What a book! A biography of a certain time in a person’s life with historical context – how perfect. If Anne Applebaum loved it, I was in (she’s the author of two incredibly detailed and horrifying books on eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Gulag: A History and The Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956).
One should never go in for hero worship, including of people like Zelensky, who are doing pretty big things against very powerful enemies. I knew nothing of his background save for his comedy roots. Simon Shuster taught me that was a tiny drop in a bucket as Zelensky was not just a performer but a writer, director, and producer. He was a very successful businessman whose career was intricately linked with Russia, and who performed and spoke mostly Russian.
According to Shuster’s portrayal, built upon numerous interviews with the president and his colleagues, Zelensky was used to getting what he wanted in the entertainment/business world. Once he won the presidency (on not much of a platform other than to eradicate notorious corruption in Ukraine) with no political record to go on other than his show, Servant of the People, Zelensky was up against not only Vladimir Putin but also the west’s initial intransigence upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Big challenge even without the invasion. But then he used his background to become the face of the war and, ultimately, of Ukraine’s survival.
In his transformation from the entertainment industry to politics, Zelensky mastered social media as a political tool, as much for his own people as for the world. Through his direct appeals, he won many over to Ukraine’s cause. He also made it possible for everyone to see the war in real time. It is easy to forget from our cushy position in the west how strong and ugly a force Russian imperialism (and propaganda) continues to be. The author is perfectly placed to capture all of this.
Simon Shuster is a Time Magazine senior correspondent with an obvious focus on Russia and Ukraine. He was born in the former Soviet Union and moved to the US when he was young. He grew up speaking Russian and his mom was Ukrainian. He has relatives who have been directly affected by the war. Banned from Russia in 2015, Shuster recognizes that he doesn’t have direct access to report from there. However, he is a good researcher and a good interviewer, speaking to Zelensky’s colleagues and wife Olena Zelenska numerous times.
Most importantly, Shuster is not an apologist for Zelensky. He doesn’t turn him into a perfect leader.
I always write that I don’t normally read biographies (and autobiographies). It turns out I do! So far this year I have read four. Not sure why??? Maybe they’re less intense to read on the subway than my usual historical fare. Maybe I just like complaining that they are not contextual enough.
I can learn something from almost any book, so let’s get on with it.
My friend Julie lent me two books about strong women who, until recently, haven’t received their due appreciation and coverage. The first was Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction by Lynne Olson. Even though Egyptian history is my favourite topic in grade 11 World History class, I didn’t know about Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, who was a French Egyptologist. Perhaps I should have because I am familiar with the famous story of the herculean effort to move the Abu Simbel Temples in the Nubian region of Sudan to avoid flooding from the opening of the Aswan High Dam. Little did I know that she was the major force behind this action conducted under the auspices of UNESCO.
Despite growing up in a time when women’s academic pursuits and work ambitions were not generally encouraged or approved, young Christiane Desroches pursued her passions by studying at the Louvre, working on site on archaeological digs in Egypt, and eventually teaching Egyptology. She was both smart and strong in order to stand up to the men in charge who were unused to someone else getting their own way! France had a deep relationship with Egyptian archaeology going back to Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign there. To admit a woman to the ranks was a real challenge to the conservatives at the museum and French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo.
One aspect of the book I enjoyed was her appreciation of the excavation at Deir el-Medina, the workers’ village outside the Valley of the Kings (where pharaohs were buried in some dynasties of the New Kingdom). She valued objects of everyday life, as she appeared to value the modern day workers who toiled under difficult conditions to the benefit of European archaeological expeditions. Because she wasn’t allowed to officially be part of some of the expeditions, she often served as nurse, tending to ordinary people and getting to know them relatively well.
One interesting non-Egypt related part of her story is her resistance work during World War Two. That’s something I’d like to explore further as it’s a subject with which I am not very familiar. A group of Louvre officials was very involved in moving the museum’s treasures as the Nazis gained control. She risked her life to make sure historically significant objects were protected. This reminds me of the scene in the horrible Netflix adaptation of “All the Light We Cannot See.” The real-life version is much better!
It turns out that moving Egyptian temples is much like moving mountains; it took money (which had to be raised from about 50 countries), clever engineering ideas, and international diplomacy over a period of 20 years. This back story definitely doesn’t normally get as much play as the “move” itself. Told against the backdrop of increasing Egyptian nationalism (in context of hostilities with Britain and France during the 1956 Suez Crisis), it is at least an effort by the biographer to put the subject in context.
One last thing most history teachers (and lovers) should be grateful to Christiane Desroches Noblecourt for is her advancing of famous exhibits such as those devoted to Tutankhamun and Ramses II that toured the world (initially to raise money for the UNESCO campaign). I don’t remember the details, but I know my class went to see the King Tut exhibit in 1979 when it came to the Art Gallery of Ontario. Perhaps it was an early inspiration for my career in teaching world history.
