For more than 30 years, I have written this column like a carpenter building a piece of furniture. Knowing what I wanted the finished product to be, I assembled the materials, analyzed how they fit together, and used my tools to fulfill my aim. For some reason, however, I spent the last few months reading with no particular goal, then looked at the pile and asked myself, “What do these random parts add up to, and what do they tell me about what was on my mind?”
Sorting through the stack, it became clearer to me what the method behind my meandering had been. I realized the books fell into two categories: history, usually about wars or political conflicts, and reflective works on finding meaning in life.
The stimulus for one book was apparent: seeing a 60 Minutes segment on Lin Manual Miranda’s Broadway show “Hamilton,” I decided to take down my unread copy of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, which inspired Miranda. I quickly understood Chernow’s impact.
First there was its subject. Hamilton was the Thomas Edison of the American political and economic system, making, with Madison, the case for the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, and creating the U.S. Treasury, the Coast Guard, the first bank, and the U.S. Mint, as well as founding the first manufacturing organization, and the city of Paterson, New Jersey. He was also the first cabinet secretary to be investigated extensively by a Congress trying to discredit him.
But he was also a destitute Caribbean emigrant, dogged by derogatory myths about his origins, barely escaping death in childhood, then singled out as a promising youth and sent to the mainland, where he played a central role in the new nation’s life, married the daughter of a prominent family, became involved in the first American sex scandal, and lost both a son and his own life in duels.
Finally, Chernow reveals the paradoxes of the early republic, whose contentious culture was “both the apex and the nadir of American political expression.” How dispiriting to read that within a year of the first national election, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Congress met and adjourned from day to day without doing anything, the parties being too much out of temper to do business together.”
The second book appeared by a more circuitous route. A while ago I had begun listening to the quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, and found, to my surprise, that I enjoyed them. Recently, I discovered a book with the curious title Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, by M.T. Anderson, whom I had admired for his Octavian Nothing series, about an enslaved boy during the American Revolution.
Symphony turned out to be everything promised, and more. It does center on the 900-day siege by Germany during World War II, and especially on Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, written in part while he was trapped in the city, and performed as a defiant anthem for Russia and for other nations fighting Hitler. But the book also covered the decades when Shostakovich tried to practice his art, and protect his life, under Stalin’s brutal and capricious reign.
The siege itself is rendered in grim detail, often reminiscent of what we imagine as the most barbarous parts of the Middle Ages. The death toll in Leningrad, which has never been completely calculated, may have run to more than a million people, almost all from starvation.
But the context in which Anderson places Leningrad makes Symphony more than a war chronicle. He catalogs Stalin’s determination to control every aspect of Soviet life, especially the arts, and his constant paranoia, as well as his shock that Hitler should attack Russia despite their nonaggression pact. It further delves into the complex strategies Shostakovich employed to stay just beyond the worst consequences of Stalin’s purges. Although not the subject of a future musical, Symphony might be the libretto for the best composer’s biopic ever made.
The historical choices were completed when I saw that Alistair Horne, a great historian of 20th century wars, had published, at 90, an apparent summation of his views on military folly, Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century.
Horne takes a broad view, finding common threads in wars from 1904 to 1954, and nations from China to Japan, Russia to France, and of course the United States. His book is especially instructive for Americans unfamiliar with wars in East Asia between Japan and China, and Japan and Russia, and offers insight into the continuity between those fights and the world clashes of 1941 to 1954.
Naturally, most of the book is devoted to the military disasters brought about by hubris, and the prior successes and lost lessons for which they paved the way. In fact the epigraph for the book might well be Bismarck’s observation: “A generation that deals out a thrashing is usually followed by one which receives it.” But Horne also focuses on the political blunders and national myths that led to the later debacles. He enlivens his narrative with quirky details about the men beneath the braided uniforms. The Japanese admiral Togo, for example, wrote in his diary that he firmly believed he was the reincarnation of Admiral Horatio Nelson, while one French general in Indochina was “nicknamed ‘the Mandarin’ on account of his affinity for opium-puffing.”
Although Horne ends his narrative in 1954, the implications for the present are clear. If Korea was “the first war fought by the United States that did not end in a clear-cut American victory,” it has not been the last. And what better word than hubris for one current presidential candidate’s proposals to “make America great again” by building the largest wall in human history, deporting nearly twice as many people as Stalin did (internally and externally) during his 30-year reign, “beating” the Chinese, and winning until we’re tired of winning?
While the first cluster of books offered me windows into history that, in turn, illuminate our own time, the second cluster gave me a set of mirrors with which to reflect on the choices each of us makes in our lives. They also reflect the social conditions under which we operate. If the first group echoed Hamlet’s “the time is out of joint,” the second confirmed Thomas More’s belief: “The times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them.”
