This book is great. It's elegantly written, well-argued, well-documented and full of insight and information. Wills not only explains Lincoln's rhetor...moreThis book is great. It's elegantly written, well-argued, well-documented and full of insight and information. Wills not only explains Lincoln's rhetorical techniques, he situates them in the context of classical rhetoric (in particular the ancient Greek funeral-for-heroes speech), American cultural trends of the mid 1800's (in particular Transcendentalism and the "rural cemetery" movement), and Lincoln's own history as a writer and giver of speeches.
Most importantly, he demonstrates how Lincoln used the address to promulgate his philosophy about the nature of the political Union that is the United States of America. Lincoln believed that the American people had decided that they were one people, one nation, at least as early as 1776, and emphatically proved they were with the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution. In Lincoln's view, the 1787 Constitution did not make the Union; it only made the already-existing Union (in the words of the Constitution's preamble) "more perfect". The Union was "given birth" by an idea, and its ideal was spelled out in the Declaration. The Constitution is nothing more or less than an imperfect attempt to make that ideal reality, subject to political constraints at any point in time.
Seen in this light, the stirring last sentence of the Gettysburg Address is more than a clever Jedi mind-trick to arouse patriotic fervor, it's a rebuttal to every kind of "States' Rights" revisionistic history, and a succinct statement of what the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg were all about.
The speech itself truly is a masterpiece, and Wills's book is equal to the task of explaining why and how this is so. Highly recommended.(less)
Having read & loved Patricia Sullivan's history of the NAACP, I decided to check out this volume of letters written over the period 1951 to 1968. Durr...moreHaving read & loved Patricia Sullivan's history of the NAACP, I decided to check out this volume of letters written over the period 1951 to 1968. Durr is an incredible writer and very sharp observer. She and her husband Clifford Durr were true heroes of the Civil Rights movement, although by Virginia's calculus they were merely trying to be decent human beings, not heroes. In fact, they shunned leadership roles and tried to avoid notice. That didn't prevent them from being smeared, ostracized, called up before Congressional kangaroo courts, and so forth. They lived in the very belly of the beast, were at the epicenter of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, were close friends with Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon. Virgina Durr's letters from Montgomery to her friends in New York, Washington DC, California, etc, are like missives from hell. Spellbinding.
I'm halfway through this book and have made margin notes on nearly every page -- and I'm generally not somebody who writes in books.
Expect a real review after I've read & pondered.(less)
I originally gave this book a 4 star rating because the author's voice is not always mellifluous or brilliant, and there are a few copy-editing errors...moreI originally gave this book a 4 star rating because the author's voice is not always mellifluous or brilliant, and there are a few copy-editing errors (e.g."hung" for "hanged") & similar. But given the general excellence of the research & documentation, the heart-stomping narrative structure, the hard to overestimate importance of the story itself, and the general excellence of the storytelling I've upgraded my rating to 5. This is quite simply a book that every decent American should read and ponder. If that doesn't make it a 5-star, I don't know what does. If you're an American and love or like or think you love your country, read this book! This is vital, vital history. So here's my review/essay.
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Patricia Sullivan’s history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a book every American should read. I begin my review with a personal anecdote.
I was born in 1952. I grew up on a small farm in New Jersey. My parents and three brothers and three sisters and I resided on the second floor of a small farmhouse; my paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Finland, and grandmother, an immigrant from Ireland, lived on the first floor.
One night in 1964 I was watching television with my grandfather, and as I recall — the details are a bit foggy — we stayed up until way past midnight, watching the debate and vote on the floor of the Senate about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
My grandfather’s invitation, in his heavy Finnish accent, went something like this. “You stay up and watch this, Yonny. Now we gonna see if the United States is full of beans or not.” When the bill passed, he said something like, “Well, OK. I guess not full of beans.”
I didn’t know many black people growing up, but I grew up in an anti-racist house. My parents taught us that any person was as good as any other, and my grandfather was a man of strong egalitarian principles. I really don’t recall encountering racism until I was a teenager, and the first time I heard anybody tell a “nigger joke” I was deeply shocked. I remember who said it, and where, and what he looked like. I was a 16 year old volunteer firefighter standing on the back of a fire truck en route to a brush fire –we did things differently back then–and the guy next to me was my father’s age. It was four days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and that’s what his so-called “joke” was about. I suppose my shock was just a measure of how sheltered my upbringing had been.
