Current Reading, November & December 2021

There wasn't an October topic and the group hasn't been too active, so I've titled this topic to cover the last couple of months of the year. Here are my read books since I last posted to the group:

Red Coats & Grey Jackets: The Battle of Chippawa, 5 July 1814 by Donald E. Graves
Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World by Richard Snow
Weapons of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Jim Garry
Visions of a Flying Machine: The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention by Peter L. Jakab

And I've just finished an excellent biography, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall.

Thanks for the start, jz.

I recently finished Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby.

This is an excellent biography of a fascinating woman, Ella Baker, an essential and vastly underappreciated figure of the American Civil Rights Movement. (That is, "underappreciated" to Americans in general, not to scholars of the movement or to folks knowledgeable about African American history.) Baker began her work fighting for the equal rights for all in the Harlem of the 1930s. Over the next four decades, Baker worked both within the NAACP and in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Baker was a moving force in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) despite the fact that she was considerably older than the organization's other founders.

Throughout her decades of work, Baker's operating principle was a faith in the people she wanted to help, in their ability to set their own goals, make their own decisions, to know what strategies were right or wrong for themselves. This put Baker at odds with Martin Luther King during her days at SCLC, where she was never given her full due or the responsibilities that her experience and talents should have allowed. The King/SCLC model was to provide strong leadership role models (always men, although a huge portion of the grassroots work was accomplished by women) and top-down leadership and closely controlled and coordinated programs and events. Also, Baker supported the idea of nonviolence, but only as a tactic to be used when appropriate, one strategy in an arsenal of strategies, rather than as a over-arching dominant paradigm.

Ransby's account of Baker's life is detailed and, mostly, readable. There are times when I felt the accounts bogged down some, but that was only because necessary background information is not always scintillating reading. Baker didn't write much, and although she gave many speeches over her life, the texts of these talks were rarely set down. As a result, we don't get much in Baker's own voice. But all in all this is a compelling study of a very important woman in American history.

I finished Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas J. Fleming. First published in 1960, this history of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major battle of the American Revolution, was evidently hailed as a major success at the time, and I can see why. Fleming did a great job of laying out the contributing factors to the growing points of contention between England and the American colonies, both political and economic, as well as giving thumbnail sketches of the major players on both the English and American sides. The conditions the combatants fought under, the weapons they carried and their motivations for fighting are all clearly described as well, as are the tactics of the officers and the ways in which those tactics either worked or didn't. The battle itself is described in detail, with a flowing narrative style that puts the reader directly into the horrific, bloody action. At times Fleming took some liberties, creating conversations between the participants that are, he explains in his afterward, recreations from the many diaries and journals he consulted. On the American side, most of the soldiers who actually took part fought bravely indeed, but many of those assembled, intimidated by the British artillery, actually stayed well away from the battle. Fleming gives a lot of credit, also, to the courage of the British soldiers, who three times charged the American emplacements in the face of point-blank musket fire. The British after that third charge, managed to get the Colonials out of their emplacements and off the hill (actually Breed's Hill, not Bunker Hill itself, as Fleming explains), but at a cost so high that they the British generals had to abandon their plans to try to break the American siege of Boston, the reason they attacked the stronghold in the first place. The British lost half their army, killed or wounded, on that day, and the question of whether American volunteer soldiers would stand and fight against the British regulars, an army considered at that time the best in the world, was settled emphatically.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of the American Revolution or of military history in general.

>3 rocketjk: Maybe a silly question, but is this a novel? One of the LT reviews said "Lacking both romantic adventures and glamorous heroines, this fine first novel by an executive editor of Cosmopolitan...". Just wondering.

4> Not a silly question. I noted those comments, as well. It is most definitely not a novel. As I noted, Fleming did take liberties here and there in terms of creating short, imagined conversations between some of the participants as recreated from diaries, etc., but still, I guess, a bit below the standard of straight history. This is all referenced in Fleming's afterward, though. But maybe that's what people were referring to.

>5 rocketjk: Thanks for the reply. I've added it to my wishlists.

>6 jztemple: Cool. I'll look forward to seeing your reaction whenever you get to the book. Cheers!