Status Updates From A Life in the Twentieth Cen...

On his daughter‘s amazed recollection that Schlesinger managed to write with his kids screaming around him, he admits, “True, I didn’t close my study door to the life of the household.

Historians are, like anybody else, prisoners of their own experience.

Schlesinger divides the 1947 Supreme Court between those addicted to process and those addicted to results.

Pretty accurate description of fallen humanity , I’d say.

Recognizing from half a century past that contemporary historians would emphasize different things than he did in the age of Andrew Jackson: “The present persistently and inevitably re-creates the past.“

My WASP snob is in insulin shock imagining the Good Old Days with the Georgetown set. I need to reread that book.

Schlesinger is narrating his and the country‘s transition from World War II into the 50s, and simultaneously giving the blow-by-blow on which is the dominant American nearest tube of the 1830s. Action on two screens is keeping my undiagnosed history major ADD riveted, but it may not be for everybody. I’m starting to understand why well-meaning people find my writing hard to follow.

On the slow adjustment of life after the official conclusion of World War II: "The war was over, but the melody lingered on."

It takes almost nothing to remind me that Christ is coming by fat He has not yet made all things new, but this certainly does.

Particularly with respect to the dropping of the atomic bomb, chip Bolin calls out what he calls hind-myopia, a refusal to take into account all the contemporary factors of a decision, including the negatives of what would happen if it was not made.

I'm going to have to try this again. I just wanted somebody else's vantage point on JFK. Turns out those around a president, maybe especially historian wordsmiths, have time and space to give to the grist of THEIR times as well. Hits some of my other likes such as wartime London, and those I didn't know I had like wartime political intelligence.

On JFK: as his political aide Fred Dutton once noted, that even if what was shown on the evening news did not by his definition constitute reality, then nonetheless in millions of homes it was perceived as reality.¹

If anything, he suspected, the black community, because of its own vulnerability to the larger white society and the cruelty inflicted on it over the years because of skin color, might be even harder than white society on anyone who was different from the norm

Casablanca was the unforced parable about the nation‘s journey from cynicism to responsibility.

When a book prompts me to give my full attention to the tele, that’s generally not a good sign. Here, though, this text makes me want to fully absorb the movie i’ve seen before but never really fallen for.

On his strategy with a disconcertingly fast talking friend: “One surrendered to the cascades and let the meaning pour in.

Could ask for that as a writer.

On the retroactive assumption that US victory in World War II was preordained: “We know the end before we consider the beginning, and we can never quite capture what it was to know the beginning over again.“ Veronica Wedgewood on the historian‘s task

Maybe I'm not wired for rollicking. Let's go for droll, an English description of Schlesinger.

Intermediate life goal: be a little more likely to be described as rollicking, as this author describes a college contemporary.

His father on this author‘s debut effort: “The easiest way to be an author is to reside outside the country one is trying to impress.“

Something there for the Christian who is a true citizenship is in Heaven and is an alien and stranger in the country in which we reside now.

“The test of an education is whether students are taught the things they need to know in order to deal with an uncontrollably changing world.“ Henry Adams

“Civilizations die of boredom.“ Alfred North Whitehead

Advice from one of his 1930s Harvard professor is still worth considering: “Write for the reader, never for yourself,“ and, “ verbs and adjectives are the guts of a sentence. Adjectives and adverbs are the water. A writer is as strong as his verbs” and, “Don’t Think in phrases. Turn ideas into component words.”

“a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. “ John Dos Passos

That’s Goodreads clickbait.

Contrasting the relative simplicity of other forms of expression, what is it Wells confesses, “to deliver his art, a filmmaker needs an army.”

Maybe eliminate the word “need”and God identifies. His glory is best demonstrated by the variety of expressions He uses.

The Legion of Decency‘s production code prohibited movies from portraying double dates, even among the married couples.

she was aware of the fact that she had been living in a pressure cooker for the past ten years of her life, trying constantly to meet the exacting standards of others, feeling that people were always scrutinizing her, as if waiting for her to make a mistake. She had grown up, she realized years later, virtually without an adolescence, without the special grace time permitted the young .

Schlesinger writes as the good son of a social historian. He pauses at the introduction of HIS 1930s to give the reader a text to the field for life in the decade.

The father was a pioneer in writing of history as made up of more than politics, war, and diplomacy. After reading the genuine admiration with which the son writes of the father and his work, I want to read it.

“The only real old-fashioned Englishmen left are Indians. “Malcolm Bundrage