I am on study leave this week. My next post, God willing, will be the sermon for March 15, 2026. I’ll catch up with folks then!
(New York: Viking, 2025), 207 pages.
On Memorial Day, 2019, on the streets of Washington D.C., Geraldine Brooks’ husband, Tony Horwitz, died of a major heart attack. He was on a book tour promoting Spying on the South.
I have read several of Horwitz’s books and have loved them all. However, by far, my favorite is Confederates in the Attic, which explores modern day Civil War reenactors. I read the book early in this century. I started it on a cross-country flight and laughed so hard that everyone in the plane around me wanted to know what I was reading. Several of them wrote down the title so they could look it up. Horwitz’s is a master of blending travel and history with humor. After recently reading his first book, One for the Road, I checked to see if he had written anything recent. That’s when I learned of his death and that his wife, also an author, wrote this book.
This book flip-flops between a narrative on learning of her husband’s death and its aftermath, along with time on an island off Australia (Brooks is a native of Australia). We learn of everything she had to do starting with the time a hospital internist call. She wants to see her husband and immediately takes off for Washington, but that is hard to do because they lived on Martha Vineyard and it’s the height of tourist season. The flights off the island are booked. She catches a ferry to the mainland. She also must take care of their dogs and to call her sons and his mother. Thankfully, she has caring neighbors.
Catching up with one of her sons is difficult because he was flying to Australia to see her sister. Unfortunately, as her son gets off the plane, the news arrives prematurely in a text from a friend expressing his condolences. The next few months is hectic with all she must do. She discovers she and her sons’ medical insurance is cancelled because it’s in her husband’s name. As a native Australian, she knows American medical insurance lacks compassion. And then, after spending the fall taking care of business and two memorial services, in Martha’s Vineyard and near Washington DC area) COVID hits.
Her time away in 2023 to West Tisbury, a remote island off Australia, allows her to grieve and to recall her relationship with her husband. We learn how they met and some of their travels as foreign correspondents. We also learn that she left journalism to become a novelist at her husband’s encouragement. We also learn about grief and death traditions, especially in Judaism as she had converted to her husband’s faith.
I felt like I was reading about the death of friend as I read this book. I recommend it. And sadly, I only have a few more of Horwitz’s books to savor before I’ll have to start rereading.
Ronald C. White, On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
(Audible, 2023), 14 hours and 23 minutes.
At the battle of Gettysburg, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s troops held back the Confederates at Little Roundtop. Late in the afternoon, as his troops ran out of ammunition, he ordered them to fix bayonets. They then changed down the hill, routing the exhausted Confederates. Had this not been successful, the South would have taken the hill, and the battle may have ended differently. But as White shows in this biography of the Maine intellectual, this was only a part of Chamberlain’s story.
A native of Maine, Chamberlain lived most of his life in the state. He attended Bowdoin College and then Bangor Theological Seminary. He debates becoming a Congregational minister but finds himself drawn to academics. Chamberlain excelled in languages (he mastered 7 languages during his lifetime). Teaching at Bowdoin, he married Fanny Adams, an adopted daughter of a Congregational minister, and they began a family. He enjoyed teaching and was offered an opportunity to spent two years studying in Europe, but the Civil War interrupted. He joined the war effort in 1862 and led the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
At the beginning of the Petersburg Campaign in the summer of 1864, Chamberlain was wounded on the Jerusalem Road near “Fort Hell.” While the location probably doesn’t mean much for most people, this was in the Walnut Hills area where I lived as a kid from 1963 to 1966. (I should write more about Fort Hell in another post). Chamberlain almost died. He survived but dealt with the wound for the rest of his life. Miraculously, he returned to the field in March 1865, near the end of the Petersburg Campaign. Again wounded, he remained on the field as Petersburg fell. At Appomattox, Grant gave Chamberlain the honor of receiving the Confederate arms and colors at the “official surrender,” three days after Grant and Lee signed the surrender documents.
After the war, Chamberlain became governor of Maine, serving four one-year terms, as the state had yearly elections for governor. White hints at the fact Chamberlain and his wife had troubles during this time and she stayed away from the state capital.
After serving as governor, he returned to teaching and later became president of Bowdoin college. He was also later called on to settle an election dispute over a new governor. While violence was a possibility, he was able to calm both sides and worked out an acceptable settlement. In 1883, he retired from academic. During this period, he worked as a lawyer in New York, as the port surveyor in Portland, Maine, and then involved himself in various businesses including land speculation in Florida. He continued to be interested in the Civil War. Chamberlain became friends with those who fought on both sides, often called to speak and to write articles. He also had to deal with his wife’s health as she became blind late in life.
Chamberlain died in 1914, at the age of 85, partly from an infection of the wound he received in Petersburg.
