With A Big Thanks to Libraries – 2024 Edition

Every book mentioned here is interesting. If it wasn’t worth it, I wouldn’t say anything about it – so “briefly noted” seems appropriate. More to the point, I find there to be so much interesting in reading and I’m especially thankful for libraries and librarians. They keep us all in good books. Visit one today and say hi to a librarian. I am so grateful for them and their recommendations.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*CK, by Mark Manson, is a short, snappy action-oriented book of basic philosophy and self-help. Drawing from common sense, the skeptics, and some thoughtful observations of human nature, Manson does, in fact, care quite a bit (regardless of the swearing). He urges readers to think hard about our values and live our lives according to them. Values are not wealth, popularity or external signs; they come from within. Moving beyond all the hype and posturing (Mason has a big online presence), this is a book of hope and optimism.

Jillian Lauren’s Some Girls: My Life in a Harem is neither titillating nor sexy, but it is very interesting. It is a memoir of discovery and exploitation. Lauren, briefly an NYU student from New Jersey, grew up in an abusive household. She doesn’t dwell on how toxic it was, but looking from the outside, it truly must have been awful. How does a smart ambitious young woman cope and/or deal with her demons? She started dancing/stripping as a teenager, moved into escort work, and took advantage of an opportunity to be a paid “guest” in a large group of women for royalty in Brunei. At that time, beautiful young women (actresses, dancers, models from around the world) were offered substantial money to live and attend “parties” with royalty. Chosen party-goers had the opportunity to sleep with royalty, and favored guests would stay for months on end, receiving expensive gifts. It was a most extraordinary experience, creepy as all get out, yet somehow normalized for those that found themselves within it. Lauren is extremely smart, too smart to be a victim or to not be aware of where she is and what was transpiring. Journaling through her time was a way to cope. It took two exits before Lauren re-arranged her life, all while in her early 20s, and returned to the US with lots of money. Judgments are easy; understanding is difficult. The book is about discovery, power, gender and sex. It is worth consideration particularly in the name of understanding.

Thanks to a friend I joined the “Free Britney” movement, wondering why this extraordinary talented and successful women was under the control of the state and her family. She struck me as immensely capable. Why wasn’t she allowed to make her own decisions? Reading Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me, the reasons for her exploitation became more clear. Above and beyond her amazing talent, Spears is (or now “was”) an extremely generous and trusting soul. Baked into her love of singing, dancing and entertaining is a desire to please. While exploitation of talent is baked into the communication industry, in Spears situation, the actions of her parents and sister were horrific. They used and manipulated her. With Spears’ children as her priority, she worked through many years of extraordinarily unjust external control, eventually retaking personal agency. She is a genuinely nice person who justifiably has rage. Yet she is not about anger or vengeance. It’s difficult to finish the book and not be a bigger fan of Britney is every sense of the world – mixed with outrage at what happened to her.

One of the scariest zombie horror novels I have ever read, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is truly terrifying. Whitehead is a brilliant author who regularly explores different genres. In this 2011 best-seller, the post-apocalypse world is ravaged by zombies hungry for uninfected humans. Our hero, ironically named “Mark Spitz,” is a “sweeper,” charged with cleaning up what survivors hope are straggling zombies. It is brutal and violent work, yet the story unfolds with care and tenderness as the non-infected remember life before the contagion and try to make sense of their current situation. Whitehead stated that Asimov and King inspired the work. While one can see how Zone One might be read as genre fiction, Whitehead’s attention to detail, his beautiful prose, sets the book apart. Some sections I read aloud – they were that good. It is a haunting book, too, and I am grateful I did not encounter it during the Covid pandemic. Whitehead gets more than a few things right in his imaginative creation of a postlapsarian America. Frightening indeed!

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art is a very interesting work of cultural criticism. Penned by Lauren Elkin, the book reads at times like one recursive narrative and at others like a series of reflections, a critic’s journal. The book emerged through the pandemic and Elkin’s pregnancy. Both, I think, shaped her thinking about herself, women, and the ways that art empowers, problematizes, constricts and reshapes ontological questions. What and who is, or is not, monstrous. Elkin is breathtakingly smart, and her prose threads seemingly disparate observations and references into something special. The book, though, is neither linear nor easily summarized. Rather, it creates an atmosphere, an ether through which cultural production and objects reveal themselves differently. Yes, I am still working to make sense of this very intriguing book and author.

