Monday, July 2, 2012

Best American Essays of the 20th century (10)

Best American Essays of the Century
Editors: Oates and Atwan
Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company
2000

Why read it? The essays are in chronological order from 1901 to 1997. If you expect these essays to be pleasant, comforting and fun to read, you are mistaken. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the editors of the book, says, “My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment, and one another Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.” Most of these essays provoke. Many of them I had never read, but they paint a vivid portrait of the twentieth century.

46. Cynthia Ozick. "A Drugstore in Winter." 1982. The author tells how she became a writer--through reading. Beginning with a lending library in her father's drug store, all kinds of people either gave her or loaned her books and she consumed all of them.

47. William Manchester. "Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All." 1987. Manchester vividly describes the conditions under which his company of marines fought on Okinawa, the island from which, if there had been no atomic bombs, the invasion of mainland Japan would have been launched. The statistics of loss are staggering, more than Hiroshima, more Americans than at Gettysburg.

He pleads for Americans to remember those who died in war on Memorial Day. And he makes it clear that he has not forgiven the Japanese for what they did to his friends and fellow marines and to him personally. I think this essay should be read aloud at Memorial Day ceremonies. Americans need to understand the realities of war. They need to appreciate the conditions under which those who gave their lives--and those who survived--fought.
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Best Ameerican Essays of the 20th century (11)


Best American Essays of the Century
Editors: Oates and Atwan
Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company
2000

Why read it? The essays are in chronological order from 1901 to 1997. If you expect these essays to be pleasant, comforting and fun to read, you are mistaken. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the editors of the book, says, “My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment, and one another Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.” Most of these essays provoke. Many of them I had never read, but they paint a vivid portrait of the twentieth century.

48. Edward Hoagland. "Heaven and Nature." 1988. Reflections on committing suicide.

49. Stephen Jay Gould. "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown." 1989. The author believes that people prefer "creation myths" to the reality that most phenomena evolve. Baseball is an example. It was not started by Abner Doubleday, a man who didn't "know a baseball from a kumquat." It evolved from primitive stick-and-ball games played by working people even before America became a British colony.

50. Gerald Early. "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant." 1990. An African-American man watches the Miss America Pageant with his daughter. Confronts the unspoken belief that white women are the image of the perfect American woman.

51. John Updike. "The Disposable Rocket." 1993. The author reflects on the male body and in the process contrasts it with the female's. The man's role in reproduction is like the rockets that propel the space capsule into space then fall away into the ocean. An interesting metaphor.

52. Saul Bellow. "Graven Images." 1997. The author reflects on the process of being photographed. He thinks that photographers try to help the public see you as you really are, as opposed to how you want to be viewed. When you are being photographed as a public figure, the battle is on between the photographee and the photographer for how you will be immortalized in public. The photographer tries to reduce the public figure to the confines of a paper or a frame that makes the public figure look like everyone else.

The End.
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Watch and Ward. Henry James


New York: The Library of America
1983 (1871)

Why read it? Novel. Why read Henry James? For many reasons. His subtle expression of the intricacies of relationships is revealing of how people think and feel in relation to others. His character studies reveal the complexity of personality. He throws off ideas and memorable words almost as afterthoughts. One will find many a mot juste in his novels. And he works mainly with the relationships of unsubtle, honest and straightforward Americans against the subtle, devious, cultured Europeans. However, Watch and Ward deals only with America and is an early novel.

The idea behind the novel is bizarre. Roger Lawrence adopts a little girl and brings her up to be his perfect wife. Only he doesn’t tell her that that has been his reason until she is fully grown and then she rebels. Two young men who have courted her turn out to be complete jerks and she finally realizes that Roger is the only man she knows who has a heart and, it is assumed, she marries him.

Note: The number before the quote is the number of the page on which the quote was found.

Some sample ideas from the novel:
4. Of Roger Lawrence: “In trifling matters, such as the choice of a shoemaker or a dentist, his word carried weight, but no one dreamed of asking his opinion in politics or literature.” 7. “…but she added that the man she married must satisfy her heart. Her heart, she did not add, was bent upon a carriage and diamonds.” 9. “The injury I do you in refusing you is less than I should do you in accepting you without love.” 12. “ ‘He [her father] meant to kill her [Nora], of course,’ said the landlady, ‘that she mightn’t be left alone in the world. It’s a queer mixture of cruelty and kindness! ’ ” 13. “…looked at the child—the little forlorn, precocious, potential woman.”

