Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

This was absolutely mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. I kept having to stop to tell Tommy about what I was learning from it. I still can't believe some of it. So insane. 

Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith's Life and Character by Various Authors

I heard about this book on the Follow Him podcast and since we are reading the Doctrine and Covenants this year for Come, Follow Me, I wanted to check this out. It was a super interesting book, made up of maybe 50 short essays about Joseph Smith by a number of different Church history scholars. I thought the amount of research and information all of these people have done and have read about Joseph Smith was amazing; they've read all of his papers (from the Joseph Smith Papers project) and they shared many insights they'd gained by studying his writing and history in a scholarly way. I felt like they shared a lot of many interesting and wonderful insights into who Joseph Smith was as a person--and they didn't sugarcoat his personality. They shared many of his flaws and problems, but also all of his very human and positive traits as well. I felt like I learned a lot about him and like I got to know Joseph a little bit more by reading this book. 

She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

I realized while reading this that I have never listened to any of Dolly Parton's songs. I don't know her music at all. Part of that is that I have never listened to much country music, but part of that is that she isn't played on the radio at all any more. These essays have a lot of speculation about why that is (country music radio stations don't play almost any women any more, for one), but they are kind of like a biography and analysis of Dolly Parton's life and heritage and her activism, although it's not the outright kind. I have seen how Dolly Parton has become everyone's favorite celebrity because of her generosity and her donations to charity, and after reading this book, I can see why. She seems almost anti-feminist at first, with her plastic surgeries and over-the-top appearance, but I love how Smarsh describes her "gender performance" and how her emphasis of her appearance has allowed her to stop people in their tracks, forcing them to judge her at face value, underestimating her before she can wipe them out. I really like her and I'm totally interested in reading her autobiography now. 

Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women by Cornelia Meigs

This is an interesting one... it won the Newbery award in 1934, so it is supposedly meant for children, but it did not feel like a children's book at all. I suppose it was less like a traditional biography because there were hardly any mention of dates or timelines, and there was this ongoing theme of how tough Louisa was and how she never gave up, even when her family was in poverty and life was hard. But it was very much not meant for a young audience, in my opinion. Of course, maybe kids in the 1930s had the ability and attention span to read this sort of biography... but definitely not today. I enjoy biographies, and I love, love Little Women, and I love Louisa May Alcott (I definitely did at least one presentation on her as a kid, whenever we had to do something about a historical person or an author at school), so I enjoyed reading this. I think the Alcotts are such an interesting family, specifically her dad Bronson and his interesting life and personality, and it is so enjoyable to me to read about how art imitated real life in her family, and to see the similarities in how her family lived and the book that we all know and love so dearly. It seemed like quite a lot of the book focused on her childhood, and then less about her as an adult, which makes sense (for a supposed children's book). It makes me want to go revisit all the books she has written, which I bought a bunch of after reading Little Women, because I loved them all when I was younger.

I guess this would be a great biography to give to someone who loves Little Women, if they were wanting to learn more about Louisa herself. But I don't know that anyone else would be remotely interested in it, haha.

The History of Joseph Smith by His Mother by Lucy Mack Smith

My family is discussing this book for our quasi family book club for the next week, as we are trying to read more about the Restoration before General Conference (as President Nelson advised). I had never read this one before, and enjoyed reading Lucy Mack Smith's account of the Restoration. It really wasn't super focused on Joseph himself--it was more of a memoir of Lucy's memories and experiences, and I kind of liked that it wasn't intending to be a full treatment of church history. It mentioned some things and not others, and it was thorough in some places and then jumped whole years without talking about other things. I liked some of the stories, like when Lucy was traveling with the Saints on a boat to get to Kirtland, and she had the faith the say they would be able to get through the ice. Most of it was not new, though... there was very little I hadn't learned before in Church History class at BYU or through reading The Work and the Glory books back in the day (which I also want to re-read!). I thought it was just overwhelming to think about all that Lucy went through in her life--their family struggled so much and she lost five of her six grown sons by 1844, not to mention who knows how many grandkids, and they never had enough money and had so many reversals of fortune. It really helped to humanize her and make her seem real, and to see how hard it would have been for her and the rest of the family. She was a pretty awesome lady, and I am proud my daughter is named Lucy too.

Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman

I read this book as part of my goal to read all the Newbery award winners--I want to read 25 of them this year (it'll take a long time to get through all of them). I really enjoyed this simple, short biography about Abraham Lincoln. I definitely want to buy this one to keep on our shelves, because it seemed like a really concise book about Lincoln that is perfect for kids. I can't say I learned anything super new about Lincoln from this one, but it would be great for kids.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

I have never been that interested in Alexander Hamilton as a founding father before (like the rest of the nation, until the musical Hamilton became a thing), but I got this as an audiobook from the library and started listening to it. It's only 36 hours long (ha!), so it took me months to get through (because it got returned to the library, etc.). I wanted to listen to it before we went to England and saw Hamilton while we were there, but I didn't finish it until today. It took so long partly because it is so long, and partly because I dragged my feet finishing it because I knew that it had a sad ending and I didn't want to get into Hamilton's affair being exposed and his son's death in a duel and his own death in a duel.

