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.

Essays Lists

Recovery in Pieces: A Study of the Literature of 9/11

Essays Lists
September 10, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 15 7 min read

Actually, I am sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny, scared out of my mind like everybody else, smoking a family-sized pouch of Golden Virginia.

–Zadie Smith, “This is how it feels to me,” in The Guardian, October 13, 2001.
If you want to read the Greatest Work of 9/11 Literature, the consensus is: keep waiting. It will be a long time before someone writes it.

We don’t know what it will look like. It could be the Moby Dick of the Twenty-First Century, or maybe a new Gatsby, but more likely it will be neither. Maybe it won’t be a novel at all. It could be a sweeping history (maybe) of New York at the turn of the Millennium and of America on the precipice of total economic implosion (or not). We will read it on our iPad34 (or maybe by then Amazon will beam narratives directly into our brain for $1.99). One thing that seems certain is that no one has yet written that book. Not DeLillo (too sterile), Safran Foer (too cloying), Hamid (too severe), Messud (too prissy), O’Neill (too realist), Spiegelman (too panicked), Eisenberg (too cryptic) or the 9/11 Commission (too thorough).

The idea is that it will take time to determine what — if any — single piece of literature best captures the events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath. We can name any number of reasons why authors seem to have underwhelmed us during the past decade. Perhaps they suffered from an extended period of crippling fear of the kind Zadie Smith described just weeks after the attacks. Literary production can tend to feel superfluous in the aftermath of large loss of life. Or perhaps it’s our persistent closeness to the events. We’re still only a decade out, despite the sense that we’ve been waiting in airport security lines for an eternity. (By comparison, Heller wrote Catch-22 almost 20 years after Pearl Harbor; War and Peace wasn’t finished until 50 years after France’s invasion of Russia; and I think the jury may still be out on who wrote the definitive work on Vietnam). We can’t blame earnest authors for trying. It just wasn’t long enough ago yet.

None of this stops critics from trying to figure out the best 9/11 book so far.

We gather books about 9/11 (and some would go as far as to make the hyperbolic-somewhat-tongue-in-cheek claim “they’re all post-9/11 books now”) into a single pile and determine who has best distilled the essence of terrorism’s various traumatic effects on our national psyche and our ordinary life. On one hand, it seems plausible to blame this tic on our collective reduced attention spans and expectations for rapid literary responses to cultural and historical events. Or more simply: we want our book and we want it now. On the other hand, the imperative to produce a 9/11 book became a kind of authorly compulsion — a new way to justify the craft of writing to an audience whose numbers always seem to be inexorably marching toward zero. Amid conversations about “the death of the novel” (and we often fail to remember that these discussions were robust and ominous-sounding back in 2001 too), 9/11 provided a renewed opportunity for books to become culturally relevant. Fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction — the whole lot. Any literary rendering of the post-9/11 world would be preferable to the unmediated reality of it. Or more simply: writers could come to the rescue of a traumatized public. Or even more simply: why shouldn’t it have been writing that could have soothed us and given us some kind of answers?

Whether these considerations will eventually vindicate the authors who tried to translate 9/11 into literature just a few raw years after the fact, we can’t say. My contention is simply that, for now, they shouldn’t be so universally panned for trying. In the meantime, perhaps this decade anniversary isn’t an opportunity to determine who’s written the best book so far, but rather to reconsider accepted notions about what constitutes the Literature of 9/11 in the first place. The books we have written and read since 2001 tell us more about ourselves than about the capacity of literature to encompass the consequences of an event like these terrorist attacks. Rather than rank these books, we should fit them into categories that allow us to consider why we turn to literature in the aftermath of a traumatic event. We can more usefully ask ourselves “Why read?” and think about why this particular historical moment produced such a rapid and rapidly evolving body of literature.

Here are some ideas to help get this conversation started. I don’t intend these bullet point-style assertions to be a decisive argument. Rather, I guess I’m just trying to figure out a way to group and regroup the books that have been on our collective radar for the past ten years.

