Tag: book review

2020 has come to an end. It was a year that we’ll not forget. Personally, it didn’t rise up to the trauma of 2016 (when I ruptured my quad-tendon, was in the hospital with sepsis following a prostate biopsy, and dealt with a tropical storm and later Hurricane Matthew), but it was still a terrible year. Stuck at home with a pandemic and unable to escape from the political rhetoric made for some long days. Vacations were cancelled. I still haven’t been to Fenway Park (which was scheduled for mid-June). And we enter 2021 with much of the same going on. The pandemic is raging and the political rhetoric hasn’t tone down. Maybe the best thing to do is to escape into a puzzle or a good book.

The puzzle above was done in our house between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It is of Shakespeare’s London and you can see snippets from 16 or so plays within the puzzle, along with others from his era (Queen Elizabeth I, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake). It wasn’t the easiest puzzle but a icy rain on Christmas Eve that turned into snow meant there was no reason to get out, so time was put into finding the pieces.

2020 Reading Summary:

Number of books: 53 of which 37 were reviewed in my blog
Categories: History, Biography and Memoir: 18; Bible, Theology, Church: 11, Poetry: 7; Fiction: 6

A few insights into my reading:

-I have now read the first four volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. Like a lot of others who are interested in this man and this period of history, I am impatiently waiting for his fifth volume (the fourth just got us through John’s first year in the White House after Kennedy’s death).
-Four of the authors I’ve read are good friends and I have met another six of the authors.
-With the racial troubles our country faces, I found myself reading several African American theologians and a new history of the 1898 Wilmington (NC) racial troubles (or atrocity). One of the books on my TBR pile deals with the Tulsa race war.
-I am spending more and more time with poetry (and I alway read books of poetry at least twice).
-It appears I need to read more fiction!

My favorite books:

In my opinion the best book I read during the year was Andy Rooney’s My War, followed by S. C. Gwynne’s biography of Stonewall Jackson. This is my second book by Gwynne (I read his biography of Quanah Parker, Empire of the Summer Moon, in 2017). If God is willing, I’ll read whatever else he publishes. My favorite fiction book was Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, which is a historical fiction account of the Battle of Thermopylae. If you don’t remember that battle, don’t worry. Ii occurred a few years before our time…

Here’s My listing of books read (posted by the order I finished the book), along with links to those I reviewed:

James Clavell, Tai-Pan
Patrick McManus, Kerplunk!
David Swift, Swift: New and Collected Poems
David Sedaris, Theft by Findings: Diaries
Chad Faries, Drive Me Out of My Mind
Marcia McFee, Think Like a Filmmaker: Sensory-Rich Worship Design for Unforgettable Messages
Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gates: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other Europeans Out of America
W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media
Andy Rooney, My War
John Leith, From Generation to Generation
John Leith, Introduction to the Reformed Faith (2nd read, first read in 1989)
John Leith, The Reformed Imperative (2nd read, first read in 1993)
S. C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
David Hallerstan, Summer of ‘49
Laura Davenport, Dear Vulcan: Poems
N. T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture
P. M. Formi, The Civility Solution: What to Do when People are Rude
David Foster Wallace, This is Water
Eric Goodman, Cuppy and Stew: The Bombing of Flight 629, A Love Story 
Paul Willis, Rosing from the Dead: Poems
Nancy Koster, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life
Harlan Hanbright, The Idiat and the Odd-yssey
Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire: The Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
Dave Moyer, Life and Life Only
Rick Wilson, Running Against the Devil
Michael P. Cohen, Granite and Grace: Seeking the Heart of Yosemite
Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History
Richard Davids, The Man Who Moved a Mountain
Gary Snyder, Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems
Nancy Duante, Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
Nancy Bevilaqua, The Gospel of the Throw Away Daughter: Poems
David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy  
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree
Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson: The Passage of Power
Myrlene Hamilton, All I Need to Know About Ministry I Learned from Fly Fishing
Chrys Frey, Tsunami Crimes
David Lee, Mine Tailings: Poems
John Barry, The Great Influenza
Jesse Cole, Find Your Yellow Tux
Ralph Wood, Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture
Craig Barnes, Diary of a Pastor’s Soul
Tim Conroy, Theologies of Terrain (Poems)  
Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunt
Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent
Esau McCaulley,  Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
Nancy Bevilaqua, A Rough Deliverance: Collected Poems 1863-2013
Aaron McAlexander, Shine on Mayberry Moon
Billy Beasley, The Girl in the River
Alyce McKenzie, Novel Preaching: Tips from Top Writers on Crafting Creative Sermons 
Gary Schmidt, Orbiting Jupiter
Aaron McAlexander, The Last One Leaving Mayberry
Jim Casada, editor, Carolina Christmas: Archibald Rutledge Enduring Holiday Tales

Gary D. Schmidt, Orbiting Jupiter 

(Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 183 pages. 