Desert Queen by Janet Wallach tells a similar story of a tough European woman entranced by the “east,” Gertrude Bell, a well-off English woman born in 1868. Growing up, she already displayed the intensity that would mark her whole life’s work. Never one to back down from what she wanted and was disapproved by noble society, Bell attended Oxford and was the first woman to earn a history “first” there, though that did not translate into a degree because no Oxford degrees were granted to women until 1920. While her views were generally considered progressive for the time, Bell was not in favour of women’s suffrage – more for class reasons – see this excellent online exhibit on this fascinating topic. Bell became a travel writer, mountain climber, “explorer” of Arabia, in the imperialist sense, amateur archaeologist, and eventually, a British diplomat in Mesopotamia (soon to become Iraq).
Gertrude Bell wrote enumerable letters home from her various travels and posts, as she had when she was at school in London and Oxford. Therefore, her life is very well documented in the sense that we know what she said about people, events, etc. However, she’s still a difficult woman to truly understand on a personal level. To say she seemed stoic is an understatement, though she did have at least two great loves that did not result in marriage or fulfillment, sadly. Gertrude Bell’s devotion to British imperialism seemed to be the driving force of her life and work. There are times when reading this book I wanted to (excuse the phrase) smack her! Only occasionally did the writer situate her opinions, class privileges and pro-empire positions within the context of the time. I found this incredibly frustrating, and I admit I took it out personally on Gertrude at times. I was sad though, when, in the end, despite her years of service and wide-ranging exploits, she died of a possible suicide, or at least an overdose of sleeping pills, in 1926.
As far as the Middle East goes, if I hadn’t already known how important World War one and its aftermath were to the region and the world, I would have found this book confusing with the often-paradoxical and/or hypocritical French and British promises to the Arabs and Jews, not to mention Kurds, made during and in the aftermath of the war. They all played out in how much control Britain was willing to cede in the newly created mandate of Iraq. Gertrude Bell’s views were initially what one would expect from a hard-core imperialist: keep the British in charge no matter what, and work with the tribes and personalities loyal to Britain, to the point of encouraging the failed King of Syria to become the first King of Iraq – Feisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca. In the end, Bell did soften somewhat to recognize that total British control was not in anyone’s interest, not least Britain’s.
Gertrude Bell’s writings and photographs are today the basis for the Gertrude Bell Archive held at Newcastle University. They have some interesting online exhibits that attempt to take a modern perspective on her imperialist views and how they interacted with her womanhood. It’s a great example for my students of the change in historiography toward uncovering women actors in history who should be part of the curriculum.
Not being a huge Rush fan, some might wonder why I chose to read Geddy Lee’s My Effin’ Life (which, being such a big, well-illustrated hard cover book, is not subway friendly). I can’t really say, but I did enjoy it. He starts off in a very historical way, with the story of his parents, who were Holocaust survivors. He put in the time to research well, and he is certainly aware of the multitude of ways this fact has influenced his life. Probably my favourite aspect of the book is his evolving relationship with his mother. Geddy’s father died young. Expectations were put on Geddy’s shoulders. He did not take the expected path: not excelling in school, taking up rock music, marrying a non-Jew. Meanwhile, Geddy’s mom kept the family afloat by running a neighbourhood store north of Toronto.
He’s also a Toronto boy, so I suppose I liked his references to the various places he lived while growing up, including Willowdale, near where I grew up.
I haven’t read a so-called rock bio before. Geddy saves his passion for his intricate descriptions of various recording processes and tour set ups. I found those interesting. Where he holds back on the details, perhaps understandably, is regarding his personal relationship with his wife. Being addicted to the touring life, Geddy obviously did not spend a lot of time at home. He knew he was often leaving home at the most crucial moments. Therefore, it’s interesting that at times in the book he seems to cut himself off from examining, in depth, his feelings on this topic. It’s not that he ignores the subject; it just doesn’t get the detailed treatment accorded to, say, the production process for an album.
The book runs the gamut of emotions, obviously from the tragic Holocaust stories, and, of course, the sad death of Neil Peart, to the funny band stories, especially the nicknames that they gave each other. Geddy is very funny and has a wide range of interests that he has clearly invested a lot of time into (and some he no longer values – which is good!). In honour of Geddy’s foray into being family historian, I tried listening to some Rush songs that don’t receive as much (if any) radio play; they still aren’t to my taste.
The last thing I’ll say about the book is that it is highlights Geddy’s intense collecting habit. There are many, many photos and documents and odd things throughout the book. As a historian, I admire that. As a person who has a basement filled with stuff, I pity it.
As a figure skating fan, I found it very difficult – yet mesmerizing – to read this book by American skater Gracie Gold. The title Outofshapeworthlessloser refers to the name she gave herself when in the depths of despair trying to make a comeback (or continuation of her career) after some difficult injuries and highly challenging family circumstances.
Without getting too much into detail on a subject where I could expand at great length (figure skating), let’s review Gracie Gold’s major results… In the first part of her career, she earned some very notable finishes at the world level: fourth at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Bronze medal in the team event (first ever) at the Sochi Olympics, two US championships, fourth at the 2015 and 2016 World Championships. At the time, I didn’t have any particular attachment to Gracie Gold other than admiring her athletic jumps. She seemed very talented but somewhat unable to put together two good programs in one competition, something relatively common in skating.
