I bought two books at the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. On returning to Duluth I began reading them both. Because of the death of my new computer and its replacement I have thrown up my hands at writing for the Reader. It has occurred to me once again that I resume penning my thoughts here at Lincolndemocrat.
That will require my rebuilding my bookmarks something lost with my old computer. After a great deal of cursing last night and my patient wife figuring out how to get past some of the behind the scenes tech challenges I have always been stricken with I can once again resume posting here and link photos from my Flickr site. There is still much to do. Here is a photo of some of the books I’ve been looking through the past couple days. I plan to say something about each of them:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I was a little surprised to see this on sale in the Civil Right’s Museum where King’s last hotel room is preserved along with a excellent history of the long road of Civil Rights leading up to King’s murder. I’ve avoided the book like the plague all my life not the least because I read ten histories to every novel I read and Cabin is novel and famed for its preachiness at that.
To make myself feel a little more sophisticated I also bought the series of essays by James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son from which I read a dismissal of Stowe’s novel as being little more than a political leaflet with only two of her black characters being treated the way a sophisticated novelist should treat them…..and besides those two characters, according to Baldwin, were practically white leaving no room for dark skinned characters to be real people. That critique challenged me as a Lincoln lover. I’ve heard countless times the probably apocryphal story that is so good it should be true that when Lincoln met the Author he said to her: “So, this is the little lady who made this big war.”
All of the books arrayed above are part of my current reading. I just passed the halfway mark at 260 pages for Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I’ve been coloring it up with lots of yellow marker. At age 73 I can better appreciate Stowe’s appeal to a war she has just hinted could be around the corner in words attributed to a shame faced slave holder.
At the same time I can cut Baldwin some slack. His book is the product of a many only 31 who has returned from six year’s living in France. The book was published when I was 4 years old and like my trip through Tennessee I pondered many era’s of the Civil Right’s era from the Slave cabins of President Jackson to the simultaneous publication and television serialization of Alex Haley’s Roots in 1976 when I was a newly married struggling teacher.
I had planned to write columns about this trip until my computer died. Now they are in doubt.
I took my third grade Bible along to read but never found the time in Tennessee. I started a column about that the other night then folded it up because of mental distractions. The Book Driven out I mentioned here some years ago when I began it but stopped on page 136 of 346.
This morning I deferred French to follow up on some stories in the New York Times which led me to the last two books in the panoply above Driven Out and Acquaintances
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This story was part two from a Part one which was published the day before: Here is a worrisome passage from the story:
“U.S. institutions are really coming apart at the seams — and we have an amazingly difficult task of rebuilding them ahead of us,” Acemoglu says. “This is a perilous time.” The author then added: “Yikes.”
Driven out was one of three books mentioned in the story about the Chinese Exclusion Act which seems reminiscent of Trump’s ardor in ridding America of the foreigners who do work Americans…….like the slave owners of old……refuse to do. I mentioned it in a post back in 2017 when a trip to China was accompanied by a lot of book reading. The NY Times stories are worth the time it would take to plow through them…..
Then there is Arnold Toynbee’s Acquaintances. Toynbee is the first big shot Historian who’s name stuck in my head. I saw the funny name among the books in my Grandfather’s library in a fat book about world history. I bought this book fifteen years ago in a used book store. I found it yesterday looking for a book about Captain Cook. I saw a passage about Toynbee’s two hour meeting with Adolph Hitler and decided to read it. I colored it up with yellow marker as well.