1. To understand the post-9/11 world, we should look to the literature of the last moments before September 11, 2001.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was published on September 1, 2001. Concerned with biotech, the dot-com crash, and the erosion of middle class family life in millennial America, Franzen’s novel captures a vague sense of menace in the days immediately before 9/11. And, though she has become better known for A Visit from the Goon Squad (which mentions the World Trade Center, only briefly) Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me proves that fiction can often seem to predict the world just ahead of us. The events of the novel so uncannily represent the shadow presence of terrorism in the unseen spaces of American everyday life that Egan, who wrote the book entirely before 9/11, included an afterward to the novel in 2002. She writes: “Had Look at Me been a work-in-progress last fall, I would have had to receive the novel in light of what happened. Instead, it remains an imaginative artifact of a more innocent time.” This last line has always been problematic for me. Were we really that innocent before 9/11? Authors seemed totally capable of exposing the dread underlying the exuberance (rational or otherwise) at the close of the Millennium. I wonder to whether we’ll remember the pre-9/11 years as one of innocence or willful ignorance.

2. There is no single body of 9/11 Literature.

As I have mentioned, the tendency in the past decade has been to lump together all works of fiction about 9/11. As the number of works that deal directly and indirectly with the terrorist attacks has ballooned, the moniker “9/11 Literature” has become a dull catchall term used to describe too many types of books. Instead, we can try to make some distinctions to figure out more precisely what different kinds of books have done, and stop trying to judge them all by the same criteria. It can be helpful, for example, to distinguish between 9/11 Literature and Post-9/11 Literature. Whereas Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man pivot around the events of September 11, books like Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children suggest how the events and their effects can be pushed to the margins. Works of 9/11 Literature obsess about the intricate and far-reaching effects of 9/11 on the lives of characters, whereas Post-9/11 Literature emphasizes how individuals can move beyond the trauma of the attacks and allow ordinary life to resume its flow.

3. The literary response to 9/11 better helps us understand the longer-term psychological effects of terrorism on families, communities, and nations.

Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close help us understand how the effects of cultural trauma reach into future generations. They explore how we are all implicated into broader narratives of belonging to national and cultural heritages. Spiegelman had to publish the serial version of his comics in Germany because squeamish newspapers in America believed that his critiques of the Bush Administration would be poorly received at home. Likewise, Safran Foer’s novel was frequently criticized as playing on themes of grief and loss that seemed too fresh. As time passes, these criticisms fall away, and what we’re left with is a more subtle understanding of how — in the immediate aftermath of a cultural trauma — we must try to recover as individuals.

4. The relationship between The 9/11 Commission Report and The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation stands as one of the most compelling pairs of books to emerge in the past ten years — and neither one of these is a novel.

While I’d argue that no single works stands out as the definitive representation of the terrorist attacks, a reader could do no better to understand the attacks of September 11, 2001 than to devour the 9/11 Commission’s official report. To 9/11 truthers, it probably makes sense that the government would produce an eloquent and sophisticated rendering of the attacks, and the complicated histories of terrorism and American intelligence failures that led to them. But to the rest of us, it comes as a fascinating surprise — one that reveals the government’s investment in the production of a literary artifact of some serious depth and skilled sentence-making. The 9/11 Commission Report defies the expectation that a government document should be stodgy and defensive. Instead, it reveals — often in a tone that breaks its own rigid impartiality and becomes downright moving — the grating human oversights of regulators and the humanity of the terrorists themselves as they bumblingly tried to find a hiding place in America.

When read alongside Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon’s adaptation of the report, the two works become a breathtaking and genre-bending account of 9/11. Together, they are proof that an event like 9/11 can actually produce new artistic forms. The effort to describe and understand — to probe and render aesthetically — gives rise to new ways of thinking about the world. These are not novels, but they certainly rise to the level of literature, no matter how one decides to define it.

