Articles

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

"This deeply researched, beautifully written book is neither a sensationalist attack on Thomas Jefferson nor a hagiographical defense, but instead a careful, sensitive, nuanced, and persuasive analysis of his relationship with Sally Hemings and much more as well. It also reveals the complicated story of the entire multiracial family that begins with the founding matriarch, Elizabeth Hemings. As such, the book sheds perceptive light on slavery, plantation life, and the complex interpersonal relations between white and black actors of both genders. Here one sees an immensely talented historian at peak form, with explicit attention to her reasoning and assumptions. Although one might not accept every conclusion, this is a bracing work of history that is as compelling as it is readable."

Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason.

"I recently took a busman's holiday and read something outside my field: Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. Having just completed a lengthy essay on what has changed in Texas history since 1990, I really needed a break. I will say, however, that some very impressive work has been done lately on Texas and the surrounding area. Studies of Indians and their role in the development of the Southwest are a particular strength of recent years and I can recommend three as must reads: Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (2007); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2008); and Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (2008). You will never think about Indians and Texas in the same way again after reading these three books.

"But back to The Closing of the Western Mind. This is a great sweeping history written for an informed general audience. It covers from roughly 500 BCE to 600 CE and focuses first on the rise of scientific thought and inquiry and then its displacement by the merging of religion and the state. The argument is not so much that religion always blocks out scientific thought and advancement, but that when religious orthodoxy and right thinking were increasingly enforced by the state, the opportunity for scientific thought and discovery vanished. Once the doctrine of the Trinity and other tenets of orthodoxy were imposed and enforced by the state in the 4th century, freedom of thought and the ability to argue about anything lessened and was in sharp decline by the 7th century. As the state became increasingly threatened, it sought further stability and an end to all controversy. I do not know enough about this period of history to offer a professional judgement on this book, but it is based on extensive source material and is written in an engaging style. I know of no other author who could make the endless debates about the Trinity in the 4th century interesting and compelling. I recommend this book to anyone who wants something broad-gauged and outside their normal reading pattern."

Edward Dolnick, The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece. 

"There are dozens of books on museum intrigue, art theft, and art forgery, ranging from the historical, such as The Art Forger and The Forger's Tale, and the sublimely ridiculous, such as The Art Thief, which is poorly written but still a good airplane read. Somewhere in between are books by Thomas Hoving (False Impressions, etc.) and Peter Watkins (The Caravaggio Conspiracy–great restaurant and menu recommendations in London and Florence). From this voluminous genre I think I own at least one copy of all, and multiples in some cases, as I learned recently while unpacking books I had in storage. I unpacked a copy of The Rescue Artist and decided to read it again—it is a fun summer read."

Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.

"This is an amazing book that shows us how the state, via immigration legislation and practices, military policy, and social welfare programs, helped craft our notions of homosexuality. Canaday provides fascinating, albeit often tragic, examples of how ignorant and invasive federal officials defined, controlled, and punished lesbians and gays for simply trying to live honestly."

Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Dogs, or Women Allowed: The Rise of The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.

"In this long-awaited study, Cynthia E. Orozco charts the development of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in precise detail placing it at the vanguard of Mexican American civil rights struggles. Orozco also shows how fundamental gender—both notions of masculinity and femininity—played in the organization's formation and subsequent work. By concentrating on LULAC's Texas roots, Orozco re-envisions the Lone Star State's history centering its emancipatory efforts."

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster.

"Favorite book is always the last good one read. Yet, Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (2009) will remain an unforgettable book. It’s a heartbreaking, lovely, wrenching, touching, and consuming coming of age novel. Although written for young adults, I guess because of the topic of a teenager with difficult issues (alcoholism, drug use, and family dsyfunctionality), it becomes riveting reading for adults. Literally, I could not put it down. The issue of finding self at the core is uniquely expressed though Zach's self-talk. So poignant when Zach says: 'I have it in my head that when we're born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people's hearts he writes happy and on other people's hearts he writes crazy … genius … angry …winner … loser. When it came to my turn, he wrote sad.'"

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.

"Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This book is not only thirty years old; it's not an easy read. It is, however, an exquisite example of classic literature. The language is complex and lyrical. Imagery and music abound. Some scenes and characters are humorous, but the tone is melancholy, haunting, and the style magically resists conventions. The story involves two sisters, Ruth, the narrator, and Lucille, who are cared for by their eccentric Aunt Sylvie, who usually lives as a transient. Themes include feminist resistance to societal roles, a transcendental connection with nature, an acceptance of disruption and change, a conscious elimination of personal need, and the recognition that absence expands and focuses that which is remembered. This is an artistically perfect book."