18. “He showed them [portraits of Nora] to two old ladies of his acquaintance, whose judgment he valued, without saying whom they represented; the ladies pronounced her a little monster.” 22. “Plainness in a child was almost always prettiness in a woman.” 24. “In fact, Hubert had apparently come into the world to play. He played at life altogether; he played at learning, he played at theology, he played at friendship; and it was to be conjectured…he would play with especial relish at love.” 26. “She had reached that charming girlish moment when the broad freedom of childhood begins to be tempered by the sense of sex.” 34. Nora: “You must keep your journals carefully, and one of these days I shall have them bound in morocco and gilt, and ranged in a row in my own bookcase.” Roger: “That’s but a polite way of burning them up…. They will be as little read as if they were in the fire. I don’t know how it is. They seemed to be very amusing when I wrote them: they’re as stale as an old newspaper now.”

37. “…but he felt as if to settle down to an unread author were very like the starting on a journey.” 37.“Roger was forever suspecting her of a deeper penetration than his own.” 41. Nora: “What are you? Neither my brother, nor my father, nor my uncle, nor my cousin—not even, by law, my guardian.” 41. “I know that if I should run away and leave you now, you couldn’t force me to return.” 41. “…you can turn me out of your house this moment, and no one can force you to take me back.” 49. “It seemed to him an extremely odd use of one’s time and capital, this fashioning a wife to order.” 50. Nora: “He has educated me, he has made me what I am.” 52. Nora: “He has known me as a child…. I shall always be a child for him.”

56. “She awoke with a keener consciousness of the burden of life.” 63. “All this had given him a slightly jaded, over wearied look, certain to deepen his interest in female eyes.” 66. “It was a specialty of Hubert’s that in proportion as other people grew hot, he grew cool.” 72. “For a young girl it’s by no means pure gain, going to Europe. She comes into a very pretty heritage of prohibitions. You have no idea of the number of improper things a young girl can do.” 76. “Your real lover of Rome oscillates with a kind of delicious pain between the city in itself and the city in literature.” 79. “It’s interesting to hear about people one looks like.”
83. “The shrinking diffidence of childhood I have utterly cast away. I speak up at people as bold as brass. I like having them introduced to me, and having to be interested and interesting at a moment’s notice. I like listening and watching. I like sitting up to the small hours.” 83. “He wished to make Nora miss him and to let silence combine with absence to plead for him.” 85. “I have brought her up with the view of making her my wife, but I’ve never breathed a word of it to her. She must choose for herself.” 88 “To go into most of the churches [in Rome] is like reading some better novel than I find most novels.” 88 “I needn’t try to define the indefinable.”

97. “ ‘Be as good as you please,’ says Society, ‘but unless you’re interesting, I’ll none of you!’ ” 105. “…you and I, for instance, are living up to the top of our capacity, that we are contented, satisfied, balanced.” 106. “There are men born to imagine things, others born to do them.” 109. “ ‘True admiration,’ said Mrs. Keith, ‘is one half respect and the other half self-denial.’ ” Hubert: “I’ll put that in a sermon.” 113. “Mrs. Keith was primed for a ‘scene’; she was annoyed at missing it.” 113 “…his eyes flashing cold wrath.” 123. “In this strange new character of a lover she seemed to see him eclipsed as a friend.”

125 “Here, if ever, was thunder from a clear sky.” 125. “Why had he never told her that she wore a chain? Why, when he took her, had he not drawn up his terms and made his bargain? She would have kept it, she would have taught herself to be his wife. Duty then would have been duty; sentiment would have been sentiment.” 128. “It would have been a vast relief to be able to hate him.” 133. “I can’t give what he wants, nor can I give back all I have received. But I can refuse to take more.” 139. “Ah, how character plays the cards!” 145. “I was dreaming then; now I’m awake.” 145. “You’ve stirred deep waters.”

Quote: 159. “She seemed to be in the secret of the universe…and the secret of the universe was that Roger was the only man in it who had a heart.”
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen.
Yankee from Olympus: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Catherine Drinker Bowen
New York: Bantam Books
1960 (1943)

Why read it? Although this book concerns primarily Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., i.e. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author, Catherine Drinker Bowen, spends time in the first quarter of the book describing in colorful detail the grandfather, called Abiel, and Junior’s father, called Oliver or Dr. Holmes. The grandfather, Abiel, was a lawyer and Junior’s father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician.

It is a good thing that Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote this book. If the book had been written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., its contents would have been as obscure as his legal opinions and dissents were. Holmes loved to use metaphors, some of which were not all that clear, and his phrases and clauses were often convoluted. Or, perhaps it was his concise or cryptic use of words. He said that people manipulated words, that words were not as transparent as crystals, that they varied according to the times and context. He said that you had to look for the living thought behind the words. That’s how one has to read Justice Holmes: his words mask living thoughts and it is the thought that one must look for in Holmes’s opinions and dissents, beyond the words.