Appearances can be deceiving, as we all know. As Gracie tells it in her very extremely forthright book, Gracie Gold was a concocted image: the blond hair to match her name, the stylish costumes, the product promotions, the perfect family, and on and on. Underneath it, Gracie endured the harshness of living in the bubble of a judged sport. She relates the soul-crushing styles of two of her coaches, one of them nicknamed Cruella, and the other whose real name she uses. He grew up a product of the Soviet skating system and transported the harsh coaching style to the US. Gracie and her, shall we say, big personality, endured years of what sounds like depravity under his tutelage, until she had had enough.
Due to many intersecting factors, including years of being in a judged sport, injuries and her family falling apart (dad was an anesthesiologist who got caught for using drugs and mom was an alcoholic who had very high expectations of her) Gracie fell into depression and an eating disorder. She suffered in silence for a long time (and highly criticizes adults for not recognizing this) before some kind people in the sport got her into in-patient therapy. That part of her story is pretty well known now.
Some things I didn’t know include that she had a breast reduction, went into coaching, and professes to still love the sport.
Where the book is the most challenging is the frank chapter on her relationship with former skater John Coughlin. As she got very close with him, he helped her career by introducing her to the world of skating workshops. He was being investigated by US Safe Sport for sexual assault when he committed suicide. Gracie plainly states she is of two minds when it comes to the man she considered to be a soulmate; she loved him, he might have raped others. It is really this chapter that got me thinking about the state of skating the most. It is most definitely not the perfect world. No sport is. But for the young, I worry about the effects of pressures and predators.
Gracie Gold has been widely praised for telling her story in a no-holds barred manner. I fully agree and feel every young female athlete, no matter their sport, should read it.
Next up, I’ll be writing about a very profound book of Canadian history (or rather, the story of Canadian slavery usually omitted from Canadian history): The Hanging of Angelique by Afua Cooper. And I am almost finished The Showman (about Volodymyr Zelensky) by Simon Shuster and will surely have a lot to say on it.
Back in October I finished American Prometheus, an intricate biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. I had planned to see the movie in November but that didn’t happen. All these months later, it’s only playing in one theatre in Toronto: the Kingsway in Etobicoke. Val and I finally saw it yesterday. I had purposely not read any reviews or watched the trailer in anticipation.
Though I am not a film person, I was not disappointed. In fact, it was an incredible effort to turn such a detailed and complex book into a movie. Normally I don’t like modern movies because they are so fast-moving and loud, as in bombastic, no pun intended. This film has those qualities in a good way. It had to be fast to weave multiple timelines into one storyline. It had to be loud because of course it’s the atomic bomb we’re talking about here. It has an interesting, dark score that also makes use of non-musical sounds to complement some of the apparently not CGI visual effects.
Not being a film person, I didn’t know anything about Christopher Nolan or his previous movies. I didn’t even know who Cillian Murphy is. No matter. It’s best to go into these things cold with few expectations, otherwise a movie is usually a let down from a book. Not this one. It is certainly different from the book (as one would expect) but it is also mostly faithful. Perhaps Einstein is emphasized more than in the book (not sure why other than he’s a recognizable figure). Perhaps a few dozen people are left out (Oppenheimer knew A LOT of people). Of course certain events had to be skimmed over to get it all in. But the gist of it is there. And of one of the keys to the book is that the reader is left unsure of what to make of Oppenheimer. He’s not perfect. He’s not a hero. He has some great qualities, and some really bad ones. His character leaves the same residue in the film, though he is probably more sympathetic in the film than the book.
I asked Val what he thought the overall message of the film is; he said politics and power would always intercede no matter what one’s intentions are. Interesting. I am normally the cynic. I think it’s a pretty depressing thing to live not only in the nuclear age but in the climate crisis. The film says to me that we are complex beings who live in a messy world of our own making. History is as life.
In comparing this movie to another recent release, Maestro (the story of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein), Oppenheimer wins on every single level. I read quite a few articles about Maestro after I watched it on Netflix because I was perplexed by its overdone approach; it seemed to go for such realism that it was difficult to watch. The Bernstein character was always smoking in the movie. Though this may have been true in real life as well, it became the signature of every single scene, to the point where I could concentrate on almost nothing else. Oppenheimer, too, smoked to excess in real life. But the film makers chose to contain it so it did not distract from the point of the movie. I think that is called art.
Biography need not be hagiography. It’s nice that Oppenheimer doesn’t make its namesake character into a great man or god.
Hallie Rubenhold possesses the best of the writer’s and historian’s skills. She gets it – and is able to communicate such in a beautiful and frank way – that history isn’t solely about the past: it’s about bettering the world of today by making the reader see complexity instead of simplicity. Late Victorian British social history carries so many parallels with today, especially the gap between rich and poor and the moralizing that goes on when one group looks at the other.
