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. 

The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland

I'd seen this book mentioned places for years but finally checked it out. It was a cute true story about the thousands of people who were stranded for days in this tiny hamlet in Newfoundland. It went quickly and was heartwarming about how many people helped and gave to strangers. It was also hard reading about 9/11 as a new event again.

Saints 3: Boldly, Nobly, and Independent: 1893-1955

My mom asked if we would read this book for her birthday and then we could all have a discussion about it. I didn't end up finishing it by her birthday, but did the next week before our discussion. It was a super interesting time period of church history, which I hadn't honestly learned a lot about before. There were a lot of great stories about different people in different countries over this wide time period, and I honestly just wished they would have delved a little deeper and maybe split this into two different books so they could have done more. I love that the Church is being really upfront about the things in our history, but there were a bunch of stories that are frustrating to read, like the treatment of black members for decades of our church history. 

Night by Elie Wiesel

I've never gotten around to reading this, even though I've always heard about it as a Holocaust story and a classic that everyone should read. I have had it on my shelves for years, and it's so short that I really should have done it a long time ago. In the end, I started and finished it on the same night, so it went really fast. But it was so sad--I think that's part of the reason why I never read it--and so horrifying to read what Wiesel went through in the concentration camps during WWII. It was crazy to read about how his family was living their normal lives and how slowly things changed and got worse and worse, but they still thought they were going to be okay--until all of a sudden, they were killed. It was just a gradual change and they were so used to being orderly and obedient--just like us. It really makes you question, what if this happened here? This happened there, and they were just normal people just like us. Wiesel really wanted people to think about what how people saw them and knew what was happening, but didn't do anything about it. We need to not be like that.

As a side note, this was my 1000th book that I've read on Goodreads. Not too shabby! I was super pleased to hit that milestone!

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. 

The Curse of the Mummy: Uncovering Tutankhamun's Tomb by Candace Fleming

Dane bought this at his school book fair with his birthday money and was raving about it and begged me to read it. I planned on just skimming through it to appease him but I actually enjoyed it enough to read the whole thing. It looks like it's trying to be a scary mummy story, but it was actually a really interesting history of the discovery and digging out of King Tutankhamun's tomb, and went into detail about archaeology and the history of the time period. I learned a lot (even though it was written for kids Dane's age) and I thought it was super interesting. It was amazing to learn about how much stuff they found in the tomb and what a years-long process it was to study and label and get everything out. 

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

This is one of the most fascinating and mind-blowing I have read in a long time. I listened to it, actually, or else I would have been underlining things on every single page and I would have so many more things to say about it than I have right now. I have thought about this book at least once a day since finishing it six weeks ago; so many of the stories he told and the points he made are so fresh, even when he was talking about things that happened three hundred years ago in America. The main thing he made me believe was that the only thing wrong with black people is that we think there's something wrong with black people--and I never really understood what that meant until he explained it throughout the book, over and over again. He started at the beginning of our American history and used five crucial American thinkers and how they dictated and represented the racist (or anti-racist) ways Americans thought and have thought at the time. I could not believe all of the parts of our history that he wrote about that I did not know or which I'd never understood in the way he shared. Like, the fact that after the Civil War, in the beginning of Reconstruction, there were black Congressmen from the South, who were slowly pushed out by the South as they reclaimed their hold over Black people through Jim Crow and anti-voting laws. I had no idea. I feel ashamed that I didn't know about all of the Black activists who have been making a difference to change political and public opinions for centuries in our country--I knew many, but they were represented here in such a more complete way that I learned so much. This book was definitely the best book I've read/listened to all year, and I feel like I might buy a copy so that I can read it again and remember better what I've learned.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

This was one of my favorite books I read this year. I heard about this on the What Should I Read Next? podcast and immediately bought it for myself for my birthday. I knew it was going to be a hit because I am always, always interested in books about books and libraries. Orlean covers such a wide scope in this book--the book is mainly about the LA Library fire in 1986, but she dives deep into the history of libraries in general, the history of library fires, the history of the LA Library in specific, the biography of Harry Peak (the suspected arsonist of the LA Library), and what the LA Library is like now. It was amazing and was some of the best non-fiction I've read in a long time.