I remember being young and reading about the March on Washington and hearing the news reports of the Freedom Riders; I remember the church bombings and the assassination of Medgar Evers and the sit-ins and the Selma fire hoses, and I remember being appalled and mystified. I knew things were different “in the South”. I guess I thought of it as a foreign place, like Russia.
But like most white Americans that I know, I never understood anything of the depth of the horribleness of the Jim Crow regime from the end of Reconstruction through the passage of the Voting Rights Act, when, arguably, things finally began to improve for Americans of African descent. I was also generally ignorant of the history of the Civil Rights movement. I thought that it more or less started with Rosa Parks in 1955, and that if you knew the general outlines of the “Eyes on the Prize” story from 1955 to 1965, you pretty much knew the whole story.
Having now read Patricia Sullivan’s magisterial Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement,
which chronicles the NAACP from its founding in 1909 through the passage of the laws of 1964 and 1965, I can tell you that until about a month ago I was fundamentally ignorant of American history, and that anybody who hasn’t read her book (or who doesn’t know the story from other sources) is similarly ignorant.
Sullivan doesn’t assert, but her book proves, that the NAACP saved America. Had it not been for the courage, resilience, inventiveness and general brilliance of the NAACP, America would have disintegrated, victim to the vicious racism of the American Southern white. The American Civil War (who knew?) ended not with a victory for the Union, but with a virtual Panmunjom-style truce, by which the South was allowed to pretty much ignore the 14th and 15th Amendments. The history of the treatment of black people in the American South after Reconstruction is about as ugly a story as you can find.
It’s true that the history of race relations in the North, by which I mostly mean racial discrimination against black people, is also not pretty. But in 1909, when the NAACP was founded, about 90% of all blacks lived in the South. And under the Jim Crow regime, the oppression of blacks by whites was complete. It was a terror regime, where lynching was an ever-present reality, and failure to abide by the most arbitrary and petty aspects of the code could result in ruination, battery, or death.
The NAACP was founded in the North but soon undertook to establish itself in the South. For decades–not years, but decades–merely belonging to the NAACP was a dangerous proposition, and assuming a leadership or organizational role could be an invitation to a hanging. And yet the NAACP did go into the South, and across the whole of the country, and they did devise a brilliant strategy that eventually brought Jim Crow to its knees.
What was this brilliant strategy? Well, I’ll only briefly summarize it because I want you to read the book. In a nutshell, it was (a) to mobilize public opinion, both black and white across the entire USA, to rally people of good will to a common purpose, and (b) to use the courts, including courts in the North and the US Supreme Court, but also, significantly, state courts in the Southern states, to acquire the rights afforded to all Americans under the 14th and 15th amendments, in particular the rights to vote and to a decent education.
But wait, you say. How could the NAACP use the courts to achieve their goals? Courts in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia? South Carolina??? The courts were white institutions, part and parcel of the entire white-supremacist establishment. The judges were racist, the juries were racist, the prosecutors and police were racist. It was virtually impossible for a black person to obtain justice under the law, and merely to seek justice in the courts was also to risk a beating or murder. And furthermore there were only a handful of black lawyers in the entire country, virtually none in the South, and very few white lawyers willing to take on black clients. So how did they do it? You’re going to have to read the book to find out. But you’ll be glad you did. It’s a breathtaking story, and expertly told by Sullivan.
Now let me tell you what I meant by my assertion that the NAACP saved America. With the First World War, the Great Migration of blacks out of the South began. And at the same time that blacks were moving out of the South, under Woodrow Wilson the federal government itself was institutionalizing segregation, making segregation not just the custom of the South but the rule of the land. The black migration out of the South increased during the Second World War.
After WWII, something had to give. Hundreds of thousands of black men had served in the war effort. There were lots and lots of soldiers, many of them combat veterans, who had done their all in a segregated Army to defeat the Nazis. And they were simply not going to put up with returning to living under the American apartheid system. In the North, the less overt but nearly as poisonous forms of institutional racism were starting to congeal. Had not the NAACP been there to channel the energies of post-war blacks and give them some hope of obtaining full citizenship at last, I can’t imagine — given the evidence Sullivan produces — that a race war would not have broken out in the American South. (Note: Sullivan does not say this. She nowhere says that the country was on the verge of falling apart. That is my interpretation of the facts as she presents them.)
