Getting to Know the Presidents: The Presidential Biography Project

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February 28, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 28 6 min read

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In the fall of 2009, I set out to read a biography of each American president in chronological order. So far, I’ve made it to James Buchanan (#15).

When I tell people about this project, I routinely get two questions.

The First Question: Why?

The short answer is that I want to be the kind of woman Josh Lyman would date, which in turn is a way of saying that I want to be an Aaron Sorkin character. The long answer is about context.

Living in a country with 235 years of nationhood under its corn belt, I have only a fuzzy knowledge of the men who led us here. I know who signed the Declaration of Independence, won the wars, had the prettiest or wackiest wives, and made landmark decisions or landmark mistakes. But who are all these other guys? Which of them decided to build a transcontinental railroad, sign the Equal Rights Amendment, or settle the Oregon border? Did you know Millard Fillmore’s wife established the White House library?  James K. Polk increased the size of the country by 500,000 square miles. John Tyler abandoned his own party while in office, and was later elected to the Confederate Senate. Zachary Taylor was Jefferson Davis’ father-in-law. Martin Van Buren’s first language was Dutch. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams visited Shakespeare’s home in Stratford together.

The march of American history doesn’t leap-frog from one monumental achievement to the next. When people ask me why I’m reading 44 presidential biographies, they’re really asking whether or not it’s boring, which it certainly can be (the blog where I write about the project is called At Times Dull, after all). In reading biographies rather than narrative history, my subject matter is constantly repeating. I went through the American Revolution six times, because the first six presidents were each personally involved. Reading about that phenomenal time period over and over – each time through the lens of a different extraordinary life – was fascinating. Reading about the Compromise of 1850 four times? Far less so.

But therein lies the worth of the experience. We’d like to build a national reputation around triumph and the progress of civil liberty, but we’ve spent just as much time making bad decisions. To read through American history chronologically is to give equal attention to both stripes.

I’ve just reached the end of the streak of presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln remarkable for how rarely they’re remembered. They are Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, and you will not find their faces on money. Their hallmarks are the Mexican-American War, expansion to the Pacific, and the Industrial Revolution, but mainly they spent 35 years scrambling to keep the country together by any means possible. Let me tell you this: anyone who says Abraham Lincoln’s legacy is exaggerated has never spent seventeen months reading about antebellum politicians.

Reading about them is to dwell in that long, uncertain, muddy time when the most an outgoing president ever boasted was a long series of compromises. And yet, each of them got up every morning with the weight of the nation on their shoulders and worked late into the night. (Polk actually micro-managed the executive office, working so hard that he sometimes went weeks without leaving the White House.) Learning about their times, watching them navigate the unglorious periods of our history with as much wisdom as they can muster, has changed the way I think about America much more than reading the lofty words of Jefferson and Madison ever could. And much as I love Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, I have a much more personal affection for the likes of Madison and Fillmore.

Which Brings Me To The Second Question: Who is your favorite president?

How my heart swells to say it: John Quincy Adams.

JQA entered public service at the age of 14, when he accompanied family friend and diplomat Francis Dana to St. Petersburg. During Washington’s administration he was a diplomat to the Netherlands, later traveling to England to help finalize the Jay Treaty, then serving as minister to Prussia. He returned to America for a short time during which he worked two jobs – U.S. Senator and Harvard Professor of Rhetoric – before going back to Europe as America’s first ambassador to Russia. He left Russia to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, then served for two years as a Minister to Britain before being appointed Secretary of State for President James Monroe, whom he helped to draft the Monroe Doctrine.

He was a lovely old grump. He got up every morning between 4 and 6 a.m., read the Bible, translated some Latin or Greek, and went for a walk, usually culminating in a frigid swim. When he lived in Russia, he swam in the Neva, on whose banks he would frequently run into the tsar. That he was a genius is no question. Everyone from Washington to Franklin to the King of England said he was one of the keenest statesmen they’d ever known, and by the time he ran for president in 1824, he was easily the most experienced.

He was not a good president. His heart belonged more to the boulevards of Ghent and London than the muddy paths of Washington. The grand ideas he had for internal improvements, university, museums, and observatories didn’t catch the imagination of the country, and he lacked the charm and tact to win them over. Additionally, Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote in 1824 but lost to JQA in a House vote, was out to get him. Jackson’s supporters blocked his legislation, and then defeated him in the 1828 election.

Humiliated and depressed, he retired to Massachusetts to read the entire works of Cicero in the original Latin. Despite his glittering career, he had always suffered bouts of self-loathing, stemming from his early fears that success came to him because of his father. He was all too aware that, to an outside observer, his life could appear to be a long string of nepotism and elite cronyism that ended in botching the highest office in the land.

“I will not desert in my old age the Republic that I defended in my youth,” Cicero wrote. At the age of 64, two years after leaving the presidency, John Quincy Adams ran for Congress. He served as a Representative from Massachusetts under the next five presidents, until he collapsed during a House session at the age of 81 and was taken to the Speaker’s chambers, where he died two days later.

JQA’s 17 years as a post-presidential Congressman were legendary. He quite literally had nothing to lose. Most of his colleagues were a generation younger, and he was vastly more experienced. He became an outspoken abolitionist, an issue no one else, politically, could afford to touch. He presented petitions for the abolition of slavery in Washington D.C., and found sneaky ways to evade the Congressional gag rule (forbidding debate of slavery). He argued the case of the Amistad sailors before the Supreme Court, and he orchestrated the founding of the Smithsonian. He wouldn’t give up, and he wouldn’t be quiet. John Quincy Adams was an Aaron Sorkin character.

His unpopularity as a president felt too similar to his own self-doubt, and he set out, in the fifth act of his life, to refute it. Remarkably, it worked. He became known as “Old Man Eloquent,” the nation’s last surviving link to the revolutionary generation, and was far more respected and popular as a Congressman than he had ever been as a president.

His was one of the most eventful lives in early American history. He met Catherine the Great and Charles Dickens. He met George Washington when he was a teenager, and served in the House with Abraham Lincoln when he was in his 80s. To remember him as the one-term, sixth president of the United States is like remembering Michael Jordan as an outfielder for Birmingham.

This month we commemorated the lives of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and we are right to do so. But the slow, busy procession of history is about so much more than the wins. The forgotten presidents are so much more than seat-fillers. John Quincy Adams was so much more than a president.

The Presidential Biographies I’ve Read (So Far)

(Image: George Washington (The Athenaeum Portrait), First President (1789-1797) from nostri-imago’s photostream)

is a staff writer for The Millions. Janet is a freelance writer and semi-professional baker living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Awl, The AV Club, the Chicago Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She is the co-host of YouTube's The Book Report and blogs about presidential biographies at At Times Dull. Follow her @sojanetpotter.