This young adult novel is about Joseph. A teenage father, he’s sent to a foster family who own a farm in rural Maine.

The family has one other boy, Jack. After getting off to a shaky start, the two become like brothers, watching out for the other. The story centers around what happened to Joseph in his past. When he was 13, he fell in love with Madeline. While Joseph was from a broken family that economically lived on the margin, Madeline’s family was well off. When she became pregnant, they sent her away where she gave birth to a daughter she named “Jupiter.” The planet plays a prominent role in the story as Joseph had pointed it out to Madeline and he often looks for it in the sky. The story’s conclusion occurs around Joseph attempt to find his daughter.

Upon Joseph’s release from Stone Mountain, a juvenile detention center, he find himself with chores to do on a farm. He works beside Jack and makes friends with Dahalia, one of the orneriest cows in the barn. Thereafter, he’s the one who milks her. At school, he struggles with some teachers who think he shouldn’t be in school, but others see promise in him. Joseph is exceptionally strong in math and a prospect for the track team. The story occurs in winter. Schmidt captures the the cold of Maine. When milking, the boys lean in on the cows to capture their warmth.The frozen landscape makes the river dangerous, but also creates an opportunity to ice skate on the family’s pond.

Christmas is especially meaningful for Joseph as he attends church with the family and learns about Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father. He also learns of Mary’s early age. While Schmidt doesn’t mention it, it’s traditionally assumed the Virgin Mary was 14 when she gave birth. This is Madeline’s age when she gives birth to Jupiter. I won’t spoil the ending. However, this book is sad, and I found tears in my eyes. Yet, there’s hope in the child, Jupiter. 

Alyce McKenzie, Novel Preaching: Tips from Top Writers on Crafting Creative Sermons

(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), 180 pages. 

As a “working preacher” who has also taught homiletics on a graduate level, I try to read at least one book a year on the craft, along with another book on writing. This year I chose this book, written by a professor of homiletics at Perkins School of Theology, a Methodist seminary in Texas. 

Writer’s Conference

This book is divided into three parts. The first two deal with the practice of preaching, where the author attempts to provide the information in a creative manner. In the first part (which is what I thought the book was about from its title), she images being at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. Taking her readers along with her, we go from conversation to conversation with fiction authors. As we overhear their discussions, we gain insight into how preachers might us some of the tools of authors to engage his or her congregations in their sermons. We learn about noticing and being aware of what’s important in the text and in our sermons. McKenzie draws from a number of authors including Annie Dillard, Natalie Goldberg, Frederick Buechner, Stephen King, Isabelle Allende, Toni Morris. We gain insight into character, plot, and shape along with picking up ideas of how to journal and to capture such insights into the human condition. 

A Cooking Show

The second part of the book involves a cooking show. Here, she draws from well-known (and some not so well known, at least not for me) professors and writers of homiletics.  Each one teaches how they approach a sermon, and the reader gets to pick up a recipe card at the end of their presentation. By the time I got to this part of the book, I was a little over with the cuteness of McKenzie’s writings. The writer’s conference wasn’t quite as overblown as this imaginary journey through some kind of convention with all kinds of “chefs,” a few of whom I’ve met, many of whom I’ve read and heard lecture. Those I knew before reading this book include Charles Rice, Fred Craddock, Tom Long, David Buttrick, Richard Eslinger, Henry Mitchell, Paul Scott Wilson, Nora Tubbs Tisdale, Justo Gonzalez, Eugene Lowry and Mike Graves. To her credit, McKenzie draws from across Western Cultures including African American, Korean American, men and women, Protestants and one Catholic example. 

Best part of the book–Sermons

I found myself wondering about those not included: Tex Sample (who focuses on the language of the working class), Cornelius Plantinga, Jr (who has written about preaching and literature long before this book’s release), Robert Smith, Jr (an African American who has strong grasp of doctrinal preaching), and Haddon Robinson. The latter really surprised me as his Biblical Preaching may be one of the most popular books on preaching and is the “bible” of expository preaching.  