Shahnaz Habib is a gifted writer, a raconteur and keen observer. In Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel, she displays her discursive talents. Chock full of references, the book is less a history than a selection of explorations. It is entertaining and diverting. I wish more of it would stick, but what remains most vivid is her prose and her perspective. It is a most personal book. Airplane Mode did remind me, from a phenomenological framing, of subject, voice and identity and their power. Sometimes the who, when and how of an account is as important and the account itself.

Under the heading of “Where were they when?” you might want to take a look at I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp. It’s an interesting read, but what makes it more of a puzzle is that it is difficult to determine what is real and what it fiction – on multiple levels. The book’s author, Glenn G. Boyer, purports that the contents were collected and edited by him. On that front, it is a straightforward first person history from Josephine, telling her story from adolescence through decades of marriage to the famous lawman. The gunfight at the OK Corral get attention, to be sure, but it is the balance of their lives together, their trips to Alaska, their never-ending hustling, that give the narrative flavor. While the book was published and republished by the University of Arizona Press, it is not academic, even with notes. Boyer provides his take on some of Josephine’s claims. Historians of the West looked more closely. Many determined that broad parts of the book were fabricated by Boyer. The press eventually distanced itself from the publication. True? False? Like the classic ending of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the west is often much more myth than history. Read it with a grain of salt. Or possibly with a tablespoon and for entertainment’s sake.

Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power and Lies is a different sort of cultural history. Akin to long form journalism with the writer’s presence throughout, this book tackles a fascinating physical site whose history has been contested for centuries. Strand is intrigued by the recurring making and remaking of Niagara, its problematic value in culture over the years. She is drawn to it, embracing the beauty, power and, at times, crassness of it. Yet she is also angry at the inherent falseness in the area’s many misrepresentations. Add to it the exploitation of nature and many who lived in the area, and the best word to describe Niagara Falls is problematic. Remember, too, that the infamous Love Canal was a byproduct of the industrial production drawn to the site. Strand’s mixed emotions give the book a surprising stickiness but ultimate left this reader wanting greater clarity of focus. That might mean different books, but I see that is fine. The subject is worthy of being viewed from many different perspectives, just like visiting the falls themselves.

Ferdydurke, a comic novel by Witold Gombrowicz, is an absurdist exercise in creative nihilism. It has a plot – a 30 year old is turned into a schoolboy by an evil professor – only in the most generous of terms. One doesn’t read it for the story. Instead, the prose tangles and untangles, jumps and refuses to be tied down. It is a satire on psychedelics. More important than enjoyable, Ferdydurke was banned from its initial publication in Poland in 1937. Everyone found it objectionable. Not that it is obscene or political. Rather, the novel’s deep cynicism, its nihilism, poses threats to logical and traditional ways of thinking. It is radical in its bones. As such, the book represents an important literary step. All that said, it is not something one picks up as a simple read. I found it slow going and I’m confident that I missed the vast majority of references, asides and comic touches.

David Potash

January 2, 2025 Curiouser and Curiouser, Reviews

Shantyboats Aren’t On The Grid

Opening a book like Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat: A River Way of Life is akin to wandering into a new world. Eye-opening does not begin to cover it, for Hubbard’s book is an extraordinarily provocative exercise in doing and thinking differently. The book, and the Hubbards, truly caught me by surprise. The more that you learn about them, the more interesting they become.

Hubbard (1900 – 1988) was born in Kentucky. His mother moved him to New York City when he was a child, after the death of his father. He attended art school and after World War I, design school in Cincinnati. Hubbard and his mom returned to Kentucky, where he held a number of jobs while becoming increasingly critical of modern culture. In 1943 he married Anna Eikenhout (1902 – 1986), a librarian. Anna, an Ohio State honors graduate, spoke several languages and was an excellent pianist. Together the Hubbards did something that many of us talk about but very few ever achieve: fashion a life together on their own terms.