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A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2005

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January 4, 2006 | 15 books mentioned 7 12 min read

My year in reading involved a couple dozen or so books, most of which I wrote about here, but it also involved, to a large extent, my favorite magazine, the New Yorker. I spent three or four out of every seven days this year reading that magazine. So, for my “Year in Reading” post, I thought I’d revisit all the time I spent reading the New Yorker this year, and in particular, the fiction. It turns out that nearly every one of the 52 stories that the New Yorker published this year is available online. I thought it might be fun to briefly revisit each story. It ended up taking quite a while, but it was rewarding to go back through all the stories. What you’ll find below is more an exercise in listing and linking than any real attempt at summary, but hopefully some folks will enjoy having links to all of this year’s stories on one page. I also wanted to highlight a couple of blogs that did a great job of reacting to New Yorker fiction this year – you’ll find many links to them below – Both “Grendel” at Earthgoat and “SD Byrd” at Short Story Craft put together quality critiques of these stories. Now, without further ado, on to the fiction:January 3, “I am a Novelist” (not available online) by Ryu Murakami: This story by the other Murakami is about a famous novelist who is being impersonated by a man who frequents a “club” of the type often described in Japanese stories. The impostor runs up a huge bar tab and gets one of the hostesses pregnant. Murakami is best-known for his novel, Coin Locker Babies. Links: I Read a Short Story TodayJanuary 10, “Reading Lessons” by Edwidge Danticat: A Haitian immigrant elementary school teacher, a resident of Miami’s Little Haiti, is asked by her boss – and lover, “Principal Boyfriend” – to tutor the illiterate mothers of two of her students. In 2004, Danticat received much praise for her novel, The Dew Breaker and this year she put out a young adult novel called Anacaona, Golden Flower.January 17, “The Juniper Tree” by Lorrie Moore: I really had to jog my memory to remember this one. It starts out with a woman who puts off visiting her dying friend Robin in the hospital. She plans to go in the morning but Robin has already died. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is Moore’s most recent collection. Links: Tingle Alley, Elegant VariationJanuary 24 & 31,”Ice” by Thomas McGuane: This story was more memorable. A young protagonist with a paper route is intimidated by a drum major. To overcome his fears he skates toward Canada on frozen Lake Erie as far as he dares. Presumably, this story will appear in McGuane’s upcoming collection, Gallatin Canyon. Links: I Read A Short Story TodayFebruary 7, “The Roads of Home” by John Updike: The middle-aged absentee owner of his family’s Pennsylvania farm, David Kern returns to his childhood home after a long absence, feeling guilty and a little disoriented. A standard Updike story. Updike has a new book coming out this year called Terrorist. Links: This story has inspired a field trip sponsored by The Alton Chronicles – AKA The John Updike Reality Project.February 14 & 21, “Up North” by Charles D’Ambrosio: City guy visits the inlaws for Thanksgiving at their hunting lodge. He goes hunting with the family men and finds out about some skeletons in the closet. I remember liking this story. I’m guessing this story will appear in D’Ambrosio’s new collection, The Dead Fish Museum.February 28,”The Conductor” by Aleksandar Hemon: The narrator and Dedo, two Bosnian poets, are reunited in America after the war. This memorable story contrasts the hardness of their Bosnian experience with their new lives on the American academic circuit. Touching and funny. Hemon’s written a novel, Nowhere Man, and a collection of stories, The Question of Bruno. Links: 3quarksdailyMarch 7, “The Gorge” by Umberto Eco: Italian boy and anarchist help Cassocks escape from Germans in war-torn Italy. Pretty straight-forward for a story by Eco, it turns out this piece was culled from his then-forthcoming novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Links: Conversational Reading, A Roguish Chrestomathy, Unhappy with the New Yorker’s editing: The LaboratoriumMarch 14, “Della” by Anne Enright: I’d completely forgotten this story. It made no impression at all, but upon rereading I see that it’s a sad story about two old folks living next door to each other, one worrying the other is dead, and beneath its somber surface, there’s a little humor to it. Enright’s most recent book is The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.March 21, “Men of Ireland” by William Trevor: I’ve never been a big fan of Trevor, his stories are a little too gray for my taste, but it can’t be denied that he’s a great storyteller. In this one a destitute man accuses his childhood priest of long ago improprieties. Though we can’t know the truth for sure, somehow, in this telling, both seem guilty. Trevor’s most recent collection is A Bit on the Side. Links: James Tata.March 28, “A Secret Station” by David Gates: A classic New Yorker story: An old man ruminates on his wasted life – multiple marriages and infidelities, dabbling in prescription drugs to dull the pain. But Gates paints the characters well and this is a good read. Gates is best known for his novel Preston Falls. Links: shes-krafty.com.April 4, “Solace” by Donald Antrim: I’ve always enjoyed Antrim’s stories. This one is sort of a romantic comedy about two disfunctional people who, due to difficult housing arrangements, must conduct their relationship only in borrowed apartments. Antrim’s memoir, The Afterlife, pieces of which have appeared in the New Yorker, will be published in May.April 11, “Mallam Sile” by Mohammed Naseehu Ali: Another good story, especially if you like exotic locales. This one is about the original 40-year-old virgin, a tea seller in Ghana. It is included in Ali’s recent collection, The Prophet of Zongo Street. Links: James Tata.April 18, “The Orlov-Sokolovs” by Ludmila Ulitskaya: I’ve had the impression for a while now that the New Yorker publishes a lot of stories by Russians, but perhaps it just seems this way because they loom so large on the page. This story is about a young couple that falls prey to Soviet bureaucracy. The story appears in Ulitskaya’s collection Sonechka.April 25, the only issue of the year with no fiction. Instead, a remembrance of Saul Bellow by Philip Roth.May 2, “Where I’m Likely to Find It” by Haruki Murakami: The first of three Murakami stories that appeared in the New Yorker (Yes, he does get in there a lot.) In this one, we have a typically-Murakami detached narrator who investigates missing people, but, this being Murakami, it’s not a typical mystery story. Murakami has a book coming out this year called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Links: Earthgoat.May 9, “Along the Highways” by Nick Arvin: A sad fellow named Graham follows his brother’s widow and some guy named Doug as they drive out of Detroit for a weekend getaway. Graham does this out of jealousy and a misplaced protective instinct. It does not end well for him. Arvin’s debut novel, Articles of War, came out in 2005. Links: Earthgoat.May 16, “The Room” by William Trevor: The second of three Trevor stories in the New Yorker this year (Yes, he gets in there a lot, too.) Another gray story, but, of course, well-crafted. It’s about a woman who covered for her murderer husband and is now admitting everything to her the man she’s cheating on the murderer with. It sounds more thriller-like than it is. Links: Earthgoat.May 23, “Two’s Company” by Jonathan Franzen: Franzen goes Hollywood in this tight little story about a screenwriting couple that battles over a script that celebrates monogamy. There’s no Franzen fiction in the pipeline that I’m aware of, so if you haven’t read it already, ignore the hype and read The Corrections. It’s that good. Links: James Tata.May 30, “The Russian Riviera” by David Bezmozgis: This is a great story. One that I still remember well more than six months after I read it. There’s something about boxers. It seems they’re always getting suckered when all they want is a shot at the big time, like in a favorite movie of mine, On the Waterfront. Bezmozgis received much praise for his debut collection, Natasha. Links: Earthgoat.June 6 “A Mouthful of Cut Glass” by Tessa Hadley: Normally, I dislike Hadley’s stories, but this one stands out as better than the others I’ve read. It’s about being young and in love and the tendency that those so afflicted have to romanticize their partners. No false notes in this story. Hadley’s most recent book is Everything Will Be All Right. Links: Simply Wait, Earthgoat.June 13 & 20. Then came the Debut Fiction issue in which three stories appeared, “An Ex-Mas Feast” by Uwem Akpan, “The Laser Age” by Justin Tussing and “Haunting Olivia” by Karen Russell. I discussed the issue here. My favorite was the Akpan for its exotic setting. I was also impressed to learn that Russell was just 23. Of the three, only Tussing has a book on the way, The Best People in the World.June 27, “The Blow” by J.M. Coetzee (not available online): This novel excerpt (from Slow Man) is about an elderly amputee who, after at first resenting his caretaker, allows himself to be fatherly to her son. Good, but too long. I wish the New Yorker would do away with these novel excerpts. They’re not really short stories. Links: Conversational Reading, Earthgoat.July 4, “Ashes” by Cristina Henriquez: This story is set in Panama City and it’s about a young woman whose mother dies. Her family is already in tatters so it’s up to her to try to keep everything together. Henriquez’s debut collection, Come Together, Fall Apart comes out this