5. It’s time to start re-thinking the place of 9/11 in the landscape of American literary production.

It has become more apparent that 9/11 is moving to the background of our cultural consciousness. Its influence remains, but its effects have faded when compared to what seem like more pressing economic and political concerns. Books like Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes help us understand what this process of fading looks like. But to return to Franzen and Egan, no two books seem better suited to the moment after the post-9/11 moment than Freedom and A Visit from the Goon Squad. To understand how authors have begun to fill their blank screens with something other than images of the World Trade Center on fire, it’s hard to do better. Franzen tackles the Bush Administration while Egan projects into a future New York, in which the 9/11 memorial has become an old landmark in Lower Manhattan. Literature looks forward at the next moment — toward a space and time during which we will no longer use the term Post-9/11 to describe ourselves, if only because newer and more troubling problems will take its place.
* * *
I have left out many works and many ideas. Where are Joseph O’Neill and Ian McEwan? Where are Colum McCann and John Updike? I have left out (in the very last minute) Lorraine Adams, whose book Harbor absolutely changed the way I thought about post-9/11 America when I read it, even though it had little if anything to do with 9/11. All of this is just to say: the conversation should continue, and I think it will only get more interesting throughout the next decade.

 

Image credit: WarmSleepy/Flickr

Essays Lists
| 15 books mentioned 15 7 min read
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Lists

An Answer to a Frequently Asked Question

Lists
August 19, 2008 | 15 books mentioned 1

Lots of people I know seem to be going on vacation in the next few weeks, and not a few of them have asked me to recommend some books to tote along to the beach or woods. It has occurred to me that I get these requests quite often so I thought it might be a good idea to put some of my favorite books all in one place for easy access. So, if you are one of those people who might be interested in a book recommendation, check out the list I just made on Amazon.A few caveats: This list contains only books I have personally read (even though I have often been known to recommend books I haven’t read based on what I’ve been hearing from my trusted fellow readers). This list contains only fiction (I may do a non-fiction list at some point). These are just the books I came up with while sleepily sitting at my desk this morning; I’ll add to the list as I think of more books that I have liked (and in the future, as I read more). Enjoy!

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 1
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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.

  9. Pingback: Atlantis Crew Member in New Yorker – Atlantis Books

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

  11. Pingback: Presidential Biographies Reading Project « Atlanta Booklover's Blog

  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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The Amazon Alphabet: From Audio Books to Zoo

Lists
September 24, 2012 | 15 books mentioned 4 2 min read

You’ve probably noticed that Amazon, like many sites, employs an “auto-complete” feature on its search box. When you start typing in letters, it suggests things that begin with those letters. It’s probably safe to assume that it suggests the most frequently searched words, so, if we look at Amazon’s book section we can type in letters and discover, for each letter of the alphabet, the most popular searches on Amazon. Last time we did this, about a year and half ago, the results were fairly literary and 18 months before that, vampires reigned. This time around, Fifty Shades has ushered in an era of erotic-inflected popular fiction, and diet books and YA lit figure prominently as well. You might consider this exercise, the ABCs of Amazon, to be a peek into the reading habits of America and, like it or not, a primer for what’s popular in the world of books:

Audio Books
Bared to You (erotic fiction by Sylvia Day)
Cloud Atlas (by David Mitchell thanks to the upcoming feature film)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (the very popular children’s series by Jeff Kinney)
Eat to Live (a diet book)
Fifty Shades of Grey (The erotica that launched a publishing trend)
Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster)
Hunger Games (Replacing “Harry Potter” as the top “H” search in YA lit)
ISBN number search (funny because ISBNs work in the search box)
James Patterson
Kindle (no surprise here)
Lee Child
Michael Connelly
No Easy Day (The book about the bin Laden raid)
Organic Chemistry (A textbook search)
Psychology (More textbooks)
Quiet (a book about introverts by Susan Cain)
Rick Riordan
Stephen King
The Hunger Games
Unbroken (by Laura Hillenbrand)
Vince Flynn
Wheat Belly (a diet book)
X-Men
Yoga
Zoo by James Patterson

(Amazon has been known to personalize and regularly adjust its results, so your Amazon alphabet may vary.)

