History At Its Finest: A Review of Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While the history of the American Civil War is quite well known by most Americans thanks to some amazing books and documentaries, the decade-long period immediately following it known as Reconstruction is little known and little understood by most. In fact, thanks to ahistorical mythologies like the “Lost Cause” narrative, Reconstruction has been painted as a dark period when corruption was rampant and Southern state governments, run by Freedmen and Northern carpetbaggers, ran roughshod over people’s rights. The historical record shows that this couldn’t be further from the truth, yet this insidious myth persists. Fortunately, there are also plenty of books that have been written to push back against this narrative and establish the true history of Reconstruction. While many such books have been written in recent years, nearly all of them owe an enormous debt of gratitude to this book, one of the very first systematic histories of the period to tell the story truly. What makes this a must-read for anyone interested in Reconstruction is how W.E.B. Du Bois centers Black Americans in this tale. In this book, Mr. Du Bois makes the strongest case for what has been said by others before: that Black Americans, the enslaved as well as the free, were their own greatest liberators and Reconstruction’s greatest reformers.

While W.E.B Du Bois is best known today as the author of such works as The Soul of Black Folk and one of the founders of the NAACP, he was also the first Black men in America to receive a doctorate from Harvard.  Published in 1935, this book is the culmination of some of Du Bois’s scholarly work, which he had been hitting upon at different times in his scholarly and popular articles decades before.  Starting with an examination of the condition of both enslaved Black people and their White enslavers in the Antebellum South, Du Bois takes his reader on a journey through the 20 year period that encompassed both the Civil War and Reconstruction.  At each step, he shows through critical analysis of the sources available to him at the time how Black Americans’ own actions were what drove many of the key changes of this period.  For example, with so many enslaved Black Americans escaping to Union lines and many of them as well as freedmen from the North eager to join the Union Army, their actions put pressure on Pres. Lincoln and the Union to transform their Civil War objectives from solely from preserving the Union to also pursing abolition.  Du Bois also shows how Black lawmakers during Reconstruction were the prime agents in the creation of the South’s public school system for both white and black kids after the war, a reform that would stay in place long after White Southerns had forcefully and violently suppressed political power.

Du Bois also addresses some of the criticism of this period, particularly the corruption that Black lawmakers were accused of partaking.  While not deny that there were cases of bribery and corruption, Du Bois helps to put it in the context of the time, which was an incredibly corrupt period in American history in general, and shows how oftentimes the corrupt actions of white lawmakers was far greater than anything Black lawmakers did.  Not only that, but Du Bois constantly reminds readers that Reconstruction was an extraordinarily violent time with many atrocities committed against Black Americans.  Racial terror and the undermining of America’s first attempt at multiracial democracy was the goal of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups.  Du Bois makes the argument that the Civil War never really stopped after Appomattox Courthouse, but morphed into a racial war of white supremacists targeting Black Americans.  Indeed, thinking of the racial violence through that lens and using Du Bois’s analysis, Du Bois may not have had the words for it in 1935, but readers who are even casually versed in the history of modern warfare can recognize the resemblance of the Klan’s violent tactics as similar to the Vietcong during the Vietnam War or the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan.  Sadly, as Du Bois shows, the North quickly grew weary of sustaining a military presence in the South and abandoned the project after 1876, a pattern America would follow in Vietnam and Afghanistan using similar arguments (“They got to learn to stand on their own feet eventually”) and having similarly tragic results.  Du Bois analyzes the reasons for the North’s withdrawal in 1876 and shows how it opened the door not just to the end of Reconstruction and Black Americans’s political power for decades, but also how it opens the door to the segregated America that follows soon afterwards.

One weakness of this book though lies in Du Bois’s Marxist background.  By the 1930s, Du Bois was firmly moving in a Marxist direction and he uses Marxist language and thought in his analysis throughout this book.  While this class approach to analyzing the period provides intriguing insights, I do feel as though Du Bois could stretch his Marxist analysis at times.  For example, while an alliance between Black labor and poor White labor in the South could have transformed the history of the period, I have doubts that large numbers of Americans could even conceive of society in such class conscious ways at the time.  Yes, Karl Marx was alive and organizing in Europe at the time and had written The Communist Manifesto in 1848, but his magnum opus, Das Kapital, was published in 1867 and I doubt his ideas had spread quickly enough in America at the time to have any effect.  I could be wrong, but to me Du Bois too often applied a class analysis that Black and White Americans would not have recognized during this period.