I was so impressed by Chernow's writing and how he made Hamilton, and so many other founding fathers and mothers, come alive. He really gave them all personalities and gave examples of their personalities through their writing--great examples of uses of evidence, as the composition teacher in me wants to say. Hamilton was so brash and so forthright and opinionated, in comparison with so many of the other founding fathers he worked with and clashed with. Chernow really helped me to distinguish between everyone and their accomplishments. He also gave a totally different perspective than the burnished, perfect viewpoint we sometimes get on so many of the founding fathers, like of Thomas Jefferson being the opposite of Hamilton and very circumspect and reserved and sneaky, and John Adams being so touchy and flighty. I felt like I learned so much about the whole American Revolution and the world in that time from reading this book, and I was really impressed by the amount of research Chernow had to have done to write this all-encompassing biography. Eliza Hamilton was one of my favorite people in the whole book--she was definitely the unsung hero of Hamilton's life (although Chernow definitely tries to correct that problem by singing those praises).

It makes you wonder what Hamilton would have become if he had lived for another 30 years. Would he have become crotchety and made a bunch of other ridiculous mistakes like he did with some of his pamphlets? Or would he have made other positive changes for our country? I was trying to explain to the boys today what he did, and it's hard for kids to grasp the Federalist Papers or the Constitution (I explained it as the "rules of our country," haha), but Chernow definitely makes it clear that without Hamilton, our country would not have been born as we know it today. Thank goodness for great people like him who got our country where it started.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

This was another one of my getting-ready-for-our-trip-to-England books, although we aren't going to make it to Stratford-upon-Avon this trip (although I would love to). It just so happens that Bill Bryson wrote this, in addition to the British travelogues that I've been reading as well, but it has a very different feel from his other books, since it is much more research-based and factual than just wandering around England and writing about how he got annoyed getting soaked in the rain. I really liked how this book was very concise and to the point--I felt like I understood all of the salient facts about Shakespeare's life, all that we really know about him, and that I was able to point out what is conjecture (95% of what people say about him) and what is fact (just a few basic things based on governmental records, saying where he was baptized and married and a few other things). I loved his (not super-in-depth) analysis of how Shakespeare wrote and how he changed the English language--I found it fascinating to see how many new words he coined and how many commonly used phrases all came from his writing. I also liked how he pointed out his imperfection with writing, and how there are some lines in his plays that are impossible to understand (suggesting that he was sloppy or rushed as he wrote). I also really liked how Bryson basically demolishes all of the arguments about how Shakespeare didn't really write Shakespeare in the last chapter, and very logically takes apart all their reasons for dismissing Shakespeare as the true author. I'm on his side--it seems a little silly to assume now, 500 years later, that we can argue with Shakespeare being the author when there is absolutely no contemporary proof to assist that argument.

I think this is a perfect layman's biography for Shakespeare. I have a few other books about Shakespeare checked out from the library that I'm going to try and read because I found this so interesting, so we will see how that goes. I feel like I got everything I really need to about Shakespeare from this book because it's not like there's anything else to go on.

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

I had a goal to read five biographies in the last year or two, and this is the fifth since I started. I loved the other Massie book I read (Nicholas and Alexandra) so I decided to continue the Russian theme and read his book about Catherine the Great. I knew literally nothing about her; her name sounded vaguely familiar but I didn't even know which century she'd lived in. It was really interesting to learn more about Russia in the eighteenth century--I feel like I have read so much about England and France and America in that time period but I'd never once thought about Russia back then. I am surprised that I didn't know that Catherine was the empress at the time when the American and French Revolutions happened.

I found the beginning of the book fascinating, learning about Catherine's youth and her life in her marriage. That part was well-written and easy to follow, and I found it easy to relate to Catherine in some ways. But it was almost unbelievable that Catherine could have been so patient and forbearing through the insanity that she had to live through. Her husband sounded seriously insane, with an obsession for playing with toy soldiers (even in his twenties and thirties), and was incapable of consummating their marriage so for nine years Catherine was never touched by him, and the Empress Elizabeth was extremely hard to deal with--yet according to Massie, Catherine was always patient and dealt with this craziness appropriately.

The later part of the book about Catherine's reign as Empress was a little harder to follow, since the author no longer was writing chronologically but more thematically. I understand why he had to do that, since Catherine as Empress had so many more facets and responsibilities than she did in her life before, but it made it harder for me to place when things were happening and to feel like I really grasped it. He wrote quite a lot about her revolving door of lovers, which were quite accepted in the Russian court, but also a lot about her attempts to modernize and liberalize Russia because of her acceptance of Enlightenment principles and correspondence with philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot.

