Another proud member of the irony-based community.
"Mysterious Jackson area lawyer's blog about history, literature, and whatever irks him." -- NMC
"Just a hypersensitive pantywaist probably of Gallic descent who still suffers nightmares over what Gaius Julius did to your people 2,000 years ago." -- Kingfish
And therefore, reader, I myself am the subject of my book; it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.
-- Montaigne, Essays, "To the Reader.""I shall see myself, I shall read myself, I shall go into ecstacies, and I shall ask -- Is it possible that I have so much ésprit?"
-- Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.... the torturer has become – like the pirate and slave trader before him – hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind.
-- Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, 630 F.2d 876, 890 (2d Cir. 1980)
I'm reading The Fiery Trial now-- just started it-- and it's quite good. Essentially a biography of Lincoln through the prism of one issue: Slavery. In some ways an ideal way to do history-- pick a controllable but very illuminating set of data. I'd got about half-way through Foner's reconstruction book, and found his style a bit of a burden there. Not so here.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've got Foner lurking on my shelf -- I had absorbed a good bit of "Lost Cause" stuff unconsciously and hope that he will help me in my recovery. Will seek F.T. at my library.
ReplyDeleteHey, I'm reliving the lost cause stuff with my revisit to certain parts of Faulkner. I just deleted a long comment running on about that.
ReplyDeleteI'll keep it short to this: The racial stuff in stories like "Was" and the famously difficult part of "The Bear" is vastly more complex than I remember from reading it in college. I'm going to go back and look at what Joel Williamson says about all that-- although my memory is that he gets the biography stuff really right but writing about the books not so right.