Overall, though this book is nearly 90 years old now, Du Bois’s strong analysis and exceptional historical writing provides a gold standard by which all other histories of Reconstruction should be judged.  Library of America has once again done an enormous service to American literary history by publishing this seminal work once again.  I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history in general and Reconstruction in particular.

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The Whole Truth: A Review of The 1619 Project edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of my favorite scenes in my favorite Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade, is the moment when Henry Jones, Sr., played by the legendary screen actor Sean Connery, is being slapped around by the Nazi colonel demanding to know where Jones’s Holy Grail Diary is. But when the colonel asks, “What does the diary tell you that it doesn’t tell us?”, Jones grabs the colonel’s hand before he can slap him again and says, “It tells me that goose-stepping morons life yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!” I bring that scene up in the context of this book review because, as of this writing, scores of “parent groups” across the United States are trying to force public schools and libraries to remove books about BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ topics from their shelves. This particular book has been at the center of many of these efforts ever since the first articles of this project were published in The New York Times Magazine in August 2019. Having just finished this book, I have to say that it is one of the best books about American history that I have read in a long time. The authors and editors of this book make the best case for why Black Americans’s 400+ year freedom struggle should be at the center of how we tell the story of America, and, to paraphrase Henry Jones, Sr., people must read this book instead of trying to ban it.

Building upon The New York Times Magazine articles that were first published, this book tells America’s history from the perspective of Black Americans with articles and works of poetry and fiction written by Black authors.  Starting with the first enslaved Africans being brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619, the authors document several different aspects of American life that have been affected by our country’s history of slavery and racial oppression.  In some ways, the concept and overall framework is very similar to another book that came out just a few months earlier than this, Four Hundred Souls edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain.  The key difference is that authors in this book are given an ample amount of space to discuss a particular topic, like medicine, music, or democracy, from the very beginning through the present, whereas in Four Hundred Souls authors a kept to a 5 page limit looking at a specific topic within a 5 year period in American history.  Because of that, the authors in The 1619 Project have the space to fully flesh out their topic and demonstrate how America’s past echoes strongly in our present.  Thus, the approach that this book provides a clearer picture and more impactful thesis in each chapter.

Each chapter of the book is divided into different topics with works of poetry and fiction separating each topic and providing a rough timeline of American history.  In anthology works such as these, I oftentimes find that the quality from work to work can vary wildly.  That is not so in this book.  Each chapter is top notch with excellent writing and research that both proves each author’s point and is incredibly engaging to read.  At no point did I feel bored or unconvinced.  The works of poetry and fiction that separate the chapters may appear superfluous at first glance, but in reality serve a vital function of marking out keep moments in American history, providing an artistic break between each chapter’s often thought-provoking topics, and inserting a creative outlet for what the authors and readers are feeling after each chapter.  

In short, this book is a monumental achievement in popular history writing that the editors and authors should be proud of.  I have nothing but absolute praise for this work and if there is one book on American history that you read this year, you owe it to yourself to read this one.

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Trumpism Around the World: A Review of Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since former Pres. Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, there have been a ton of books written regarding our current political moment. While many have of these books have been directed straight at former Pres. Trump, many others address Trumpism more tangentially, trying to explain the political and cultural forces that have made his rise possible. While these are valuable books about American politics, they fail to take into account that the rise of the extreme right is a global issue. In this book, not only does Mr. Applebaum provide an invaluable look at this global phenomenon, she also offers a different way to look at how these political forces are aided and abetted, and she offers a personal story of loss friendships that sound very familiar to many readers today.

As a historian of the Soviet era who is married to a Polish politician, Ms. Applebaum is well placed to comment on the rise of the extreme right in Europe and America.  She specifically devotes time to the nations of the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Poland, and Hungary in her analysis and even American readers who are only familiar with the rise of Trumpism will get chills at how familiar much of the rhetoric is in these countries.  Indeed, you could take the essence of former Pres. Trump’s “America First” message and adapt it to any one of these countries and the politicians trying to lead these extreme political movements.  Thus, Ms. Applebaum makes a very strong case that the rise of extreme right political movements is cause for global concern.

One of the more valuable aspects of this book is that she doesn’t focus all of her energy on the leaders of these movements, like Donald Trump of Victor Orban.  Instead, much of her attention is focused on middling politicians and intellectuals who aid and abet their rise whom she calls clercs.  She sets up this argument in an explicit contrast to Hannah Arendt’s own analysis on totalitarianism in such classic works as The Banality of Evil.  In this book, Ms. Applebaum argues that these clercs are not just “following orders” like German citizens were under Nazism.  Instead, whether out of jealousy, thwarted ambition, sheer opportunism, or all of these things, these clercs provide the intellectual and political framework for the rise of extreme right politicians.  It’s an intriguing look at our current political moment as well as a great critique of a famous political theory.

