Egregious Reader

  I am so tired of being a dumbass american. Dumbass here is technical for "one who never wants to know what others feel, think or experience." Sometimes it is active, demanding silence and erasure of other parties. Much of the time the desire to know is so absent, the american dumbass doesn't even think to ask a question. He is so sure of his own problems or successes or puzzles he never thinks of the other at all.  Take Vietnam as a country and a people, for example. What do we know about Vietnam? Only the war that we lost. Only what is called Vietnam Syndrome that set in after the war and new political division between hawks and doves. Or maybe you think of the peaceniks and hippies and draft cards being burned. Or maybe you think of the calls for raised-right men and grumbling old men who said the great generation never lost a war ....  Sadly, even when I ask google "What happened in Vietnam after 1975," I get articles titled 40 years after the fall of Siago...

WEB Du Bois is one of the greatest American thinkers and writers. This is a collection of essays meant as a follow on to Souls of Black Folks and published approx 20 years later. Like Souls, it is a mixture of genres ... essays interposed with fiction, poetry and prayers.  On these pages you see arguments for women sufferage, anti-poverty measures, raw explanation of the continued racial struggle in our country, perspective on WWI, Jesus in Texas --- where he witnesses a chain gang, has dinner with a wealthy white family and then witnesses a lynching, and more. I don't think you can be an american citizen without interacting with Du Bois.  To start-Credo; Of Work and Wealth and The Damnation of Women. For fiction, read The Comet.  Here is the very last paragraph of an essay called The Souls of White Folk: "Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,--this modern Prometheus,--hang bound by his own binding,...

  Audible has many books "included" which means you can listen for free. So I have been on a little George Eliot kick (I am sure you know, but this was her pen name, her real name is Mary Anne). Silas Mariner was a good heart-warming shorter novel. The Lifted Veil was victorian horror (not really what you are thinking, but creepier than Frankenstien, though no monsters ... just human ones). And yesterday I completed a listen of Felix Holt, The Radical.  I loved it. She is a deeply perceptive and wise author. Her plot is nearly as intricate as Dickens, though with less characters, and it feels more realistic, possible as if the events that converge were after all the ones bound to happen from the beginning. Which, of course, means they are not always as surprising as in Dickens, but it feels less of a magic show as they happen.  This is also a very unique love story, one that contains elements of Austin (surprise inheritance, etc) but in the end Esther must choose between ...

I don't like Anne Lamott. She is the kind of endless chatty I don't like. The kind that has fourteen million stories about her life and ideas and friends. (Please note as the title says, this is an ignorant opinion ... I write this from reading five pages of one of her books I got from the library yesterday).  And even as I write that, I remember that I actually do like Anne Lamott. I borrowed Bird by Bird from my sister and read the first 20 pages and thought it was very helpful.  Let me spin everything around again and take a slight Lamottian tone. I think of myself as too occupied with the contents of books and many abstract notions (not that history is abstract, but it is past). I imagine that if Lamott was at a party she would be surrounded by guests and she would be telling story after story like a grownup shooting ducks at a carnival (assume the distance between shooter and ducks were set for children). And all the stories would be of her experience (insert crazy thing ...

 If you didn't know, Bonhoeffer was in NYC as a Sloan Fellow at Union Theological. He was 24, post doctoral. It was 1930-31. He actually got involved at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and taught Sunday School there. "On Jan 12, 1931 ... an African American man was accused of rape in Maryville, Missouri, chained to a schoolhouse roof, and burned to death by a white mob. Bonhoeffer read the story of that lynching and viewed the graphic photographs." (22) I knew some of this from other biographies, but what Williams does is dive deeper into what Bonhoeffer was reading and where he traveled, as well as what was going on in Harlem -- Alan Locke's New Negro and what James Weldon Johnson called the Harlem Renaissance. Williams even sought and spoke with Albert Fisher's family for more insight. (Fisher was an black theology student who introduced Bonhoeffer to Harlem).  Williams also introduces us to Harlem and the movements taking place there (I am so excited that i...

Goza takes us back to foundational thinkers of Western Civilization and specifically those who are the roots from which the American experiment begins: Thomas Hobbes; John Locke and Adam Smith. Specifically, Goza wants to know what they said about slavery and what they say about the Bible. Smith is a little different from Locke and Hobbes, but the older thinkers essentially use reason to reduce the Bible to formula and a means of control/order. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Most people know the quote “the life of man is nasty, brutish and short.” This is from Leviathan where he takes such a dark view of human beings and the chaos they generate that he argues for a totalitarian tyranny to keep us from endless war. One of the instruments this tyrant finds useful is religion - “that feare of things invisible.” Goza also says that Hobbes, an Enlightenment thinker, turned to reason as the way forward, for individuals to basically handle ordering society like one would solve a geometry problem. ...

Derrick Bell was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard Law School. This happened in 1971. This book is his story of his protest for the Harvard Law School to tenure its first African-American woman. He announced his unpaid leave April 24, 1990.  Universities often have visiting professors, sometimes for multiple semesters, but these professors are not embraced until they are given tenure. Bell watched as qualified African-American professors who were teaching at Harvard were rejected or overlooked for tenure. Harvard did not enjoy his protest and ultimately, after three years, terminated his tenure.  Bell tells this story, but also uses it as an example to explore all the aspects of protest, especially a solitary one like this. In it, he walks us through the many ways status quo is maintained ... as he states in the conclusion - "After all, there is at Harvard, as in the rest of our modern world, a distressing commitment to the unwritten commandment: 'Tho...