This week I finished: An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, by Peter Fritzsche: This book recounted life during 1939-45, mostly in Paris, Warsaw, and Switzerland. I got it because I’m interested in learning how people and cultures rationalize and justify acting against their values. The book delivered, though people’s internal psychology wasn’t its main point. Still, it talked about how citizens of occupied countries knew what the Nazis were doing[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngelo: After watching the video I mentioned of DiAngelo speaking, I had to finish the book, not just skim it. She doesn’t understand what causes racism so she can’t attribute it to its causes. Instead she grasps at what she can, no matter how inaccurate or how much she exacerbates the[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo: Engaging, intimate, researched, poignant. It’s hard to imagine it was written by an American, not someone who lived there. This book recounts a period in a Mumbai slum from the perspectives of a few of its residents. Their lives interact. The global economy affects them. Some things they can control, others[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Educated, by Tara Westover: I didn’t know about this book except seeing the cover in bookstores and the library. I looked it up and saw how many people and institutions put it on their “best of” lists. I found it riveting. I almost couldn’t believe someone lived through it. I read it toward the end of my first year since my father died. That year brought[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, by podcast guest Manisha Sinha: A comprehensive and thoroughly researched review of how slaveholders thought from around 1820 to secession. The book prompted my recent post about how we study Lincoln and abolitionists because we want to be like them or at least have them as role models. We would help ourselves to learn about[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, Manisha Sinha: From the author of The Slave’s Cause: a History of Abolition, winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and other awards, and one of my undergraduate teachers. Like The Slave’s Cause, this book is encyclopedic in detail and being comprehensive. It treats the Civil War and Reconstruction as a different period, as the[…] Keep reading →

Often I hear a someone say their opponents form a new religion, implying the other side doesn’t think through their beliefs or come up with them on their own. They just believe what they’re told to. Anyone can lob that grenade at anyone they disagree with. From anyone’s perspective, anyone with different beliefs or values seems ungrounded. To call the other side “a new religion” just shows the speaker lacks[…] Keep reading →