What makes Ms. Applebaum’s analysis of present day clercs intriguing though is that she is not examining them not just as an academic from afar.  As a self-proclaimed center-right Reaganite, Ms. Applebaum has known and met many of these clercs.  Some of them were her very good friends.  Thus, she is not just speaking as an academic, she is speaking from personal experience seeing many of her friends succumb to the allure of extreme right politics.  Her shock at seeing so many of her friends, who were staunch anti-communists and prominent politicians who took part in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, fall for propaganda, misinformation, and lies, or even propagate them, is evident.  So too is her personal pain at losing these friends.  This is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.  While her personal experience with many of these clercs aids this book, her pain is also palpable and at times she can’t stop herself from criticizing her former friends and the people they surround themselves with rather harshly.  Granted, much of that criticism may be warranted, but this book does lurch from time to time into a screed of personal betrayal. 

In conclusion, while there are plenty of Trump books or Trump-adjacent books out there, this is one of the few of those books that offers a truly global perspective.  She may indulge in some rather harsh criticism, but Ms. Applebaum speaks as both an academic with unimpeachable credentials as well as from personal experience.  If you’re still interested in reading Trump or Trump-adjacent books, I would highly recommend this book to you.

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Where Do We Go Now?: A Review of Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No event in recent history has been as disruptive to the world as the COVID-19 pandemic that, as of this writing, is still ongoing. Millions have died and millions more have been infected by this disease. In the United States, the number of deaths from COVID are comparable to the number of combat deaths during the Civil War. And the recession caused by the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns is on a par with the 2008 financial crises that we had only just recovered from. Much has been laid bare by this once in a century catastrophe, but fortunately Mr. Zakaria has written a fabulously book to guide us through this pandemic and look forward beyond our current crisis to see what the world may look like afterwards.

Best known for his book The Post-American World and his Sunday international news show on CNN, Mr. Zakaria is the right man to take a global perspective on this pandemic.  But, rather than disprove the central theses of globalization and relative American decline, Mr. Zakaria argues in this book that the pandemic proves both the necessity of globalization and America’s continued to decline.  He even goes beyond that to reveal how important quality government is to daily living, the need for two-way dialogue between experts and average citizens, and the overwhelming necessity for global cooperation.  All of these “lessons” are very well backed up by statistics and figures from an incredibly wide variety of authoritative sources.  And yet, despite all the overwhelming citations, Mr. Zakaria’s writing style is both engaging and easy-to-follow.  Both experts and laymen should be able to pick up this book and learn something.

The only drawback of this book is how outdated some of the information is.  Published in October 2020, some events have accelerated since then.  The COVID vaccine was still in development, though close to completion, when this book went to press and, of course, the 2020 U.S. presidential election and Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol had not  happened yet either.  Though this book in hindsight is quite prescient, I do hope Mr. Zakaria does update this book when it comes out in paperback.

Overall, though only slightly out of date, this is one of the best books to examine these current times and try to project into the future.  Though the pandemic has scarred nearly all of us, this book can help us make sense of this current crisis and what is necessary to build back better in the future.  I highly recommend this book to both policy wonks and laymen alike.

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Feminist Literature's Prophet: A Review of Novels & Stories by Zora Neale Hurston (Library of America No. 74)

Zora Neale Hurston : Novels and Stories : Jonah's Gourd Vine / Their Eyes Were Watching God / Moses, Man of the Mountain / Seraph on the Suwanee / Selected Stories by Zora Neale Hurston

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Zora Neale Hurston was an African-American novelist and anthropologist who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance and wrote the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sadly, much of Ms. Hurston’s fictional work were not popular with the public at large until well after her death in 1960. This volume from the Library of America gathers four of her fictional novels and a few of her short stories, including Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses, Man of the Mountain. Through this collection, one can read the full breadth of Ms. Hurston’s fictional talent and all the good and bad elements of it.