To the great benefit of all of us, the NAACP was actively pressing an alternative to taking up arms to secure liberty for blacks in the South. But the NAACP was only *there* because it had established itself by patient work over forty years. By 1949 Thurgood Marshall was only one of a cadre of dozens of brilliant black lawyers working a relentless, multi-front legal attack on every aspect of Jim Crow — throughout the country, but especially in the South. By 1949, Thurgood Marshall already had 13 years of experience as a civil rights lawyer in many states and before the Supreme Court, and he had dozens of skilled black (and white) colleagues.
It was in this context that Rosa Parks’ bold gesture could spark a quiet revolution. Had she refused to give up her seat twenty years earlier she might have become just another lynching victim, but in any event we wouldn’t know her name. The NAACP had made the Montgomery Bus Boycott conceivable, and thus possible.
The NAACP was not a perfect organization, and its members were not all saints. There were rifts and factions and clashes of ego and long-standing feuds over strategy, tactics, organization, budget, and leadership. Sullivan lays them all out, buttressing her story with excerpts from letters, diaries, meeting minutes, memoirs, internal NAACP reports, congressional records, contemporary newspaper accounts, interviews and other primary sources. But whatever its flaws, whatever the foibles of its members, in the final reckoning, the NAACP prevailed. They made it possible for Dr. King to have a Dream. In so doing, they saved the nation. It’s an astounding story.
Lift Every Voice is a dense read, with hundreds of notes and several dozen important people to keep track of. But Patricia Sullivan’s voice is strong and the narrative propulsion is relentless. If you’re an American and want to know what country you live in, do yourself a favor and pick up this book today.(less)
This is a modest and charming little fable. There is nothing astounding about it, other than the voice in which it's told. I gave the book 4 stars bec...moreThis is a modest and charming little fable. There is nothing astounding about it, other than the voice in which it's told. I gave the book 4 stars because DiCamillo's prose is so quirky, kind, funny, and poetic. It's hypnotizing in the way Beatrix Potter's is. Highly recommended. (less)
I've wanted to read this book since reading the magazine article that precipitated it in 1994. Even if the book had sucked I probably would have given...moreI've wanted to read this book since reading the magazine article that precipitated it in 1994. Even if the book had sucked I probably would have given it three stars for the title alone. "Autobiography of a Face". It gives me gooseflesh.
Now that I've finally read it, I can report that book lives up to its title. Five stars.
William Carlos Williams concluded his introduction to Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" saying something like, "Ladies and gentlemen, lift your petticoats. You're about to walk through Hell." Grealy's book, which is as poetic in its own way as "Howl", merits a similar warning. "Autobiography of a Face" is about a pleasant stroll through hell, as told by a sublimely intelligent, detached and observant child: Dante reincarnated as a nine year old girl. But like "Inferno", like "Howl' (together with "Footnote to Howl") "Autobiography of a Face" gives its readers an opportunity to experience a transcendent joy: the joy that comes not only from the majestic, nuanced language and tale well told, but the joy that you get from reading tales of pure unadulterated courage, like Joshua Chamberlain's courage at the Battle of Little Round Top.
This book has its critics, I know. Ignore them. "Autobiography of a Face" is a masterpiece.
If you're like me, there aren't many magazine articles that haunt you for fifteen years or more. There aren't many stories that shine a torchlight into your eyes so brightly that it takes you fifteen years to find the courage to pick up the book that came after.
I'm 58 years old. It so happens that my wife used to own a children's bookstore and has subsequently been a "young adult" librarian. That's why I've read a lot more "young adult" books than the typical geeky fellow of my age. I've read perhaps 100 "YA" books. But I can't recall ever reading anything has better reminded me of what it felt like to be 9 years old, 10 years old, 11, 12. . . through early adulthood than "Autobiography of a Face."
I'm not going to go over the story told in this book; it's been more than adequately covered in hundreds of other reviews here and elsewhere.
But the subject of this book, which I thought apparent, seems to have escaped many readers, so I would like to offer a comment or two on that, viz, what this book is really about.
As Grealy herself stated, the subject of the book is (I'm paraphrasing), what is a self and how does one arrive at an understanding of what it is to be oneself?
Other writers have of course addressed this question. Among living writers who deal with this question, the cognitive scientist and computer scientist and linguist and philosopher of language Douglas Hofstadter is my personal favorite. But lots of writers have looked into this simple but deceptively deep question. Dante and Ginsberg, obviously. Plato, not so much, but Aristotle, absolutely. Augustine. Montaigne. Henry Miller. James Joyce. And perhaps topping the list, Shakespeare.