Imagine this: a book about the victims of Jack the Ripper with not a single detail about their deaths. Rubenhold has investigated every detail that can be found (or triangulated) about the lives of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.
The other day while waiting for the bus outside Dufferin Station, I saw a woman sitting on the ground, obviously not in the best of health. She had many bags, was coughing, and smoking something so horribly foul smelling. It’s easy to turn a blind (or crude) eye these days to people on the streets. But I caught myself: what is the difference between her and the five women? On that same day, on the bus, a man called a woman a “f-ing b_ _ _ _.” A woman chastised him, even challenging him to a fight. I felt the spirit of the women on that bus, not because they’d be quick to a fight but because they had to stand up for themselves every single day!
Rubenhold goes to great lengths to paint many-layered pictures of the five women’s lives. The common factor was struggle, both as women and as members of the working class. She is careful to say what is not known for sure (documents being lost, not all things being able to trace). But she also uses the conditional tense throughout to infer the potential feelings and conflicts of struggling women of that time and place. This is particularly true for their relationships with the men in their lives.
Rubenhold’s subjects are women who didn’t always have a place to stay at night. Gerunds abound: tramping, charring, prostituting themselves (in only one case for sure). Signing themselves in and out of work houses. Having children die in their arms. Coming from situations where multiple siblings died. Losing parents to disease at a young age. The tragedies went on and on.
There’s a lot of talk, not surprisingly but also sensitively, of alcohol and alcoholism. In the passage below discussing the fifth victim, Mary Jane Kelly, Rubenhold shows her gift of positing what might have run through the woman’s mind:
However, drink also offered a convenient escape from a miserable existence. It dulled the fear of unwanted pregnancy and disease, a very real possibility in every penetrative encounter. It obliterated and it quieted, even for a short time, feelings of self-loathing, guilt, and pain, and traumatic memories of violence.
Earlier in the book, Rubenhold tells the complicated story of Kate Eddowes, liver of an almost nomadic life, for a time, as a seller of chapter books and ballads. Travelling Britain with her ‘husband’ Thomas Conway, they often attended hangings in search of crowds to buy their tales. In one instance, the person being hung was a relative of Kate’s. Kate, being literate, would certainly have had a hand (if not sole authorship) in the writing though Thomas seemed to see himself as the author. Rubenhold quotes from the ballad which shows sensitivity to the plight of the condemned relative. Once again Rubenhold sees the humanity in Kate even at the most gruesome time:
Satan, Thou Demon strong,
Why didst thou on me bind?
O why did I allow thy chains
To enwrap my feeble mind?
Before my eyes she did appear
All others to excel
And it was through jealousy,
I poor Harriet Segar killed.
May my end a warning be
Unto all mankind,
Think on my unhappy fate
And bear me in your mind.
Whether you be rich or poor
Your friends and sweethearts love,
And God will crown your fleeting days,
With blessings from above.
At the end of the book, Rubenhold includes a list of the items found on four of the women. I find this a particularly effective, if chilling, way to end the book. Mostly the lists are filled with items of clothing, for layers were probably a survival tactic. Kate’s list is the most interesting to me. In addition to bonnet, jacket, and multiple skirts she had tin boxes of tea and sugar, soap, knife, teaspoon, cigarette case, pawn tickets, a partial pair of glasses. Finally, “twelve pieces white rag (some slightly bloodstained (menstrual rags).”
Hallie Rubenhold has brought hidden lives back into the light.
Started Sept. 20. Finished Oct. 17. Nearly 600 pages (more for the notes and bibliography)!!!
I have not seen Oppenheimer (the movie) but now I want to! I really want to record my thoughts about the book first, however.
The first thing I want to say, without meaning to overblow anything, is that this is one of the best books I have ever read. And most of the books I have read in my life are in this genre: American history (though this is technically a biography).
I absolutely love the writing style of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. How two authors so seamlessly put together a book I do not know!?! Their research is meticulous. They are so matter of fact and relatively balanced in their interpretation of their very complex subject. Oppenheimer, if I am to believe these wonderful authors, was an incredibly layered person. I found him absolutely fascinating. That doesn’t mean that I love him; I take my cue from authors who clearly respect him but are honest and candid about his good and bad aspects. I will say, though, that I cried when he died, fittingly, at the end of the book. I was sitting in my chiropractor’s office waiting for him to come in. I think I was crying because the story was over.
My purpose here is not to review Oppenheimer’s life – read the book for that. It’s to talk about how to incorporate history into biography, successfully. The subject of a biography is usually both a reflection of their times and a shaper of their times. The best subject of a biography is also someone who grows and changes. Static subjects are boring.
Oppenheimer checks all the boxes. He came of age as a scientist near the dawn of quantum physics. He used his skills – especially of integrating other people’s work – to manage a large project (the creation of the first atomic bomb) driven by his desire to defeat the Nazis. But his true imprint lay in his attitude toward the burgeoning nuclear arms race after the war. And in his openness to new ideas across so many disciplines, not just science. So, yes, a kind of renaissance man.