Most of this book’s staggering 1000+ page count is used by her four novels, starting with her first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine and includes: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Moses, Man of the Mountain; and Seraph on the Suwanee.  The last 100 pages or so consist of her short stories.  When talking about her novels, you cannot skip over Their Eyes Were Watching God.  This now classic tale of female empowerment would prefigure and inspire such African-American novelists as Alice Walker, who would do much to rescue Ms. Hurston’s works from obscurity after her death.  But to me, the most interesting novels in this collection are Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee.  The first is the retelling of the Biblical tale of the Exodus, with a bit of Ms. Hurston’s flare from her previous works thrown in for good measure.  It was a throughly entertaining retelling of an otherwise familiar story.  Seraph is interesting because it was a departure for Ms. Hurston.  Whereas Jonah and Their Eyes, and one could rightfully argue Moses, revolved mostly around black characters, Seraph revolved mostly around white characters.  And yet Ms. Hurston’s fascination with marital relations, which is a common theme throughout almost all of her fictional work, is at the very heart of this book.

In terms of her short stories, the ones that stuck out to me were “John Redding Goes to Sea”, “Spunk”, “The Bone of Contention” and “The Fire and the Cloud”.  I especially enjoyed “The Fire and the Cloud” as it is a short story about Moses, written in the same style as Moses, Man of the Mountain, and sees Moses at the end of his life just before the Israelites are about to enter the promised land.  Thus, its a little addendum to Moses that puts a little bow on that novels ending.

While each of the novels and stories has their own highpoints and drawbacks, one of the most persistent drawbacks of this book is Ms. Hurston’s use of dialect for her characters’ dialogue.  In both Jonah and Their Eyes as well as all but one of her short stories, Ms. Hurston uses dialect for all of her characters' dialogue.  As I understand it, dialect as used by Ms. Hurston and other writers is suppose to make the story and the characters more realistic, but I have always found it difficult to enjoy it.  To me, it just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the story and slows down my reading pace (it took me twice as long to finish this book than I had originally planned).  It also seems unnecessary to me as in both Moses and Seraph, Ms. Hurston jettisons the dialect, but is still able to convey her character’s realistic accents without it.  So, if you are not fan of dialect, just know that this book may turn into a bit of a slog, especially at the beginning.

Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneer of black feminist literature in America, even if her contemporary audiences didn’t fully appreciate her talents.  This volume is a worthy inclusion in the Library of America and I highly recommend it to fans of African-American literature in general and specifically the literature of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Timeless Advice, Dated Text: A Review of Choosing Civility by P.M. Forni

Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct by P.M. Forni

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the first two decades of the 21st century, American culture has been characterized by a coarsening of our civil society. Politics and politicians have become more ideologically polarized and prone to see opponents as enemies to be totally destroyed rather than as the loyal opposition. Adding fuel to the fire has been social media, which through anonymity and filter bubbles has led to less tolerance and patience with those who disagree with us. To our credit, Americans have recognized this declining civility and this book offers some timeless advice, even though its text is a little dated.

Dr. Forni co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project in 1997 and promoted civility as both an academic and public lecturer until his death in 2018.  This book is one of the early products of that work.  Broken into three parts, Dr. Forni examines the societal and philosophical necessities for civility in daily life in the first and third parts, but also expands the definition beyond just speaking respectfully to others.  To Dr. Forni, civility also includes our actions towards others, towards animals and the natural world, and how we treat ourselves.  The bulk of the book’s value comes in the second part where Dr. Forni lays out his 25 rules for civility.  Each rule is accompanied with a couple of short pages on why the rule is important and some real-world examples of its use (or lack of use).  With such advice as “Accept and Give Praise”, “Respect Other People’s Time” and “Don’t Shift Responsibility and Blame”, it is hard to find fault with any of his advice.  This book has already helped me to reflect on some of my prior actions and resolve to do better in the future, which is what all advice books such as this should aim to do. 

That said, this is a book that was first published in 2002, so some of the text is a little dated.  For example, Dr. Forni calls cell phones “portable phones”, talks about using your own credit card to pay for long distance calls, and since social media platforms such as Facebook didn’t yet exist, he only makes a passing mention of civility on “internet message boards.”  As much of our current concerns about incivility in society center around behavior on the internet, it is a shame that such a good book is too old to directly address the topic.  And though much of Dr. Forni’s advice could be applied to this sphere, it would be nice if someone would come along and update this text.

Incivility is a national issue, as evidenced in its most extreme form in the Capitol Insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.  The solution to this will not come from government, but rather from society and individuals working together to show mutual respect to our neighbors and their views.  While the text of this book is in need of updating, its advice is absolutely timeless.  It’s easy to read size and format also means that this is a relatively quick read, though I would concur with Dr. Forni’s advice that you try to read this book at a slow pace and mull over everything that has been written.  Overall, I highly recommend this book to everyone looking to improve civility and respect in our society.

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