Memorial Day, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell's book is sobering reading as we honor our veterans on Memorial Day.

Today’s Memorial Day, and, in addition to being a day when people across the country mark the unofficial beginning of summer by throwing steaks, burgers, dogs or fish on the grill, it is a time to honor veterans’ service.

I read yesterday in Parade magazine about Frank Buckles, America’s last remaining World War I veteran, or doughboy, and his campaign to establish a National World War I memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC.

American soldiers like Buckles entered the “War to End All Wars” relatively late in the game, in 1917, after then-President Woodrow Wilson had successfully campaigned for re-election in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”

For millions of others, though, their fighting had already ended with their death.

The years of trench warfare and the development of the machine gun had led to hundreds of thousands of young men being slaughtered in “no man’s land” over what ultimately turned out to be hundreds, and at times dozens, of yards, in battles at the Somme and Verdun, among others.

These deaths were accompanied by nearly as high numbers of men dying in the trenches due to the diseases that ran rampant throughout them.

Such staggering rates of mortality lofty visions of a short, bloodless and seemingly noble campaign-there were predictions of the war ending by December 1914-understandably led to a changed vision of the war.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell documents those changes through an analysis of the work of many of the leading war poets.

Rebecca Romijn’s decision, Birth Order book.

Kevin Leman writes about the impact of birth order in this entertaining book.

Although I write primarily here about books, I also do read some celebrity magazines.

While most of my reading happens in line at the grocery store, I will cop to having been a People magazine subscriber somewhere in the mid- to late-90s (It did get a bit much when I started quoting People’s book reviews to other people, and habits are powerful things.).

I will do some online celebrity gazing online, putting in more time than is necessary to stay current with what Aidan’s generation is paying attention to these days (This isn’t a particularly convincing reason to begin with, I know.).

Stephanie Behne’s tip

Reader Stephanie Behne is reading this book with her book club.

Friend, reader and former Chicago Reporter intern Stephanie Behne offered the following suggestion:

Book Idea – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot:

Hi Jeff!
Had to write a quick note–I’m starting the above for my book club, and I totally thought of you…not that you’re at a loss for books to read or things to write, I’m sure!

It’s about a black woman in the 50s whose cells were taken and used without her knowledge in many significant advances in scientific research…

It’s looks good and might touch on a lot of themes your readers would be interested in.

I hope you and yours are well and looking forward to summer the way we are!
Best,
Stephanie

Thanks for the tip, Stephanie!  Please feel free to add your suggestions, everyone!

Celtics game, the psychology of flow

People looking to learn about flow have the right book here.

My beloved  Celtics are about to tip off Game 6 against the Orlando Magic, and the stakes are high indeed.

After storming to a seemingly insurmountable 3-0 lead, the Celtics, should they lose tonight, could be in line for an unprecedented defeat of epic proportions (For those of us who consider basketball games epic, anyway.).

The difference between the two teams in Games 3 and 5 have been palpable.

Whereas in the third game, the Celtics were playing lockdown defense, passing crisply and moving without the ball in the process of storming to a 23-point rout, in the last game the tables were reversed and the Magic were draining threes, physically dominating the C’s and showing the form that led to their winning 59 games for the second consecutive season.

In each game, the winning team was in the flow.

In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Hungarian psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi explains the elements behind each team’s impressive outing.

Visiting Facing History, A World Made New

Mary Ann Glendon's book makes for worthwhile reading.

I’m back in Brookline for the next few days, helping Mom as she transitions out of rehab and back to her home in Brookline Village.

After a stop to pick up some high-end face cream for her, I visited the national headquarters of Facing History, the building where I used to work and where Dunreith and I met.

It was wonderful to see old friends and colleagues, including Margot Strom, Facing History’s founder.

Margot and Bill Parsons founded the organization in the mid-70s after attending a workshop about the Holocaust and realizing that that history was not being taught.

The organization’s growth has been both steady and remarkable.  Since its inception, Facing History has expanded domestically and internationally.

FDR’s Funeral Train

More than 65 years after his death, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) remains a towering influence in American culture.

Whether being invoked as a titan of the left or by the right as an example of where government nearly went irreversibly wrong, few disagree with the notion that he was one of our most important presidents.

At this point, nearly everything about the man in some way or another has assumed mythic or epic proportions, even his death in Warm Springs, Georgia, and the following days when his body was taken to the nation’s capital and eventually to his burial in his beloved Hyde Park.

In FDR’s Funeral Train, Robert Klara tells the story of those momentous days, near the end of the war he had seen the nation through, when America realized it had lost its longest-serving president.