What would his story have been without the context of the cold war? What would this book be without that background? It would be flat: A smart guy builds a world-changing tool and goes on to worldwide acclaim.
The full story is how Oppenheimer, a former leftist, or fellow traveller, got trapped in the cold war “purges” during the McCarthy-Hoover era. The genius of this book is how it builds to that climax so expertly, by charting how so many of his moves and those of his political enemies eventually led to the ‘trial’ that saw him lose his security clearance.
Though this book was published in 2006 – pre-Trump (almost a different world) – it is so resonant in today’s insanely polarized climate. Democracy and the civil society need to be protected. Nations need to work toward not just diplomacy, but openness and a shared purpose: protecting people. Oppenheimer wasn’t a perfect person; he made many mistakes, had difficult qualities, helped create a deadly weapon. In this book, however, he comes across as someone of purpose with a wider vision.
We can all use more of that quality, especially people serving in our governments.
I finally got through Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (2017).
I would not say I loved this book due to the writing style – just not my style, nothing wrong with it; however, I found it interesting enough to keep at it. And I certainly learned a lot about the Osage people and their history. I also took on board lots of new information about the early years of the FBI, but that I was not so keen on. Maybe that’s why it took me about a month to get through this book.
Note: I didn’t choose it because of the upcoming movie, though that may have helped. I was actually browsing on my local book store’s website when it came up. There were a few times when I was reading when I pictured Leonardo DiCaprio in my head. Weird.
Simply put, the book tells the true, very sad, and angering tale of the mass murder of Osage in the 1920s, up until the 1930s. Its premise is that a very well-connected white guy lauds himself as a friend of the Osage. Quite a lot of white people make their way in, too. That’s because the Osage are earning tonnes of money from their underground reservation, oil, in Osage County, Oklahoma. It was an oil rush! However, given the underlying racism of the country at the time (and probably still so), the Osage are required to have non-Indigenous guardians to manage their headrights. That’s how the murders started – greed, manipulation, and an unjust system that made it possible. Though there were some good people who worked hard to find the killer (it was suspected that the multiple murders were all directed by one man), the US and state governments, the nascent FBI, and the open-to-corruption court system just didn’t put enough into the investigation. In fact, as Grann points out at the end of the book, more people were killed than originally suspected. That’s one thing I definitely appreciated about David Grann’s narrative approach was his delineation of his historical research methods: archives, interviews, other books, etc. Working with Osage and descendants of other victims allowed Grann to piece together unknown parts of the story, expanding the conspiracy.
At the start of the book Grann goes into the history of the Osage prior to arriving in Oklahoma – look it up; it’s maddening. Given what we now know of the Canadian government’s treatment of Indigenous people here, it’s not a surprise that whatever little was given was taken away. However, they lucked out, initially, in arriving in northeastern Oklahoma because of the oil. Obviously, the moral of the story is that money does not bring happiness, especially when that money comes with conditions that put the Osage in great jeopardy.
I wanted something a bit lighter and quicker for my spring subway reading so I turned to YA fiction to keep up with possibilities for credit recovery (NOT next year). Earlier in the year I had read the entire Hunger Games series for credit recovery, though it turned out the neither student got past chapter 10. No worries, I enjoyed all three books – far more than the movies (which I also watched simultaneously on Netflix). I also read Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes, more of a children’s book, as I was using it for two students in credit recovery on Mr. Bryant’s excellent recommendation. It is an excellent, easy reading book with a powerful story about a 12-year old Black boy shot in Chicago. He tells the story from the perspectives both of being dead and alive. He is taught to be a ghost boy by the ghost of Emmett Till. I wish my students had cared more about the moving nature of the book. Though it only took about two days to read, I cried a bunch of times. They got through it (which is meaningful) without much connection.
The Sun Is Also a Star, by Nicola Yoon; A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi
I very much enjoyed the dual perspectives (two characters relate an event in different ways) in The Sun Is Also a Star. The whole time I was reading the book (about 3 days) I was thinking about how I could use these perspectives with students in English credit recovery even if they don’t read the whole book. I heard it was made into a movie as well. However, after watching the trailer I buried what I had seen. The book IS always better.
I had started A Very Large Expanse of Sea about a year ago. I got about a chapter in and decided I didn’t like it because the main character swore too much; this felt too forced. So I put it away. I decided to give it another go. This time I loved it. I guess I had to be in the right headspace to read young adult fiction. The narrator has a very strong voice and is an interesting character, not an easy-going character. I like her sharp tone. I will admit the book brought back a lot of high school memories, some pretty painful in retrospect.
How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith
This is a highly engaging, relevant, hard-hitting book. I had heard about it from the New York Times best seller list last year. So I bought it in February as part of a collection of books to be given as gifts from THHSSSC to people who came to the subject council session at the SWSH PD conference at York Mills. No one wanted it so I kept if for myself but held off taking it home feeling kind of guilty. It was worth the wait.
