Summer Reading

Well, I've made little headway on my summer reading list.  I read the two Sir Ken Robinson novels.  I made it a little way through Lies My Teacher Told Me. Then I had to start on my reading for the MNHS summer graduate course that I've been a part of for a number of years now.  That meant reading through a packet organized by the course administrator.  This actually turned out to be the best reading.  I never realized that Dr. Seuss was so political.  He worked for a number of years as the cartoon editor for a major magazine (I want to say The New Yorker, but I don't think that's right).  His cartoons spoke out on the need to the US to get involved in WWII.  He also called out ant-Semites like Charles Lindbergh who wanted to remain isolated and stay out of the Nazi's way. I also read the mammoth The American People in the Great Depression by David M. Kennedy.  This was an exhaustive look at the factors that led up to the Great Depression.  I enjoyed this because Kennedy used a number of narratives to help support his research.  I did, however, find myself suffocating a bit under the repetitious nature of each chapter.  Instead of chronologically attacking the time period, he seems to start over with every chapter, discussing again and again what Hoover did wrong and what Roosevelt tried to counter the economic collapse.  I found that a bit repetitive.  But at least there's voice and style in there to keep it entertaining.  There are numerous comparisons too of the economic collapse of 1929 and the current economic crisis we are in now, so that adds a modern and relevant aspect to the reading. Plus, Kennedy had me running for the dictionary constantly.  It was like I was back in college all over again.  A sampling of his vernacular - nascent, huzzahed, febrile, archipelago, adumbration, solipsistic, autarkic, bonhomie (and not just 'bonhomie' but 'vacuous bonhomie'!) . . . I'm part way through our final book The Modern Temper by Lynn Dumenil.  For whatever reason - because I read the Kennedy text first or that it is just a boring read - the Dumenil book is pure drudgery.  It's the reading equivalent of watching paint dry.  I'm not kidding.  Here is a passage - you be the judge -- "Similarities in what men and women encountered in the 1920s are important, but gender was crucial in determining experience (nothing like stating the blatantly obvious).  Contemporary observers recognized this implicitly by characterizing the "new woman," as she was called, as a telling maker, s symbol, of modernity itself."  Oh boy.  And that goes on for well over 300 pages.  What I wouldn't give for Sinclai's The Jungle.  One fiction book and one non-fiction book.