The couple built a shantyboat in Brent, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio River upstream from Cincinnati, in the fall of 1944. A shantyboat is a small, simple houseboat, something that can be put together and repaired easily by someone good with tools. It is a craft for drifting, not for speedy travel. The Hubbards moved into the rough structure, and nearby tent, almost immediately. It took about two years to make the craft ready for the water. They then floated down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, reaching New Orleans in 1950. Shantyboat is Harlan’s account of the trip, brightened with his illustrations. Published in 1953, the book became something of an underground classic. Hubbard followed up with several other books, as well as a lifetime of making art.

The book does not argue for organic living, avoiding capitalism or the dangers of working for another. It is not a treatise and nor does Harlan complain about modernity. Instead, it is a most direct and straightforward account of how the Hubbards went about their six-year journey. Hubbard explains how they put the boat together, the decisions they made about heating, storage, windows and all the other details that called for attention. If you have to find firewood to burn to stay warm, priorities change. Eating, not surprisingly, takes up much of the couple’s time, for they did not have much money and they did not want a lifestyle that required regular shopping. They grew vegetables, foraged, fished and traded, all with quiet good cheer. If they ever went hungry, it did not appear in the narrative. They always found a way and found ways, too, to help those they met along the way. The community of people they encountered, on and around the river, were supportive and welcoming.

Details give the book a tremendous tangible texture. I didn’t know that groundnuts would make a good alternative to potatoes, or various types of catching river fish. Shantytown is studded with hands-on experience and words of wisdom. Harlan could have given more maps, charts and diagrams. It is that interesting. He is a patient guide, too, for he is up front about learning from others. While it might seem to be a solitary way to live, there were always opportunities and reasons to interact with others.

The boat drifted, which meant there had to be constant attention to where and how the boat was situated. Paying attention to traffic on the river, who was going where and why, was essential. The Hubbards were far from the only people living along the river, either. They met many different characters, found places to stay for extended periods (helped with their farming), and they lived in community while somewhat apart from traditional society. Harlan painted, they wrote, they read, they made music and stayed very busy, with dogs, bees and an endless series of adventures.

One might be tempted to think of their journey as a way of leading a “simple” or “leisurely” life, but that would be far from the truth. Their day-to-day was very full and rich with experience. Who is to say it is better or worse than anyone else’s?

The couple returned to Kentucky and purchased land by the river. Their spot, Payne Hollow, grew over the years. It was a physical expression of the couple’s values and lifestyle. Payne Hollow was their home until their deaths. They had no electricity, no motors and no engines. The Hubbards had their own environmental commitments. Their food never came from a supermarket. A bicycle got them to a local town, when needed. They were quiet, enjoying what each day brought, and it was often visitors. In fact, they became minor celebrities in Kentucky. PBS did a show about them, and Harlan’s art was appreciated and purchased by many.

Shantyboat and the Hubbards are, in a word, inspirational.

David Potash

January 1, 2025 Reviews

Sullivan County In The Day

In 1873 James E. Quinlan published History of Sullivan County. A Catskills newspaper editor (the Republican Watchman was his charge), Quinlan wrote the book after retiring from the rigors of the daily press. The history was something of a labor of love. It is a compendium, an old-time history with lots of names and a less than clear structure. If it interested Quinlan, he included it in the history. As the editor of a reprinted version, David Gold notes, “the book is long on anecdotes and short on analysis.”

Nonetheless, the History remains an important overview of the early years of Sullivan County in lower New York State. The book highlights the scattershot nature of economic development and white settlements in the years up to the early 1800s. With no real center or dominant industry in the region, European settlers moved in, made a go of things, and either moved on or remained and survived. More than a few perished, though. Early life could be nasty and brutish.

The book helps to identify names and events that would later become well-known to all of Sullivan County. It offers some gripping accounts of battles with native Americans, or “savages” in Quinlan’s words. Early plans for bridges, canals, town centers, churches and the like figure prominently in the history. Development did not happen quickly in the region. There simply were not enough people, sufficient capital or even opportunities to propel rapid growth. Instead, things proceeded slowly and, with the benefit of decades, steadily.

Some of the stories stand out, though, personal histories of families, crimes, and day to day life. In that the history can read like a column in a local newspaper. For example, William A. Thompson, the original permanent resident of Thompsonville, receives several pages of attention.