Although Justice Holmes was a student of law, he was also a student of life. He thought deeply about it and his words are often memorable. For example, here is his attitude toward death: “At the grave of a hero, we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight.”

I think my overall impression of Holmes’s life is that of his sense of purpose throughout his life. He appears not to have intentionally wasted a single day.

Sample ideas from the book: ix “By his own confession, [OW, Jr.] Holmes was an ‘internal’ man, to whom ideas were more interesting than things.” “The [law] books seemed quite impossible to understand. The suspicion assailed him that if he ever did understand them, they would still be dull…. In its pages, one caught no glimpse of that subject which was the only thing worth studying in the world: Man.” 116 “What did surprise him [Wendell] was the attitude of his classmates toward the whole business of scholarship. They looked upon books as something to avoid.” 117 “The men who came to the Holmes house…never read a book because it was the thing to do. They read with passionate interest and with passionate interest discussed what they had read.” 117 “ ‘Read for ideas, not for authors,’ Wendell wrote.”

149 “At Fair Oaks the men charged with fixed bayonets across a field of mud, sinking knee-deep at every step.”150 “War was not chivalry. War was not gallantry, heroism, adventure. War was terrible and dull, and a man had better not try to make sense of it. A man had better just keep at it day by day, doing the next job that lay before him.” 152 “The longer he was in the war, the more Wendell Holmes was convinced that not death was the horror, but the loss of a young man’s chance to live. Never to have your chance, never to show the world—to show yourself what you could do!” 163 “…but Wendell could not forget. Dead men sprawled among the corn, naked, stripped of trousers and boots, eyes staring, limbs flung out in awful abandon. For these boots and trousers the Rebels had fought like tigers. If the North fought for “victory,” for “Union,” “freedom,” the South fought for shoes to put on its bleeding feet, pants for its legs, and fought no less bravely…. They [the Rebels] were not cowards.”

163 Wendell Holmes: “War? …. War is organized bore.” 164 “The surgeon…had told him men were divided into two kinds—external men and internal men. Internal men considered ideas more interesting than things…. The opposite, those robust creatures who acted and did not need to think…filled with health and a kind of blessed immediacy, a capacity for living in the present and the present only.” 178 “ ‘Get down, you fool!’ a young voice shouted. Automatically the President [Lincoln] stepped back. It was Wendell Holmes, angry and terrified…. ‘Captain,’ he [Lincoln] said, ‘I am glad you know how to talk to a civilian.’ ”180 “…Holmes recalled the first time he had tried to use his saber. Down at Edwards Ferry he had been sent on horseback to carry dispatches. On the road he met a Rebel captain. They tried to get their sabers out. Both got thoroughly tangled up, wheeled, drew their pistols, rode close and pressed the muzzle to the other’s side. Neither pistol went off. No one but a soldier would understand that story.”

199 OW Holmes on studying the law: “One found oneself plunged in a thick fog of details….” 246 OW Holmes: “The fact is…that legislation…is empirical. It is necessarily made a means by which a body, having the power, puts burdens which are disagreeable to them on the shoulders of someone else.” 256 “…he was saying that judicial decision does not derive wholly from precedent. He was saying that a good judge unconsciously predicates a law according to the result it will have upon the community at large.”

267 “Holmes approved the case system. Law only ends with a theory; it begins with a concrete case. Naturally, a students remembers an actual instance more vividly than a general principle.” 274 “Experience was what made a judge—not scholarship or theoretical conceptions of the judicial function.” 278 “A country that in Holmes’s youth had been rural in tone now rushed to build new cities. Jefferson’s fears had come to pass. Men lived piled upon one another, struggling for survival under smoking factory chimneys of which Jefferson could not have dreamed. By 1883, the transition from a rural to an industrial economy was gathering momentum; in the ‘90s the ills attending it would be acute.”

279 “The trouble was that the courts gave this working document [the Constitution] no elasticity; they regarded it as immutable, written in stone on Sinai” [allusion to the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai]. 279 “The Constitution is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.” 291 “Lawyers were allowed two hours for oral arguments…. Holmes liked to decide from the oral argument, not wait for the brief. He went at it zestfully, as a man goes after game. The moment the lawyer started to speak, Holmes leaned forward, listening raptly, making penciled notes. Sometimes, five minutes were not gone when he threw himself back, closed his eyes. ‘Holmes has made up his mind.’ ”

339 “If the Northern Securities Company was proved, under the Sherman Act, to be in restraint of trade, it should be dissolved. If not, it should stand. All this pressure of public opinion served merely to cloud the issue.” 339 “If the public would come out frankly and say it desired to sock the rich, it would be, Holmes thought, far more admirable than this pretense of using the courts to call the rich illegal simply because they were rich.” 339 “As for the conscience of the court, a court that ruled according to its ‘conscience’ would be no court at all. Law was neither morality nor politics, nor expediency nor art.”

