Posts
 |
| Follow on Twitter as @GregoryCowles |
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times by Gregory Cowles, Senior Editor, Books.
Hey, baby: It’s the Fourth of July.
Maybe read a book about America? My father will be — ever the history
student, he’s made it a life goal to collect books about each president.
(He reminds me that a few years ago, when I gave him Candice Millard’s
“Destiny of the Republic,” about James A. Garfield’s assassination, I
told him, “Good luck finding a whole book on Rutherford B. Hayes.”)
This
week’s titles won’t help on the Hayes front — obviously — but we do
have one book about two presidents: In “The Problem of Democracy,” Nancy
Isenberg and Andrew Burstein revisit the father-son team of John Adams
(the second president) and John Quincy Adams (the sixth president), who
between them spent much of their lives puzzling out the implications of
self-rule as a form of government. Read that, and be struck anew by the
coincidence that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the
nation’s 50th birthday, July 4, 1826.
Democracy
and America’s national identity are twin themes running through much of
this week’s list. In “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When
It’s Gone,” the Canadian filmmaker Astra Taylor tries to develop a
working definition for democracy. In “Ill Winds,” the political
scientist Larry Diamond looks at threats to democratic order around the
world. In “This America,” the historian Jill Lepore considers the uses
and misuses of American exceptionalism. And in “Spying on the South,”
the late journalist Tony Horwitz retraces Frederick Law Olmsted’s
antebellum journey below the Mason-Dixon line to better understand the
country’s stubborn divisions. We also recommend a couple of novels, a
memoir of grief, a literary biography and a reporter’s exposé of the
generic drug industry.
It’s not all
bad news. When we reviewed three of those democracy books on our cover
last week, we went with a cheeky grim headline — “Woe the People” — to
reflect the mood of the times. But as Astra Taylor pointed out in a subsequent tweet,
her book also celebrates the power of community organizing and
grass-roots movements to effect change: Sometimes, she wrote,
democracy’s real message is “Whoa, the people.”
Source: New York Times