But as the saying goes (as far as I can determine, originating in Frank and Ernest cartoon) "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards in and high heels". I won't say that Lucy Grealy did "everything" that Shakespeare, Aristotle, Dante, Ginsberg et al did. Her opus is (like Ralph Ellison's), small. But "Autobiography of a Face" belongs in the same discussion with Hamlet, with Howl, with Inferno. Moreover, much of what she did (observing, experiencing, thinking), she did as a child from a broke, dysfunctional family, who had a form of cancer with a 5% expected survival rate. And the rest of what she did (writing her book) she did as a woman who had endured decades of pain, humiliation, ostracism, fear, surgery, poverty, ridicule, self-destructive excess, bigotry and cruelty. If that's not "backwards and in high heels" I don't know what is.
I've read thousands of books. Of them, "Autobiography of a Face" is one of the ten or twenty that I'm pretty sure will stick with me forever.
**spoiler alert** I found many of the ideas in this book pretty interesting, and I thought the tale was well told despite occasional amateurish writin...more**spoiler alert** I found many of the ideas in this book pretty interesting, and I thought the tale was well told despite occasional amateurish writing (such as shifting points of view within the same paragraph) that kind of broke the spell from time to time.
As in a lot of SF, none of the characters were especially believable as people; they were more cartoonish stand-ins for types in a schema. Ender himself was the most believable and well-drawn of the characters. That being said, I didn't really "buy" the Ender character. I've never been a child super genius so I don't know if his way of looking at the world is plausible. I do know that he seems more like an adult in a child's body than any kid I've ever met.
I liked the idea behind the Ender's Brother and Ender's Sister characters, but their personalities were inconsistent and unconvincingly drawn. The "adult" military officers were similarly cardboard.
From a logic point of view, the thing that most bugged me was that Ender was supposed to be a great strategist; that was the whole point of his training -- to make him a commander who could command the enormous military forces assembled to defend Earth and indeed the human species against an alien military force that was larger and in virtually every way superior to Earth's. But virtually everything in the book was about Ender's mastery of tactics, not strategy. The big "surprise" climax of the book, which was telegraphed from about page one, amounted to a Luke Skywalker versus Deathstar or Randy Quaid versus squidmen in "Independence Day" type lucky shot. I won't say it was stupid, exactly, but it certainly wasn't interesting or surprising -- nor was the other "surpise twist" a surprise.
So there was a lot about this book that was implausible, shallow, poorly written and/or trite.
But there was also a lot to like. SF is a literature of ideas, and there are some deep ideas in Ender's Game.
The most obvious complicated problem faced by the invisible, off-stage powers-that-be is how to deal with an existential threat to humanity from an alien species from an alien universe. If you were in charge, how would you deal with this problem? How would you deal with it militarily, technologically, politically? In Ender's Game, Card imagines that the powers-that-be would harvest the skills of the smartest children on Earth, on the idea that just as children learn languages faster than adults do, and without accents because their brains are still being formed, children would better learn military strategy, and would be more likely to come up with new solutions to problems that stymied adults. I think this is a pretty cool premise for an SF novel.
The second idea that Card explores is "what goes through the mind of a child soldier"? As I said, I don't find his portrayal of Ender all that convincing, but I do think that his question was daring and his attempt to answer it a worthy effort. Now, I have read an autobiography of a child soldier of the Sierra Leone civil war (A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah), and Ender's Game is weak tea by comparison. But that doesn't mean Ender's Game should be dismissed on that account. These are important questions that Card is asking. When does childhood end and adulthood commence? Where does the responsibility lie when children grow into ruthless soldiers--soldiers who, for example, save the human species but become monsters in the process?
Card also looks at geopolitical questions such as how political factions use the cover of a threat by an outside entity to jockey for position and advance their own political agendas. When Card wrote Ender's Game the context was the Cold War, but the same ideas transfer quite easily to the so-called wars on drugs and on terror.
I liked Card's introduction to the 10 anniversary edition, especially where he explained how his reading about the American Civil War and its own child soldiers was much on his mind as he wrote the book. In a way, I suppose, I was disappointed that the understanding of the difference between strategy and tactics that Card evidences in the introduction seemed to be missing from the book. Oh well.
I did not find the conclusion of the book silly or "tacked on" -- although I know from reading the introduction that it was, in a way, tacked on. I found it unexpected, logical, and surprisingly moving. It was the final chapter of Ender's Game that got me to go out and purchase "Speaker for the Dead" to see what happens next to Ender Wiggens.
I'm only 1/3 of the way through that book, so I guess I'll have to stop here, for now.(less)
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