Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in June 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children (1965) by Rachel Carson may seem slight upon first examination but looks can deceive. In these few pages about the introduction of children to nature there is much that is inspiring, spiritual, and timeless. Carson’s story begins as she takes her twenty-month-old nephew Roger down to the beach on a rainy night. “Together we laughed for pure joy — he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of Oceanus, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me.” It was clearly, she notes, “a time and place where great and elemental things prevailed.” It is in both their reactions that Carson draws the inspiration for her call to contemplate the awe and beauty of nature, bringing a “spiritual renewal, inner healing, and a new depth to the adventure of humanity.”

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A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (2023) by Timothy Egan is a page-turning true-life historical thriller of the rise and fall of the powerful Indiana chapter of Ku Klux Klan and D.C. Stephenson, the charismatic, ethically unmoored con man at its helm. This is not the KKK of the post-Civil War South but a retooled all-purpose hate and special interest group. The Klan succeeds in gaining control over much of the state and local governments in Indiana, Colorado, and Oregon, and they came close to infiltrating the nation’s government. The book turns on Stephenson’s conviction for the brutal kidnapping, beating, drugging, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a twenty-eight-year-old unmarried educator. “Democracy was a fragile thing,” writes Egan, “stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.”

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Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity (2023) by Leah Myers is one young Native American’s fierce piece of personal history. Myers, who may be the last member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in her family line due to her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws, is searching for ways to ensure that her identity, her family’s story, and the tribe’s history in the Pacific Northwest’s Olympic Peninsula is not lost forever. Hers is a young Native American voice fearful that her culture is being “bleached out.” She is searching for a personal as well as a tribal identity and is writing to stake her claim as “Native enough” to tell these stories and take her place alongside the ancestors.

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The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings (2021) by Amy-Jill Levine is full of challenging questions and problematic sayings. Levine, the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, is well suited to the task. Levine describes herself as “an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who until 2021 taught New Testament in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Levine notes that “if we look at the Bible as a book that helps us ask the right questions rather than an answer sheet, we honor both the Bible and the traditions that hold it sacred.” In this helpful book for seekers everywhere, she looks at the questions that we should be asking ourselves today.

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The Fourth Man (2005) by the Norwegian writer K.O. Dahl is a smart, dark, complex, and ultimately very satisfying crime novel. We meet Detective Inspector Frank Frølich of the Oslo Police in the third sentence, as an unexpected woman inadvertently endangers both his police stakeout and her own life. As bullets begin to fly, Frølich lays on top of her. The inspector and the dark-haired beauty with mysterious eyes and a unique tattoo meet by chance a few weeks later and their affair begins. It is only after Frølich is hopelessly in love that he learns that Elisabeth Faremo is the sister of a hardened and wanted member of a local crime gang. Through a fast-paced and compelling story, Dahl has Frølich explore the seamier sides of Norwegian life and his very conflicting emotions about Elisabeth. His gruff, firm, yet sympathetic colleague — with his own challenges in love — helps do the tough police work that gets us to the unexpected ending that is as complex and satisfying as the rest of the book.

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Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas (2016) by Steven Poole is an insightful work around the story of how many of our new and seemingly innovative ideas are actually based on old ideas that were mocked or ignored for decades if not centuries. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.” All those electric vehicles you see on the road today, for instance, are based on technology that came from the first electric car . . . which was built in 1837.

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What’s on the nightstand for July (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

• Sleeping With the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery by Joseph McGill, Jr. and Herb Frazier
• South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry
• The Alaska Native Reader edited by Maria Sháa Tláa Williams
• Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America by Adam Cohen
• Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in May of 2023 and to see the books I read in 2022. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

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Photo by blaz on Unsplash