The subject matter is exactly the hard stuff I love reading about: the history of slavery in the US. But the framework is so clever. Clint Smith travelled to sites – museums, cemeteries, plantations, Angola state prison in Louisiana, to name a few – that have deep connections with slavery; some of them are honest about that history, some of them are not. He went on tours and spoke to fellow tour members and tour leaders. He spoke to experts and researched on his own as well. The result is a meshing of excellent history with beautifully written prose. It is both a timely book given the polarization in the US, and a timeless book given its deep, pensive approach to a very difficult conundrum: how Americans consider (or don’t) slavery in their view of their country’s history.
There were times while reading this book on the subway that I had to stop, put it down, and shake my head. During the author’s tour of the Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola, I learned that the US – to this day – has a number of states that do not require unanimous jury verdicts in trials. I was floored but not shocked when I learned the reason was to sideline Black jurors. Similarly, when Smith relayed the average length of sentence in the prison is 87 years I just had to stop reading for a while. All of the chapters are very indicting but the Angola one really shocked me. I don’t know why; it is obvious that mass incarceration is a direct descendant of enslavement.
I’d like to divert to a film review here. About a month before I started reading How the Word Is Passed, I saw a meaningful documentary on Netflix. In retrospect, it pairs very effectively with this book. Descendant shares with the book the perspective that history matters, memories matter. It is the story of a community of people in Alabama who are the direct descendants of the last enslaved people brought to America from Africa over 50 years AFTER the slave trade was made illegal. The premise for the movie is that the there is a new search for the ship, the Clotilda, that was scuttled by the owners in 1860 after it dropped off 110 people in Mobile. The community, Africatown, part of Mobile, Alabama, is coming to grips with what it means, how it should be commemorated, and, for some, how it can bring tourism to the town. It turns out the story isn’t just about the ship and the people who began their forced journey to enslavement on it. The town, very similar to Africville in Nova Scotia, has been a dumping ground for heavy industry for decades as Mobile encroached. There is one moment in the film where a person is walking in a leafy, green section of the town. The camera suddenly pans up to an overhead drone shot and huge smoke stacks are revealed. The town is surrounded by pollution and has high cancer rates (reminds me of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta). One of the last scenes in the film is of a young activist who is taken on a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC led by one of the curators who has been to Africatown to work with the community in the aftermath of the discovery of Clotilda. She is awakened to the power of history. I was ALL in.
Back to the book, I learned a lot even though I consider myself knowledgeable about slavery in the US. Starting with Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia, Monticello, Smith reports facts about his selling and moving of enslaved people as a means of paying off his personal debts. Some white women on the tour were shocked. Their education on slavery had been limited, part of Smith’s point. Then he goes to Whitney Plantation in Louisiana to learn about a plantation with its enslaved people centered in telling its story. Then to Angola where the prison obfuscates about its history as a plantation and its smooth transition post-slavery to using essentially unpaid the labour of the inmates. Following the prison tour, Smith goes to Galveston to experience and investigate Juneteenth, the celebration/commemoration of Texas’ freeing of the enslaved people. Here he explores the intersection of facts and memory. Next, Smith visits a Civil War cemetery where folks are commemorating the Lost Cause view of the Civil War pretty much completely in opposition to what the war was really about. Interestingly, he also travels to New York City and takes a tour of several areas of the city with Black pasts that aren’t very well known, including to a section of Central Park which was once a Black community. In the penultimate chapter Smith travels to Senegal to look at the telling of the story of slavery from the African perspective and confronts, once again, the complicated relationship between historical fact and historical memory, this time in relation to the infamous House of Slaves which cruelly sent off thousands of enslaved people to their fate in the new world. I found it quite poignant that Smith chose to end his book by exploring the history of his own grandparents by having them share their experiences with racism, Jim Crow, education, and finally, memory.
This book reaffirms for me how much I am grateful to have a career in which I get to instill the importance of history to current day life. Without it, we flail and move backwards.
The 99% Invisible City by Kurt Kholstedt and Roman Mars.
Val bought this book. It’s by the guy who hosts the 99% Invisible podcast, apparently. I haven’t listened to it but I enjoyed the book as its focus is on urban architecture and design (one of Val’s favourite topics, and thus mine, too). It has very short chapters (about 2 pages) that reveal little known facts about cities, ranging from the design of emergency vehicles to the design of lamp posts. Perhaps the podcast is a little bit more in depth. I enjoyed it (note – I am 99% done reading it). But it was too heavy to read on the subway. It’s more for my night table.
What If? 2 by Randall Munroe
This book is also too heavy to read on the subway, but I took it for a few weeks as I needed some lighter fare. The best way to describe this book is: smart, funny, really useless stuff based on science. In other words, Donald Trump wouldn’t read it. Well, I don’t know if he can read. It’s not exactly my thing – I will probably never finish this book. But when I need a ‘smart’ laugh, I will pick it up and learn something that I will never be able to use in real life since I am not planning to create a tower from here to the moon or to know if a plane can be launched by catapult.
