Reading

"If you ever get down about American culture, you might like to remember that there are still more public libraries in this country than there are Starbucks." (David McCullough, this morning at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., aired on CSPAN.)

That is a comforting thought. Reading, widely, is a bulwark of American democracy. The only people who can keep democracy are those who read.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Four books

I mentioned David McCullough's book, The Wright Brothers, in a post last night. I finished reading it a few days ago. It's a great and surprisingly quick read and the first of all the biographies of the Wrights that I have read that have helped this caveman mind appreciate the peculiar insights the brothers had that allowed them to break through to powered, heavier-than-air flight. As I said last evening, like all of McCullough's books, this one is a treat!

Yesterday, I began reading Joseph Ellis' The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution: 1783-1789. Ellis looks at the development of the United States Constitution in the period following the end of the Revolution and narrates the key roles played by the "quartet" of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in bringing the governing document into being. Absent their work, the new republic would have been doomed to chaos and susceptible to foreign conquerors as it labored to get out of debt and establish itself under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation. The Constitution was the second American Revolution. Ellis, as always, writes well, clearly, and insightfully. (This fits with a contention I've often made here that the American Revolution was not completed until the Constitution was ratified.)

I'm also now reading Bill Mowry's The Ways of the Alongsider, a helpful guidebook on how Christians can share their faith with others, life to life. Over the past year, Bill has been my coach in deepening my walk with Christ. He's as helpful in print as he is one-on-one.

And, in the wake of the decision to resume referring to the mountain we once called Mount McKinley as Mount Denali, I'm re-reading Kevin Phillips' short biography President William McKinley. Of all the US presidents to come from Ohio, McKinley was by far the best. Phillips argues that the Canton native was a consequential president in two ways.

First, he upended the partisan logjam that had for several decades produced Republican presidents interspersed with Democratic presidents, back and forth, leaving the country with no clear policy direction for more than twenty years. McKinley created what remained a sustained Republican occupation of the White House, with the exception of a narrow victory for Woodrow Wilson--brought about by Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 run for president on the Progressive Party ticket, thus dividing Republicans--from 1896 to 1932, when Democrat Franklin Roosevelt brought basic dominion for his party through 1968.

Second, McKinley, Phillips argues, is not Mount Rushmore-worthy, but safely near the top of the second-tier of effective presidents. He was, it can be argued, the first modern US president in both domestic and foreign policy.

Phillips' discussion of the unique role Ohio played in nineteenth century America alone makes the book worth reading. The state was the country's greatest center of innovation, business risk, and scientific inquiry, playing a part in world history that California's Silicon Valley later played some one-hundred years later.

I recommend all these books. (By the way, I'm indifferent to the change in name for Mount Denali. A more appropriate memorial for William McKinley can certainly be found.)

Huffman Prairie and the Wright Brothers

After their success at Kitty Hawk, Dayton, Ohio's Wright Brothers still needed to perfect their powered airplane technology. Instead of trekking back to Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, chosen for its twenty-mile per hour average winds and its remote location on the Outer Banks, the Wrights decided to stay in Ohio, relying on the engine forged by their employee, Charlie Taylor, and a catapult to set and keep them aloft.

During the "flying seasons" of 1904 and 1905, Wilbur and Orville Wright experimented at Huffman Prairie, an 84-acre parcel of flat land that became the world's first airport. The brothers took hundreds of test flights there.

Huffman Prairie was about ten miles from the Wrights' home on Hawthorn Street and from their bicycle shop on Third in Dayton. They reached Huffman Prairie via the Interurban trolley that ran between Dayton and Springfield. The picture below shows the spot where the trolley stop was. As you approach the prairie, you travel along a narrow, tree-lined road that must be on the old trolley right-of-way.

Huffman Prairie is now part of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base complex in Fairborn, Ohio. Below is an Ohio historical marker telling a bit about Huffman Prairie. You can walk all around the site where the history of the world was significantly changed.

