A GLIMPSE INTO OUR INNER BEINGS: WHAT WE READ

In this space over the last 3 ½ years, we’ve acknowledged drawing on books we’ve read for ideas on matters we see as worth writing

about. We’ve pointed readers to books (The Half Has Never Been Told, The Color of Law, and The Warmth of Other Suns) we regard as essential for understanding race in America. We reviewed one of them (The Color of Law) in explaining America’s chronic housing discrimination problem. And, we drew on Madeline Albright’s Fascism: A Warning, in sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump’s dangerous affinity for dictators.

                      

Reading books defines each of our lives, beyond the utility of their content. We find

solace in the books strewn around our homes and offices and packed onto our shelves. None of us can contemplate a life without books. But, what do we read and why? With each of us, there’s a story offering insight into who we are and how we’ve evolved.   

Henry: Diversity, Diversity, Diversity

Many books I’ve read have taken me places I

couldn’t have imagined and offered context for the jumbled exploration of my own thoughts. From my earliest years, reading provided a spiritual experience in which I could join others in exploring humanity and personal relationships. Even in childhood, I read many

different things in many different areas.  I still do: science fiction like Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; physics, like The Great  Unknown by Marcus Du Sautoy

and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams; religion, including The Bible and A History of God by Karen Armstrong; fiction,including mysteries like Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea and classics like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Updike’s Rabbit Run, and The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. In keeping current on events of the day (and in step with my co-authors) I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

                    

Each of these works, and many others I’ve read, remain part of my fabric. This approach

has a drawback. Sometimes, when I go into a bookstore, I find myself happy and sad at the same time – happy because I’m amidst so much knowledge I’d hope I can absorb and sad because I can’t read it all.    

Rob: A Change is Gonna Come

If 25 years ago I’d been asked for an explanation of what I read and why, the answer would have been quite different than what I offer today. Before the late ‘90s, with the exception of trashy

“airport novels” I occupied  myself with on cross country flights, I read nonfiction. My bookshelf included volumes on elections (Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President series), analyses of World War II

(Richard Overy’s Why  the Allies Won), political memoirs (Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect), and biographies of major historical figures (Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson series).

These books brought  me considerable knowledge about a few subjects and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. But, as I see now, I was missing something. A change was coming.   

In 1999, a friend invited my wife and me into a couples book club. Under its rules, each

person took a turn at picking the book for quarterly dinner meetings. Book club membership changed my reading habits (and my life). During the ensuing 21 years, we’ve read 90 books, about half fiction. I found myself reading, and enjoying, A Confederacy of Dunces, John K. Toole’s wonderful, Pulitzer Prize winning novel  set in

New Orleans, where I once lived, and Stephen King’s 11/22/63,  a time travel novel that presented an entirely different perspective on the JFK assassination. 

My book club experience confirmed the wisdom in the old adage some writers live by: if you want facts, write nonfiction. If you want truth, write fiction. l took that to heart. My

book club experience in hand, and after my wife’s death, I  decided I’d try my hand at writing fiction. I began grabbing more and more novels. I still read lots of nonfiction, but I’m now a confirmed, dedicated fiction reader too.

Woodson: Choices and Goals

My book choices are influenced largely by my life choices and goals. With fewer days left to live than I’ve already lived and with goals remaining, I concentrate my reading on what furthers achievement of my goals.

                        

Because I am a property manager and real estate investor, I read a lot on real estate and economic matters (books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chris Hogan’s Everyday Millionaires, Joseph

Stiglitz’s People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, and  Property Management Kit for Dummies by  Robert Griswold).  My interest in political and racial issues is satisfied by reading books like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful Team of Rivals and the critically  important That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World and How We Can Comeback by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Meltz, and

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Finally, because I participate in several Christian ministries, I read books

on religion, including Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, Instinct: The Power to Unleash Your Inborn Drive by T.D. Jakes, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, and The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. Then there’s the Holy Bible. I read that too.

                         

As with Henry and Rob, my reading focus developed over time. It reflects life choices

I’ve  made because of my evolution as a person and as a professional, and through recognizing the limitations we all face as humans. Reading remains an essential part of my life.   

            

  

A Little Light Reading: Our Top Three Books on Understanding Race in America

The three of us read a lot because (1) we each enjoy it, (2) we think it essential to being informed citizens, and (3) it’s crucial to this enterprise.

Because we read as much as we do and because we spend so much time interacting with people about the things we care and write about here, friends and readers sometimes ask us what books we think will increase their understanding of the topics we discuss with them, especially race. We thought we’d offer some reading suggestions – a Top Three, if you will – recognizing our list isn’t gospel and others might present lists that would impart as much or more knowledge.

What Missed The List?

We’ll start by recognizing some great works that didn’t make our top three.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander garnered a great deal of attention during the 2016 campaign for its focus on mass incarceration.

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man retain their places as classics, essential to understanding this issue.

Taylor Branch’s epic trilogy America in the King Years would make many such lists.

Master of the Senate, the third book in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson series presents an excellent account of early legislative efforts on civil rights.

One friend reminded us that Colored People by Henry Louis Gates offers rare insight into the culture of black America outside the South as the civil rights era dawned.

The same friend extolled the virtues of Days of Grace, Arthur Ashe’s wonderful memoir about his experience as a black athlete in a white sport and as a black man in America.     

But, we have our favorites – three books we regard as critical to understanding where we stand with race in America today and how we got here.

Our Top Three

1. We suggest starting with The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, an African American woman, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and it shows in her compelling narrative about the twentieth-century African-American migration out of the Jim Crow South to the North and West. She gives us the story through the experiences of real people: a Florida orange picker who finds a new life in New York, yet still must cope with returning regularly to the segregated South in his job as a railroad porter; a Mississippi sharecropping family that moved to the Midwest only to confront the restrictive ethnic zoning rampant in the urban politics of Chicago and Milwaukee. A doctor from Louisiana who drove across the desert to resettle in California. The black exodus from the South makes up an important part of American history and Wilkerson tells the story with verve and compassion.

2. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist

The Half Has Never Been Told explains the role slavery played in America’s development as a commercial powerhouse in the world economy. Along the way, it explodes many myths, most significant among them the idea the United States became a significant player on the world economic stage after the civil war ended slavery.

In this exhaustively researched book, Baptist, a white son of the South, shows how slavery and the cotton-based southern economy made the United States a world commercial player well before the war. Warning: While the book is profoundly informative, it is not comfortable to read. Baptist, a Cornell University professor, comes at this topic with data and analysis. Narrative takes a back seat.

Getting through The Half Has Never Been Told requires a certain level of compassion and willingness to vicariously experience human suffering. It also requires a strong stomach. Baptist details many of slavery’s horrors. Few “benevolent” slaveholders, if any lived, made the cut in this book. We can’t overestimate the importance of The Half Has Never Been Told to understanding the real history of slavery in America. Rob saw it as significant enough to give a copy to each of his children with the admonition that they read it, “even if you don’t get to it until you’re on your death bed.”

3. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein.

Anyone clinging to the notion that the economic inequality plaguing America based on race occurred by accident must confront some unpleasant, but documented, truths in this book. Relying on government documents and independent studies, Rothstein, a senior fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Haas Institute at University of California, Berkeley, details how court decisions, legislative actions, executive branch policies, and administrative actions drove blacks into segregated neighborhoods, kept white neighborhoods white, and in the process, assured that black wealth would not grow through homeownership, a major way other Americans accumulated assets. This book doesn’t make for comfortable reading either, largely because of the offensiveness of the deliberate acts of racial discrimination it describes.

As we said, there are other books. We think these three present a good starting place.

What are some of your suggestions?