Catherine had a ton of ambition and had her eye on the prize of gaining full power as the empress, and she didn't intend to share any of that power, even with her son. I feel like I would have had a hard time relating to her ambition--because of the things she willingly gave up in order to achieve her goals. Some of her experiences were so heartbreaking, like when she finally gave birth to her son Paul and then he was effectively kidnapped by the reigning empress immediately, so Catherine literally never bonded with her son. After all the reading I've done about how important the bonding that a mother and child do in the first few years, it makes sense how twisted that made her relationship with her son. It seemed like Catherine and her son were both shaped by their rejections by their own mothers and that affected their relationships for the rest of their lives.

There was so much I had never considered or learned about before in this book, and I'm glad to have read it. But I think I'll take a break on the heavy, long biographies for now. I liked Nicholas and Alexandra much more than this one, although it was still a worthwhile read.

Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie

I've meant to read this for years, and I'm not sure why. But I finally got around to starting it when we went on our trip and I had to download a bunch of books to the Kindle to read instead of bringing hard copies of books (best reason to have a Kindle--while traveling!). It had been a long time since I'd added this book to my to-read list, so I didn't remember that it was actually a biography of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia and not just a novel about them--which was kind of what I expected. So when I saw that it was 583 pages of solid biography, I started to get a little bit bogged down in it, but I powered through, and I'm really glad I did. I thought this book was so incredibly fascinating. I learned so much about Russia's history, recent and long-ago, and I learned so much about these two people specifically. (I have always loved all the Russian books I've read by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky--they have such a distinct flavor to them and I felt like I was reading one of those again while reading about life in St. Petersburg and Moscow). I didn't know very much about the Romanovs other than the Anastasia supposed mystery, but I do know a lot now. And I love them. They sound like they were amazingly nice, good-hearted, hard-working people who legitimately thought they were doing what was best for Russia. They were wholly devoted to their family and viewed taking care of Russia as their reason for living. I'm sure there is more to the story and that Massie isn't a completely impartial viewer of the situation, because it seems like there wasn't much negative he had to say about the couple other than their mistakes that they made in governing the country.

Because they made some incredible mistakes to bring along their own downfall and that of Imperial Russia. Tsar Nicholas was terrible at listening to advice from people at crucial moments, and was determined not to take away from the power of the monarchy until it was far too late and his kingdom had been completely taken away from him altogether. And, dare I say this? He was too accommodating to his wife, even when she had completely gone off the rails of normal beliefs and behavior--in her faith in Rasputin. There was almost two years during WWI, just before they were deposed, when Nicholas was off at the front leading the troops (from their headquarters) and Alexandra was basically taking over the running of the government from home, and she uprooted almost the entire set of ministers from the Cabinet based solely on who liked Rasputin and who didn't. Massie quotes tons and tons of her letters to Nicholas about removing such-and-such minister pretty much because he doesn't like Rasputin, and putting in so-and-so who does, no matter how good the minister was at his job and how inexperienced or useless someone was who she wanted to put in. She sounded seriously insane. She had no criteria other than someone liking Rasputin, because she had such faith in him as being basically the embodiment of good and of godliness (even though he was anything but!) so that anyone who didn't like him must be bad. And Nicholas never did much to check her or try to take any other control over the situation, and those few years pretty much drove the government to ruin. It sounded unbelievable.

Massie basically makes the case that their son Alexis's hemophilia drove Alexandra to complete despair and complete dependence on Rasputin's unexplained ability to heal her son's drastic bleeding episodes, and it was this decade-long relationship with Rasputin that seriously undermined the people's opinion of her and pretty much led to the Revolution (at least partly). Basically, hemophilia --> Rasputin --> Revolution. If Alexis had been a healthy boy, the whole history of Russia in the twentieth century might have been different. I found the many what-ifs that Massie entertained here and there so fascinating and interesting.

There were some other mind-blowing facts about older Russian history as well. I loved the story of how the first Romanov tsar came into power: he was just the nephew of Ivan the Terrible's wife who died and drove Ivan insane with depression, and he was the only person the group could agree on to elect as Tsar. So this random sixteen-year-old kid was elected as tsar in the 1500s, and then his family were the tsars for the next four hundred years. I just thought that was hilarious and so insane!

Overall, this was such an interesting read. I am toying with the idea of reading Massie's biography Catherine the Great next because I enjoyed this so much, and I would love to learn more about Russian history. But maybe I'll wait a little longer between big heavy biographies...

Glimpses into the Life and Heart of Marjorie Pay Hinckley, edited by Virginia H. Pearce

It's hard not to love Sister Hinckley, and I want to be more like her. Reading this book was a fun glimpse into her life and her mentality. I felt a little bit insecure about comparing myself with her at the beginning of it, but after a while I started to get a sense of her and feel less intimidated by her perfection and more admiring and feeling like I could eventually become like her. After all, she was about ninety when this book was written, she wasn't perfect. It was very refreshing to read some of the stories about her as a young mother, and to realize that she got mad at her kids every once in a while too. She had so many wonderful qualities, like her faith, her optimism (she has so many wonderful quotes about being positive, like the famous, "You either have to laugh or cry. I choose to laugh. Crying gives me a headache."), and her uplifting nature towards everyone else. I loved what everyone said about her always saying kind things about everyone--not just kind things, but admiring, uplifting, and constantly positive things. So many of her qualities are ones that I would like to emulate, particularly in my mothering and someday, in my mother-in-lawing (she sounded like a wonderful mother-in-law). Anyways, this is definitely a great book to keep and to be able to refer back to and remember. When I'm ninety years old, I want to be like her.