The final section of the book was my favorite. The section consists of a number of creative sermons written by McKenzie. Who’d ever think of angels as UPS workers (after all, angels deliver messages from God which ties into the packages delivered by a UPS driver. I’ll come back to these sermons, I’m sure. McKenzie is able to touch on her audiences fear and concerns and offer a helpful word of reassurance from scripture. I would have preferred to have read more sermons and less of her “tidbits” of information from authors and homiletic professors. 

Caroline Christmas: Archibald Rutledge’s Enduring Holiday Stories

edited by Jim Casada (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 225 pages. 

Archibald Rutledge was the poet laureate of South Carolina for decades. He was a well-known poet and author writing about nature and hunting during the first half of the 20^th Century. Having read several of his works beforehand, I waited till a week before Christmas to read his collection of “Christmas stories.” This book was a gift from my staff in Georgia. 

While the book is filled with Rutledge stories, Jim Casada selected the stories included within the collection. Casada also provides insight into when the selection was written, the circumstances around the story, and where it had previously been published. Many of these stories have been published multiple times. First, in magazines (especially Field and Stream, Outlook, and Outdoor Life), and later in collections published by Rutledge. 

The book is divided up into six parts. The first section all deals with Christmas stories at Hampton Plantation. Rutledge spent thirty years teaching at Middlebury Academy in Pennsylvania. During these decades, he would always come home for Christmas. In one story, he writes about catching a train during a blizzard up north and arriving on the Atlantic Coast Line early the next morning in the sunny South. His brother meets him at the train station in Charleston and two hours later they’re hunting. Such descriptions brought back memories of me, as a young seminary student, catching a train from Pittsburgh during a snowstorm, heading south to visit my sister the week before Christmas in Florida. When the train arrived in Savannah early in the morning, wearing shorts, I went for a walk along the platform. 

A Natural Christmas

The second part of the book, titled “A Natural Christmas,” has selections where Rutledge describes walking in the forest and fields of coastal South Carolina during the Christmas break. Known as a hunter, we are provided a glimpse of Rutledge’s vast knowledge of wildlife, especially birds. While most of these stories are about watching birds, he mentions dove hunting. During such a hunt, in 1896, he shot a bird twice the size of the others. It turned out to be a passenger pigeon. Before Rutledge’s time, these birds flew in vast numbers that would darken the sky. But even by the time Rutledge came along, they were rarely seen. This story was published in 1911. That was just three years before the last of passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo. I find it interesting the world Rutledge describes had not yet been impacted by chemicals like DDT. Such chemicals have been destructive to birdlife. Reading his prose is to be taken back to a more primeval world. 

Deer Hunting

Deer hunting is the focus of the third part of the book. Such hunting on the coastal plain is done with shotguns. In telling the dangers of using rifles in such flat terrain, he draws on a familiar form of transportation of his day. “Express bulletins don’t make no local stops,” he humorously notes. Around Hamilton, deer hunting was also done with dogs who would chase the deer out of the bays and swamps. While I never hunted with dogs, I did go a few times with my father. I was not yet old enough to carry a gun. We were stationed along a remote road. We froze while waiting and listening for the dogs to drive the deer out way. While my dad did shoot several deer, he never did when he had my brother and me in tow. Again, these stories are filled with wisdom and insight into hunting. My favorite of his deer hunting stories was the last. In this story, he prepared to take his son hunting when he returned from Europe after World War Two. 

Other Game

There is a small section of stories about hunting other wild game, especially turkey and quail. He mentions squirrel, rabbit, duck, and ‘coon hunting, but his stories are mainly limited to deer, quail and turkey. There is also a very short selection of seasonal poems. Casada feels his poetry hasn’t “aged” as well as his prose. One of the three poems, “Christmas Eve on the Rapidan (1863)” was set om the Civil War. Rutledge’s father was one of the youngest colonel’s in the Confederate army. The last section of the book has a number of recipes. 

Rutledge is a master at describing the land in which he’s hunting and the “chase” of the deer. His stories often contain humor, and the hunter doesn’t always come away with dinner. On one occasion he notes that after a week, they were still eating pork. In another story, he writes about a turkey hunter who followed a bird into a tree. Moving closer on Christmas Eve, as the light drained from the sky, he saw two dark figures in a tree. Not able to determine which was the bird and which was a clump of mistletoe, he fired and guessed wrong. The bird flew as a chunk of mistletoe fell to the ground. He picked it up to carry home for decoration. I also remember shooting mistletoe from a tree. It was an easy way to harvest the seasonal green, however the white berries often don’t survive the fall.

