Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in December 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

---

Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (2008) by Timothy Brook is a work of history that opens up the world for the reader. Using the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, he encourages us to view certain objects as doors which we can “step through into the teeming social, economic and political context which lies beyond.” Those doors include a beaver hat, Chinese porcelain, a geographer’s map, and more. Once we step into these worlds, Brook then deftly explains how the early years of the seventeenth century took mankind from isolated communities to interconnected worlds. It is, as one reviewer noted, an exhilarating piece of history.

---

Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy (2016) by Lewis H. Lapham surveys the period from 1990 to 2015 to make the strong case that America’s imperial impulses have shaken our democratic principles. Drawn from monthly commentaries produced as the editor of Harper’s Magazine and essays written as backstory to various issues of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lapham makes the case for history as folly’s antidote. Lapham wants to teach us that “we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware what happened yesterday.” A nation denied knowledge of its past, he asserts, “cannot make sense of its present or imagine its future.”

---

Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate (2004) by George Lakoff is about framing messages. “Framing is about ideas—ideas that come before policy, ideas that make sense of facts, ideas that are proactive not reactive, positive not negative, ideas that need to be communicated out loud every day in public.” Don’t use the language that the right-wing wants you to use, Lakoff asserts, because their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame we want. Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview—your values. And yet it goes beyond language. Ideas are core. Language simply “carries those ideas, evokes those ideas.”

---

How to Fight (2017) by Thich Nhat Hanh with illustrations by Jason DeAntonis begins by reminding us that how we respond to unkindness by others is a practiced habit, resulting from well-worn pathways in our brains. We feel slighted and we generally retaliate immediately. However, we can change our minds and develop new habits, new ways of approaching life’s challenges. In these short meditations, Thich Nhat Hanh “instructs us exactly how to transform our craving and confusion.” Paradoxically, we have to learn to take good care of our suffering in order to help others do the same.

---

Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (2019) edited by Ben Nicholson and Michelangelo Sabatino is a scholarly exploration of an iconic small town in Indiana that provides insights and new perspective into architecture, landscape, preservation, spirituality, and philanthropy.  Avant-Garde in the Cornfields traces how nineteenth century utopian aspirations based on the renewal of society through faith and later science became the touchstone for a transformation through preservation and reinvention of New Harmony’s traditions. An expansive vision of the third “utopian” chapter in New Harmony’s history which the editors have brought together in one eclectic, in-depth, and ultimately satisfying volume, this story of how the extraordinary past and present of New Harmony continue to thrive today is worthy of consideration in our own troubled times.

---

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

• In the Beginning Was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality by Diarmuid O’Murchu
• The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley by Marietje Schaake
• White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
• Troubled Waters: A Sea Story by Syd Stapleton
• Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

---

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in November of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2024. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

---

Man reading in park from Pixabay