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Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times by Gregory Cowles, Senior Editor, Books.
If representative democracy requires
informed citizens, a crop of new books is here to help with the
informing. This week’s recommended titles include Jill Lepore’s
expansive new history of the United States, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
consideration of four presidents who weathered national crises, a memoir
about growing up in a Kansas farming family and a treatise about the
importance of public spaces like libraries or parks. There’s also a look
at the nature of authoritarian leaders, a reappraisal of Wendell
Willkie’s 1940 run for president, and Adrienne Rich’s “Essential Essays”
— a posthumous collection from a towering poet whose nonfiction drew in
equal measure on her capacious heart and mind to engage with art,
culture and politics. Let’s give her the last word, from an essay she
wrote after refusing the National Medal for the Arts in 1997:
“In
the long run art needs to grow organically out of a social compost
nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public
education complex with art as an integral element, a society honoring
both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common
life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire,
discontent, passion, reminding us that the democratic project is
never-ending. For that to happen, what else would have to change?”
Read more...
Source: New York Time
Read more...
Source: New York Time
