Books and Ideas (41)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan.

Martin Luther King, Jr.. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 1963. In a letter that I think is as eloquent as anything I have ever read, King responds to white clergymen who criticize him for engaging in nonviolent peaceful protest that results in violence and who urge black people to wait patiently while white society adjusts to accept them. King quotes Aquinas and Martin Buber. He uses scathing logic. He uses plain statement of the treatment of blacks by whites. His message is, Why are not you, the white religious Christians, joining us in the march to justice in behalf of your black brothers to fulfill the Constitutional guarantees for its citizen? Unforgettable.

Tom Wolfe. “Putting Daddy On.” 1964. Father visits his college-dropout son, living like a hippie, to try to talk sense into him, but his language, almost unintelligible in its use of metaphors, is incapable of being understood by his son whose point of view is completely different from his dad’s. The two see the world differently, summarized by the father’s final comment to the narrator as they leave the son’s “pad” to take a taxi: “You tell me,” he says. “What could I say to him? I couldn’t say anything to him. I threw out everything I had. I couldn’t make anything skip across the pond. None of them. Not one.” That is, not one of his reasons for wanting his son to return to respectable middle-class life made sense to his son.

Susan Sontag. “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” 1964. The best summary of “Camp” is in the last sentence: “It’s good because it’s awful.”

Vladimir Nabokov. “Perfect Past.” 1966. Reflections on the themes that emerged through writing his autobiography.

M. Scott Momaday. “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” 1967. As an adult, the author reflects on his Kiowa Indian culture as he experienced it through his grandmother in his youth. The love of the sun and of nature stands out.

Elizabeth Hardwick. “The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King.” 1968. The author reflects on the meaning of the death of Martin Luther King. She suggests that the Christian religion will no longer play a part in the battle for civil rights.

Michael Herr. “Illumination Rounds.” 1969. Interviews and incidents in the Vietnam War. They add up to the incomprehensibility to the men who fought it. “The intel[ligence] report lay closed on the green field table and someone had scrawled, ‘What does it all mean?’ across the cover sheet.”

Maya Angelou. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” 1970. Growing up in Stamps, Ark., the author as a young girl suffers both indignities herself and the indignity of watching her relatives as they are threatened or taunted by whites. Her mother always sang hymns to help her endure existence and to dream of relief from that existence in God. That’s why the “caged bird” sings.

Lewis Thomas. “The Lives of a Cell.” 1971. The single cell with its complexity…. “…with too many working parts lacking visible connections….” is like the complexity of the earth and the earth is most like the single cell.

John McPhee. “The Search for Marvin Gardens.” 1973. Contrasts Monopoly, the game, with the real world of the sordid streets and places in Atlantic City.

William H. Gass. “The Doomed in Their Sinking.” 1973. Thoughts on the subject of suicide.