books I’d have been proud to write

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After an rare six hours of uninterrupted sleep I woke in the pre equinox dark with the book at my side waiting for me to read. I’ve been fighting old habits that cheat me of sleep. Among them was waking up and writing in my office next door which helped drive my bedmate to another room in time and looking at my cellphone with lights that interfere with sleep. In recent months I’ve propped a pillow behind my back and use the red light of a reading lamp that has a twisting neck to read and avoid the blue lights said to keep you wakeful.

I’d finished Driven Out a couple days earlier that way reading only 10 to twenty pages before turning the lights out. I actually found that amount of reading helpful to slowly drive the books conclusion in my head. If I’d done it in a couple days it might have been more apt to evaporate. I started reading it when we prepared to go to China in 2017. It was one of a half dozen books my old bedmate and I read to have a better idea what we’d be seeing. They weren’t my first books on China but they rounded out my general knowledge. I spread many of them out for this post. I’ve been spreading books out like that for posts for a couple years.

The book I cracked open at 4:30 was a book I bought in 2013 at a conference of Minnesota school board members. I had just been reelected to the School Board for four years after a Trump-like absence from political mayhem. My lapse was voluntary and lasted from 2004 through 2012. (I did try to get back on the board to stop the School Board from screwing with democracy like the January sixers but this happened three days before the election.) The “this” was delivered to every house in Duluth just before the election. Its one of the reason’s I identify with Senator McCain who was defeated in the South Carolina primary days before the election with robo calls telling Republicans that he fathered a black child implying out of his marriage. No, that was anti-“miscegenist” and eventual centenarian Senator Strom Thurmond. I just looked for an old 2002 column I wrote beating Thurmond up and was surprised that it doesn’t mention that when Thurmond ran for office (back when only white South Carolinians could vote) he screamed that race mixing would ruin America. He didn’t mention that he’d knocked up his black maid when he was a superintendent of schools.

Sorry for the birdwalk.

The book I cracked open was “The Teacher Wars,” by Dana Goldstein. It seemed less pressing a decade ago and although I put a lot of yellow marker in its introduction I suspect I didn’t get any farther because I thought it was too union oriented. I crossed 100 pages a day ago and this morning when Chapter four reached my birth in 1950 I yellowed out a lot of stuff on Brown vs. Board of Education in the 6th chapters first two pages. Then with my head full of things to write I hopped out of bed took a shower and jotted down:

Pyrrhic Victory
Son of a Nazi
Federalist Society Nazi enablers – 65,000 of them
Brown Trump and me
Jefferson Hypocrisy rules
Trump in the mob

You may notice that so far that only “Brown” has been mentioned here.

While I was in the shower thinking about that list I also thought more generally about books and what they can do…..like get you to jump out of bed with a head full of thoughts. Note on the left the general category books. There are about 220 such posts in this blog.

In recent years I have increased my intake of history books on areas of American study that I’d put on the back shelf as I plowed through books on African American history. I’ve recently corrected my neglect of the history of the disposition of native Americans from the land. I’ve read (or listened to) six or seven books about different eras of persecution. I may have taken a picture of all the books on my shelves but so far I’ve only found a few of the books mentioned in different recent posts like: Teepees, Books and French and Techumseh and one sans book cover From the Pottawattamie death trail …

Americans generally take their history in small 90 minute doses called movies. And since Hollywood wants to make money Hollywood has taken pains not to make movies that would turn off their audiences. That began to change when I was a kid and it tended to begin with fiction, To Sir with Love, The Color blue with Sidney Portier, and Sounder with Cicely Tyson and Little Big Man one of a million Dustin Hoffman vehicles. Before that. Well, there was Errol Flynn.

I read a couple light history books before becoming a teacher. Profiles in Courage, The Day Lincoln was shot, and I religiously read my bland school history books. My best source of history was the Readers Digest which had a little bit of everything in it. I remember reading about Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier and his voodoo dictatorship in one issue. My first foray into a big history book was a fiction door stop the Source by James Michner. It was about the Middle east and like so many of his books it told stories in historical chronological order from cavemen at a spring to the springs first permanent dwellings and the five thousand years of human detritus building it into a small hill or “tel” with layers of human remnants built up with crushed houses and city walls. Cementing all the stories together were interludes about the archeologists studying the past their finds becoming the seeds of the stories of each historical era.

Having written about seeing a Palestinian corpse when I visited Israel what has stuck with me about that 1970’s novel was the archeologists joking with a reporter in good humor about the Palestinian archeologist working with the Israeli’s on the dig. It was a way to laugh of the claim that the peoples in Israel couldn’t get over the 1948 war that gave birth to the modern Israel.

It took me two years to finish that book. I read half then set it aside feeling guilt about not finishing it. I read James Michener’s Hawaii too but balked at his book about Colorado a little after its first chapter about dinosaurs. What brought Michener to mind as I took the shower was an image of another of his books sitting in my Grandfather’s old house. I think it was my cousin reading it not my grandfather. It was an orange paperback called Caravans. I always assumed it was about Saudi Arabia but looking it up now I found a description of the book from 2002 that said it was a rip snorting adventure of a father trying to rescue a mission daughter who disappeared in Afghanistan. BTW – that link is to another site not the one I read. As an added incentive to read it according to my source back in 2002 was the destruction of the World Trade Towers and the wars that followed. The book was said to have given good context to those events.

I will stick to history generally but sometimes there is no getting around good fiction as was the case with the first intelligent warning of the holocaust-to-come by a Jewish German novel explaining how Nazism snuck up on over confident Americans as Trump seized the reins of power……ooops I meant Hitler. That book was The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger.

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty