Thursday, February 22, 2024

The Soul of America by Jon Meacham




The painting, Rainy Day on Fifth Avenue, 1916 by Childe Hassam captures the faith, risk, hope for the future, and the challenges which have faced our country ever since its foundation. There has almost never been a time when the delicate balance of interests represented by our diversity of populations, size of our land-mass, degree of independence, and the challenge of our founding as a democratic, representative republic has not existed.

We're living through an era of division along social, ethnic, racial, age, and technological, and more lines than most of us can imagine. And we find it scary! We imagine that we're in worse shape than our country has ever before seen, filled with complex issues most of us cannot see our way through. Into this era of fear and sense of lost direction, comes Jon Meacham's 2018 book, The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels, available from all your favorite outlets. 

Meacham's narrative focuses on the leadership of often flawed but effective terms of U.S. Presidents, faced with seemingly intractable problems that threaten the continued effectiveness of our system. He presents both Democratic and Republican presidents who respond with both inspiration and, sometimes, subtle political  maneuvering and at others blunt exercises of Presidential power. He looks at presidents whose behavior does not deal easily with their reputations (the intractable racism of Woodrow Wilson, who was once seen as one of the four great presidents, but is now nearly forgotten, for instance.) He also points out how history often is made by having the right person in the right place at the right time Abraham Lincoln provides a great example. In each era he describes, the future of our Republic often is questioned, yet we survived, adjusted, and often triumphed. As I read this highly readable book, I found that I gained increased insight into the strengths, weaknesses, and difficulties encountered by the great, and not-so-great, as they navigated the issues raised and the difficulties involved in building and maintaining a democracy. 

People accustomed to Meacham's television guest appearances will recognize his upbeat personality and positive viewpoints expressed about individuals and situations. He radiates confidence in positive outcomes, as does this book, without ever sounding heedless of the real challenges these men face. Despite my own gloominess about our current level of anger, division, and violence, reading Meacham increased my confidence that we will emerge a stronger and better nation.

Jon Meacham

John Meacham is a visiting professor of History at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, TN. He graduated with honors from The University of the South, after which he embarked on a long and successful career as a newspaper and magazine writer as will as a prolific writer of historical works. He has won the Pulitzer Prize as well as numerous other awards and recognitions. He is also a frequent guest on television programs, interpreting history in context delivered with warm good humor. I highly recommend this book to history and politics buffs. It's highly readable and filled with insight and wisdom. I bought John Meacham's The Soul of America in a trade paperback edition from ThriftBooks.com. As usual, the book arrived in a timely fashion and in very good condition. 

Monday, February 12, 2024

June - A Documentary Life of June Carter Cash


June Carter Cash


June, a documentary film now available for streaming on Paramount+, strikes all the right notes. It allows fans who only knew June Carter Cash as Johnny Cash's wife, to understand and revel in the career she built in country music before she married him.  June provided him with an anchor and a fully committed love, helping him build his career as became one of the most recognized and successful  artists in country music history. 

The Carter Family at Bristol Sessions


June Carter was country music royalty. The Carter Family lived in the rolling hills of southern Virginia, where their father, A.P. Carter farmed while spending most of his time trekking off to collect songs in the nearby mountains. The Carter Family, A.P, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle travelled south to Bristol TN/VA to participate in the first recordings of country music, made by Ralph Peer in 1929. The next generations of Carters emerged as Sara, along with her daughters Anita, June, and Helen emerged and continued to perform and record, while staying anchored in Mace's Springs, VA.  (We visited the Carter Fold fifteen years ago, finding Carter descendants continuing the Carter Family legacy of acoustic music and country dancing. It felt like a genuine pilgrimage.)


The Carter Sisters - It's My Lazy Day


When June Carter met Johnny Cash, she already had two daughters, was currently married, and a Grand Ol' Opry star in her own right. They fell in love (or perhaps "exploded into" would be a better term), and were soon inseparable. The rest is still more music history. Fortunately, there seem to have been movie cameras around both June and Johnny from early in their careers, and the Opry kept excellent records of its performers. Thus, the film is also visually stunning and moves along quite quickly. Lots of interviews with big and lesser known people along with their children permit a well-balanced and nuanced view. 

June Carter Cash & Johnny Cash - Jackson


We didn't realize how much of Johnny Cash's musical life had impacted us during our musical journey, or how important June Carter Cash was to both the history of country music and the success of Johnny Cash. June subordinated her own ambitions and talents to care for Cash, even deep in his years of drug addiction. When he joined The Highwaymen, she practically disappeared, sidelined while keeping him propped up and able to perform, creating a whole new career. We laughed, cried, and thoroughly enjoyed this marvelous documentary film. 

June is currently streaming on Paramount+. It runs for an hour and thirty-eight minutes, and seems too short, leaving the viewer wishing to see more about the family and their surroundings. It's well worth your time!




Friday, February 2, 2024

Sing Me Back Home: Southern Roots and Country Music by Bill C. Malone




 Bill C. Malone, a name unknown to many people who are performers or fans of country music is the man who virtually invented a body of research and experience which has helped to define and broaden various kinds of music referred to as Country. Without his thoughtful scholarship informed by his rural roots in East Texas, country music would be less widely distributed and understood. His book, Sing Me Back Home: Southern Roots and Country Music, published in 2017, contains sixteen meticulously annotated essays exploring the roots, spread, influences, and importance of Country Music, not only in music, but in the wider American musical culture.  


Born in East Texas near Tyler (where we lived for three years while I taught at what was then Texas Eastern University and is now The University of Texas at Tyler) Malone grew up on a hard-scrabble cotton farm, where his first interest in music was sparked by his father’s bring a battery operated radio into the home in the mid-1930’s. Soon, his inexpensive first guitar was given to him as a gift. Malone, showed an interest in the music he heard, and later, as a student at the University of Texas at Austin, widened his interest into his studies and his research. Encouraged by his faculty advisor, he wrote his doctoral dissertation at UT on country music. It was published as the still-in-print book Country Music U.S.A.


Sing Me Back Home: Southern Roots and Country Music, published in 2017, is a collection of serious, well documented essays previously published in scholarly journals or delivered as speeches to university audiences. Despite his academic excellence, Malone’s country roots and essential decency shine through on every page. Examined in its overall focus, lies Malone’s highly knowledgeable awareness of the deep variety and wide-reaching roots of what has become known as country music. He looks carefully at the roots from which much of the music sprang, discovering more complexity and nuance than most fans attribute to their own version of the sources and nature of their preferred version of country. 


In his chapter on Bill Monroe, for instance, he looks at the lonely boy who picked up a mandolin, as well as the young man who followed his brother to the industrial Midwest. He was influenced by all the musical strands he encountered as well as bringing his own personality and strength towards developing the basis of what others came to call bluegrass music. He finds the same diversity in early country music, discusses the influences of going to war, the wide dispersal growing from radio and, later television, on the development of country music. He examines how jazz, pop, the movement of rural people to the cities, and other factors make country music and bluegrass variants on the same tree trunk. He particularly examines how various ethnic and cultural communities in America have contributed to the music. Purity is not what you find, but, perhaps, a greater understanding of much of what makes America great emerges.


If you’re interested in a book that helps you solidify your personal conception of what country music really is, this book may not be your best choice. If, on the other hand, you think you can benefit from getting a more eclectic understanding of how common people from America’s rural roots became one of the most powerful and influential musical formats in contemporary life around the world, this book will thrill you. 


I bought Sing Me Back Home: Southern Roots and Country Music as a used book from ThriftBooks.com in a hardback edition. The book is published by the University of Oklahoma Press and is widely available


Friday, December 15, 2023

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders & the Birth of the FBI by David Grann




The plight and treatment of Native Americans in this country cannot be overemphasized as we become more aware and sensitive to the way they have been treated throughout our history. Killers of the Flower Moon stands out, at least partly because it has provided both the title and the source for a hugely popular movie, just released for streaming on Apple+. However, the book was a best-seller, listed as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2017. Author David Grann, spent a number of years digging into the story of exploitation, murder, government disinterest, and simple graft which allowed this too typical rape of a people and the land during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The Osage people were settled on a barren piece of unwanted territory in Osage County, Oklahoma, the largest county in the state, with Tulsa anchoring it at the southeast corner. It was sandy, dry, and unwanted until oil was discovered underneath it in 1897. The Osage people owned the mineral rights underneath land, making them, for a while, some of the richest people in the world. Soon, a number of white entrepreneurs and politicians realized the could gain control of the oil money only by marrying some of the women on the reservation. This led to a period, between 1917 and 1925 of local and imported men marrying Native people. Soon, a strange increase in the death rate of these Indian wives and the increased riches of the men, who gained control of much of the oil, began to occur. 

When called upon to investigate what was happening in Osage County, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI was just at the point of organizing his agents as a national police force and creating the FBI myth for integrity and efficiency that lasted for nearly eighty years. He had little time and less inclination to seriously investigate the situation. Moreover, there were numerous investigation of the deaths and trials, all featuring extensive corruption, the the increasing exploitation of these not well educated or sophisticated people. 

The story, told by David Grann, brings the characters and the setting to life. Furthermore, his deep dives into archives long gathering dust in the State Library and other depositories lay waiting to be carefully collated, read, and interpreted. While the Osage people knew much of the history, they were not able to become good advocates in their own interests. As he digs through the various archives he uncovered, the horror of the treatment the Osage people received becomes increasingly horrifying to Grann and to his reader. This is a story you should read to shed additional light on the story before seeing the film. 

David Grann

David Grann is an award winning writer whose works have received best-selling status. Several of his books have been New York Times best-sellers, and he was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. I bought the book and read it on my Kindle reader. 

Monday, December 4, 2023

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson




The seemingly ubiquitous biographer, scholar, university president, think-tank director, CNN chief, and editor of Time Magazine, Walter Isaacson, wrote The Innovators way back in 2014, which looks like a lifetime in the history of the development of computers. Nevertheless, with the exception of scanty attention paid to the development of artificial intelligence, this volume presents a lively and comprehensive picture of the development of calculating machines that have become indispensable in the modern world. Author of at least twenty volumes during the last thirty years, Isaacson has focused on the "great man (or woman)" theory of human progress, always writing about the people behind the ideas while making the ideas cogent for the thoughtful reader.

The story begins with Ada Byron (Lord Byron's only legitimate child) who became Ada Lovelace, and whose reputation remains bright in the world of applied mathematics, who saw the possibilities of Babbage's counting machine for more advanced applications. She is so important in the development of the idea of computers, that at least one major modern computer system was named after her. From mechanical devices, the computer industry developed as a variety of mechanical and then electronic devices made their appearance. Each idea, from  learning to program machines to produce answers, electric wires to transistors, to microchips, and more required reliance on past advances and the imagination to advance to the next step, as well as applications for those advances. Neither the microchip, the computer, the Internet, software, nor the World Wide Web itself was inevitable without the foregoing work or forward looking visionaries. 

Isaacson is a master of making links between advances that don't always easily emerge as inevitable advances growing in an ever widening universe of possibilities and making them coherent. Thus, the works of industrial giants like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs become necessary, but not sufficient, cogs in an ever-widening electronic universe. This is all presented in an approachable, almost friendly, writing style which makes the ideas we can't quite grasp into concepts the reader can see an appreciate without ever having any of the necessary skills to contribute to the ever expanding world of computers. 

 Isaacson takes a great person approach to the development of the ideas needed to culminate with the cyber world in which we're currently living, while also emphasizing the fact that great advances in nearly all areas of advance rely upon cooperation and collaboration between innovators, organizers, and entrepreneurs. Often great ideas in seeing the implications of an advance or in doing the math require someone to make the connections. It takes a different sort of personality to turn the resultant innovation into a salable product, making it possible for consumers to understand that they have a need it might fulfill. Thus, he emphasizes conjunction of brilliant ideas, useful applications, and finished products.

 Radio Shack TRS-80


 I have one, perhaps, personal quibble with the account of innovators who made computers available to the masses. Isaacson left out the role of Radio Shack and their TRS-80 home computer. Released in 1977, this home computer was the first computer I owned and where I began my learning curve. I got it from my mother and, later, sold it to a friend, so it did mighty work, back when so many of  us were learning to function in the cyber world...I never did learn to be a programmer, but I sure have worked any number of computers to the death over the years. 

Walter Isaacson


Walter Isaacson is a widely  known and widely read writer/administrator/television personality, and political advisor who has published numerous fine biographies. He's always readable!

I bought my copy of The Innovators in a bookstore as a remaindered book. 





Wednesday, September 27, 2023

The Pioneers - David McCoullough




Pulitzer Prize winning writer David McCullough could always be relied upon to tell a terrific story while presenting the reader with a good read. With eleven major titles to his credit, he managed to pick up a couple of Pultizer Prizes, a National Book Award, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also narrated some of Ken Burns' PBS historical series, and kept busy with freelance writing. McCullough was a great writer who kept his readers' attention with lively prose that keeps the reader with him to the end. The Pioneers, published in 2019, two years before his death at age 89, showed he had lost none of his narrative skill. 

The Pioneers opens in Massachusetts around the end of the Revolutionary War, in June of 1787. The book focuses on the lives of Manasseh Cutler pastor of the First Congregational Church in Ipswich and Rufus Putnam, who fought with Washington during the Revolution, who began to look westward.  They helped lead the move westward from New England at a time when, having won The Revolution, the United States suddenly found itself as a country hugging its Atlantic coastline and having won control of millions of acres west of the original states, most of which was unexplored wilderness as far as they were concerned. He managed to commit Congress and President Washington to support a trip West with Revolutionary War General Rufus Putnam. The land they were headed for was the vast Ohio valley, west of Pennsylvania and across the Muskingum River, hundreds of thousands of acres of vast, mature woodlands inhabited only by a variety of Indian tribes. Forty-eight men set off for the Ohio River in the Winter of 1788.

Along the way, the first company encountered rough or nonexistent roads, cold winter hardships, and dense wilderness that none of them had ever encountered before. They had to break a trail across western Pennsylvania, cutting their way through deep forests and building rafts to cross rivers or to use them for transportation. Overcoming great hardships, the men reached the Marietta River separating western Pennsylvania from the Ohio Territory, built rafts to travel down-river, and chose to settle near what became Marietta, OH. They found the land filled with huge trees that had never heard the sound of an axe, as well as plenty of game for food. These men were determined to maintain Ohio as a non-slave territory, as the issues leading to the Civil War were already lively concerns. On their next trip West, they were joined by family members and more people seeking land and riches. 

Soon they were able to establish a ship-building center based on the availability of large timber. Women came to join their spouses, and both shipping and trade on the rivers flourished. The rest of the book contains lively descriptions of the development of communities, the building of churches, and, possibly the most important,  the establishment of schools and colleges in an area previously devoid of any formal education. As the Ohio territory grew in population and wealth, many of the heroes of the American Revolution came there to visit, and newer political figures came to marvel at the areas progress and promise. 

David McCullough

The Pioneers by David McCollough is top of the shelf history reading for anyone interested in American History, the opening of the West, the resistance to the spread of slavery, or simply a good story-teller bringing American History to life. I bought the book as a used book from ThriftBooks.com, which is one of my go-to sources for good reading at a reasonable price.