William Faulkner, Light in August.

"Summer is the best time to read those big, classic books you've always promised yourself you would read but still haven't gotten around to doing so. I hadn't read Light in August since my freshman year in college, when it was assigned in an English class. All I remembered was that there was a pregnant woman wandering around, there was a character named Joe Christmas, and Faulkner used the word 'avatar' (which I'm still not sure I understand). Reading the novel again after such a long time was electrifying. The characters, the atmosphere, the tension, the violence, and the thrilling language all take this book into a realm that is convincing and familiar and uniquely Faulkner's. For instance: one short night at a country dancehall. That may not sound like anything exceptional, but read Light in August and see how dangerous and horrifying and transcendent such a night can be."

David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America: The Brief Edition.

"If you read one book this summer on the Spanish presence in North America (what is now the southern half of the U.S.), try David J. Weber's The Spanish Frontier in North America: The Brief Edition (Yale, 2009). It is available for under $20 through Amazon and is worth the price just for the amazing bibliography. The last chapter, "The Spanish Legacy and the Historical Imagination," provides very balanced insights into how our culture has been affected by the real and imagined aspects of the early Hispanic experience in the U.S. Lots of material for lesson plans in that chapter alone."

Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk.

"Rawicz is a hero for Poland and all those who value freedom. It tells the most incredible but true story of survival of the author, who after being imprisoned by the Soviets in 1939, managed to escape and walk almost all the way from Moscow to Siberia, then through the Gobi Desert and across the Himalayas into India and freedom. It is as remarkable a human triumph as any I've come across. I couldn't recommend any book more highly."

Winston Churchill, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Great Speeches. Edited by David Cannadine.

A collection of speeches by the British statesman edited by a renowned historian of British history.

Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815.

"Travel back in time to the first years of the American republic. Meet the founders whose clashing ideas are interwoven in the fabric of government. Witness the events that shape the nation's destiny and the forces that give rise to the American political system. Our tour guide is the distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood. His splendidly written new book, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, draws from a lifetime of extraordinary scholarship."

Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind.

"I was shocked to realize a week ago that I've been reading about a book per week—for us writers, it is always summer. I forget titles and names of protagonists but never a good story or a poem that takes away our breath like fine tequila. I tend to read what I like when it comes to me. In the next week, I'm re-reading Paradise of the Blind by the Vietnamese writer Duong Thu Huong, her fourth novel banned in Vietnam, where she lives. At once, it is a story of family and dreams with the secrets of injustice paving the twisted road on the way there. Like any great artist, Thu Huong writes with feverish beauty and grace. This kind of novelist, like Clarise Lispector, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Barbara Kingsolver, who I've been reading lately, helps me see beyond the illusions of our so-called borders."

Edmund White, City Boy.

"White, who teaches creative writing at Princeton, reflects on his life in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. I know it's recent history, but it continues White's series of memoirs and sometimes autobiographical writing of his life. The book introduces a new side of a number of major literary and historical figures of the late 20th century. A quick and light and thoughtful read about friends."

Stendhal, The Red and The Black.

"This classic French novel that follows Julien Sorel, an ambitious young man who tries to find his way into the upper reaches of French society through hard work, deception, and hypocrisy. When he is about to reach the pinnacle he is betrayed by his own passions. It has been described as the first realist novel."

Helen Thorpe, Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America.

"A beautifully written true story of four friends coming of age in Denver. They share many of the experiences, hopes, and aspirations of the average American teenager, but one thing divides the girls: two of the friends are undocumented. Examining the messy issue from all sides, this book illuminates the profoundly human face of the present immigration debate."

Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race and Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh, Caballero: A Historical Novel.

"I'm deeply interested in how American society changed over the nineteenth century. In many ways, our nation is still coming to terms with the incorporation of Mexican and indigenous peoples as part of American westward expansion. If we look closely at the period of annexation, we can see how and when ethnic and racial beliefs and attitudes begin to take form. These two books, one fiction and the other non-fiction, give us a window into that time.

"The novel Caballero, written in the 1930s by Jovita Gonzalez, takes us inside the home of a landed Mexican family in the years after Texas statehood. Gonzalez shows us how difficult it was to become neighbors in the years immediately following the war. For Gonzalez, women feel the changes most and provide the key to survival in the future. Historian and law professor Laura Gomez also takes on annexation by demonstrating how it redefined American race relations. Neither fully Black nor White, Mexican people made a new category that came out of the conquest of New Mexico and other Mexican territory. Gomez's very readable history has even more meaning given current debates around American culture."