Quotes from the book that I loved:

"We are not asking for something spectacular but rather for our sisters to find real self-fulfillment through wise self-development in the pursuit of righteous and worth endeavors" - Spencer W. Kimball

"We have a lot to learn about simplifying our lives. We have to decide what is important and then move along at a pace that is comfortable for us. We have to develop the maturity to stop trying to prove anything, to be what we are."

"Do whatever you have to do this week; do it with your heart and soul, and do it cheerfully."

"I am so grateful for the blessings that I have enjoyed in my life.I do not know why the Lord has been so good to me. I don't know why I have been so blessed. But I do know that the Lord has a right to expect a lot of me. Sometimes the commitment gets a little heavy and sometimes I wonder if I can really do this. Then I think of all that I have been given, and it is easy to get up and do something a little more."

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

I have always felt some affinity for the Wright brothers, ever since we went to North Carolina when I was in high school and we visited the Wright brothers' museum in Kitty Hawk. Then Tommy and I went again when we lived in North Carolina, and the Outer Banks became one of my favorite places in the world. I loved visiting there, and I especially remember walking around in the sand dunes in Kitty Hawk when we visited in November, exactly where the brothers made their first flights. With all that in mind, I was excited to listen to this biography about them and their accomplishments. This book mainly covers the years of their innovation and flights, from 1900-1910. In their spare time after working in their bicycle shop, they spent years conducting experiments and studying mathematics and physics to figure out how they could build a flyer that would fly like a bird does. They spent hours observing birds and watching how they made their wings work, and read hundreds of books about how flight might work. It was really amazing to me how they persevered, and how they worked to discover the way to fly. They worked in the evenings and in all their free time for years before they ever even were able to build a plane that would work on its own. It really stuck in my mind how they were serious examples of grit (from Grit) and how they had passion and perseverance to work endlessly towards their goal and make greater and greater strides towards improving it, even when it would take years for them to get anywhere close to their goal. They seemed like true examples of some amazing qualities: humble, hard-working, respectful, stubborn and determined. Their opinions of themselves didn't change when they became famous, and they remained focused on their goals. I really admired them and thought it was pretty amazing how they did it. (It makes me wonder what I could accomplish if I had that much grit and passion about something.) It was also super interesting to learn about their flight demonstrations in America and in Europe and how amazing and awe-inspiring it was to the people then, since nobody had ever seen anything fly before.

Again, McCullough is pretty incredible at conducting detailed research, and it sounds like he read every single letter that they and their family ever wrote to each other. I also really liked how their family was so tight-knit and close with each other, and how they treated each other. The only thing that seemed a little off about their lives was how at the end of the book, he mentioned that they stopped flying altogether to take care of their patent lawsuits they were filing to stop people from stealing their ideas and to protect their legacies. I totally get that, but then on the other hand, it seems like they did kind of change their values from wanting to learn how to fly and to improve to do it better and better, to just wanting to make sure that everyone knew they were the first ones to do it. But, oh well. Good for them, it worked out and they're household names across the world still.

Book #34: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddartha Mukherjee

This book is a super-detailed history of the fight with cancer, starting with its earliest mentions in the histories of the Romans in 500 BC and continuing to the present day. Mukherjee, an oncologist by training, started researching and writing this book in response to his patients telling him, "I need to know what it is I'm fighting." He writes about the earliest attempts to find a cure for cancer in the eighteenth century, the beginnings of true modern cancer research in the 1940s and 50s, and the changes in society's views of cancer through fundraising efforts and developed understandings of what causes cancer (like things like asbestos and smoking). He ends in the modern day with what he believes is the future of cancer--we won't be able to perfectly prevent it or cure it, but our understanding of the genetic makeup of cancer will help us to adapt the treatments perfectly for each person's cancer and hopefully make it that much easier to cure. Throughout the book, Mukherjee also writes about his experiences with his own patients as he develops as an oncologist, and shares about the patients who died in his care and those who miraculously survived.

I really was interested in this book. Mukherjee writes very well and was extremely easy to follow, even though I was listening to the audiobook and it gets pretty technical at times (particularly once he started talking about the cellular makeup and genes involved in cancer mutations). I was specifically interested in the different stories of cancer treatments being developed, like lung cancer and the changes in understanding about smoking and cancer. He does a great job of writing about the scientific developments behind cancer treatments but also writing about the people behind those developments, and the societal norms of the time. This was a really long and hefty book (it was 20 hours of audio listening) but I thought well worth the effort.

