Four of Seven Books – A Reading List to Save Democracy – Part II
by Kansas Reflector columnist Max McCoy
https://kansasreflector.com/2024/07/07/seven-books-for-the-7th-of-july-a-reading-list-to-save-democracy/?emci=542b4462-e83b-ef11-86d2-6045bdd9e096&emdi=a4c99c4c-3f3c-ef11-86d2-6045bdd9e096&ceid=116925 (Edited and used with permission.)
This is a list of seven books to save democracy, one reader at a time.
Joan Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
This collection of essays takes its title from a W.B. Yeats poem and is a firsthand account by a wickedly good essayist who didn’t just write about the ’60s, but who was the decade.
“Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything,” Didion writes in an essay about morality. “They are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. … Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”
Allen C. Guelzo. Our Ancient Faith (2024)
Guelzo’s book is about Abraham Lincoln, and the faith referred to in the title is Lincoln’s faith in democracy. Guelzo, who has written 17 other books, mostly about Lincoln or the Civil War, is the most centrist of observers, turning away from the extremes of both right and left, but nursing a hope for America based on his deep understanding of our greatest president.
“This is a brief essay, in a time of shadows,” he begins in an author’s note. “My long life has been a hurdle race of public agonies, from the Vietnam War, through repeated and destabilizing economic convulsions and a ‘clash of civilizations,’ to a crazed and inhumane technological environment in which no reality seems stable, bullhorns trample debate, and the smiling threat of power is too ominously real.”
To all those who despair for the future, Guelzo offers Lincoln’s example.
“And just as we, as a nation, were once rescued at the last gasp by an intervention so unlooked-for as to defy hope,” he writes, limning the Gettysburg Address, “I take up principles with the yearning that once again, this last, best hope of earth may yet have a rebirth of freedom.”
Dorianne Laux. Facts About the Moon (2006)
In a previous column, I wrote about Walt Whitman’s influence and the power of poetry to guide us. For this list, I’ve chosen a book by an award-winning poet from Eugene, Oregon, whose poem titled “Democracy” includes the homeless in Hefty bags and a young bus rider with a swastika carved into his shaven head.
There is much more in this volume, and Laux’s authority and humanity comes through on every page, as well as an enduring hope for the future. But writing about poetry is like describing a movie to someone. To really understand it, you just have to sit in the theater and watch. Laux’s vision is worth the ticket.
Tim O’Brien. The Things They Carried (1990)
I’ve included this one, in part, for my historian friend who is also a Vietnam vet. A collection of linked short stories, O’Brien — also a vet — gives us the story of one platoon and the interior lives of the men in combat. It ranks with the Red Bad of Courage and The Killer Angels as the most powerful literature about Americans at war. It is one thing for politicians to talk about war, for ordinary people to wave the flag, for kids to shoot fireworks on the Fourth of July.
It is quite another for soldiers to put themselves bodily in service — and perhaps sacrifice — for their country.
“For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity,” O’Brien writes. “Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn’t, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers hoping not to die.”
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. A Kansan, he started his career at the Pittsburg Morning Sun and was soon writing for national magazines. His investigative stories on unsolved murders, serial killers and hate groups earned him first-place awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors and other organizations. McCoy has also written more than 20 books, the most recent of which is "Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River," named a Kansas Notable Book by the state library. "Elevations" also won the National Outdoor Book Award, in the history/biography category.