340 “Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgments.” 340 Reducing the issue to a simple comparison: “…as if the question were whether two small exporting grocers shall go to jail….”
343 “Moreover, it was not the number of his dissents that won for Holmes the title of the Great Dissenter…. It was the quality of Holmes’s dissents that made them famous; it was what he said and how he said it.” 343 “A dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed.” Charles Evans Hughes.

353 “…faith in a universe not measured by our fears….” 358 Holmes: “Moral conceptions don’t belong in a court of law.” 360 “Sentences of twenty years’ imprisonment have been imposed for the publishing of two leaflets that I believe the defendants had as much right to publish as the Government has to publish the Constitution of the United States….” 361 “…the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas….”361 “…I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe….”

365 Holmes: “ ‘Delusive exactness’ is a source of fallacy throughout the law. By calling a business ‘property’ you make it seem like land.”373 “Often, Holmes had talked of life and death, saying…that life was action, the use of one’s powers.” 373 Holmes: “…if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.” 375 “With taxes a man buys civilization—by no means a bad bargain.” 376 “…the Court, it seemed to him, acted on their own economic theories—and then called upon the Constitution as a sanction.”

Quote: 399 Francis Biddle: “Holmes was skeptical of everything except for life itself.”

Quote: 386 “Time, events, history itself, would prove his dissents. One by one they became law.”

Quote: 387 “There was indeed a great contagion in this courage—a courage not born with Holmes but handed down with all the accumulated force, the deep spiritual persuasion, of the generations behind him.”
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, June 18, 2012

The Best and the Brightest. David Halberstam.
The Best and the Brightest
David Halberstam
New York: Random House
1972

Why read it? Fascinating study of the diffrences in the behavior of presidential advisers under two different styles of leadership--JFK and LBJ. These differences in leadership changed American history. Same presidential advisers--McNamara, Rusk, etc.--but different styles of presidential leadership. JFK welcomed all points of view on issues. In the end he made the decision whether his advisers agreed or not. LBJ made decisions by consensus. "Let's vote." The consensus became the decision.

Some sample ideas:
66. "...it would be said of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson that both had their Bay of Pigs, that the former's lasted four days and the latter's lasted four years (Vietnam)." 69. Bowles: "The question which concerns me about the new [Kennedy] administration is whether it lacks a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and what is wrong.... ...adds up the plusses and minuses of any question and comes up with a conclusion...the pragmatic approach." 75. "[Harriman] had tuaght all his proteges always to be brief when talking to a president; they have so little time; everyone is always telling them things. Keep it short and simple, and brevity above all...one idea, a few brief sentences."

91. "Harriman...knowing the importance of repetition within a government, he had started repeating a litany whenever he could at Washington meetings, at dinner parties...." 102. [About the President]: "There was too little time to plan, to think; one could only confront the most immediate problems and get rid of them piecemeal, but as quickly as possible, or at least postpone any action." 121. "The essence of good foreign policy is constant re-examination." 170. The American assumption...that the government and the people of South Vietnam were as one, that what Diem wanted was what the 'people' wanted."

184. "For Stilwell it did not matter whether the news was good or bad; the worse the news, the more you needed it." 212. "In government it is always easier to go forward with a program that does not work than to stop it altogether and admit failure." 234. "McNamara's power was facts, no one had more, and no one used them better, firing them out, one after another, devastating his opponents (though sometimes his friends would feel that there was a missing piece, that sometimes this brilliant reasoning was bsed...on a false assumption.)." 256. "Both at Ford and at the Pentagon, McNamara had always loved statistics and facts, particularly those which confimred what he wanted to prove."

Quote: 282. "Kennedy was by this tme very frustrated; he told aides that he could not believe a word that the military was telling him, that he had to read the newspapers to find out what was going on."

Quote: 665. "...a fully confident Pham Van Dong...told Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times in December 1966 in Hanoi: 'And how long do you Americans want to fight, Mr. Salsbury...one year? Two years? Three years? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? We will be glad to accommodate you.' "

Quote: 638. "The body count in Chau Doc is marvelous!"
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Titles of Books Reviewed


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)