Book #9: Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser

I vividly remember when I picked this book up at the Durham Library annual book sale and bought it on a whim. It was a total judging a book by its cover--I think the pink made it seem like it was less hefty than it was--and it's sat on my bookshelves for the last 3-4 years with me feeling bad about not having read it. One of my goals for this year was to read ten books which I own without having read, though, and so I finally made it through this one. (And now I am planning to go sell a bunch of these books to Half Price Books, including this one, because I don't see myself reading it again--although I enjoyed it.)

This is a very well-researched and interesting biography of Marie Antoinette, starting with her parents and childhood and ending, obviously, with her execution during the French Revolution. The fact of the book--which Fraser starts with on the very first page--is that Marie Antoinette actually DID NOT say, "Let them eat cake" like everyone thinks. That quote was already floating around as some other princess having said it, centuries before Marie Antoinette was in power, so there's no way it was actually from her. The other reason that she never said it was because it would have been totally out of her character, because she was sympathetic to the poor and concerned about their plight (but not enough to cut back on her expenses or lifestyle). Fraser gives a very sympathetic view of Marie Antoinette and shows that she was actually a relatively good, kind person, who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, thanks to her mother's (the Empress of Austria) over-reaching ambitions and attempts to use her as a pawn in a treaty between Austria and France through her marriage to Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette was only fourteen when she was shipped off to France as a bride, and she was obviously immature and unfamiliar with the customs of that court and her role there. She was not very smart (it seems) and never truly grasped her role as the go-between Austria and France (as it was intended when her mother shipped her over there) vs. her role as the Queen of France. She was also very expensive, spending millions of livre a year on clothes and re-furnishing apartments--but, as Fraser is always careful to point out, she wasn't any more spendy than any of the other aristocrats of her time. She was actually in between a rock and a hard place, because it was part of her role as the Queen of France that she look and act the part and uphold a lifestyle that the people expected, but they also resented it for her as well. But she was a good and dedicated mother, and she developed a lot of courage and backbone through the years of trial and struggle leading up to her execution. It is obvious through reading about the last few years of her life that she was unfairly mistreated and given no chance to defend herself, that the people were determined to kill her without any evidence. One of the most heart-wrenching things to me was that they took her son away from her and brainwashed him against her to get him to accuse her of incest during her trial--and after everything else she had suffered, that seemed like it was probably the final straw, because she had always cared first and foremost about her children and their well-being. Every single witness to her execution talked about how brave and quiet she was walking to the guillotine.

This book was very interesting, but it was hard to keep track of all the people and there wasn't enough explanation of all the major goings-on of the French government and the Revolution (Fraser expected you to already know what was coming). But it was easy enough to skim along and get the main points. It started to drag once they got arrested, but I really enjoyed the first half of the book and learning about the court of Versailles and their customs and outrageous lifestyle they had there. Overall, definitely a worthwhile read--but it was a hefty book and I don't think I'm going to read it again.

Book #47: The Biography of Gordon B. Hinckley: Go Forward with Faith by Sheri L. Dew

I've been thinking about reading this book forever. I took it from my parents' house before they moved so that I would actually start it, and then it sat on my bedside stand for three months. I loved reading about President Hinckley and learning more about his character and personality. I was surprised by how many of the stories or anecdotes in the book I was already familiar with, like he had told them in Conference talks or people had included them in lessons in church that I have heard.

Things I loved learning about President Hinckley:

-How hardworking he was. He really valued a strong work ethic and had one himself. He may have been a sort of workaholic, but he was always dedicated, particularly since he saw himself as working to further the work of the Church.
-He built their entire house with his own hands. He was extremely handy and knew how to do everything, from the plumbing to electrical, etc. He was constantly making up projects and remodeling their house just for fun or for major events. He would take down walls and put them back up for any little reason.
-He came home from his mission in England and went to report to the First Presidency on something for his mission president (asking for more and better missionary materials). Then he thought he would apply to journalism school back East. But two days later, the First Presidency asked him to work for the Church and be in charge of the project he had proposed to them--and to be their main PR guy. He basically became the PR and missionary departments at the Church headquarters. And he worked for the Church for the rest of his life (except for two years during WWII when he worked for the railroads). This really prepared him to be a leader later because he knew every aspect of the Church and its functions.
-He spent many years traveling to Asia and getting to know the people there, in Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines, and all over. He went to tiny towns and talked to individual members, and he saw their sufferings and their lives. He may have only lived in Salt Lake City his whole life, but he was very aware of the issues of the world.
-His sweet relationship with his wife. He always wanted her to travel with him, even when they had young kids at home, and he hated being separated from her. They were a completely equal partnership (even though he didn't do all that much of the parenting at home, because he was always gone)--he never tried to tell her what to do. Pretty awesome when they got married in the Great Depression.
-He was very humble. He was very shaken every time he was called one step up the chain of command--when he was called to be an Assistant to the Twelve, then an apostle, then second counselor in the First Presidency, then first counselor, then of course when he became the prophet. Every time was very nerve-wracking and scary to him, and he struggled with a lot of self-doubt and concern. But he always felt relieved reminding himself that it was the Lord's church and not himself that mattered. He didn't love it when people would all stand when he'd come into the room and sing "We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet", because he didn't want all the attention. He struggled with the loneliness of leadership and being separate from everyone else, especially in the First Presidency and as prophet. It's so interesting/nice to know that even the prophet has moments of self-doubt.