Mairi Cowan, author of The Possession of Barbe Hallay
Readers familiar with my book reviews know that I like to email authors after I finish their books. I did it again, but this time I was not emailing a stranger. Mairi Cowan, amazing author and history professor at UTM, is a friend I met through a colleague.
Her new book, The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada, was an amazing read. It tells the story of a young woman who migrated to Quebec from France in the mid 1600s and experienced some kind of “infestation” by devilish forces. But really it is a book about how to approach a historical mystery or story. I would have read Mairi’s new book no matter what, but I especially love its devilish connection. Ever since I learned about Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, 1486), I have been interested in the topic of women and witchcraft. Luckily, as Mairi points out, by the time of Barbe Hallay, Europeans (or in this case Canadian settlers) religious officials didn’t get quite so worked up and no major panic ensued like in Salem, Massachusetts a few decades later to the south.
I love how didactic this book is. I mean that in the most complimentary way. In fact, I am reading “Barbe” again with a highlighter in hand – yes, on the subway. Out of this I intend to create some new content for my grade 12 world history course; I’ve already adjusted a few things based on things I was reminded of while reading about 17th century Quebec.
I even told my grade 12 history class, on the first day of the semester, that I felt guilty for not including Canada in world history for the last 20+ years of teaching this course. Of course Canada fits in with all the negative themes of colonization, empire, genocide, conversion. It just doesn’t get mentioned very often – my fault.
Since I haven’t taken a university level history course since 2002 (I took Roman history in the summer after my fourth year of teaching), I’ve lost touch with some trends in the discipline. Mairi’s book connected me with microhistory. In her introduction she quotes Edward Muir on the purpose of microhistory: “to elucidate historical causation on the level of small groups where most of real life takes place and to open history to peoples who would be left out by other methods.” Love it, especially Mairi Cowan’s inclusion of the story of watermelon making its way around the world into the hands of a French nun in 17th century Quebec.
She also quotes historian Johan Huizinga: “‘the mainspring of all historical knowledge” is “our perpetual astonishment that the past was once a living reality.'” I suppose that is akin to the saying, “the past is a foreign country.” It’s a good quote to help students understand the importance of context. And perhaps it also helps explain why I like history. I can never answer that big “why” question when students ask. You’d think I’d have one by now, 25 years into my history teaching career.
This book has prompted me to add some Quebec-based figures into my unit one culminating activity, the Global Gathering. It also got me thinking about ways to add more Indigenous content into my course. I’ve done so with some topics in unit two related to the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Royal Proclamation, and some Indigenous figures I never learned about during my education.
Next up, Val and I are reading David Javerbaum’s The Book of Pslams. NO, that is not a spelling error. Yes, we are reading it together because it is so hysterical. I’ll be sure to give it a puritanically glowing review.
It has been a while since I’ve reported on recently read books. Taking the TTC still allows me lots of time to read, mostly in the mornings when service is more reliable. It’s hard to read standing up on the way home.
Val recommended this book to me after he read it. Val and I don’t always enjoy the same kinds of books, however, we both enjoyed this one.
I had never heard of Elamin Abdelmahmoud even though I’m a CBC person. He’s a CBC host, apparently, but his field is popular culture so I would never have known about him. I’m rather an outsider when it comes to popular culture. His book, in a nutshell, is about immigrating to Canada at a young age from Sudan. The glitch: he moved to Kingston, Ontario, where he came to learn he was seen as Black in Canada. He writes about this with humour and sensitivity. It was a great book for a white person such as me who has had no life experience of having to fit in.
Elamin definitely has an interesting personality. His writing is sweet and quirky and metaphorical. Highway 401, seen on the cover, emerges as the dominant metaphor in his life as he travels up and down, from his restricted life at home in Kingston with his family to his new and more freeing opportunities down the road in Toronto and beyond.
Elamin came to love wrestling, particularly writing fantasy wrestling scenarios. Who had ever heard of this? It got him into writing. He became very methodical about it. And thankfully so for he has written a great gem.
Since I had enjoyed Val’s recommendation of “Son of Elsewhere” so much, I asked him to suggest another book for me as I had nothing lined up. The previous two books I had read were kind of fast moving so I wanted something longer. He went with Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow.” Wow, what a different kind of book. Very heavy and academic, but also really well written, funny at times.
The last time I read a book with a section on economics was in a biography of Karl Marx. The chapter on his economic views for Das Kapital put me to sleep. I hardly ever skim over a chapter when reading. This time I made it through an entire 400-page book by an economist – well, he’s actually a psychologist. That’s mostly because he is a very entertaining writer. I loved it when he totally dissed people who pick stocks. It’s just the law of averages, he says. More so than the material, I enjoyed Kahneman’s descriptions of the life of a professor. Interesting life. His wife, it turns out as revealed in the post-script, is also a great writer. She wrote short summaries at the end of each chapter that made the complex psychological concepts much more digestible.
The major theme of the book is that our brain has two systems: one that think quickly and without deep consideration; the other that considers and analyzes. If we can learn more about these systems, we can make better decisions and become more aware of when we’re not making decisions at all. I find a lot of this applicable to my job as a teacher. However, most likely I’ll forget it because it’s so complex. That is the current state of my brain (my memory).