Invictus and the love of country.

John Carlin's Playing the Enemy is the basis for Invictus.

Dunreith and I watched Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s feel-good representation of the true story of South Africa’s 1995 victory in the Rugby World Cup it hosted.

When the finals took place against the vaunted and heavily favored All Blacks of New Zealand, which featured the punishing Jonah Lomu, I had gained admission to the Fulbright Teacher Exchange program and had a plan to talk with Vukani Cele, my exchange partner.

The call never happened as Vukani and the rest of the nation were caught up in a delirious and unprecedented joint national celebration and did not make it back to Durban.

Invictus, which is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, gives us a better understanding why.

I have written before about Carlin’s book, so won’t recap it too much here other than to say that then-President Nelson Mandela had a visceral and profound grasp on the power of symbol and of the meaning of sport to white South Africans.  The international boycott of South African sporting teams may have contributed to white voters’ approving F.W. DeKlerk’s 1992 referendum among white voters to have a second and larger vote with all citizens, according to Arlene Getz in a Newsweek piece that ran shortly after the movie opened in theaters last year.

Mandela’s understanding culminated and converged in his donning the once-hated Springboks jersey with the captain Francois Pienaar’s number 6 on it before the championship game.

Texas’ Textbook Wars, Lindaman and Ward’s History Lessons

Texas' textbook battles are given context by this book.

In addition to being the Lone Star State, Texas is now the battleground for a heated war about the content of their students’ Social Studies textbooks.

Despite being a source of ennui and groans for students the world over, textbooks in general, and history ones in particular, are inevitably imbued with values and endorsements of particular ideologies.

Unsurprisingly, the proposed Texas vision is a conservative one.

The Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this week about the majority-conservative Board of Education’s proposal for a textbook that would include, among other components, learning about Phyllis Schlafly, de-emphasize Thomas Jefferson’s arguments for the necessity to separate church and state, and change ‘slavery’ to the ‘Atlantic Triangular Trade.’

In short, the changes are more than cosmetic and the issue’s impact extends beyond Texas’ border.  Texas is important both as one of the nation’s largest states and as one in which, like in many European nations, the same book is used throughout the land.  As a result, landing a contract for Texas can be a boon for business and a statement about who we are as a nation and from where we have come.

This is the most recent, but far from the only, example of textbooks, which purportedly are there to give an official, if not neutral, description of what has happened in a country’s past.

Laurence Gandar’s honor, William Finnegan’s book.

The Mail and Guardian reported earlier this week that the late former editor Laurence Gandar was declared a World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute (IPI), and will be honoured at a ceremony in September.

Gandar is the second South African recipient of this honor; the first was the late longtime editor Percy Qoboza.

Qoboza is one of several memorable characters in New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan’s Dateline Soweto.

Tom Rath helps us find our strengths.

Tom Rath's book helps us find our strengths and encourages us to use them.

I’ve written before about Marcus Buckingham’s book that advances the idea that we should focus at work on areas of strength, rather than weakness.

Tom Rath agrees with that proposition, and even includes a formula that reads Talent x Investment=Results.  His central point  is that folks who are stronger in different areas are likely to get better results and to feel more engaged in their work, when they are doing what they are better at more of the time.

In StrengthFinders 2.0, Rath provides a  primer that encourages people to identify one or more of 34 strength themes, and then to move into those themes more actively at their work sites.

The book is short and has a simple consistent format.  First, Rath explains how people who are strong in each of the themes-these range from Competitive to Creative to Woo to Connected-view the world.  He then talks about 10 ways to think about your work based on that them as well as how to work effectively with people who are strong in that area.

It’s intriguing stuff  along the line of the Myers-Briggs personality test, and I could feel myself resonate more with certain themes than others. 

This points out one of the book’s challenges-that the tools are based on self-diagnosis, which can be a faulty.  Another is that StrengthFinders provides little guidance in identifying where others’ strengths are other than a general application of the philosophies, questions and situations Rath includes in the work. 

In some ways the biggest issue with the whole strength approach is what to do if you truly love an activity that you are not particularly good at doing.  Rath talks about spending endless hours shooting hoops in a vain effort to become a professional basketball player when that was never in any way a real possibility for him.

I can relate to that experience viscerally, and there was still part of me not completely at peace with not doing what your heart tells you because an appraisal of your strengths leads you in a different direction.

The book’s imperfection does not mean that you shouldn’t read it or that the ideas are wrong.   Indeed, I found the idea of not focusing as much on weakness-enter handwriting and organization-a liberating one.  It’s just that, like with many ideas, I find that we are often better served by moderation than fundamentalism.