
The book that is opened to the grey pages is Driven Out. If you buy it at Amazon remember the crude thing I said about its founder in the previous post.
I resumed reading it a week ago. I bought it well before my 2017ish trip to China but only read the first third of it out loud to Claudia. My recent completion of the Book about the Chinese typewriter prompted me to resume this detailed chronical of the attempted purge of Chinese from the West coast in the years surround my grandfather’s birth. By that date, 1887, it was at fever pitch. Some California cities burned their Chinatowns down six or seven times in a row to rid themselves of the “Mongolians.” Last night I got to the second to the last chapter ninety pages from completion. It is mind numbingly harrowing but also hopeful. There are a few heroic Americans and many stubborn……Ah that’s the third phrase that came to mind this morning that I could remember in the last post……”stubborn as a mule.” Yes. Stubborn. I’m stubborn too – just look at my stubborn fight against the rot in the Republican Party. Trump is more stubborn that I am but it only compromises his other deficiencies which after a mere month in office with 48 more months to go are alarmingly obvious.
I will finish the book in a week if I keep waking up at night to still my brain when it awakes. I typically read ten or twenty pages before I’m ready to resume sleeping.
The two books above Driven out are about Irish Americans. To the right is the thick book Claudia gave me six or seven years ago after PBS’s late Gwen Ifel praised it. Its about President Kennedy’s father who decided to make one of his sons the first Catholic president of the United States. First in line Joe was killed in action flying over world war II Second in line Jack survived having his PT boat cut in half by a Japanese Cruiser. Grandpa Kennedy wasn’t on my radar with so many other books about actual Presidents on my shelves waiting for me to open them until I heard Trump’s SS warrior, Steve Bannon, joke about Kennedy being listed as the author of the book I read in 1965 borrowed from the Garfield Junior High School library. Profiles in Courage was an early inspiration for me.
Bannon’s dig got me thinking about JFK and I recalled the first book “he” published just before the US entered World War II. Why England Slept was an ambitious book for even a Harvard undergraduate. Originally a class assignment the son of the millionaire US Ambassador to England on the eve of war got some attention. JFK donated his royalties to English victims of the blitz and bought a new car. I learned that when I consulted the book about his father an Irish-American whose life seemed more interesting as I read about the violent conflict between Irish and Chinese working people. The same conflicts arose between Irish workers and Black Americans before during and after the Civil War. I thought back to my great grandfather who sailed to the US in 1861 from Ireland and wondered about JFK’s Irish forbears. To that end read chapter one of the Kennedy Senior book. Kennedy’s immigrant forebear arrived in about 1853 almost a decade ahead of Thomas Robb. The book to the left is a book I bought used twenty years ago about the famine that drove Irish onto the dreadful “coffin ships” that Kennedy’s sailed on to get to America. I left my bookmark on page 72 of about 336 pages.
The book on the bottom of my photo is one I found a day ago in a pile of books about American education. I bought “The Teacher Wars” in about 2013 at a state School Board Conference book sale after I was elected like Trump and President Cleveland to the School Board after a long absence from that office. I know I finished its introduction from the yellow flair marks in it but I stopped there. I bought it looking for more early American education history and was disappointed that most of the book was devoted to the years 1950 of Brown v Board of Education to the years of the Republican war against teacher’s unions. I know that history well already so I was only interested in the first 100 pages. I’ve been thinking about running for the School Board again since getting elected to Congress as a Republican seems so outlandish. In fact my school board career is really the only politics that was available to me and of interest as well. The cultists and fetus fetishists of the emerging Trump GOP made any run as a Republican by me a strictly outsider affair. My last such run was for the legislature in 2002 (I think) Ah…yes it was.
I suspect I’ll read the first hundred pages of Teacher Wars by day as I keep reading Driven Out by night. As for the Kennedys…..I have a couple other books circling my runway.