Last year I attended an equity workshop that mentioned this book by Beverly Tatum, originally published in 1997. When I saw this 20th anniversary edition in my local bookstore I jumped at it. And that was not a mistake.
The first chapter, a prologue written in 2017 after the Obama years and just as Trump was elected, was a highly depressing summary of the history of the last 20 years in the US replete with police shootings and entrenched white supremacy.
The premise of this beautifully written, personal and heartfelt book is that all children and teenagers, regardless of race, develop their racial/ethnic/cultural identities in their social contexts, whether that’s in situations where they’re in the majority or the minority.
Even though the book is American, I found it really helpful for prompting me to consider my students’ identity development processes. I sincerely hope that the Canadian context is different the American one, though this may be inherently naïve. Like all equity materials I have read over the past few years, it reminds me that racism is best understood as institutional, systemic.
One resource that Tatum relies on often is comments from students in her past university seminars on racial awareness. I found these the best parts of the book, honestly addressing the challenges of all kinds of students in living in a rapidly changing world. I loved reading their words, first person. Tatum is an optimistic – some might say slightly naïve, person who feels change is possible through hard work and deliberate interactions between people of different backgrounds overcoming their fears, ignorance, and lack of past experience.
This line really got my attention on the subway: “Institutional policies and practices are created and carried out by individuals, and when those individuals have homogeneous social networks, they too often lack empathy for those whose lives are outside their own frame of reference. I believe opening social networks and closing the empathy gap is a step toward bringing about positive change (Tatum, 345-46).”
I don’t have a next book. This one was really hard to top.
“21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari, published in 2018, offers an interesting take on the current world even though it was written pre-pandemic. It’s supposed to be about the future but I don’t take it that way since we are living in the future according to when the book was written.
I don’t want anyone to think this is a self-help book, or one of those Jordan Peterson type guides to understanding the world. I don’t read such things. It’s a very thoughtful book written by a left-leaning history professor/public intellectual (a catchall term if ever there were one) with a deep interest in the effect of living in such a changing, global world. As for its purpose, I still can’t discern that even after finishing it. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes when you live in a fishbowl (the world) you have a hard time seeing the water. This means you don’t realize what’s around you on a daily basis. I feel that Harari’s role is to make the fishbowl visible. He describes the world as incredibly complex and constantly changing. He is critical, sarcastic, blunt. Sometimes he goes on weird tangents, as in the last bit of the book where he goes on about meditation. It was above my head, for sure. But there were a lot of chapters I thoroughly enjoyed, such as his critiques of religion (a human invention) and nationalism (another story humans tell themselves to simplify the world through focus on their country’s excellence.)
I particularly enjoyed the chapter on secularism. As an atheist (a term he did not use), I was curious to see what he’d say about secularism. Not that I don’t know the definition of the word – it’s actually one of the driving concepts in my unphilosophical life. Rather, I wanted to know what his critique would be. Harari (who I’d assume is a secularist) identifies the main preoccupations of secularism as ‘commitment to the truth’, lack of obsession with “any group, person, or book as if it and it alone has sole custody of the truth”, ‘compassion’, ‘equality’. ‘freedom’, ability to doubt and admit ignorance, and finally ‘responsibility’ – that humans care about what is wrong and want to make it better, actively, without invoking some kind of deity. Ironically, his criticism of these ideals is that they’re too idealistic for the needs of the world and can default into the creation of emotion-based stories rather than realities, like any other movement. He calls this the ‘shadow’ of secularism. I will take one for the team and accept that fault.
My favourite quote from the book might be my hook for grade 12 history class this coming school year: “Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it.” This pearl of wisdom comes in the chapter on war. He follows it up with “…even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.” I love it! So true. And hard to convey in history class when students want to understand why people do things.
For the Careers class I must teach this coming year, I will refer to the chapter entitled “Education” in the part of the book called, interestingly, “Resilience.” Here his premise is that the world is changing so quickly we teachers won’t even know what our students’ futures will be like. I often think about the paradox of me teaching careers class; I’ve been in the same career for 24 years, overridingly at the same workplace, too. Here’s a relevant passage: “In such a [information saturated] world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.” I sincerely hope that is what I do, or at least try to do, as a teacher. Later in the chapter he thinks “schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.”
Me teaching the inventing part? I’m not sure about that, but I can definitely help with the life skills part. I don’t hate the Careers curriculum, and it overlaps a lot with the GLS (learning strategies) curriculum that is one of my mainstays in student success. We’ll see how I do offering guidance for the future.
On the whole “21” is a really interesting read with a few weird bits about science fiction and meditation thrown in. It proves to me that the pandemic is not adding new problems to society; it’s just elaborating on ones we already faced. Sadly, we’re not getting better at coming up with long-term solutions.
Next up? I may check out one of Val’s previous recommendations, “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.
Comments (0) 
Themocracy