Mark Edmundson’s Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals covers almost three millennia to challenge what he sees as the modern loss of any purposes in life besides longevity, security, and prosperity. Trained in literature, Edmundson builds his case largely on the works of major writers. From Homer comes the Heroic Ideal; from Plato, the Contemplative; and from the Gospels and Buddhist texts, the Compassionate.
Surprisingly, the villain of the piece is Shakespeare, “the first great secularist,” whose characters embody a narrow view of life as the obtaining of personal goals, and some of whose greatest speeches — see Macbeth, Hamlet, Edmund, Odysseus, et al. — are denials of a higher dimension to the universe. Only the Romantics, especially William Blake, sought to resurrect an ideal, whose death blow was provided by Freud, for whom “Soul is the seat of illusion,” and who claims “there is no justifiably cogent sense of Self.”
Edmundson spends many pages on the past, but saves room for jeremiads against modern life. He particularly deplores the harm done to young people by asking them to “attend universities where Truth is held in contempt and think themselves to be educated….” Too many today “acquire the skills of the marketplace and call it learning.” On his last pages he can offer only a nebulous hope that, “At a certain point it will again become clear to young people that they have a choice in what they make of their lives. There are ideals of the Soul and there are desires of the Self, and young people will once again have the chance to decide which they will pursue.”
A harsh and depressing book, you might say, and one whose conclusion is much overstated. Yet it is also a thoughtful journey through some of the world’s greatest books, in the company of a writer who challenges you to test your mind and values against his.
Finally, I came across a little-known work by an even less-known author, philosopher Jean Kazez’s Philosophy and the Good Life. Kazez confounds the image of philosophers as pedantic, remote, and impenetrable. In a relatively short book she gives a lucid examination of numerous views of life, not claiming to find an answer, but indeed emphasizing that “good lives are numerous and come in lots of varieties,” though all should probably include significant portions of morality, happiness, autonomy, and progress, as well as other “B-list” values, like accomplishment and creativity.
Like Edmundson, Kazez takes us on a journey through writers and thinkers, from Aristotle and Mill to Tolstoy and Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as exemplars as different as St. Simeon Stylites and Dr. Paul Farmer. I found myself writing innumerable marginal notes and stopping to reflect on idea after idea, not to debate, as with Edmundson, but to consider. In her final paragraph Kazez writes, “I’ve enjoyed spending time with all the people in this book while writing it.”
I most enjoyed spending my recent reading hours with her.
After 40 years as teacher, administrator, and school head, Richard Barbieri is now helping schools deal with a range of interpersonal and organizational communication issues. He can be reached at richarde.?[email protected].
Briefly Noted
A Classroom Revolution: Reflections on Harkness Learning and Teaching, coedited by Jane S. Cadwell and Julie Quinn (Phillips Exeter Academy)
The “Harkness” method of teaching and learning — a heavily student-oriented version of discussion-based classrooms — has been around for decades. But until now, there was no book to turn to for guidance and advice. That has changed with the 2015 publication of A Classroom Revolution: Reflections on Harkness Learning and Teaching.
In the book’s introduction, former Phillips Exeter Academy Principal Tom Hassan makes it clear that there is, in fact, no one way to “do” Harkness: “Approaches to teaching and learning around oval Harness tables are as varied as our faculty and our students. Techniques differ from discipline to discipline, class to class, and person to person.”
So what does this collection of essays offer? For one, we get the story of the man for whom the tables and teaching method are named — philanthropist Edward Stephen Harkness, who in the 1930s gave Phillips Exeter Academy $5.8 million (the equivalent of $69 million today) to shift its pedagogy. More important, the book offers reflections from experienced teachers on both the value of the Harkness method at the secondary level and on how they approach it in various disciplines, from English to math to science to foreign language instruction. Most of the contributing writers are current or former teachers at Phillips Exeter Academy. But the book also includes essays from teachers engaged in Harkness teaching at other schools.
What one understands from reading A Classroom Revolution is that Harkness teaching — part science, part art — is more complicated and demanding than it may first appear. To a writer, it’s also more rewarding. As Kwasi Boadi, an instructor in history at Exeter, writes, “The Harkness table… is a meeting point of ideas, a forum, where students get the opportunity to learn to think critically and creatively, where they learn to develop and articulate their voices, and where they learn nuance and humility. It is a meeting point on the road to goodness and knowledge….”
For those looking for hard data on the value of Harkness classrooms, Jim Heal, head of the upper school at Wellington College in the U.K., also offers a list of “22 Traits of a Harkness Classroom,” along with a detailed analysis of the student outcomes that underscore the value of this approach to teaching — indeed, that makes it clear Harkness remains a highly valuable and valued approach to education more than 80 years after it was first proposed.
The book is available through the Phillips Exeter Academy online store, exeter.bncollege.com.