I was disappointed in this book for several reasons though. First, it was published right after he became President of the Church, so it only covered about 18 months of his term as President. I didn't realize that when I started reading it, and I wished it went longer because I wanted to learn more about the years in which I remembered him as prophet. He is the only prophet I remember as a child (although I was six or seven when he became prophet, so I should probably have remembered Presidents Hunter or Benson) and I was disappointed that I didn't get to read more about what he did as prophet. I was also disappointed that this book was so focused on what he did every year. It seemed like there was so much minutiae about every trip he took and every assignment he had that it dragged a lot. I didn't feel like this format gave me as much information about what he was really thinking or feeling, like you usually get from biographies. (Probably part of the reason of that was that he was still alive while she was writing/publishing this, and he didn't want the book to be written anyways, so he may not have wanted it to get too personal.) But it felt like she just got a hold of his calendar and journal from his whole career and just expounded on everything he did each year. It really was dry. I feel like it might have been more interesting if she'd had a whole chapter just on his trips to Asia over the years instead of every chapter talking about another trip to Asia, and another trip to Asia, and another trip to Asia. All of them sounded the same and all of them were a ton of work and he loved the people there, yadda yadda yadda. That might have been an abnormal format for a biography but it would have helped to keep it feel like it was dragging.

Book #46: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I have been meaning and wanting to read this book for a while. Goodwin's Team of Rivals was one of my favorite books I've ever read--so I've wanted to read more books by her but haven't gotten around to it until now. This book obviously is about FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt and their relationship and what they accomplished on the home front in America during WWII. The narrative starts in 1940 when Hitler began invading other countries in Europe, and then ends when Roosevelt dies in 1945. I really enjoyed reading this book and learning more about FDR and Eleanor individually and as a team, and about the country's development and change during WWII and that crazy time. Although Goodwin doesn't discuss much about what they did before WWII, even though FDR had been president for six or seven years before WWII starts, it's obvious that FDR and Eleanor had a great working partnership established well before this time period because of all the things they were able to accomplish together. Goodwin paints a portrait of Eleanor as insecure in many ways but extremely morally focused and motivated by wanting to help others, and FDR as kind of self-centered and much more politically motivated by what the public wanted and would accept rather than what he believed was right. It makes FDR seem like less of a good guy, but he was also much more realistic and accomplished much more than Eleanor could have on her own. They were such a good team because Eleanor pushed him in forward-thinking directions while FDR helped her see what was possible.

During the war, FDR made a lot of logistical decisions that made a huge difference in the ability of the US to help win the war. He was focused on spurring manufacturing to build up the "arsenal of democracy," stopping strikes that were causing problems with war manufacturing, and helping Great Britain and Russia to stop Germany's advances. Eleanor, on the other hand, was seriously concerned with making sure that the strides of the New Deal towards helping labor improve their circumstances were not curtailed because of the necessities of war. She focused on improving Negro relations at home and in the armed forces, tried to represent to FDR when strikers had good reason for striking, and spent weeks and months traveling around the world visiting US soldiers to try and boost morale however she could. They both did so much, it's unbelievable to see how they managed--and kind of unsurprising that it basically killed FDR in the end. He died of a brain hemorrhage a month or so before V-E day.

After reading the book, Eleanor definitely comes off as maybe a little of a workaholic but more of the sympathetic character of the two to me. I really detested FDR's womanizing personality and how he always wanted to be around beautiful, simpering women who wanted to lavish him with praise. Eleanor may not have understood him in a lot of ways, like always wanting to make him work when he needed to relax, but I hated how they both had these somewhat intimate relationships (not necessarily romantic, but mentally intimate) with other people and not with their spouse. I respect them both for how well they maneuvered the country at this time but I didn't love that about them. But nobody's perfect. And I just came away from this book feeling like our country could not have survived that era without the two of them.