A Presbyterian, Willam was a “weak, puny child, much afflicted with salt rheum.” That is eczema in today’s language. William studied law in New Haven in the 1780s. He was from Connecticut and his professional life began Sharon, CT. He moved around the state before marrying Fanny Knapp. She was described as “tall, genteel, 16 years old, and much marked with the small-pox. Her uncommon strength of mind, great elegance of manners, and lovely disposition, completely veiled her misfortune from the eyes of the scholarly young gentleman who made her his wife.” The young couple was not able to spend too many years together. Fanny died of consumption three years into the marriage after bearing two children. 0

Two years later, in 1791, Thompson married Amy Knapp, Fanny’s sister. According to Quinlan, a widow marrying the sister of a wife carried with it a significant penalty in Connecticut. Thompson, accordingly, decamped to New York City. His career took off and he found financial success as an attorney. It was not easy for Thompson, though, for the stresses of work and city life led to poor health. In 1794 he purchased land in Sullivan county, taking residence in one of his parcels by Sheldrake Creek. The family had been living on Cherry Street in Manhattan.

Like many New York City families with upstate homes, the Thompson’s found the first winters uncomfortable, so they returned to the city. The family moved back and forth as their home, and the surrounding area, improved. This is a pattern even common today, as wealthier city dwellers figure out how they want to live in the Catskills. Thompson’s upstate homestead increased in size and comfort. He invested in Sullivan County and became a very important person in the area. Thompsonville was named for him in 1803 (he was politically connected). Thompson enjoyed the status. He invested in a larger home – Albion Hall – and when his career as a magistrate ended he became an amateur scientist, studying local geography. He passed away in 1847 with a lengthy legacy.

Absent from Quinlan’s account are the voices of Fanny and Amy. We do not read of other family members, the many people who may have worked with or for Thompson, or of any detail about daily conditions. History from the nineteenth century was mostly about white men.

Quinlan’s history is far from modern or complete. Nonetheless, we can learn a great deal from local tales.

David Potash

December 31, 2024 Reviews

Detroit-Ryan Speedster as Muse

Do you know about Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Read the book or watched the movie? It was a massive phenomenon in the first half of the 1970s. A short allegorical novella about a bird’s flight and self-realization may sound like an unlikely best-seller, but one never knows what sticks and what does not. While I never quite understood its popularity, I read it as a real cultural phenomenon.

The book’s author, Richard Bach, wrote many other things – fiction and non-fiction. Several of his works were quite popular, making him one of the best selling authors of the period. When I was recommended an early Bach book, penned before he became so well-known, I decided to give it a try. Less allegorical and more a straight up personal account, Biplane was published in 1966. A short book, it offers insight into Bach, his passions and his thinking.

Flying has been absolutely central to Bach’s life. He took his first flight at the age of 14, and he later becoming a military pilot. He flew for the US Naval Reserve, the NJ Air National guard, and for the US Air Force. Bach flew military planes and personal planes for pleasure. Obsessed with flying, Bach worked for Douglas Aircraft and he edited Flying magazine. In the early 1960s, Bach owned a recently rebuilt Fairchild 24 aircraft. It is a reliable single-engine four-seat plane, often used for training and light transport. Bach traded it for a 1929 Detroit-Ryan Speedster, Parks P2A, an old-time biplane. How old? It did not even have a radio. The move was not an upgrade but rather a conscious commitment to a different kind of flying. Biplane is about the trade and Bach’s subsequent flight across the country, from New Jersey to California.

Flying is much more than a means of transportation for Bach. He philosophizes, goes on at length about it and the ways that it makes him think about the world, for flying energizes his creativity. Bach’s mind is never at rest – or at least in Biplane, it does not take much of a break. He is fully engaged, meets people on the journey, considers the land, the communities, and the very act of flying a vintage machine. The Detroit-Ryan Speedster was not an easy plane to fly. In fact, it is the kind of machine that demands constant attention. The very difficulties attracted Bach to the biplane. As he learns more about the aircraft, how to fly it and what it can and cannot do, he fills us in on how one thinks as a pilot.

My favorite line in the book encapsulates Bach’s themes: many people travel by airplane but few know what it is to fly. Biplane helps the reader know what it is to fly. It gives you a deep appreciation of aviation.

