Flagler Reads Together’s choice this year is a historical novel about Belle da Costa Greene, the Black woman who passed herself as white as the J.P. Morgan librarian for 43 years.
Books
FPC’s Jack Petocz Is Featured at Length in Page One New York Times Story on Schools’ Book Bans
Jack Petocz, the Flagler Palm Coast High School senior who organized last November’s protest against two local school board members’ attempt to ban books from school libraries, is featured today in a Page One New York Times article that examines a surge of attempted and actual book bans in school districts across the country, including in Flagler.
Dismissing ‘Slippery Slope of Censorship,’ GOP Senators Back Stricter Scrutiny of School and Library Books
The proposal (SB 1300) would change the review process for books and other learning materials, adding requirements and making it more open to the public but also enabling regular purges of book lists to align them with standards or if the books are considered out of date.
Americanisms: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Babbitt
Today we read the Sinclair Lewis of “Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Elmer Gantry” and “It Can’t Happen Here” not for literary value but the way Margaret Mead studied the Balinese character–for ethnographic insights. Lewis’s novels are a window into an America not nearly as dated as his reputation.
Eulogy for Nature: Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” published in January 1968, worthy of any top-100 list of the best books of the last hundred years and an essential read–and re-read-today, is a meditation, a polemic, a manifesto, a provocation, a valentine and an elegy to the red desert and to American wilderness.
God’s Plagues: Philip Roth’s Nemesis
Philip Roth’s “Nemesis” is the story of an unsuspecting Everyman who becomes a polio superspreader and turns on his fiancee, God and life. Written in 2010, the novel can be read in the age of the coronavirus as a study in grief and loss and the limits of personal, or divine, responsibility.
Trump Troll Chronicles: Bob Woodward’s Peril
Bob Woodward’s and Robert Costa’s “Peril,” third in the trilogy of Woodward’s books on the Trump administration, isn’t history. It’s most revealing in what it does not say. It’s tragicomedy. It’s a chronicle of trash foretold. And it’s prediction. The worst is ahead.
Call DCF: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, who now goes by the pronouns they/them, won the International Booker Prize for “The Discomfort of Evening,” an autobiographical novel about a 10-year-old girl who thinks she willed the death of her brother, and who watches her family and her bearings collapse after his death. The book caused a controversy due to themes of adolescent sexuality and animal torture.
The Loneliness of a Dictator: Garcia-Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch
Autumn of the Patriarch is a study in power unbound, unscrupulous, re-imagined rather than invented. History gave Garcia-Marquez too much material to need invention. Approaching 50 years since the novel published, it has recently come to feel more contemporary again.
Patriotism Recovered: Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country
“Achieving Our Country” is an energizing manifesto, a reminder that we are not as good as we think we are, and, atrocious as we can be, not nearly as bad, either. We are merely unachieved. With a little less despair, a little more affection, even–heaven forbid–a bit of patriotism, however defined but equally respected we can achieve more.