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 4 2 min read
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Lists

An Ode to Photocopies: 50 Versions

Lists
November 17, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 4 6 min read

1. I make too many copies.

2. When using even the best machines, including those newly serviced and primed, a double-sided job is a risk. I say prayers while the sheets are sucked through the feeder. Hail Mary, full of grace (the sheets disappear), the Lord is with thee (the originals reappear on the other side of the feeder, safe), blessed art thou among women (the copies begin to move through the machine’s hidden innards), and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus (the stapler engages), holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now (the first packet exits, secure), and at the hour of our death (more packets follow, until the first tray is out of paper, and the machine shifts, slowly, to the second tray), Amen.

3. I am a high school English teacher. I give my students books, but they can’t mark-up those bound pages. Yellow and pink Post-its flap from the sides, but after they finish an essay on Beloved, the notes are torn out, stacked, and tossed.

4. Except for that one student who arranged her notes for The Sun Also Rises so that her marks formed Ernest Hemingway’s face.

5. Which is a copy, itself.

6. I like the word “photocopy,” but not as much as the word “mimeograph.”

7. I have one prep period a day, which means 40 minutes to pause, drink water, but mostly make copies. I hog the machine. I teach AP literature and two levels of creative writing.

8. There are a lot of words worth sharing. Photocopies are my contribution to this literary communion.

9. We used to enter a personal code so that the district could track our copies. Teachers would leech off those who did not log-out. I will neither admit nor deny my own participation.

10. I pull a chair to the front of my classroom. Students open the door, and each day there are fresh copies piled, waiting to be plucked. They are an announcement: it is time for work.

11. “Do you have an extra copy of __________? I lost mine.” Yes. But I always keep two copies for my files. Siblings to be saved.

12. I tell my AP literature students that I might be the last English teacher they will ever have. If they score well on the exam, they will gain college credit and never again read about the “inscrutable house” of Elizabeth Bishop.

13. Which means I am not going down without a fight.

14. Or, without making copies.

15. One of my first summer jobs was destroying photocopies of courthouse records that had become computerized. I fed the sheets into an industrial shredder that chomped staples and clips as easily as paper.

16. Teachers often ask if they can put-in the next job, creating a chain of words that wheel through the overworked machine. It can handle that play in the morning, when tired students trudge to first period and tired teachers down coffee and tired bus drivers chat in the lobby. But come noon, that litany of literature slogs the machine, and it clunks to a stop.

17. Breaths are held.

18. The status screen lights up, red scattered among the machine’s skeleton. Someone takes a knee, opens the door, and performs mechanical surgery.

19. Recent copies: “Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?” by Thomas Pynchon (essay). “Antarctica” by James Hoch (poem). “The Visit” by Amanda Davis (story). “No One’s a Mystery” (pdf) by Elizabeth Tallent (story). “The Way It Has to Be” by Breece Pancake (story). “Stained Glass” by Charles Baxter (story). “Whaling out West” by Charles D’Ambrosio (essay). “Jacob and His Friends Work Out the Difference Between Post and Modern” by Jacob Paul (essay). “The Dinner” by Clarice Lispector (story). “Fiat Lux” by Traci Brimhall (poem). “Cameo” by Natasha Trethewey (poem).

20. Teachers from other departments drift to our building, their eyes wide, originals leaning from their hands. They want to use our machine. They want to know if we have staples.

21. Students expect packets to be stapled.

22. Students shouldn’t expect anything. They are cared for in high school, but that care will end, soon. I ease them off the care, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be very caring.

23. My desks are in rows. 5 copies of 5. Like formal verse, I find that the greatest freedom and eccentricity occurs within structure.

24. Other than creative works culled from books or PDFs, my handouts are homegrown, peppered with metafictive asides and references. Those phrases are buried within contextual information about William Faulkner’s Mississippi or sample annotations for “Out, Out” by Robert Frost. A smirk means they found it. A blank stare means they didn’t read, or they found it and are not amused.