Book #21: Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I loved, loved, loved reading the Little House on the Prairie books when I was younger--and still do. I asked for Pioneer Girl for Christmas from my parents, without really even knowing what it was. Turns out it's Laura Ingalls Wilder's official autobiography that she wrote, which she tried to get published before she ever got into writing the novels in the Little House series. She used the stories and life history from Pioneer Girl to shape the children's books that she wrote. But, unlike what I thought before, the children's stories in Little House are not perfectly true to what really happened--they're fiction based on fact, not fact themselves. Wilder did a lot of reshaping and representing as she wrote the novels in order to make them work for her young audience, to make the chronology work appropriately, to make her characters sympathetic, and to give the entire series an overall feeling and plot of the family always moving westward and progressing to bigger and better things. This, Pioneer Girl, is the unedited and true-to-life autobiography that Laura Ingalls Wilder originally wrote. And it's accompanied by pages and pages of annotations explaining and expounding on the stories and people that Wilder mentions throughout her narrative. Almost all of it is already familiar to anyone who's read the Little House books, but the fascinating part of it all is reading where and how things were the same or different from what really happened to the novels, and to read about these characters that Laura meets and describes in the books and what happens to them in their real lives. I really enjoyed reading the annotations, even more than Wilder's autobiography itself--so much so that I think I am going to look up a biography of her to read. And I had so much fun re-reading the story that I'm going to revisit the Little House books now--I recently read the first two, so I already started On the Banks of Plum Creek. This was definitely worth a read and I felt like I got to know Laura herself better through reading it--although it is a HUGE book (not in number of pages, but in the size of the pages themselves) and kind of cumbersome and awkward to read.

Bok #47: Elizabeth the Queen by Sally Bedell Smith

I picked up this book as one of my choices for an audiobook for my mom and I to listen to on our drive from NC to TX, on the off chance that Dane would nap or be watching a movie and we would be able to pay attention. We only got through about three of the CDs while driving, but it was still pretty interesting, so I decided to finish it on my own over the last few weeks.

It has been fascinating to learn more about Queen Elizabeth, someone I really didn't know all that much about. It has been very interesting to start with her early life before WWII and then during the war, and then to progress seemingly quickly through the decades to the current era, and to realize that she has been alive throughout all of it--and queen of England for most of it! It is unbelievable that she was basically my age when she became queen, and that she's been doing her royal duties for her entire life. It was also very interesting to learn more about what those "royal duties" are, since I'd always kind of imagined the royal family were more of just centerpieces and ornaments rather than actually accomplishing anything, but the queen and her family are really very busy and do lots of important things for Great Britain. She is a kind of ambassador to the world and to the country, and she has made a huge difference in a lot of events through her presence and her actions. This book also lightly covered British history over the period of her lifetime, since her life and the events in her country are so tied together. There are seemingly two whole chapters on the Diana era and her death and funeral, which seemed a bit overdoing it, but I imagine that's something that a huge number of readers associate with the royal family and want to learn more about. I enjoyed reading about the different changes the monarchy has made over the decades to remain relevant in today's culture and how the queen has had to remain flexible over changes in government and public opinion.

Listening to this book, I can't help but wonder how biased the author is. Basically in every story and situation the queen comes out untarnished and the author explains how she is just amazing at everything and basically always made the right choices. I really do admire the queen after listening to this book and everything that she has accomplished. I'd heard that she (and the royal family) had not treated Diana very well, but it really seems like it was more the other way around (although I'm sure it was on both sides). However, the queen is expected to be completely neutral on political topics (which is very interesting to me) and this forced neutrality has probably helped her to remain in good light for many experiences in her life, like that one with Diana.

It does seem sad to see how her children have acted and how they've turned out--almost all of them had affairs within their marriages and got divorced at one point or another. The author points out that the queen had a "laissez-faire" view of parenting and hardly ever intervened or got involved in disciplining them or telling them what to do, and she was apparently not super involved with some of them when they were young, and this has turned out to haunt her in later years. Honestly, that just seems so sad to me. It reminds me of the LDS quote: No success can compensate for failure in the home. She has done amazing, wonderful things for her country and the world, but her relationship with her children and their actions towards others must be a source of regret and frustration for her (as described by the author of this book).

Book #42: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

I started this book while we were in Mexico and just finished it today. I feel like David McCullough's name is hugely familiar to me, so it's surprising that I hadn't actually read any of his books. I'd listened to the abridged version of John Adams with Tommy, and the Johnstown Flood with my family (both on road trips). But I am glad to have finally read one of his books, particularly this one on Teddy Roosevelt. I love that this book was about his background and upbringing, because it is so fascinating to hear about where people come from and what their families are like. It was very neat to learn about his family, especially because they were such a loving and happy and tight-knit group. I feel like much of the time you learn about people who do wonderful things despite their depressing beginnings (Abraham Lincoln is one that comes to mind) but Theodore Roosevelt is the complete opposite: ridiculously wealthy without a care in the world for money his entire life, surrounded by loving, caring family members, and always encouraged in all of his endeavors, no matter what he was trying to do. But he was still amazing in his personal accomplishments and achievements on his own, not just because of what his family contributed for him. I loved hearing about how he was so intensely curious about learning about science and the natural world as a child, and how his dad was one of the founders of the Natural History Museum in New York because of Theodore's fascination. I also loved reading about his asthma as a child and how his parents were tireless in doing what they thought was best to help him whenever he needed it. His parents both sound like they were fantastic human beings, who were super-rich but helped other people and really cared about other people. And his sisters, especially his older sister Bamie, were really interesting (and probably deserve their own books written about them too).