year. Links: Simply Wait.July 11 & 18, “Long-Distance Client” by Allegra Goodman: This, I think, was my favorite story in the New Yorker this year. In it, Mel, the oldest employee at a tech start-up, bewildered by his coworkers, finds himself misaligned and in severe pain. He goes to an odd sort of chiropractor, Bobby, who, when not giving Mel the runaround, is able to straighten him out. But Bobby claims to have a client that he treats over the phone, and the truth behind Bobby’s claim becomes the quirky question at the heart of this story. Goodman has a new novel coming out soon, Intuition. Links: Earthgoat.July 25, “Awaiting Orders” by Tobias Wolff: The masterful Wolff puts together a brief story that deftly circles the topic of gays in the military. It’s funny that now that we’re at war, the once popular gays in the military controversy is old, old news, and, somehow, without being obvious, Wolff manages to highlight that irony. Wolff’s most recent book is Old School. Links: Earthgoat.August 1, “Commcomm” by George Saunders: There’s no one writing like George Saunders. “Commcomm” is too weird to briefly summarize, but in typical Saunders fashion, he places us in an alternate and oddly terrifying universe where people talk like zombies yet somehow remind us of people we interact with every day. “Commcomm” includes an element I’d never seen before in a Saunders story: ghosts. Saunders’ new collection, In Persuasion Nation will come out this summer. Links: standBy Bert (featuring an appearance by Saunders in the comments), Earthgoat.August 8 & 15, “Gomez Palacio” by Roberto Bolano (Not available online): A somewhat oblique story, this one is about a young man teaching in Gomez Palacio. Both he and the director of the school are poets and they’re a little odd. They go for a long drive together. That’s about all that happens. A new book by Bolano is coming out this year: The Last Evenings on Earth. Links: Earthgoat.August 22, “Thicker Than Water” by Gina Ochsner: This story is about a Latvian girl who lives across the street from a family of Jews. Latvia being what it is I suppose, her parents are suspicious of these people, but she is fascinated by them. In the end, there is an ill-fated chess tournament. Ochsner’s most recent book is People I Wanted to Be. Links: Earthgoat. August 29, “The View from Castle Rock” by Alice Munro: An unusual setting for a Munroe story – a ship heading for Canada in 1818. I like Munroe’s stories generally and this one is no exception, though the drama at the center of this long story – a young man who meets a well off father and daughter who tantalizingly offer to lift him from his poorer circumstances so that he must choose between his family and the promise of a better life – it’s a bit trite. Munro’s most recent collection is Runaway. Links: literarylover, mike.whybark.com, Earthgoat.September 5, “Club Des Amis” by Tony D’Souza: Mr. Wu, who lies at the center of this story, is a Chinese man in Africa. The narrator is a Western aid worker, and he relates how Wu’s son “went native” and died in the bush and now Wu is trying to be a distant benefactor to the son his son had with a native woman. I’m a fan of exotic locales, so I liked this one. This story appears to be an excerpt from D’Souza’s forthcoming novel, Whiteman.September 12, “Coping Stones” by Ann Beattie: A very good story that asks how well do we really know the people we think we know. A widower, Dr. Cahill, rents a house on his property to a young man, Matt, who he treats as a son, but one day the authorities come looking for Matt. Beattie’s most recent collection of stories is Follies.September 19, “Cowboy” by Thomas McGuane: This story is about An old cowboy who hires a young cowboy to work with him. Both exist under the watchful eye of the old cowboy’s sister, who eventually dies. I think this story is about friendship, really, one that grows slowly over many years. This story will appear in McGuane’s collection, Gallatin Canyon. Links: Literarylover.September 26, “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day” by Haruki Murakami: What if you knew in advance that you would only love three women (or men) in your life? Would you worry, with each new person you met, whether he or she was one of three. This is Junpei’s problem and it makes relationships pretty tough for him. Links: shake it off.October 3, “Companion” by Sana Krasikov: I enjoyed this story. Ilona, thrice divorced we quickly learn, is living with Earl, a man much her senior, not because she is “with” him but because she is in financial straits and he has offered her a room. This makes pursuing her love life difficult and all of her friends somewhat snidely assume Ilona and Earl are together. Earl’s family meanwhile is quite suspicious of her. I like the desperation in this story. A sample description: “The air was stale with the yeasty scent of bread.”October 10, “Early Music” by Jeffrey Eugenides: Another story of desperation. Rodney just wants to play “early music” on his clavichord, but he and his wife Rebecca are in serious debt. She is trying to make ends meet with her ridiculous invention, Mice ‘n’ Warm. His precious clavichord on the verge of being repossessed, Rodney watches his life’s dream slipping away. Eugenides’ most recent book is Middlesex.October 17, “Path Lights” by Tom Drury: A bottle falls out of the sky – no, it’s not The Gods Must Be Crazy – and almost hits Bobby. He becomes obsessed with this bottle, Blind Street Ale, and eventually tracks down the bottle-thrower, but it’s awkward. This story may be an excerpt from Drury’s forthcoming novel, Driftless Area. Links: Short Story Craft.October 24, “Summer Crossing” by Truman Capote (not available online): This is an excerpt from a long-lost, recently found Capote novel. The story is well-crafted, if a bit formulaic. Rich girl gets mixed up with tough guy who she thinks she can “save.” You can tell that Capote wrote this when he was young – he was only 19 – but still, his talent is evident. Links: Earthgoat.October 31, “The Children” by William Trevor: Another Trevor story, the final one of the year, and he uses the same palate we’re used to, the scrubby Irish countryside. Young Connie and her father Robert suffer the death of a mother and wife and when he decides to marry the mother of Connie’s friend, we think all might be well, but as Robert new wife Theresa discovers, “nothing was as tidy as she’d imagined.”November 7, “God of War” by Marisa Silver: A daring choice of main character, the troubled child Ares, is at the heart of this story. Set near the desolate Salton Sea, this story covers Ares’ relationship with his brother Malcolm, whose inability to speak Ares may have caused, thus dooming them both. Silver’s most recent book is No Direction Home. Links: Wuff.November 14, “The Best Year of My Life” by Paul Theroux: A young man and woman are in love but nonetheless, she is pregnant with his baby. To escape scrutiny (the story is set in an earlier time), they hide out in Puerto Rico, where they are miserable, but somehow find the experience heartening. If there’s anything I enjoy as much as stories with exotic locales, it’s stories in which the protagonists travel. Theroux’s most recent book is Blinding Light. Links: Short Story CraftNovember 21, “The Year of Spaghetti” by Haruki Murakami: One of the weakest stories to appear in the New Yorker this year. Murakami brings us a guy who eats a lot of spaghetti, then a girl calls looking for an old friend of his, the narrator demurs and returns to cooking spaghetti. That’s about the extent of it. Murakami has a book coming out this year called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Links: Earthgoat, Short Story Craft.November 28, “Love and Obstacles” by Aleksandar Hemon: I loved this story; exotic locale,traveling, etc. An adolescent Croatian (I think) narrator is sent by his family to buy a freezer in Slovenia. Desperate for adventure, he treats this errand as though he were a wandering poet, but he turns out to be more bumbling than anything else. Funny and poignant. Hemon’s written a novel, Nowhere Man, and a collection of stories, The Question of Bruno. Links: Short Story Craft, The Glory of Carniola.December 5, “Wenlock Edge” by Alice Munro: This was one of my favorite stories of the year. It starts out very predictably before taking a deliciously strange turn. I won’t ruin it for you, but basically our narrator gets thrown in with an oddball roommate in college, and this roommate lures her into some odd situations. Munro’s most recent collection is Runaway. Links: Short Story Craft.December 12, “La Conchita” by T.C. Boyle: Boyle, a California resident, loves to make use of his home state’s frequent natural disasters in his fiction. In this story, we’re dealing with mudslides, which impede the route of the narrator who is delivering a kidney for transplantation. He is on a journey to save a life but he stops on the way to try to save another. Boyle has a book coming out this year called Talk Talk.December 19, “Twenty Grand” by Rebecca Curtis: A pretty good story. A harried young mother is forced to give away an old coin – a family heirloom – at a toll booth, only later discovering the coin’s real value. The story is told from the perspective of the young daughter. Links: Short Story CraftDecember 26 & January 2, The year ended with the International Fiction Issue. It contains five stories. In lieu of descriptions, I’ll rank them in order of my favorite to least favorite and provide links when available. “Last Evenings on Earth” by Roberto Bolano, “The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman” by Ismail Kadare, “Beauty is a Fate Better Than Death” by Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Pregnancy Diary” by Yoko Ogawa, “The Word” by Vladimir Nabokov. Links: Literary Saloon.If you want to keep up with the fiction next year, you can always subscribe.