25. Whether I mean to or not, my students copy my style of reading.

26. How could they not? They share the room with me for 180 days, 40 minutes a day.

27. But they are never the same as me. Each copy has a smudge, a misplaced staple, a loss of toner, the gain of individuality.

28. Copies for the next week are piled along a cabinet or tucked into plastic shelves.

29. Teaching is all about planning, along with the awareness that plans should often defer to realities. If I meant to talk about how Hemingway hid the subject of the conversation in “Hills Like White Elephants,” but if my students are speaking with passion and insight about the rhythm of the couple’s speech, do I stop them?

30. Photocopying is often a subversive act. I do not mean the breaking of copyright. Fair use is fair. I mean that before quick clicks from smartphone cameras, photocopies were ways of lifting pages from reference libraries and locked offices and spreading them into the outside world.

31. So every photocopy is a manipulation, a copy of a copy.

32. Of course I copy Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

33. “One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.”

34. Literature dies when it becomes the means toward the ends of absent politicians and distant state departments of educations. The role of the high school English teacher is also not to create a legion of English majors — God help us — but rather to pause a student’s hectic and harried day and get them thinking about words.

35. Their own words, and the words of others.

36. To get them thinking about auras.

37. Because one argument for literature that should find supporters in both conservative and progressive traditions is that the arrangement of beautiful words into beautiful shapes has intrinsic worth, and that artistic beauty can do something to the soul.

38. Something that might not be catalogued on a rubric, or on a standardized exam.

39. Both of which, ultimately, exit a copy machine and enter less-than-willing hands.

40. “Vilar was a little bomb-happy for my taste. But there it is. And George in the meantime was wearing out the Xerox.”

“Not knowing.”

“I liked George. We got along. George was an interesting man. We spent time together.”

“What did you do with the material he copied?”

“It was worthless.”

“A lot of waxy paper.” from Players by Don DeLillo.

41. I have likely copied more words by or about DeLillo than any other single writer.

42. “If anyone is guilty of turning modern Americans into Xerox copies, it is Don DeLillo.” — Bruce Bawer.

43. I disagree with Bawer, but some of my students might agree with him. What I love about photocopies is that they flatten the spines of books; they wrestle authority from the author for a moment, and give the students a chance to participate.

44. I want them to push back against Bawer and DeLillo. At first, they are knocked down; they swing wildly, without reason. But the firmer their critical sense is cultivated, the sooner they become readers who can mark-up their photocopies with annotations that are not merely “personification” but “Gary Harkness needs Taft Robinson, but Robinson does not need Gary; this scene in the dorm room reveals it.” They become readers who commune with literature.

45. I have saved photocopies from college. Handouts that somehow retain the blue-purple tinge of a typewriter.

46. My daughters are identical twins. They have been called “multiples.”

47. “Identical twins are not exactly alike. They begin in the womb, at conception, with a single egg and sperm. Twins are made after the egg is fertilized and splits. Similarity is a result of how long the egg takes to divide. The longer it takes for the egg to split, the more alike a set of twins will look. We must have split early. My feet and nose were larger than Cara’s. As adults she usually outweighed me by fifteen pounds. Identical twins share the same DNA but do not have identical DNA. The egg splits into two halves to form identical twins, but the DNA does not divide equally between the two cells. We were like an apple sliced in half: two halves of the same fruit, one with more seeds, one with fewer.” from Her by Christa Parravani.

48. I read Christa’s memoir while in manuscript, and wrote notes after notes on those workshop copies. I hoped that those copies became a book, and they did.

49. My wife and I are always asked how we tell our twin daughters apart. There is a tension in that question that perhaps only an English teacher would worry about: why do we often begin with a desire to separate? My girls are not copies, but they are connected. I see how they look at each other. They share something.

50. I hold the fresh photocopies against my shirt, and they are warm like my daughters’ pajamas from the dryer. Each copy is made with the hope that words will reach hands and eyes that will consider them, if only for the long moments of class. That is enough.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 4 6 min read
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