There were two things I wish were a little different about this book. First, I don't really know anything about Theodore as an adult or as President (all I remember is that he made Yellowstone a national park and the whole Bull Moose Party), so it would have been nice to have a little more information about what he did then and how his younger life contributed to his later accomplishments. Second, I didn't like how abruptly it ended. I felt like McCullough didn't even make an effort to wrap things up smoothly; he just barely introduced the fact that Theodore was going to be getting married and that he was about to go to England to meet his new bride for their wedding--and then the book ended. What?! I know that this book was about his younger years, but I felt like there could have been a much more graceful foreword to what was to follow for Theodore to finish off the book. All in all, I loved this portrait of Teddy Roosevelt and I kind of want to read a more thorough biography of the rest of his life now to find out what really happens--in more detail--for the rest of his life after the point which I read to in this one.

Book #19: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I know this may sound weird to say about a 750-page biography, but I could NOT put this book down. I totally neglected everything around here for the last three days while I was trying to power through the rest of this book because I was just so interested in everything happening with Lincoln. And it's not like I didn't know what was going to happen--it's just pretty regular Civil War stuff, which I remember SOME of from high school--but I absolutely loved the insights that Goodwin provides to Lincoln's character and the men that he worked with in his cabinet. I felt like I really got to know him, similar to how I felt after watching Lincoln (which was in part based on the research from this book, and which I definitely want to watch again after reading this).

Goodwin takes the really interesting tack of studying other people in addition to Lincoln in order to give greater insights into Lincoln's personality and achievements, including the men who were his rivals for the Republican nomination for President and who later were members of his cabinet--Seward, Chase, and Bates. The first half of the book talks about each of these men and their histories and their ambitions to become President, all the way up to the election in 1860. I really enjoyed reading about the different men and their different personalities, and seeing how Goodwin compared them at different points. The second half of the book follows (very closely, in much detail) Lincoln's presidency and how he brought together all of these men, and many other people with differing skills and opinions in order to succeed through the Civil War.

Goodwin views Lincoln as a "political genius" (as the subtitle says) and after reading all of her commentary and the evidence she quotes to back it up, it definitely seems like it. Lincoln was incredibly skilled at reading public opinion and waiting until the exact opportune moment to present his opinions or make a move when it was most likely to succeed (like with how he decided to present the Emancipation Proclamation when and how he did). He knew how to use the members of his cabinet to the best of their ability and to ignore their petty faults to focus on the good they were doing in their positions, and he could universally ignore the personal attacks made on him by anyone in order to utilize their skills to save the Union and support him. That was the most amazing thing about Lincoln that came through this book--what an amazing, charitable, "magnanimous" (Goodwin used this word to describe him or his actions about twenty times; she used the word "indefatigable" to describe Seward about thirty-five times) human being Lincoln was. He was incredibly forgiving towards everyone--people that he knew personally who hurt or offended him, soldiers who deserted the Union who he pardoned, and the South as a whole during the plans for Reconstruction. He was welcoming and kind to everyone who came to him as President and he was patient to a ridiculous point with everyone around him. Everyone (at least, everyone who wasn't crazy) who got to know him and worked with him on a close basis became his lasting and loyal friend because of his generosity.

I loved the emphasis Goodwin placed on his storytelling habits and abilities, and on his literary/writing skills. He told stories almost constantly in his conversation to defuse situations, amuse his listeners, and make a point--it was funny because it seemed like no matter where he went, and no matter what age he was, he was always surrounded by a crowd of people listening to his stories. He started telling stories to his friends when he was a kid, entertained young men around the fire in his friend's shop before he was even a lawyer in Springfield, and would lighten the mood while waiting for telegrams with his aides during the War. Also, Goodwin called him "our only poet-president"--can you believe if our leaders wrote their own speeches today? Everyone wrote their own speeches then; men had to be accomplished orators to be successful as politicians.

He definitely wasn't perfect, but it definitely seems like he was the ONLY person who could have helped the nation weather the storms it went through at that time period, and he was the only person who could have gathered the people around him who helped to solve the problems. He definitely seems like probably the only person who could have responded to so many unfair and ill-willed situations with such graciousness and, yes, magnanimity. It's interesting because one reason he is such a huge public figure is because of his assassination, making him a martyr and instantly preserving him as this larger-than-life person, but he really was an incredibly capable and charitable person beyond just his presidency during the Civil War and his assassination.

I tend to have a very cynical opinion about politics and politicians, but this book helped me to see a little bit about what politicians do (or at least what they DID, but I am sure that some of it transfers still, in generalities) and why it is valuable and why it takes skill. I guess if all politicians were like Lincoln, things wouldn't be so bad in this country.


A few other random notes about this book: I was really touched by Goodwin's description of Seward and Lincoln's friendship and Seward's reaction to finding out that Lincoln had been killed. I loved Stanton and hated Chase--he drove me crazy with his lack of responsibility and obnoxiousness. I feel so sorry for Mary Lincoln, even with all of her craziness--I could never go through all of those trials that she went through without partially losing my mind either.