I abandoned reading books through much of my school board campaign and that largely meant history books. But I’m always looking for good books and I told Claudia of one book that would make a good Christmas Gift while I bought a good read aloud book for her that I noticed at Barnes and Nobles. The book for me (honestly they were both for me) was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Bully Pulpit about Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The book for Claudia was Bill Bryson’s One Summer America, 1927. I’m 200 pages in the former and a little bit further along in the latter. Together they are 1200 pages of gloriously reported history.
I loved Kearns Goodwin’s Eleanor and Franklin and more recently her book on Lincoln Team of Rivals. She covers history the way both my Mother and Father would have appreciated. My Dad would have been interested in the backstory my Mother would have found the personal stories compelling.
With the second Roosevelts the story was about the anguish that Eleanor felt as the mission to make a better America during the Depression disintegrated in the face of surviving a world war. With the book on Lincoln it was about how Lincoln made a team of the political rivals who all thought him a joke to win another war of survival.
The latest Kearns Goodwin Book is equally about Teddy and his good friend William Howard Taft who nearly came to blows when Taft, a moon, disappointed Teddy Roosevelt’s sun. In Goodwin’s hands both men come alive and have grown in my estimation. Although I knew the Roosevelt biography pretty well its fleshed out here and now, even only a third of the way along I know a lot more about Taft than that he had to have a humungous bathtub to fit his 300 lb frame.
There is something of a third character in the book that is every bit as interesting the press, specifically the reporters Teddy famously dubbed the “muckrakers.” Thank God for them and Thank God for Teddy even if the great Republican thinker of today Glenn Beck regards Teddy as a communist for letting government try to keep rat parts out of our canned food.
The Bryson book was a bit of a surprise to me. I read “A Sunburned Country” at my Brother’s recommendation because its about Australia and he said he laughed his way through it. It was one of a dozen books I read in 2010 and 2011 in preparation for our expedition to the Antipodes.Bill Bryson is a kid from Iowa who moved to Great Britain where he now resides and who writes ironical travelogues. He wrote a great book about growing up in Iowa in the fifties and sixties called “the Thunderbolt Kid.” His books often leave us in stitches and 1927 has as well.
If this book is a travelogue it more time travel than anything else. My parents and in laws all got their start about this time. My Dad was born two years before, my father in law was born in May as this summer dawned and my Mom was conceived during the summer. The most famous event of the spring/summer was Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic. Throw in poisoned liquor, Babe Ruth, Al Capone and a tightly woven narrative interlocking these characters and more and the year comes alive in the humorist’s hands. It helps that humor is a great way to get past the serious story that the author wants to get across.
Both of these books have led me to lots of sleepless nights where I imagine teaching history again in high school classrooms. I once tried to get my old school board to give me an OK to substitute teach only to have them soundly turn down my request. The reasons for saying no had to do with conflict of interest (having two sources of ISD 709 income), liabilities should a school board member blow up a classroom, and I think for some of my colleagues a certain amount of disdain. One of my old colleagues once acidly told me “you are no teacher.” As with warnings that I couldn’t possibly win a political campaign, I’ve mostly found such cautions motivational.
I keep thinking of ways to inveigle my way into a teaching position again. I think it would be great fun to teach with a classroom full of cell phones.