Below are two views of Huffman Prairie. The second one shows replicas of the Wrights' hangar and catapult on the site where they placed them in 1904 and 1905.

If you haven't read David McCullough's wonderful biography of the Wright Brothers, I highly recommend it. It's a real treat! (By the way, Tom Hanks has bought the movie rights to McCullough's book.)

"If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would tell him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio." (Wilbur Wright)

'Life's Tragedy' by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a major American poet, African-American, who was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. He was a high school classmate and friend of Orville Wright. Wright, with his brother, Wilbur, of course, invented the first functional airplane. There was a lot of intellectual candle-power in Orville's and Paul's class! Dunbar was married to poet Alice Moore. Tragically, Dunbar died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.

This poem is poignant, beautiful, sad, and true all at the same time. It suggests that the greatest tragedy of life is to come close to that "perfect love," the kind "which lays aside its vanity and gives...truth."

(Sources: The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, and The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.)

It may be misery not to sing at all,
And to go silent through the brimming day;
It may be misery never to be loved,
But deeper griefs than these beset the way.

To sing the perfect song,
And by a half-tone lost the key,
There the potent sorrow, there the grief,
The pale, sad staring of Life's Tragedy.

To have come near to the perfect love,
Not the hot passion of untempered youth,
But that which lies aside its vanity,
And gives, for thy trusting worship, truth.

This, this indeed is to be accursed,
For if we mortals love, or if we sing,
We count our joys not by what we have,
But by what kept us from that perfect thing.

© by owner.

Saturday This and That

Some things that caught my eye this past week.

David McCullough on the Wright Brothers...
...in an interview with the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast.

The next time someone's offended because you fail to notice someone's new haircut...
...tell them it's that pesky inattentional blindness. Actually, this article makes me wonder about what a mess my brain must be because I always notice changes in people's haircuts.

What might Michael Jackson have looked like...
...if he hadn't had all those surgeries.

How has nobody thought of this until now?...
...it's a shoe that grows with a child's foot.

Disgusted with the misogyny and gratuitous sexual violence of Game of Thrones?...
...You're not alone. I've never seen it. This doesn't make me want to.

A way to get kids to listen to the sermon on Sunday...
...amazingly simple.

It's the only technique for learning...
...or so says James Altucher.

Science says that two basic traits...
...are what make all relationships work. Cinchy, right?

The Backwards Brain Bicycle...



Anxious, afraid?...
...Check out the Bible verses linked here.

Notes by Martin Luther found...
...They were jotted down (if you can imagine someone as intense as Luther ever jotting) as he worked on his important essay on Christian freedom.

How Lutherans might cross themselves...
...and why they might want to do so.

The five best running backs...
...in Ohio State history. Joe Dexter has so far named four of them on Buckeye Sports Radio:

#5: Howard "Hopalong" Cassidy #4: Keith Byars #3: Chic Harley #2: Eddie George #5: Archie Griffin

What the Inklings wrought...
...(Hint: They had an enormous impact on the world and still are impacting it.) A sample:

Drawing as much from their scholarship as from their experience of a catastrophic century, they had fashioned a new narrative of hope amid the ruins of war, industrialization, cultural disintegration, skepticism, and anomie. They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes — sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will — in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change.

Tantrum...
...This mom seems to say, "This is how ridiculous you look when you have a tantrum. Now, let's go before I let you have it." Advert from the UK.



By the way...
...when watching the video linked in the article on inattentional blindness, I lost count of the number of passes between people in white shirts because I noticed the gorilla. Does that mean I can't focus? Maybe I suffer from the as yet undiscovered attention satiety. Squirrel...

"They could spend seven hours a day watching that?"

McCullough's response to the last question is the clincher.

By the way, The Greater Journey, the McCullough book which occupies most of the attention in this interview is fantastic!

Thanks to my son for sending out the link to this video.




 

Americans in Paris

That's the subtitle of David McCullough's new book, The Greater Journey. It looks interesting, as usual when it comes to anything McCullough writes.