compass and begins to tell them a story that is so enthralling Karl and his mother are immoveable.

Lizzie’s story begins when she is sixteen. She and her eight-year-old brother Karli live in Dresden with their mother Mutti, which means “Mom” in German. The father has been conscripted into the German army and is fighting on the Russian front. The three have had no word from him in months. To make ends meet, Mutti goes to work in the Dresden Zoo, where she has drawn close to a four-year-old elephant, Marlene, who is grieving the loss of her mother. The elephant’s health is declining to the extent that Mutti convinces the zoo director that she should bring Marlene home to her family’s garden and shed at night. Reluctantly, the director agrees, yet at the same time, he reminds Mutti that all large animals in the zoo will be shot if the allies bomb Dresden.

Marlene brings joy to the distressed family. For weeks Mutti, often accompanied by Lizzie and Karli, take Marlene from their home to the zoo and then back again for the night. Then the bombing begins. Dresden is firebombed by the allies creating a conflagration unequaled in WWII until the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In four raids, the RAF and the U.S. Air Force dropped 3,900 tons of incendiary bombs on the city, killing 25,000 people and decimating 1,600 acres of the historical city’s center. Lizzie, Mutti, Karli, and Marlene make their way out of the city with nothing but the clothes they are wearing. Trudging through the snow, they head first to an aunt’s and uncle’s farmhouse and then trudge two-hundred more miles toward the advancing American lines. They have no time to rest, for the dreaded Soviet forces are close on their heels. Their heroic escape includes a life-changing encounter with a young Canadian navigator and a life-saving meeting with a German countess.

The destruction of Dresden. Photo compliments of Wikipedia.

Written with children in mind, Morpurgo incudes no gratuitous violence, yet at the same time, he carefully narrates this chapter of WWII. These are books our children should read or we should read to them. Edmund Burke, (1729-1797) the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman, insisted, “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.” Our children and grandchildren must grow up knowing the history that formed them, the nation in which they live, and the world community that surrounds them. At the same time, we adults must reacquaint ourselves with that history. If not, the way forward will prove to be perilous, and the cycle of forgotten histories and deadly mistakes will continue.

What comes next?

After the New Year, look for my fresh look at the Gospel of Luke. We will be both inspired and challenged by the study.