Rutledge and African Americans

 These stories are dated by Rutledge use of the term Negro for African Americans. While they were no longer slaves, they were still bound to the land and held a subservient role. During deer hunts, white hunters were stationed around a swamp or bay, while African American men led the chase. Using dogs, they’d go into the swamps to flush out the deer. One has to remember that Rutledge is writing from another age. While he often speaks highly of African Americans as a race, especially his childhood friend Prince, there is a separation. He lived in the big house and they lived in the shacks around the plantation. These stories were all written in the first half of the last century. At the time, long before the Civil Rights Movement, Rutledge saw no problems with such relationship. Anyone reading this book today needs to understand time has changed and realize Rutledge was blind to such injustices. 

Aaron McAlexander, The Last One to Leave Mayberry

(Stonebridge Press, 2011), 219 pages, a few b&w photos.  

McAlexander’s family is from Mayberry even though he grew up in Meadows of Dan, which is located three miles north of Mayberry. In this book, he along with others from his family tell of their ancestor’s moving to this hardscrabble mountain terrain.

Today, there’s not much in Mayberry. There’s the church and there’s the store. Even in the good old days, there wasn’t much to Mayberry. The store also had a Post Office, but that closed in the 30s. There was a tannery and a number of diaries along with a school. Although the community is sparse, it created many good memories that McAlexander mines to create this collection of short stories. 

If you read this book, you’ll learn about trout fishing, the first telephone in the community, and the depression (that Mayberry seemed to experience long before the rest of the country). There are stories about men going off to World War 2 and a training flight over the mountains that crashed in the dark hours of morning in 1945. You’ll learn about a “suck-egg dog” (beside being a nasty term for one’s enemies). You’ll learn of the influence of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which divided farms, and about a blacksmith who became a Presbyterian preacher, who occupied the pulpit I currently attempt to fill. You’ll learn of mysteries that still remain mysterious. You’ll read about people who make a break for the West, only to come back home. McAlexander himself headed off as a physics professor, but upon retirement maintains a cottage in the community in which so many of his relatives reside (many of whom are below ground).  This is a delightful book with good stories. 

James H. Cone,   (Marynoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 202 pages including notes and an index.

The late James Cone (1938-2018) tackled a tough topic, linking together the most powerful symbol for Christians, the cross, and the most shameful symbol of white supremacy, the lynching tree.  The shame of the latter has been with me since the fourth or fifth grade. We had just moved back to North Carolina and in our state history book, there was a photo of lynching in Moore County that occurred in the late 19^th Century. The main thing I remember was all the people, many young, were smiling around a dangling lifeless body. It was as if they were having a party. I was born in Moore County. I quickly did the math and realized that some of my great-grandparents (several of whom were still alive) could have been in that photo. I was horrified and didn’t want anyone to know that I’d come from that county. Of course, lynching wasn’t limited to Moore County. There were more lynchings (and ex-judicial killings) in other counties within the state and even more in other Southern states. Lynching wasn’t even limited to the South. Lynchings occurred all over the country. While some victims were white; in the West, Chinese and Mexican were thrown into the mix. But most of the victims were African American. Lynching was a way to keep the race terrified and, having been freed from slavery, under the control of their former white masters.

Cone set out to ask, “Can the cross redeem the lynching tree?” and “Can the lynching tree liberate the cross and make it real in American history?” (161)  There is a danger to our theology when we spiritualize the cross. There is a danger to our humanity when we ignore the lynching tree and deny the sin of white supremacy and the horrible treatment that African-Americans have experienced since first being brought in chains to American shores in 1619.

Cone begins his study with a detailed look at the cross. As a religious symbol, the cross is a paradox. Like the lynching tree, the Romans used the cross to terrify and keep at bay those who might threaten the Empire. Death on the cross was horrible. Yet, the church adopted this horrific symbol, claiming that God’s power is greater than the worse evil humans can inflict on others. For the human mind, as the Apostle Paul points out, the cross is a contradiction. But God can redeem this symbol and today the cross instead of being the horrific symbol of the empire’s power, is a sign of freedom and hope. As Cone explores as the beginning of his book, the cross is a common theme in both Black and White churches, but because of the experience of the two races, the cross is experienced differently. In White Churches, its more about the other world. That’s true in Black Churches, too, but there the cross is also a powerful symbol of hope for a people who have been oppressed.

