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AARP BookTalk Newsletter
Volume 7, Issue 10
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September 24, 2007
A Message from The Empress of BookTalk
The book I recommend in this issue, The Rise of American Democracy, is a “good for you” read rather than a fun one. Sometimes, no matter my rapidly advancing age, I think I should further my education and learn something. History, psychology and the natural sciences grab my attention a few times a year and I go struggling along to understand quasars, Russian pogroms or obsessive-compulsive disorders. I think of these ventures as my “vitamin pill reads.”.
Really, if left to my own frivolous whims it would be all historical fiction and fast-paced biographies for me – with the occasional best-seller or mystery thrown in. But with a physicist for a father and a historian for a brother, I suppose I have some hard-wiring that drives me to the difficult stuff. DNA raises its querulous head and I go looking for Copernicus and Jung in the stacks.
Naturally, I read the final Harry Potter volume with great delight (and a few tissues at hand too) and the book I’m recommending next month is going to be on the cotton-candy side, but now and again we must rise to a challenge and work at our reading. Honestly, it’s good for us.
Please email your thoughts, opinions, psychoanalytic insights, or just whatever is on your mind book-wise to me at booktalk@aarp.org.
Recommended by the Empress of BookTalk
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
by Sean Wilentz
This is a LARGE book (over 900 pages if you count the notes) and I admit I’m not quite done, although I’ve been plugging away at it for a couple weeks now. The subject is large too – how the American Revolution led to a wobbly government, taking a few years to find its feet. How close we came a few times to collapse. How often citizens were disappointed in leadership.
That period between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War has always been a bit murky to me and I was looking for a single volume to lend some clarity.
Wilentz focuses on political issues more than cultural ones and that may explain why I’m not galloping along – politics of the early 19th century seem as twisty and surprisingly personal as things that are going on today!
Choices made for economic reasons (and Wilentz focuses a lot on the economy) have repercussions that surface years later. The slavery-abolitionist conflict is allowed to fester for decades without resolution. America is both a glorious success and a haphazard mess.
I will not tell you this is a rollicking good time of a read, but it is a fascinating account of how we got the government that we have. If that interests you, here’s a great start.