Recent Books

First, a health update and then I want to discuss, briefly some of the books I've read lately.

I slept through the night, but I didn't want to wake up this morning, and if I hadn't had to pee, I would have stayed in bed longer. Now that I'm up, my eyes are causing me problems still. I hope the eye doctor can do something about this. I see him Tuesday afternoon.

What I really, really don't like is that I have no motivation to do much of anything. Everything seems harder than doing nothing. Perhaps it is the depression more than the sleep apnea that has me down at the moment. Well, I see the psychiatrist this week. Much as I hate to consider it, I suspect he'll either up my antidepressant dosage or change to something else for me.

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I've been reading a number of good books lately, and it's a relatively eclectic group, if I do say so myself. Since December, I've read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Doris Kearns-Goodwin's Team of Rivals, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Jean Edward Smith's John Marshall: Definer of a Nation. I also listened to the audiobook version of Memoirs of a Geisha, but I can't remember the author.

Each is interestingly written. Each held my interest. And each taught me something different about the world in which I live. So I want to write about each a little bit.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is an award-winning book about her grief in the year after her husband's sudden death from a heart attack. It's a very compelling read, and a good listen too if you get the audiobook. I got the real sense of the grief and how the sudden loss of someone on whom the writer depended for everything, especially the little things that make up anyone's life was so shattering. After reading this book, for the first time I understood the difference between mourning and grief.

Team of Rivals by contrast is a biography of Abraham Lincoln that focuses on the man as a capable man. Lincoln may have been the quintessential American rags to riches story, only he never achieved great riches. Instead, he achieved great power. It's really the story of how he defeated his rivals for the Presidential nomination in 1860 and then brought them into his cabinet to be his advisors. Kearns-Goodwin may have followed in the tradition that makes of Lincoln a secular American saint, but she makes a compelling case that he may really have been one such man.

John Marshall: Definer of a Nation in contrast treads mostly unfamiliar ground. It is the story of the American Constitution's beginnings in functional government and especially the story of how John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court actually manifested the court into the third leg of power in this country.

If I dwell just a few moments here, I want to say that the argument between those who favored a living Constitution that was flexible to the needs of the time and those who favored a strict construction of the Constitution's words really started in the beginning of our nation. This is hardly a new argument, though it has been enlisted in various causes and the nation has grown and matured.

John Marshall also shows just how political the court has always been. Congress is empowered in the Constitution to define the court, to set how many Justices there are and what their duties are. And there have always been complaints, invariably by the losers, about 'activist' judges. It is fascinating to see how all the arguments we hear about the court today played out over 200 years ago.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is perhaps the best book I have read tracing the creating and evolution of Planet Earth and all who have dwelt upon it (as far as the fossil records allow). The writer is an excellent synthesist of physics, astronomy, archeology, geology: every physical and some metaphysical science. He really puts the human being and the current epoch in perspective. If I came away with nothing else, I came away with the conviction that the planet will survive far longer than we human beings will.

Memoirs of a Geisha I decided to listen to because I decided that the book would be better than the movie. From everything I've read, I was right. Certainly, it was a great book to listen to. It's the story of how a woman survived in the world into which she was born: semi-feudal Japan before WWII. It's also the story of how she survived the war and prospered after the war. The writer did a great job of storytelling and presenting a time and a profession that are fascinatingly different from anything I'm likely to experience.

I want to add one more book to this list. Recently, A Woman in Berlin was reissued. It is the true story of a woman who survived the end of WWII in Berlin. She tells us what it is like to be a woman, any woman, in a conquered land, any conquered land. It is the unvarnished truth about what people have to do to survive, particularly women. Anyone who wants to understand the agony of being defeated and of being a woman in a chaotic world needs to read this book.

Okay, that's my book reviewing for now. Have a nice day.