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| 15 books mentioned 7 12 min read
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28 comments:

  1. Thoughtful and insightful post. Those Adamses were consistently amazing, though not so easy to like. I’ve always had a weakness for Zachary Taylor, particularly since I learned that Ulysses Grant modeled his military leadership on Taylor’s.

  2. Great post. The part about being the kind woman Josh Lyman would want to date made me laugh out loud. I think I want to be that kind of woman too! But I aspire to be smarter than Donna! You mentioned who your favorite president is so far. What has been the best-written, most interesting book of what you have read? (Not sure if that is mutually exclusive.) Please keep us posted on how your project comes along. I would love to hear an update in a few months.

  3. Hi, this is great. How do you chose which biography to read? For some of these men there will be many to chose from. Also, please add later posts with the books you’ve chosen – I’d love to keep track.

  5. Thanks for your questions, I’m glad you liked the essay.

    The best written and most interesting biography so far has been John Adams by David McCullough, which shouldn’t be a big surprise. McCullough is as much a novelist as a historian, and he provided the most atmosphere and personality. I’m excited that I have his Truman biography to look forward to.

    However, Ralph Ketcham’s biography of James Madison was the most valuable to me in understanding American government, because Madison had the final say in constructing it. There are great stories of later presidents who, when faced with a question of whether or not something was constitutional, simply went and asked Madison, its author.

    It’s a great day when I get to choose between possible biographies. Many of the early presidents only have one or two biographies still in print, if that. When there are several to choose from – as was the case with Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson – I go for the best combination of scholarship, reputation, and length. If you know you want to read a well-respected book, and you’re willing to read between 400 and 600 pages, that normally narrows it down to 3 or 4. After that I read reviews of the candidates or, better yet, ask a good bookseller.

    I may write more for The Millions on the presidents at some point, but you can also follow the project’s blog at http://attimesdull.blogspot.com

  6. What an outstanding, ORIGINAL idea! I’m going to follow in your footsteps. How do you select which biography to read?

    I can’t argue with your selection of JQA, but before your ideas I wrote a blog post offering Grover Cleveland as my favorite President.

    I’m officially a fan of yours!

  7. I was speaking with a group of high-schoolers recently, and was shocked to hear about their US History curriculum. It essentially ignored everything prior to the Revolutionary War, then allotted an astonishingly skimpy amount of coverage to the first one hundred thirty-some years of “official” American history before plunging into a decade-by-decade exploration of the twentieth century. I mean, can we give our high-schoolers a little more historical context please? Sheesh…

    Anyway, back to your post: thank you for demonstrating how one can break out of the box of common US history knowledge by exploring it on their own, and in such a creative yet systematic way. I wonder if your system could be applied to other areas of American history. A ‘biography’ of each of the fifty states? Each decade?

  8. I am doing this too! I’m currently about 3/4 of the way through the Nagel biography of JQA. I don’t know that I would have liked Adams if I encountered him, but I also see so much of myself in him. He’s really an interesting character.

    I’m really looking forward to TR and Jimmy Carter (I’m young enough that I was born soon after Carter left office).

    Will you be reading any presidential autobiographies?

    I look forward to reading more of your reflections on your blog.

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  10. I love you and your brilliance Janet Potter! You make me want to follow your footsteps and pick up a biography

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  12. I think it is a great idea to read about all of the presidents and how they affected America in their time. America is like it is today because of each and every one of them. We can lean a lot from their life and the experiences they had.
    I think the presidents today are nothing like the presidents we had in the past. Number one, the effect the media has today on what the president says in amazing. Everyone wants to look good to the world and society. However when it comes to a person like the president its a hundred times worse. They are thinking at all times about how they appear and what people are thinking about them. I can’t ruin my reputation. It all turns in to arrogance and they don’t put the nation and their people first. We have a democracy and the people govern America however, sometimes I think that it ends up being governed by the presidents’ reputation and not always on what is the best for the people.
    This problem that we have can be changed if worked on. The presidents today can learn a lot from the presidents of the past.

  13. What a great idea for a project, and a fascinating post on your progress. As a non-American, I have possibly even less idea about those “lesser” names. There seems to have been an extraordinary range of characters and abilities occupying the Oval office in the 19th century, from the highest calibre to people who you wonder how they could have achieved such a level.

    Certainly a great way to understand your country’s history and politics. Like other commenters, I’m inspired by your approach to try something similar myself. Thanks!

  14. Well done! I’m glad that you’re framing the experience through overall events, since it’s not like the president was always the most powerful person in the country.

    I’m also not surprised at the Adams choice with the exception of the differences in your (probable) politics. Now, to see how you react to a Chester Arthur (hack to incredibly honorable person, lowbrow to highbrow, no power to, well, some power and some success).

  15. Funny you should mention this. I recently worked out an itinerary taking in all the presidential birthplaces, starting in Quincy, Mass and ending in Yorba Linda, CA (after which I guess one could board a plain to Hawaii). Not sure why I felt compelled to do this – no idea whether I’ll ever actually go on the trip (certainly not while I have small kids and limited vacation time) – just a daydream, and a chance to learn obscure but telling facts about where these guys came from.

    Maybe many of us are suddenly interested in the presidency because, for the first time in our lives, we aren’t embarrassed by the incumbent?

  16. anyone who says Abraham Lincoln’s legacy is exaggerated has never spent seventeen months reading about antebellum politicians.

    This is very, very true. That said, I’ve always admired Polk, and Crapol’s John Tyler biography was surprisingly interesting.

    Did you consider reading George Pendle’s The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President for your Fillmore biography? It’s pretty good, and more accurate than you might think given that he’s shown on the cover riding a unicorn.

  17. You immediately won my heart and abiding support for this project by admitting to your love of Sorkin and wanting to be Josh Lyman’s girlfriend. Even *I* want to be Josh Lyman’s girlfriend. And I’m a dude.