David Potash

December 31, 2024 Reviews

Where Is the Gate? Woodstock Operations

The Woodstock Museum in the Bethel Woods Center for the Performing Arts gives an excellent overview of the world’s most famous music festival. “Woodstock” stands apart as more than a music festival. It is a major part of American history and the 1960s, and the focus of an untold number of studies. A recent trip to the museum sparked my curiosity to learn more.

Journalist Bob Spitz’s Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969, is perhaps the best account of how the event came together. Reprinted many times, the book relies heavily on first-person accounts and solid research into the cast of characters and the multiple machinations that made the festival special. Spitz has penned biographies, books, and articles for decades. Especially relevant to the history of Woodstock, he worked in popular music, managing Bruce Springsteen and Elton John. Spitz writes from an informed perspective and his interest is very much in logistics. How did the damn thing come together?

As a refresher, Woodstock was a three-day music festival held in Bethel, New York, in August of 1969. Nearly half a million attended and heard many of the most vital musicians of the time. While it was originally supposed to be a profit making concert with 50,000 attendees, massive logistical problems led to a venue change and free admission, for they couldn’t control the crowd or take tickets. The problems cannot be understated – they were enormous. Nonetheless, the event was remarkably peaceful, even with three deaths and untold numbers of issues, from water to electricity to traffic. In sum, it was a beautiful mess, like a party when 10x as many guests arrive. On a totally different scale, with a documentary and a firm place in popular culture and history.

Spitz’s book is enormously interesting, especially to those curious about event promotion, planning and execution. He goes into great deal regarding the financing, the coordination (or lack thereof), and the thousands of small decisions that shape an event. The lighting and sound system posed challenges, for example, and who, why and how the problems were addressed makes for an engaging tale. The people involved in security make up another important thread. Fear of hippies and the counterculture ran deep. Figuring out how to keep people safe and de-escalate problems was no small task.

The medical situation takes up a big part of the book. It makes sense, too. There were few rules or guidelines for this kind of event at that point in time. The haphazard nature of the festival, as it emerged over the months, called for real leadership and innovation. Kind of in the weeds, to be sure, but it adds up. The deep local resistance to the “hippies” added an extra level of stress.

What Spitz does not examine in much detail are the larger questions about why so many attended, why so many have been drawn to the festival over the decades. To be sure, the list of artists who performed is extraordinary. We don’t think of Woodstock, though, as a 1969 greatest hits festival. Other factors were afoot, other trends and moments. Many others have looked at those questions, and I look forward to following up and learning more.

For how to – and not to – put on a festival, though, I heartily recommend Barefoot in Babylon. And a massive thumbs up, too, for the extraordinary Max Yasgur, the conservative Republican Jewish dairy farmer who stepped up to give the festival a home after the original site fell through. He was truly a special human being.

David Potash

December 30, 2024 Reviews

The Double Meaning of Prey

One of more popular twentieth century novels of manners, love and heartbreak, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love has been in print since it was first published in 1945. Re-crafted into movies and a television series, the story has struck a nerve over the decades, connecting with different generations. Roman a clef? The book most definitely was closely drawn from Mitford’s own experiences and that of her family and friends. More than a biography, from stories to observations, it cannot be read solely as a veiled family history. Though one may be tempted to do some investigative googling . . . .

Mitford was a brilliant novelist, a member of a family with a peerage (her father was a Baron), and a highly networked celebrity. Her friends and family had money, wealth, power and status. She authored eight novels, four biographies, edited numerous works and numerous articles and essays. Several biographies have taken aim at her and her family, explaining the who, what and when behind this book.

The Pursuit of Love opens with a scattered family history from the voice of a first person narrator, Fanny. While not a member of the Radlett family, Fanny was intimately connected with them from childhood. All the eccentricities of English country wealth are gently satirized as the story steadily moves to focus on one of the Radlett sisters, Linda. By the second half, the novel takes the shape of a more traditional account of a woman’s loves, hopes and dream. Fanny’s closest friend, Linda, is a memorable character. She is larger than life and in surprising ways, smaller than one might expect. Linda moves through marriages, relationships, war and family with a remarkable ability to disengage and engage without consistency. As such, Linda is both of the world and strangely apart from it. Love, as the title indicates, is central to Linda’s life. She searches for love, in particular forms, and love, in other forms, finds her. She both preys on some of those around her and is preyed upon by others.