The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder that Shocked Jazz-Age America by Karen Abbott

I included the whole long subtitle there to show why I was intrigued by this book and why I thought it would be a fun book to listen to on our drive home from California. It turned out that it was only moderately interesting and really started to drag. The first few hours of the book were fascinating, about George Remus and his youth and how he got started as a bootlegger. He seemed like this larger-than-life character. However, once he got arrested and went to jail, the rest of the book seemed like a long repetition of him whining about his life and getting "brainstorms" and yelling at people. Karen Abbott really seemed proud of the fact that she was including all this real-life dialogue which was included from the actual court transcripts involving George Remus, but I feel like it would have been better if it had been a little shorter and didn't go into quite as much detail. It definitely went too long.

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.

Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society

I read this book before, around when it came out, but maybe I didn't read it all and I'm sure I didn't read it all at once. I decided to read it this time because I just got called into the Relief Society Presidency in my ward, and I wanted to think about the bigger picture. I loved reading about the church history aspects of this book, particularly the chapters after they arrived in Utah and the next century and a half. It was so interesting reading about what the Relief Society sisters did in the years of church history that we don't talk much about... it seems like we only talk about Nauvoo and being pioneers, but once they make it to Utah I hardly know anything about what they did. I liked how they mentioned/discussed all of the past Relief Society presidents, and talked about what Relief Society has done over the years and how it has changed.

I didn't love several of the chapters, especially the one about women in the home. There was a quote about how women are homemakers and specifically talked about how that meant sewing and cleaning, etc... Not exactly the most exciting or empowering of quotes. But I felt like I got the idea out of this book that we need to do more service to get back to our Relief Society roots, and we need to do more with helping people be prepared for emergencies. I also think we need to study more of our past Relief Society leaders' words and thoughts. I hope we are able to do some of these things in our Relief Society.

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.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

I heard about this book from the Modern Mrs. Darcy blog, where she listed some good audiobooks. I was interested in it because I loved getting to know the OED a little bit when I was in college. It's absolutely amazing to see how much goes into every entry about every word. Not just definitions, but actual quotes showing how and when the words were used and when they first entered the language. I was fascinated by it, and I loved the idea of learning about how the book was put together. This book gave a lot of information about that, but it also focused a lot on one of the contributors to the dictionary: William Chester Minor, who was an insane man being held in an asylum in England after he killed a man. I'd say this book was more about him than it was about the dictionary--kind of a biography of Minor with more asides about the dictionary and Murray, who was the "professor" in charge of the dictionary (at least for part of it--it took 70 years to complete so he died before it was finished). And I was kind of disappointed about that--I didn't feel like the story of Minor and Murray was worth spending most of the book on. It would have been great to have it be maybe split halfway between the personal story and more information about the making of the dictionary. I'm sure there was some exciting dramas that must have happened while adding specific words, etc., and that's probably what Minor and Murray would have been more interested in talking about than themselves. But it was still a pretty good audiobook--the narrator's (and author's) voice was so supremely upper-class British that it was perfect for this story about the Oxford English Dictionary.

Saints, Volume 1: The Standard of Truth, 1815-1846

A big thank you to the Church for putting their new church history book in the LDS Library app for free, and providing free audio to it so I could just listen to it like a regular audiobook. I would have probably never gotten around to reading this if I hadn't had the audio version. But I'm glad I did. This book covers the early period of church history, in a new narrative version of church history. It seems like the Church is being more open about some of the uncomfortable parts of our history, the things that have been stumbling blocks to people before, like plural marriage and seer stones and the negative things that leaders have done. I didn't feel like much of this history was new to me--I'd learned it all in Church History at BYU. But I was surprised by how uncomfortable a lot of it made me, even though I knew it all. I think I was uncomfortable with how unapologetic this account was, with no explanations or reasonings or apologies for anything which we Mormons are used to explaining away. In my head, I agree with this approach and I think the bare-bones, open nature of this book is going about it the right way, but in my heart, I think I'm still not comfortable with all of these things and I want more explanations to make it more palatable. Particularly everything with plural marriage, which we all know is a huge issue for pretty much everyone today. I've never struggled with major aspects of church history, but I can definitely see why people do.