Jaime Javier Rodriguez, The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War, Narrative, Time and Identity and Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea, Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857.

"In this time of mounting anxieties regarding the U.S.-Mexico border, I'd commend a summer reading of two books that help us to go beyond the headlines to a deeper understanding of the origins of frontera mania. University of North Texas professor Jaime Javier Rodriguez's just-published The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War, Narrative, Time and Identity (UT, 2010) is an insightful critical survey of the popular literature and journalism of the war, casting light on the cultural forces that cast many of the forms of Mexican and American identities that still haunt both nations and manifest in their direst ghostliness along the border. Paula Rebert's La Gran Línea, Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849–1857 (UT, 2001) is a fitting companion beach read, refracting the cultural narrative of Rodriguez's book into the gripping tale of how American and Mexican cartographers, in the aftermath of the war, sought to serve their political masters by hammering down the borderline onto maps, thereby inscribing into history the incalculable enrichment of one nation and the impoverishment of another. We live today in the shadow of the line they created."

Tom Lewis, The Hudson: A History.

"There is something wonderful about rivers. They can seem endless and are endlessly fascinating. The first word of James Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake, is 'riverrun,' without a capital because it flows from the last words of the novel. 'Corso e recorso,' always changing, always the same. One of our greatest novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, takes place on the Mississippi. Another great river inspired America's first major art movement, The Hudson River School.

"The Hudson begins high in the Adirondack Mountains, in small streams running into Lake Tear of the Clouds, a small tarn, 4,293 feet above sea level. It continues its course through Albany and the Catskills, past West Point to Sing Sing, under the Tappan Zee bridge, over the Holland Tunnel, and finally to the great New York harbor and into the Atlantic. All along the river's path its banks have inspired artists for two centuries. It has been the scene of horrendous battles as well as a source of commerce and of pleasure. It has survived the many attempts of man to destroy it and the creatures who inhabited it. We have begun to learn just as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and many others that like all great monuments of nature it should inspire respect and care. Among the inspired is Tom Lewis, the author of this fine and detailed history of the Hudson. The Hudson, published in 2005 by Yale University Press, is a great tribute to this magnificent river and the people who fought, lived, and worked on it, but most of all were inspired by it. A good read for summer or anytime."

Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"If you've never read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, now's the time! (Nothing like a hot tropical jungle in Columbia to help us make it through our Texas summers!) And they have ants, too! But what really nails your attention in this book is the power of human beliefs to change the way the world is built, to create truth from magic, to rescue love from heartache, and to see with a fresh and newly empowered eye the magic of our everyday experiences. But warning: reading this book is addictive—you may forget the breakfast burning on your stove, the doorbell ringing, the bills to be paid, the doctor's appointment, the friend you said you'd meet for lunch. Time tends to stand still, as we fall into the deep well of its trance. But . . . isn't that what a good book is for?"

Barbara Kingsolver, Lacuna.

"A novel about 1930s and '40s Mexico, with Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo playing significant roles. The novel focuses on a young man who gets kicked out of an American military academy and spends his formative years in Mexico. Fascinated by ancient Mexican history, he returns to the United States to become a successful author of historical adventure novels. Kingsolver provides an interesting contrast between American and Mexican society during these years."

Collecting Texas: Essays on Texana Collectors and the Creation of Research Libraries, edited by Thomas H. Kreneck and Gerald D. Saxon and published by the Book Club of Texas.

"A series of essays about collectors who contributed to the growth of the state's special collections libraries, with an inviting memoir of collecting by San Marcos bookman Al Lowman. Included are essays on Everett DeGolyer (DeGolyer Library at SMU), Jenkins and Virginia Garrett (Garrett Library and Map Collection at UT Arlington), J. Evetts Haley (Haley Library in Midland), George A. Hill, Jr. (San Jacinto Museum), among others. In the same vein, Allen Gribben's account, Harry Huntt Ransom: Intellect in Motion, tells the story of the formative years of the modern University of Texas—both the University and the great library that bears Ransom's name. For anyone who has done research in these collections, it is fun to learn about the driven individuals who helped build them."

Miranda Carter, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I.

"What an eye opener! Very well written and fills in the gap of how the world changed enormously with the new century and the World War that followed. An incredibly researched book but one that reads easily in spite of its great length. Carter fills in what has been mainly passed over by historians, it seems to me."