Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

On a challenge, Gene Weingarten wrote a book about December 28, 1986, a Sunday in America picked at random. Think of all the newspapers in the country and what might have made the cut back in the day and it is pretty much what you'd expect: fires, murders, sports, car crashes, arrests, celebrations, and the arts, though not a lot of arts as the selected date fell in the quiet week between Christmas and the New Year. In the hands of twice-awarded Pulitzer Prize author, story after story unfolds to reveal the full depth of the American experience. A burning house, when fully investigated, includes the life-altering reactions of fire-fighters, children caught in the blaze, and parents whose trajectories from birth to that cataclysmic moment are far more complex than they are described in a newspaper column. Those swoops and arcs, measured as snapshots on December 28, are carried through the next 25 years with contemporary interviews. A football playoff game, similarly covered i...

Back in November 2017, John Kelly, President Trump's Chief of Staff, said “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”   Ta-Nehisi posted an article in the Atlantic shortly thereafter, " Five Books to Make you Less Stupid About the Civil War ."  Battle Cry of Freedom  was top of the list.  With good reason. Until the casualties of the Vietnam War were fully counted, the number killed by the Civil War, more than 600,000, was greater than all of America's wars combined.  Kelly's wish that such a calamity could have been avoided is not unreasonable, but as the first third of McPherson's book makes unavoidably clear, the Civil War was fought over the South's insistence that enslaved blacks were property.  Southern owners of other human beings made clear that their property could only be taken by theft and even in such cases, southern owners had as much right to search for and regain their human property as they did when searching f...