I did love a lot of this book, though. I loved the focus on lots of different people and how regular people sought and received revelation. Throughout the whole story, from the very beginning, each person prayed to Heavenly Father to receive an answer if the church was true or if a specific doctrine was true. The book talked about how these answers came and what the Spirit felt like for each person. I really liked that angle of the book and how it taught those sorts of doctrines. I also loved some of the faith-promoting stories that were new and fresh, like about Wilford Woodruff serving a mission in some far-off islands and about Edward Partridge's family. I learned a lot about the sequences of things in church history as well. This book made it seem like there was a direct connection between the leaders of the church directing the Nauvoo Expositor press to be destroyed and Joseph eventually being murdered. I didn't really realize that those things happened in such quick succession, or that's why Joseph was eventually captured and held prisoner.

I thought a lot about how we choose to write and view history while listening to this book. The very act of rewriting Church history is an acknowledgement of the fact that history can be rewritten and re-framed based on how you choose to write about it and what you choose to include. I think this step in rewriting the Church's history is a really positive, eye-opening step towards acknowledging some of the darker parts of church history, which aren't emphasized as much but still are there. They don't need to be kept a secret, because it makes us stronger when we know about them and talk about them, and learn from them. (I kept thinking about the "Me, Too" movement when the whole John C. Bennett chapter was going on, when the women talked about how he persuaded them to sleep with him by telling them it was sanctioned by Joseph. So horrible that things like that happened back then like they're still happening today--men in positions of power taking advantage of that power to hurt women. From this account, it seemed like the leaders of the church took the women's accusations seriously, and took away Bennett's power. Maybe not as quickly as they should have, but they did.)

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy

I listened to this book because it was our book club book for September, but then after I was about halfway done with it book club ended up getting canceled, so we aren't even talking about it at all. I probably wouldn't have bothered listening to it if I hadn't had it for book club, because there are just so many good books that I want to read/listen to. And this one was so long! It was maybe 14 hours? And 14 hours of history, not a novel. I really did enjoy it and get caught up in it, but I felt like it could have been condensed wayyyy down. This book reminded me a lot of Hidden Figures--they are pretty much the same book, just about two different groups of women working in a field where they usually wouldn't have been admitted and where they made enormous strides. It also reminded me of Hidden Figures because I had some of the same complaints about it--it just seemed like it should have had more of a cohesive storyline. But it was about a bunch of disparate women characters, so it was hard to keep each of them straight and to really get invested in any of their lives or their choices. I know it was about the group as a whole, and it was really amazing and interesting to learn about the codebreaking units of WWII and what they accomplished. But it was hard to care too much about any one girl's fiancee dying or something like that when you don't remember if you've heard her name before or not. It was also hard to understand or keep track of all of the different types of codes and codebreaking skills the girls had to learn, but that was mostly because I was listening to it as an audiobook--it probably would have been much easier to read. But I didn't really need to understand each of the specific codes to understand the achievements of these women.

I am glad to have learned about this small pocket of history, and especially to have learned more about the war and how codebreaking played a role in it. It was fascinating to learn about how during WWII, the radio messages and the radio traffic were such an enormous way that each side was keeping track of the enemy. There were no satellites or any way to check up on how large the armies were, so the main way that they got intelligence about each other was by intercepting and breaking each other's codes and reading about their armies and navies. I loved the part about D-Day, how the Allies kept D-Day a secret by convincing Hitler that there were several huge and nonexistent armies stationed in different parts of England that were going to be striking in Norway and Calais, and the Normandy invasion was just a distraction. They made him believe that by spending months and months sending fake radio traffic to and from these false armies, in the same patterns and types of messages that a real army would be sending. They did it so well that the Axis powers really did believe that whole armies existed that really didn't. I love that and how that could never happen today because of satellite surveillance. So fascinating!

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...

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I have been reading this book for over a month now and only just finished it. I will say that this book was very good and well done, but it definitely did not live up to my goal of reading books that made me happy this year. I was reading it for my book club, and I was the one who suggested it, so I really should have enjoyed it. But given the subject matter--a slave escaping from slavery--it was really heavy and sometimes dark reading that didn't lend itself to being loved. I think this was a good book, an important book, a worthwhile book, but not one of my favorites that I would pick up again for fun.