Cone explores the theology of the cross of Reinhold Niebuhr. Perhaps the greatest American theologian of the 20^th Century, Niebuhr had a lot to say about the cross. (Cone suggests Reinhold Niebuhr may be the greatest American theologian ever, but I would argue that point. However, Niebuhr was a major theologian and a scholar in the public realm during the 20^th Century.)  Much of Niebuhr’s early writings (1920s-1940s) was done at a time when lynching was at its height. And while Niebuhr spoke out against white supremacy, Cone finds it strange that he never linked together the cross and the lynching tree. The second theologian Cone explores is Martin Luther King. While King, coming from the African-American tradition, focuses on the cross, also avoids linking it with the lynching tree. However, the poets and musicians from the Black tradition, do make the link as Cone explains:

They ignored white theology, which did not affirm their humanity, and went straight to the stories of the Bible, interpreting them as stories of God siding with little people just like them. They identified God’s liberation of the poor as a central message of the Bible, and they communicated this message in their songs and sermons. (118)

Cone’s fourth chapter focuses on the women’s voice from the Black community. While some women were lynched (warning: there are horrific details of lynchings in this book), most victims of lynching were men. Women spoke out for the men who, in the face of the lynching tree remained quiet and tried not to be seen. However, the lynching tree, like the cross is stripped of its gender and made an experience of all who encountered it, whether as a victim or as a witness. Perhaps the best-known woman’s voice to raise the issue of lynching was Billie Holiday. In 1939, she began singing the song “Strange Fruit.” No publisher wanted to record this song, so she sang it in nightclubs. No one could doubt the meaning of the lyrics: “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree.”

This book may be difficult for white middle-class Christians to read, but we can’t deny that these things happened. If we want to get into the experience of how others understand their faith, we must listen to their voices. We must acknowledge their pain. In this book, Cone forces us to see the horrible treatment of a race and how it contradicts the Christian message. We need to lift up the lynching tree, in confession, realizing the sin it represents and live in the hope of a God who has the power to free us from such a past and shape us into a new people who might live in sister and brotherhood with those of a different hue.

This is the second book I’ve read by Cone. In the late 1980s, while in seminary, I read A Black Theology of Liberation. As a seminarian, I also studied under Ronald Stone, whose writings and conversations helped Cone shape his interpretation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s views of the cross. While the subject matter is often difficult, Cone is an engaging writer. In a time when American seems to be coming apart at the seams, this book should be read by those of us in the majority culture so that we can “walk a mile” in the shoes of those who are of a different color and whose experience as an American is different that ours.

W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018, Mariner Books, Boston, 2019), 407 pages including index and notes plus eight pages of photos.

This timely book begins in 2009 with Donald Trump’s first tweet, promoting his appearance on David Letterman that evening. It then weaves various threads such as political operatives use of social media in the 2016 campaign, to celebrities who use Social Media to increase their fan base, and to social media’s reach onto the battlefield. Social media was used to ignite the “Arab Spring.” There were many who felt it held a promise to bring more democratic processes into autocratic countries. But the dictators who survived learned and soon, social media was being used by those on both sides, such as in Syria. Isis also learned to effectively use social media, not only to recruit followers but to terrorize the countries in which they operated. Isis captured the city of Mosul with much smaller army and one poorer equipped because the Iraqi forces were so scared of Isis’ inhumane acts toward their enemies which were splashed across social media. By the time Isis arrived in the backs of pickup trucks, the Iraqi garrison had fled. Today’s battlefield involves not just military tactics, but social media strategies. In some cases, enemy fighters taunt those on the other side on social media, making them feel more vulnerable. Not only is social media changing the way war is fought, it is changing the meaning of war.

Social media has quickly been adopted as a way for us to remain connected with friends and family, but it is also the place most Americans get their news. The authors spend significant time discussing the development of the internet and then the evolution of social media. As the various menus of media grows, so do those who attempt to use such media to sway our opinions. While Singer and Brooks extensively covers the Russia use of social media as a way for them to influence politics around the world, from the British Brexit vote to the American elections, they have also looked at how other countries have used social media for their own purposes. Truth and fact checking that used to be expected by the established news media is now out of the window. And because everything is based on algorithms that few understand, social media can be used to make the outlandish seems true (why else, would so many people like something is it wasn’t true).