The story is romantic and tragic. It delivers in style.

And yet . . . . for this reader, I found it a little thin. Great characters and gentle satire can only take a work so far. Missing from the story are issues of growth, realization, and deeper meaning. Like its heroine and me, the novel is searching for something a bit more substantial. It is one of the reasons I have enjoyed discussing the book with those who have read it. The question always comes down to a little less interest in the story and great curiosity in the why. In Pursuit is a well worth your time, but for me, more appetizer than a full meal. Unless, of course, we’re talking about it. If so, we’ll linger for all of dinner.

David Potash

November 26, 2024 Reviews

Jewish Eden in the Borscht Belt

A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills from the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt is an expansive cultural history from Stefan Kanfer. Published in 1989, when the memories of the Catskills Jewish resorts was still fresh, the book is long on anecdotes, personal stories and jokes – lots and lots of jokes. While the Catskills have changed since it was written, the book’s relevance remains. A Summer World has value and an immediacy that shines through its pages.

The heart of the book is Grossinger’s Catskills Resort Hotel, a famous facility whose cultural impact extended well beyond New York City’s Jewish population, and its long-stranding owner, Jennie Grossinger. It was founded by Jewish immigrants from Poland, like many other hotels and bungalow colonies in the region. Grossinger’s grew, changed, and changed again over the years, growing more sophisticated as it catered to a more sophisticated audience. So many famous entertainers cut their teeth at Grossingers and other Jewish resorts. Kanfer, an enthusiastic fan, relishes telling tales.

A Summer World is neither scholarly nor tightly argued. The prose is nostalgic and warm. It is an easy read, perhaps best suited to those that already have a sense of the region and its history. Or for those who miss Borscht Belt humor.

David Potash

November 9, 2024 Reviews

Reconstruction Culture In The Crescent City

Wandering around in New Orleans during the day invariably means ducking into a restaurant, a bar, a store, a someplace to cool off or for protection from one of the steamy rainstorms that so often punctuate the afternoon. Spend enough time in the city and you’ll no doubt wander into a used bookstore. (that’s an assumption, of course, dear reader of this blog) The city has quite a few, each with a strong whiff of history and more than a spot of dust. I am grateful to have been to many and, as is my pattern, I invariably drift to the local section, the shelves stocked with books about New Orleans.

In my last trip I came across several copies – in several bookstores – of Christopher Benfey’s Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable. Benfey, a professor of literature with a named chair at Mount Holyoke College, is a well respected scholar. This is his first book, penned in the late 1990s. It is a deeply researched critical study, a strong academic work that has somehow found its way in bulk to tourist bookstores. More than a examination of a short period in Degas’ life, the book is also more than a three-subject biography. It is a nuanced investigation into creative production during a very traumatic juncture in the city’s troubled history. Degas’ trip in the autumn of 1872 coincided with Reconstruction politics, a rise in racial hatred and the creation of the White League, a racist group that briefly took over the city in 1874.

Despite its immediately accessible title, this book is not a quick read for those expecting a holiday memoir. It pursues a rigorous cultural argument, grounded in history. Benfey sketches out the key families in the city, the tangled relationships, and the complex social structure of Creoles, free Blacks, formerly enslaved Blacks, whites, and those with French citizenship in this book. The destructive power of racism is the driving force shaping lives, opportunities and families. Benfey gives attention to Degas and his art, to be sure, but his heart in this book is with literature and criticism against the backdrop of race in post Civil War.

The failures of Reconstruction haunt American history and culture. Similarly, they haunt this book. Under Benfey’s eye, the romantic cultural production of the period is inextricably tied a dark history.

The next time you visit New Orleans, if you’re looking for an easy thrill, take a ghost tour. Stroll and admire the architecture and google the history of buildings. And if you want a coffee table book, you’ll find many with glossy photos. But if you want something substantial, consider Degas in New Orleans. It is a solid scholarly treatise.