    Fantastic project, envious of your focus and concentration. I’d love to do this someday. Keep us up to date!

  18. My wife passed this link to me. I too started this project last year.

    I am a naturalized US citizen. I became a sparkling new American last year and although I have a reasonably good grip on the big events in history of my new country, I wanted to get a much more in-depth perspective on how the US has become the country it is today. While there are many history books I could read (and I have read a few), I thought it would be interesting to read about the Presidents, to get a feel for the issues of their day that have gone on to shape the nation.

    I started with Ron Chernow’s great biography of Washington that was published in just the past year or so. At 900 pages it is long, but he has kept it interesting and the chapters are all about 10 to 14 pages long which is a perfect length to read each night before bed. I have decided to take a slight deviation to read Chernow’s biography of Aleaxander Hamilton, and I’m also on the look out for a good biography of Benjamin Franklin. Although neither of these men served as President, I think they were very influential in the forming of the early US Government and its policies.

    Beyond that I am looking forward to McCollough’s books on Adams and Truman. I have read a few of his books and love his writing style. Thanks for posting the books you read. I’ll need your list for good suggestions on some of those lesser written about Presidents.

  19. Thrilling stuff…! I was a presidential nerd as an elementary schooler, and have carried this torch ever since. The specific focus on a case-by-case understanding is a laudatory endeavor. Can’t hardly wait for the Taft/Bush narrative, the Harding intrigues and the Roosevelt saga. Presidentia rocks!

  20. I was so pleased to see that Janet and I share a
    favorite in David McCollough’s John Adams. It
    may be impossible to choose a favorite President
    – they are such a varied group. I love Alexander
    Hamilton for a lot of reasons. Though he did
    not run for President I always think of him as
    a NY superstar. Great series. More of the
    same, please.

  21. Pingback: The greatness of John Quincy Adams

  22. Thank you, Janet, for this wonderful essay – so original, insightful and enlightening. I’ve got some good news for you. You’re in for a treat when you get to the president who makes Millard Fillmore look positively memorable. I’m talking of course about Gerald Ford, who, as you’ll soon learn. was born Leslie King Jr. in Omaha, Neb., where his mother fled from her abusive husband and took her infant son to Grand Rapids, Mich. There she married a solid citizen named Gerald Ford Sr., who treated the boy like own son. It’s positively biblical, and I predict you’ll find yourself thinking about Moses in that basket beside the Nile. Much later, you’ll think back to those antebellum presidents who spent their time in office scrambling, as you put it, “to keep the country together by any means possible.” Sometimes, on the eve of a calamitous war or in the aftermath of a national trauma, that scrambling can be a memorable achievement in itself. Please give us more as you read your way through the rest of the presidents – especially the ones whose faces will never appear on money. Again, many thanks.
    Bill Morris

  24. Great idea. In fact I’m doing the same thing myself. Just finished a biography of John Tyler. I’m currently in the middle of Henry Clay: The Essential American. I’ve decided to add bios of non-presidential statesmen, as well as general histories of the period. Walker Daniel Howe’s What Hath God Wrought has been my favorite of those thus far.

  25. Pingback: First, Some Reference Links « SR20Pilot

  26. Just wondering – and maybe I missed it here somewhere – about your choice of each biography. How did you choose each one, and when did you do so – overall in advance, along the way, or only choosing each one in sequence as you’ve concluded the prior one? Have you ever begun a biography, then changed to a different one (and if so, why?). I find this a fascinating process and did something years ago – but for some odd reason I read two at a time, starting with Washington AND the incumbent, then reading toward the middle. Made no sense and I’ve decided to begin again – in order this time. Just curious about the process and administration of building a reading list.

  27. Hi, I am reading Killing Kennedy and got to thinking that I don’t know very many details about the past presidents. Then I thought I would like to read a good biography about every president. So I googled good authors for biographies of U.S. presidents and I would your website. Do you think the biographies you chose so far are good? How did you decide what book to read. Since there are so many books out there.

  28. Pingback: “We are the Mediocre Presidents” | Fatherhood Etc.

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Outside the Neighborhood: Reading Italy Through Elena Ferrante

Lists
February 19, 2015 | 15 books mentioned 7 6 min read

1.
Near the beginning of My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante’s series of novels about a complicated friendship between two women from the slums of Naples, the girls, then in elementary school, play hooky and sneak out of “the neighborhood,” their claustrophobic network of courtyards and stairwells filled with violence and poverty. Lenú and Lila aim for the sea. Though Naples is a port city, neither of them has seen the “vague bluish memory” of water. After hours of walking, Lila becomes suddenly afraid and turns them back, while Lenú, usually the timid one, discovers that distance “extinguished in me every tie and every worry.”

The Neopolitan Novels, as they are known, expand this dynamic tension between the pull of Naples, the city, and the expansion of the girls’ consciousness as Italy enters the modern era. This is a story of self-realization alongside the self-realization of a nation. Acutely sensitive to the workings of class and power, Ferrante subtly works in black market war profiteers, fascist collaborators, mafiosi, the workers’ movements and radical terrorism of the 1960s and ’70s, and the arrival of wealth and consumer goods to Italy’s new middle class. Ferrante attaches the story of Lenú and Lila to the history of postwar Italy in a way that never feels contrived.

That’s also the history of feminism in Italy, a story that remains unfinished. Lenú escapes the confines of the neighborhood thanks to her book smarts, but remains tethered to Lila, and to the alienation and difficulty that makes “the form of a female body break.” The burden of the physical, the invisible work that makes up women’s lives, is a recurring theme in Ferrante. Radical Italian feminists once proposed wages for housework, but Ferrante is writing, after all, in the Italy where Silvio Berlusconi hosts bunga bunga parties with underage girls, and jokes that to prevent rape, the country needs “as many soldiers as there are beautiful Italian women.” In Ferrante’s early novel The Days of Abandonment, set in contemporary Italy, the protagonist has a breakdown trapped in her apartment. Her children whine and one falls ill; it’s unnervingly possible she may ignore them entirely. She mentally runs through her chores to calm herself. “The vomit stained sheets. Run the vacuum.” “Housecleaning,” is the last word of the chapter, sinking like a sentence.

I wonder if, for the American reader, part of Ferrante’s appeal is that her Italy — with its complicated women and its political history — is an antidote to popular destination literature and visions of expat romance like Eat, Pray, Love, Under the Tuscan Sun, or Beautiful Ruins. The next and final installment of the Neapolitan novels, which have become a surprise hit in the U.S., will be brought out in English this year (her website says only that an as yet untitled fourth volume in the series will be published in September 2015). In the meantime, here are a few suggestions for those hungering for more of Ferrante’s dark Naples and Italian feminist heroines.

2.
A History of Contemporary Italy
Ferrante’s heroines, Lenú and Lila, are born in Naples in 1944, at the very end of World War II. In September 1943, American troops landed south of Naples and marched up the peninsula after the Germans, who retreated looting and killing along the way. Italy — a country then less than a century old — soon found itself “with national state authority having dissolved, two occupying armies and three Italian governments…claimed the obedience and allegiance of the Italians,” writes Paul Ginsborg in History of Contemporary Italy, an exhaustive accounting of Italian politics from the war to the 1980s, paying special attention the position of Italy’s poorest, in the South.