White goes into detail as to Chamberlain’s religious and academic beliefs. A solid Calvinist during a time when Unitarianism and Transcendentalism were on the rise in New England, Chamberlain remained close to the church. As for academics, while classically trained, Chamberlain encouraged the school to embrace other disciplines, especially in science. He attempted to make room for such studies at Bowdoin.
White’s biography of Chamberlain’s life during a time of great change in the United States is a worthy read (or listen) to those interested in such history. The book is read by the author, who was the Dean at San Francisco Theological Seminary when I was doing my doctoral studies there. White has published biographies of Abraham Lincoln, U. S. Grant, and two books on Lincoln’s speeches. I also highly recommend Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, which is on the President’s second inaugural address.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s
(2024, Audible), 17 hours and 38 minutes. Read by the author with insert recordings of speeches.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a presidential history. I once heard her lecture and have enjoyed reading some of her books and many of her articles. Her late husband, Dick Goodwin worked within the Kennedy and Johnson administration. After he had moved on, she worked for Johnson. The two of them met at Harvard in the early 1970s. After Dick’s first wife died, they married in 1975. Dick died in 2018. Before his death, Dick and Doris went through the 300 boxes of papers from Dick’s years working with Senator and later President Kennedy, President Johnson, as well as working on the Presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. The two of their insights provides for a unique review of all that happened in the 60s.
This was a unique book to hear. Doris Kearns Goodwin read most of the text. But as her husband primarily (but not exclusively) served as a speech writer for the two Kennedys and for Johnson, where speeches were quoted, the Audible book inserts the actual speech. Some of the Johnson speeches I have vague memories of, and it was interesting to hear him again. It was also interesting to hear her husband’s role with phrases like “The New Frontier” and “The Great Society.”
The early LBJ years were so hopeful. Johnson articulated a vision of “The Great Society.” It promised hope for all Americans, especially the poor and those of African descent. Sadly, our current administration also uses “great” in their logo (Make America Great Again), but I never hear a vision of what a Great America entails. Instead of being forward looking, like LBJs vision, MAGA looks backwards to some mythical place and time which never existed.
As Vietnam began to consume the Johnson Presidency, many of the President’s advisors bailed, including Goodwin. He left with hard feelings for the two men never talked again. Dick Goodwin went to work for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 primaries. He told McCarthy that if Robert Kennedy (a friend) entered in the race, he would have to support him. So, after the early good showing by McCarthy and LBJ dropping out of the race, Goodwin moved over to support Kennedy. And after Kennedy’s assassination, he was back with McCarthy for the 1968 Democrat Convention.
Doris came to work for LBJ late in his presidency. She was picked by Johnson to help him work on his memoirs and organizing his papers. She wanted to go back to teaching at Harvard. He finally agreed with a compromise, which her commutating back and forth between Texas and Boston. Her insight into Johnson was as a broken man whom she came to care deeply. In a way, Doris and Dick had differences with LBJ, which makes the book even more interesting.
The book is also about the hope they both had in the 1960s. That’s the love story, but it’s also about their love story which didn’t begin until after the decade had ended. I appreciate Doris Kearns Goodwin’s writing. It’s easy to understand and she catches the reader up with the hope the decade began and the tragedy with how it ended.
While the book is about the 1960s, it also contains wisdom which our world needs today. I recommend it.
Amy Leach, The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 221 pages.
This is the second book I read by Amy Leach. In 2013, I read her book, Things That Are. Then, in 2014, she was a presenter at the Calvin Festrival of Faith and Writing. As her first book focused on nature, I arranged her to make a presentation for Pierce Cedar Creek Institute on nature and literature. Having found her first book delightful, when I saw this book, I picked it up and thoroughly enjoyed it. Leach creates wonderful essays by pulling dissimilar things and ideas and mixing them together.
Much of The Salt of the Universe comes from Leach’s background. She grew up in Texas as a member of the 7th Day Adventist Church. She attended 7th Day Adventist camps and college and have worked on their mission field. While she has moved away from the church’s teachings, she remains a vegetarian. This is not because of the teachings of Ellen White, who I learned in reading this book helped solidify the church’s position. Leach draws on scripture and especially Peter’s vision in Joppa to question the church’s fundamentalist view against eating meat. She also challenges the church’s position on supporting the community over against the individual. Quoting a church president who said, “the individual is nothing,” Leach insists the opposite is true. “The institution is nothing; individual is everything.”
Her writings encourage her readers to take notice of the world, its wonder and awe. She draws on all her interests to create these essays. As a classical trained musician, she pulls music into her stories. She is obviously well read, drawing on diverse authors from Shakespeare to Jim Harrison, from the Hindu poet Tagore to her favorite poet, Emily Dickerson, and dozens of others. She is also a keen observer of the natural world. Her weirdly mixed concepts that are often dissimilar create delightful essays.