David Potash

October 13, 2024 Reviews

In Praise of the Accessible: Penguin’s Collection of Japanese Short Stories

A conversation with a colleague who is deep into Japanese history started me thinking: what have I read recently from Japan? Or by Japanese writers? There was a stretch when many I know were referencing Haruki Murikami, but beyond his work? While I may be up on some popular culture, my knowledge of Japanese fiction and literature is minuscule. The discussion called for action, so I picked up a well-reviewed book: The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. Translated by Jay Rubin, a respected Japanologist, the book is accessible and fascinating. It is a very good read.

The book is organized by themes, but it is neither chronological nor scrupulous in its categorization. There’s great variety in topic, style and intent. Some of the 34 pieces are quite short and others might be considered novellas. The collection strikes a respectable balance between encouragement and awe. Why awe? It is humbling to read so much absolutely brilliant writing from a culture of which I know so little. It’s a compelling introduction that calls for more trips to the library.

There’s too much in the book to cover here, but I do want to call out a few items that stood out. Betsukayu Minoru‘s “Factory Town” is very funny with a tone reminiscent of classic Russian satire. “Patriotism” by Mishima Yukio gave me goosebumps. He was a complex artist, a nationalist with deep sympathies to a romantic tradition. The story celebrates ritual suicide, but it’s impossible to read it as a humanist and not have it resonate with sorrow. Seirai Yuichi’s “Insects” is haunting, too. With a background of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, it humanizes loss and love.

Reading is a safe yet challenging way to de-center one’s viewpoint – be it philosophical, geographical, historical or cultural. The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories took me on a trip without leaving the house. I encourage you to consider going on a similar journey.

David Potash

October 3, 2024 Reviews

Hope From Hyde Park

People are stressed about politics. The rhetoric, the drama, the threats, and the concerns – they all appear to be on the upswing. Is every election “the most important in recent memory” or is 2024 different? It most certainly has been historic, with the media avidly covering the changes, the shifting expectations and the ever more extreme positioning. We are in a period of extreme partisanship, so much so that some wonder if the country is coming apart at the seams. But are things truly that bad? And if we do face great challenges, are there any models or figures that might help us think through how to address these daunting difficulties?

To re-adjust my perspective and to gather hope, I recently visited the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Located on the beautiful family estate in Hyde Park, NY, not far from the banks of the Hudson River, the trip to the compound was exactly what I needed. The future President Roosevelt grew up there, lived there on and off throughout his life (it was his mother’s house), and is buried on the grounds. It is a National Park Service site, as FDR wanted, with frequent tours and inquisitive and appreciative tourists from all over the globe. Roosevelt was born to a generation who lived through the US Civil War (1882). When he passed away in the latter stages of WWII in 1945, the United States was securing its role as the preeminent military power in the world as a staunch defender of democracy. It is hard to suggest a political leader more responsible for that dramatic change. He truly was one of the most important figures in the 20th century.

The FDR story – born to wealth and privilege with expectations of service – is a vital reminder of character and leadership. Far from perfect, Roosevelt was a complicated and complex man, a masterful politician who reshaped the presidency and America. He worked tirelessly to help the US navigate the Great Depression, keeping American values alive. The world’s most horrific conflict, WWII, consumed him. Much of the war’s result can be traced to his resolve. Polio crippled him, yet his confidence and enthusiasm seemed to never lag. A small, rope-driven elevator in the house memorializes the man in a poignant manner. FDR, who simply could not walk after polio, would hoist himself up and down in this little contraption. Grandchildren would sit on his lap, the guard told us, and the president insisted on using the rope himself to get to the next floor. It is incongruous and telling, a personal fact that renders this extraordinary political leader all the more driven and all the more human.

Perhaps my greatest takeaway was one of overwhelming gratitude to FDR and those around him who fought the good fight, who worked to keep the country strong, to improve the lives of others, to secure the four freedoms that are essential to modern life. The economy may be troublesome now, but current difficulties pale in comparison to the hardship of the 1930s. The world may be contentious and dangerous now, but we are not facing a global conflict akin to WWII. And on a personal note, while I may face difficulties and responsibilities that, at times, may seem unfairly burdensome, FDR handled a million times more stresses and did so with values, elan and success.

The day at Hyde Park was humbling, inspirational, and a much needed remedy for today’s stresses. I encourage you to find the time to visit and reflect.

David Potash

September 25, 2024 American Culture Today