Naples, with over one million inhabitants, was devastated and impoverished by the war. Sewers and water systems barely functioned, Allied bombing left 200,000 homeless, and the black market commandeered what little supplies existed. Ginsborg quotes an Allied report describing “many hundreds of urchins” roaming the streets, “pimping, prostitution of minors, acting as ‘fences’ for stolen goods, etc.,” and “little girls ill and pregnant, at thirteen and even twelve years of age.” Even as Italy experienced enormous economic growth in the 20th century, the South continued to lag stubbornly behind, remaining until today the poorest part of Italy. Ginsborg also explains the consolidation of the reign of the mafia, romanticized in American mob movies and exposed as very real in Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s account of the mafia wars of the early 2000s. The children that Saviano finds fed into the Camorra’s violent underworld are modern-day remnants of the destitution that has long characterized Naples: the city’s reputation is still dirty, difficult, and dangerous.

The Skin
In the spring of 1944, Mount Vesuvius erupted violently. American troops captured footage of villagers on the outskirts of Naples preparing to evacuate, holding a religious procession before billowing ash filled the streets and smashed their homes. It must have seemed like the end of the world.

This is the dark setting of The Skin, a novel by Curzio Malaparte, a former fascist and political shapeshifter, perhaps better known now for his pink modernist villa on the rocks of Capri, where Bridgitte Bardot sunbathes nude in Contempt. The book’s narrator is an Italian Army captain also named Malaparte who has been assigned to escort occupying American officers around the “dreadful Neopolitan mob.” (The novelist, born Kurt Suckert, invented his name, which means “the bad part,” the opposite of Bonaparte.) Dressed in the bullet torn uniforms of dead Allied soldiers, Malaparte and his troops now have “to show ourselves worthy of the shame of Italy,” a people simultaneously liberated and conquered. Malaparte’s Naples is lurid and apocalyptic. He applies caustic humor equally across the decaying pretensions of European aristocrats, the naïve crowds cheering the arrival of U.S. troops, and the dangerously blithe good faith of the Americans. Misogyny abounds: the only women are prostitutes and Nazi collaborators, easy metaphors for Italy’s prone postwar position.

But Malaparte’s chilling prose and bantering wit animate the most surreal horrors of postwar deprivation. The book’s finale is a frenzy at the summit of Vesuvius after its eruption, where supplicants pray and fling offerings into the volcano beneath the “blood-soaked sponge” of the moon. All the book’s cynicism rises to a sincere effort to make sense of the sacrifice the country made to war.

Discovery of the World
Luciana Castellina was 14 in 1943, when she began keeping a “political diary.” On the day it begins, she played tennis with the daughter of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The girl was called off the courts abruptly — her father had been turned out of government and arrested. Four years later, when her teenage journals end, Castellina has become a student radical and gone to volunteer building railroads in Communist Yugoslavia. Discovery of the World: A Political Awakening in the Shadow of Mussolini, is a memoir “reconstructed” from these diaries, so we get rather a lot of Castellina, now an elderly former politician and prominent figure on the Italian left, interrupting to explain her younger self. Nonetheless, the diary excerpts are charming. They begin with a dutiful student whose notebooks are marked with her fascist party membership number, to whom the war arrives as the sudden need to hide Jewish relatives, to smuggle rations, and to await the Allies while hiding from their air raids. Later, she learns about the resistance, becomes enmeshed in Communist politics and debates on modernist painting and the atom bomb. It was a historic intellectual moment, when fascism’s fall seemed to have created an opening for utopian political reforms. Though it may be hard to follow for someone unfamiliar with the history of the European left, there’s still something infectious and familiar in the adolescent excitement that declares, one day, “It’s two years since Rome was liberated. What have I learned? Almost nothing. My ideas are more confused than ever,” and on another, “I am happy with everything. The world is mine and I want everything.”

The Art of Joy
“The world is mine and I want everything” might be a motto for Modesta, the ironically named firebrand heroine of The Art of Joy, a novel by Goliarda Sapienza. Completed in 1976, the book didn’t find a publisher until decades later, saturated as it is with sex and blasphemy (one Italian critic called it “a pile of iniquity.”) If Ferrante elegantly weaves history through her protagonists’ lives, Sapienza’s Modesta drags the 20th century behind her by the hair. Born in 1900 in a peasant hut in Sicily, she rises through a mix of guile and happenstance to become the unorthodox matriarch of a prosperous family. Her purpose in life is the pursuit of pleasure and freedom from authority in any form: she battles Catholicism, fascism, Freudianism, and even the demands of lovers and children. She realizes very young in life “how many false concepts I had fallen victim to.” Self-educated in business, politics, and history, she determines to take up every word she encounters, “wipe away the mold, free them from the deposits of centuries of tradition, invent new ones, and above all discard and no longer use…the most corrupt ones, such as sublime, duty, tradition, self-denial, humility, soul.” The first half of Sapienza’s mammoth book is that breathless wreckage, as Modesta’s self emerges from an angry, eccentric, and impoverished child. Later, it sometimes lapses into didactic dialogue and tedious political exegeses. But the initial brilliance of the book is, as with Ferrante, in watching the formal evolution of the narrator’s voice from the sensual environs of childhood to a sharp awareness of herself and her place in history.

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 7 6 min read
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55 Thoughts for English Teachers

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May 27, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 31 6 min read

All of a sudden, I have been teaching public school English for a decade. Why am I surprised? I never thought I would be a high school teacher. I never took education courses. Only now am I beginning to reconcile my different professional selves: teacher, adjunct professor, and writer.

For years I avoided writing about my full-time profession. From 7:20 to 2:21 each day, I teach literature and creative writing courses at a large public high school in New Jersey. The day stretches much longer than that, but those are my salaried hours. I love kids, and I love books, and I love writing.

I didn’t avoid writing about teaching because I was ashamed of my profession, though I am aware that save for a handful of other teacher-writers scattered around the country, the majority of my literary peers work in higher education or publishing. They are tenured professors and adjuncts, editors and freelancers. When people learn at a book release or reading that I actually teach high school, as in kids, they look confused. I don’t blame them.

There are few professions more confusing, or misrepresented, than high school teaching. Education is a ubiquitous experience — public or private, we are all taught by someone, somewhere — and yet it remains misunderstood. I have now begun to write about teaching because I profoundly respect this vocation. I refuse to allow politicians to corner the rhetorical market on this subject. There are stories that need to be told.

I hesitate to call what follows “advice,” though it might seem as such. There are so many varied experiences during a single teaching day that I am much more comfortable thinking in epigrammatic terms. I have a lot more to say about teaching, and certain reflections will need to wait. But, for now, here are 55 thoughts about teaching English.

1.
You need to love words. You don’t need to love a certain type of book or a particular writer, but you need to love letters and phrases and the possibilities of language. You will spend most of your days dealing with words, and students can sense if words do not bring you joy.

2.
Students can sense a lot of things.

3.
Do not confuse reading passions with reading biases. Be aware and upfront about your biases and work to decrease them. Your passions are healthy, as long as you help students understand why certain words stir you. Love Gerard Manley Hopkins? Telling them so won’t do a thing. Blow-up “Pied Beauty” on an 11 X 17 page and show them how a comma can change a moment, turn a breath.

4.
Speaking of poetry: they will hate the idea of it, but they already love and live the soul of it. Condensed narratives and emotions tucked in abstractions? Those are their existences. Give them “Scary, No Scary” by Zachary Schomburg, and see what happens.