Of course, it’s not all about “fake news.” Some countries want to limit the news their citizens receive.  China, in a way to only let its people know what the party wants them to know have created a firewall to control unwanted information which has led to humorous stories. When a study published under the title of “the Panama Papers,” which documented how many in the upper echelon of the party were stashing money overseas, Chinese firewall quickly blocked anyone from seeing anything that mentioned Panama. For a while, an entire country ceased to exist, at least according to the Chinese internet, under the internet police changed their blockage from anything Panama to “Panama” and other key words.

At the end of the book, the authors argue that social media companies (most of whom are U. S. based companies, need to be more responsible for how their technology is used.

In a perfect world, I would recommend this book, or something similar, to be read by every voter. But then, a perfect world wouldn’t have such issues with social media!

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Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Tw o Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (New York: Scribner’s, 2019), 478 pages including an index, bibliography, notes, along with several pages of black and white photos.

This is a difficult book, to read and to realize people thought this way. However, the message is important and the book is well researched which is why I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads. The author begins in the 19^th Century and looks at how native born Northern European Americans saw themselves as the ideal race. Using science (especially drawing on Darwin’s theories), they debated how they might protect the race and even improve the race. This had profound impact across the society including non-voluntary sterilization in most states. But Okrent, while acknowledging these other implications, focuses his study of this “false science” on its influence in the immigration debate in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The thrust of the book essential ends with the 1924 legislation that limited immigration at a percentage of those who ancestors came from counties as defined in the 1890 census.  After the passage of this act, which remained the law until 1965, the author only briefly notes how the American debate over race and eugenics was picked up by the Nazis in Germany.

Starting with leading American families from New England, there was a rising concern about what immigration was doing to America in the late 19^th Century. Leading politicians like Boston’s Henry Cabot Lodge sough a restriction in immigration but ran up against obstacles. Literacy was one of the restrictions, but as schools began to be more popular in places like Italy, educational barriers were no longer effective at reducing the influx of new populations. Immigration kept the price of labor cheap, which meant that many business leaders wanted new immigrants. Steamship companies often brought empty ships to America in order to ship American products (especially timber) to Europe found immigration to a windfall to their business. Business leaders saw that the attempts to restrict immigration kept failing. In an attempt to boost their argument, many who were against the immigrants south to support their arguments with science. The proposed there was a danger of mixing American blood (Northern European) with the blood of those deemed less desirable.  It’s interesting (and frightening) how groups like the American Breeder’s Association, which had worked to improve agricultural practices such as raising healthier sheep, growing higher yielding soybeans and corn, and mildew-resistant cherries, began to debate at how to build a better “human.” Thankfully, these ideas never took a strong hold in the United States, but these ideas did catch on in Germany and even after the war, it was used as a German defense at the Nuremburg Trials, where Hitler’s “doctors” pointed to America as the source of their heinous ideas on race (see pages 392-393).

While there were many conservative and traditional politicians and business leaders drawn to such theories as a way of avoiding “racial suicide,” such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams, this was not only an issue supported by conservatives. Those with more progressive views such as Madison Grant (of the Bronx Zoo Fame), Teddy Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt also supported such views. Okrent follows the money and intellectual trail, as he links the support of such research, the scientist involved (such as Charles Davenport and Fairfield Osborn), the leading universities, and those funding such studies (which included Rockefeller, the Harriman family, and the Carnegie Institute. Also thrown into the mix includes Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and Samuel Gompers of American Labor fame.  In a way, the ideas that lead to the 1924 restrictive immigrant policies in America, drew support from leading thinkers across America. It is sobering to look back today and to see the flaws in their thinking. As Nazism began to rear its ugly head, most moved away from such theories.

Okrent notes how his own publisher (Scribner) supported such theories in the past. Madison Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, and Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color against the White World, were both published by Scribner.

It would be nice to know such ideas that were popular in the United States in the early years of the 20^th Century are no longer present as we move into the 21^st Century, but I’m not so sure.  The recent debate over immigration and with a book like Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization (2002), makes me wonder if there are still those who hold on to such ideas about race.

While Okrent mentions issues with Asian immigration, and early anti-Catholic immigration issues, this book primarily focuses on the attempt to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. I listened to this book via Audible, and then checked out the book from the library and read selections in preparation for a book group meeting where we were discussing this book.

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