This book is about Cora, a slave who escapes from her plantation in Georgia with another slave named Caesar. The plot seems like straight historical fiction until Cora and Caesar are helped into the Underground Railroad--and in Colson Whitehead's version of history, it's a real underground railroad with trains and tracks barreling along underground. And in each state that Cora travels to in her journey to freedom, she encounters different and not-actually-historically-accurate circumstances for black people. For example, in South Carolina, black people are given quite a lot of freedom and help, or so they think--until she learns that the doctors that are helping them are actually doing tests on them and trying to sterilize the people they deem undesirable. In North Carolina, they've exterminated and expelled all black slaves from their state and brought in white poor workers to take their place. In Indiana, she lives on a sort of commune farm owned by a black man who has taken in all sorts of runaways and people who need help. But all along the way Cora is being chased by Ridgeway, the slave hunter who was never able to find her mother who ran away long ago when Cora was a child, and who has sworn to not let Cora do the same thing to him.

I have a lot of confused, half-baked thoughts about this book, but mostly, I liked how it made me think. Obviously Whitehead is making some serious points about the history of relations between blacks and whites in America through this time-traveling journey through American history--it's like Cora visited the Tuskegee Institute in South Carolina in the 50s just after escaping from her plantation in Georgia, for example. I think I need to watch or listen to some interviews with Whitehead to get a little more out of it. So the historical information was pretty interesting. However, it was hard to get that invested in Cora or in the story, because you never really got to know her. She was very closed off, even from the reader, so you never knew much about her other than what she did on the outside. Same with all the other more minor characters who drop in and out of the story, and it's hard to tell what they are all about. Obviously it was also pretty difficult to read about the terrible things that slave owners did to their slaves, but even more difficult to remember that those things really happened and were not just a part of a fictional story. I felt guilty reading the scene where an escaped-then-recovered slave was hung and tortured and burned in front of a garden party of other rich white planters who came for the "entertainment"--it made me wonder, what kind of depraved people were these people? And would I have been that terribly unconcerned about slaves and torture if I had been born in that time and place? (I think these thoughts are healthy in a humbling way, and a good reminder that we all are predisposed to racism if we don't actively try to work against it. Don't you?)

In the end, I'm glad to have read this, but I don't know that I'll recommend it to most people as a pleasure read--definitely more of a thought-provoking one.

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.

1776 by David McCullough

When I read The Midwife's Revolt last month for my book club, it got me interested in reading some more things about the Revolutionary War. I realized I really didn't know or remember that much about that time in our history, and what I did know or remember was from listening to the abridged version of David McCullough's John Adams maybe a decade ago. (So, it really wasn't that much. I basically remembered that he lived in Braintree and that he and Abigail loved each other and wrote tons of letters to each other.) I found that this book was available on audiobook from the library and I was super excited to listen to it. This book, as you might imagine, is about all of the battles and difficulties of the Continental Army in the year 1776 (and 1775 leading up to it), mostly focusing on George Washington and his decisions and movements at the time. And all in all, it was really interesting--there were a few times when it was hard to follow some of the specific details about the battles that McCullough went into (and maybe that was just because I was listening and didn't have any visuals that were probably included in the book), but generally, I was pretty impressed by how McCullough made this potentially dry history into such a smooth narrative that was easy to follow.

It was also very impressive how much research into primary sources that McCullough had to do to write this book. Almost every other sentence was a quote from a letter or a diary written by someone at the time--it is exhausting to even imagine how much work it was to track down everything written by everyone, even just random privates in the army, and work it in to the story he was trying to tell. I definitely enjoyed learning more about George Washington--I'd never really thought about what his personality was, other than noble and solemn like he's always portrayed in paintings at the time, and I liked learning more about his flaws and his positive traits. The other thing that really stood out to me was how slowly and deliberately every decision about the army had to be made, on both sides. Information moved so slowly, and people moved so slowly--any battle had to be preceded by days and days of marching, and it kept things from actually progressing very quickly. It was basically understood that people didn't fight battles in the wintertime, so the war would shut down for months at a time. And it was amazing how few people were killed in each battle! Usually, the casualties for the battles described in this book were between 20 and 200--which really is amazing since I normally think about WWII where thousands of people die in every battle. I really enjoyed this and want to revisit John Adams again too (although sadly the library doesn't have an audiobook copy so I'll have to get around to reading that one hard copy sometime).