5.
“Mostly I want my poems to generate their own energy through confusion. I want my poems to confuse the reader. Not a confusion in a cognitive or narrative sense, but in an emotional sense.” — Zachary Schomburg

6.
Create a space for safe confusion.

7.
Teach Sylvia Plath, but help your students understand that she is more than how she passed from this world. Teach “Blackberrying,” teach “Pheasant,” and, most of all, teach “Sow,” that beautiful and strange poem about a mythical pig hidden by her breeder.

8.
Show them that poetry is about being surprised.

9.
Remember why you are doing this.

10.
Your students are not data.

11.
Teach them writers who look and sound like them, so that they can believe that their words are the types of words that can be printed and praised.

12.
Teach them writers who look and sound nothing like them, so that they can recognize what we share.

13.
Politicians will misrepresent you. Vote.

14.
Teachers used to be activists. There is a difference between being an activist within your classroom — which is not your role — and being an activist for your profession and your students.

15.
Know what opinions are appropriate to express, and which are not. Respect your students enough to never cross that line.

16.
Students have a reason for everything they do.

17.
You need to be awake. Sleep is essential. Hoard your hours of sleep.

18.
You will make a hundred decisions within a single class period.

19.
You need to somehow give your attention to each individual student without dividing that attention.

20.
Thomas Pynchon is worth teaching. Often confusion breeds later curiosity.

21.
Think about the worst teacher you ever had. Recognize that he or she was probably not as bad as you thought. Think about that teacher’s classroom, students, situation. Were you part of the problem? How would you have helped yourself?

22.
Write. Talk about your writing. Show them your drafts, your edits. Write along with them.

23.
Trade robotic peer editing for writing workshops. Follow the undergraduate model but manipulate it for the needs of your students. Establish clear guidelines and model them during a mock workshop of your own work. Show them that you can be vulnerable, that you can accept criticism.

24.
Never ask students to complete an assignment that you are unable to complete.

25.
You will often have young women in class who love to write, and who outnumber the men, and yet these young women will stop writing. Teach them to keep writing. Show them their words matter. Introduce them to Mary Shelley, Marilynne Robinson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Toni Morrison, Tayari Jones, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Alice Elliott Dark, Virginia Woolf, Stacey D’Erasmo, Roxane Gay, Jamie Quatro, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Mary Karr, Susan Sontag, Natalie Diaz, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, and, please, Flannery O’Connor.

26.
Do not try to sanitize Flannery. Let her live on the page.

27.
Students want to know about you. Sometimes their personal questions are a clever distraction. Be more mystery than memoir, but never be cold.

28.
If a student wants to engage in small talk at the start of class, they probably have not completed their assignment, and are hoping for some temporary graces. But don’t assume that.

29.
Give them the benefit of the doubt until they will no longer benefit from it.

30.
Avoid instructing your students to use dialogue tags in fiction other than “said.”

31.
Cut their adverbs, but show them how, in the right hands, those words can be powerful.

32.
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” — “The Dead” by James Joyce.

33.
You may be the only person who will ever read their sonnets, or their prose poems, or their dystopian novellas. Don’t take that privilege lightly.

34.
Teach writing from literary magazines. Encourage your students to read those magazines. If a student comes to class with tomes of speculative fiction, send them to Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons. Show them how literature is built from these little magazines on up, and how they can help maintain the foundation.

35.
Give students the confidence to believe that they might publish their work, but teach them the humility necessary to withstand rejection.

36.
Create meticulous plans for each day.

37.
But be alive in the classroom.

38.
“Through my years of teaching, I learned to walk into a classroom wondering what I would say, rather than knowing what I would say. Then I learned by hearing myself speak; the source of my speaking was our mysterious harmony with truths we know, though very often our knowledge of them is hidden from us. Now, as a retired teacher, I mistrust all prepared statements by anyone, and by me.” — Andre Dubus

39.
Social media and cell phones exist, and neither is going anywhere. Help students use both responsibly.

40.
Teaching is performance, but not the performance of theater; there needs to be genuine interaction. They can tell if you are putting on a show.

41.
Each course is a different world. Each class period is a different world.

42.
There is an art to asking questions. There is a way to ask questions that will only produce answers that you want to hear.

43.
Wait after asking a question. Help show them what silence can reveal.

44.
Math is language. Physics is language. Language is math. Language is physics.

45.
You are there to teach them, not punish them. They need your help.

46.
Read aloud. Every day.

47.
Don’t be so dramatic about drama. Barebones in-class productions can be beautiful.

48.
Of course, read Shakespeare, but also read Ionesco, Beckett, and Shepard.

49.
For the right group of students, No Exit can be perfect.

50.
Teach them how to closely read a text. Not only for the skill, but for the experience of spending time with words. Show them the worth of contemplation.

51.
Be pragmatic and idealistic. If you are too much of one, the students will catch you.

52.
This is not supposed to be easy.

53.
Remember that you, also, are not data.

54.
One day you will no longer be in the classroom. You will be standing in a garden or sitting in front of a television or holding the hand of a grandchild or pulling a plate from a dishwasher, and you will remember those rows and some of the faces. Try to remember none of the distractions; not the shortsighted pedagogical fads or the boorish politicians. Remember the students who thanked you. Trust that you helped the ones who did not.

55.
For some students, you are their only light.

Image via Jayel Aheram/Flickr

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| 15 books mentioned 31 6 min read
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The Most Anticipated Books of 2007

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January 2, 2007 | 15 books mentioned 18 8 min read

As I did in 2005 and 2006, I’ve decided to open this year looking ahead to some of the exciting or intriguing titles that we’ll be talking about over the next few months.Possibly the biggest literary arrival of this young year will be that of Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest later this month. Unfortunately for some fans, the book is not the long hoped for sequel to Harlot’s Ghost, a book that Mailer abandoned for this one, according to an interview. With this effort Mailer treads into charged territory, chronicling the early life of Adolf Hitler from the point of view of the devil or something like it. The curious can read an excerpt of the book that appeared in the January issue of Esquire.Also coming right around the corner is House of Meetings by Martin Amis. The book came out in the UK in September where John Banville in The Independent named it a “Book of the Year.” The reviews have been generally good. The Observer called it a “compact tour de force.” The Guardian was slightly more skeptical saying that the book is “an attempt to compress the past 60 years of Russian history into 200 pages, delivered as the monologue of someone whose name we’re never told; an ambitious plan, held together by the sound of a voice.”Also this month, Paul Auster’s latest book Travels in the Scriptorium comes out. It sounds like another inscrutable, postmodern tale from Auster, this time starring a protagonist named Mr. Blank. In this case, Auster’s inward looking tendencies are amplified as the book references many of his previous works. At both Condalmo and Strange Horizons, this particular Auster experiment has been deemed less successful.Louis Begley, author of About Schmidt, has Matters of Honor coming out this month. It starts with three unlikely roommates at Harvard in the 1950s and goes on to trace how the diverging outcomes of their lives came to be. If that sounds like a tired old tale, PW makes the same observation but then brushes it aside: “It’s a story covered by everyone from Cheever to Roth, but Begley finds new and wonderful nuances within it.”Colum McCann’s fourth novel Zoli will hit shelves soon. The book is named for a Roma (or Gypsy) woman in Slovakia who we follow from her harrowing childhood during World War II to her becoming something of local literary celebrity. Through it all, however, she is unable to escape what her heritage signifies in her Communist bloc country. The book has been out for several months in Ireland and the UK where The Guardian hailed McCann’s “near pitch-perfect control of character and narrative.” For those who want a taste, a pdf excerpt from the book is available.Another big name with a new book out this year is Jane Smiley, whose Ten Days in the Hills arrives in February. Hills is being billed as Smiley’s “LA Novel” (note that Jonathan Lethem’s “LA Novel” arrives in March). PW sums it all up rather well: “Smiley delivers a delightful, subtly observant sendup of Tinseltown folly, yet she treats her characters, their concern with compelling surfaces and their perpetual quest to capture reality through artifice, with warmth and seriousness. In their shallowness, she finds a kind of profundity.” On the other hand, I’m not convinced that the world needs another literary look at the Hollywood-caricature side of LA.February will also see the arrival of Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City Radio. This is Alarcon’s first novel, following his collection of stories, War by Candlelight, which was a finalist for the 2006 PEN Hemingway Award. Alarcon likely came to many readers’ attention in 2003, when his story “City of Clowns” was featured in the New Yorker debut fiction issue. This new book scored a blurb from Edward P. Jones – “Mr. Alarcon, like the best storytellers, reveals to us that the world we have secreted in our hearts spins in a bigger universe with other hearts just as good and just as bad as our own.” – always a good sign.Also in February, a new book will arrive from Nuruddin Farah, quite likely the best known Somali novelist and the winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998. Knots is about Cambara, a Somalian woman who has emigrated to Canada, where a crisis sends her on a journey back to Somalia. Farah is known for his strong female protagonists and this book appears to be no exception. Knots gets a glowing review from PW – “Despite its heavy subject, joy suffuses the novel” – and Farah will likely continue to be discussed as a potential Nobel winner.It would be strange to read a book by Jonathan Lethem that wasn’t deeply rooted in his hometown of Brooklyn, but readers will get that chance in March when You Don’t Love Me Yet arrives. The book is set in Los Angeles, but, while Fortress of Solitude had some amusing LA moments set in the office of a Hollywood agent, this new book concerns itself with the city’s grungier east side neighborhoods, home to a star-crossed indie rock band whose members are classic LA misfits. Early accounts at PW and this bookseller’s blog have found the book to be funny and entertaining but not up to par with the author’s earlier efforts.If you’ll indulge me in allowing a little non-fiction to sneak into this post, please note that William T. Vollmann has a new book coming out in March called Poor People, a rather slim tome, weighing in it at just 464 pages. This is the book that Vollmann mentioned when Ed and Scott saw him read back in spring 2005. From Scott’s post: “Vollman is currently working on a book about the experiences of poor people in different countries. He says he asks everyone why they think they are poor, and the answers greatly vary. He says most of the Thais told him it’s because they were bad in a previous life. Most of the Mexicans he spoke to told him it was because the rich stole from them.”A book by Columbian writer Laura Restrepo will hit American shores in March. Delirium was originally written in 2004 and follows the life of a struggling literature professor who must investigate what has caused his wife to go insane. The book bears an impressive array of blurbs befitting a writer of Restrepo’s stature (if not here, then overseas), including raves from Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harold Bloom, and Vikram Seth.We’ll also see a new novel from Kurt Andersen co-founder of the influential magazine Spy and host of the public radio show Studio 360. Heyday is set in the mid-19th century and it follows an immigrant, recently arrived on bustling American shores, who falls in with a group heading west, lured by the California Gold Rush. Random House calls the book “an enthralling, old-fashioned yarn interwoven with a bracingly modern novel of ideas.” A short story about two of the book’s main characters appeared in Metropolis in 2003.Debut novelist Joshua Ferris already has a backer in Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation, who says Then We Came To The End is “a humane and affecting book.” Mark also included the novel in his contribution to the Year in Reading series where he said that this “hilarious and gorgeously written novel might just change [his] mind about MFAs.” Of course, Mark is fully aware that we all might not share his particular tastes, so he convinced publisher Little, Brown to let him publish the book’s first chapter at TEV, where you can now check it out for yourself.Orange Prize winner Lionel Shriver also has a new book coming in March, The Post-Birthday World. PW describes as “impressive if exhausting” this novel that explores what might have been if its children’s book illustrator protagonist had given into temptation and pursued an affair. Following the success of Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and the subsequent re-release of her back catalog, The Post-Birthday World marks her first new effort since hitting the literary big time.The Savage Detectives, originally published in 1998 by the late Roberto Bolano, will arrive in April. The book has already appeared in other languages, which is how Francois of Tabula Rasa came to read it. he shared his reactions with us as a part of the Year in Reading series: “Pure bliss! In turn coming-of-age story, roman noir, literary quest, this is a real tour de force, reminiscent of Julio Cortazar and Jack Kerouac while remaining deeply original. Bolano passed away in 2003. He was fifty years old, and I just can’t help thinking about what else might have been coming from him.” New Directions, meanwhile, will publish a translation of Bolano’s novella Amulet in January.There’s not much available yet on Dani Shapiro’s new book arriving in April. Buzz Girl notes that Black and White is “about mothers and daughters set in New York and Maine.” The book follows Shapiro’s well received 2003 book Family History.The biggest literary month of 2007 might be May which will start with the much anticipated, much delayed publication of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Chabon’s first full-length adult novel since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a thriller set in an imaginary world inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s short-lived plan during WWII to create a Jewish homeland in Alaska, rather than the Middle East. Sounds interesting, no? We’ve been following this book for quite some time now, as it was originally set to be released nearly a year ago. But Chabon put the brakes on the project when he decided it was moving along too fast.Yet another big name author with a new book out this year is Haruki Murakami, whose book After Dark hits shelves in May. The book was originally published in Japan in 2004, and has already been translated into some other languages, including Dutch. In keeping with the title, the novel tracks a number of nocturnal characters who dwell in Tokyo and have the sorts of encounters that tend to occur in the wee hours of the morning. Murakami’s typical melding of dream and reality will be familiar to readers of this new novel as well. Still, I join Scott Esposito in hoping that Murakami breaks new ground with this new book.Also in May: the arrival of Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. Not much available on this one yet, save a stray synopsis or two. The novel begins with a family on a farm in northern California in the 1970s and moves to the casinos of Nevada, at which point a “traumatic event” breaks the family apart. The pieces are put back together in the novel’s second part, which takes place “in the stark landscape of south-central France.” Like I said, not much to go on just yet.Susanna Moore, best known for her novel In the Cut, has a new book coming out in May. The Big Girls is based on Moore’s experience teaching writing in a federal prison in New York, and one early look at the novel found it to be, as one might expect, fairly disturbing. It’ll be interesting to see other opinions of what sounds like a very emotionally charged book.The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins will arrive in June. Wiggins’ last book, Evidence of Things Unseen, was a National Book Award finalist in 2003. This new book is a historical novel about the Old West photographer Edward Curtis.I’ll close the list with two additional non-fiction books that I’m particularly looking forward to. Pete Dexter has a collection of his old newspaper columns coming out called Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage. A number of the columns are from his time in Philadelphia, which should be of particular interest for me, since the city is now my home. In addition, I’ve always felt that the old school newspaperman’s sensibility that Dexter brings to his fiction is one of his most appealing qualities as a writer, so I’m looking forward to getting the opportunity to delve into the pure stuff, as it were. Another journalist whose new collection is, for me, hotly anticipated is Ryszard Kapuscinski. Kapuscinski is a Polish writer who, to me, is unsurpassed in his chronicling of the so-called Third World and its forgotten wars and struggles. I don’t yet know what his latest, Travels with Herodotus, will cover, but I know I’ll be reading it.While long, this list is by no means exhaustive, so please use the comments to share what you’re looking forward to reading in 2007.

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| 15 books mentioned 18 8 min read
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