All posts filed under: Recommended Readings

Open your eyes and see what you can see with them…

Published by DJB

Now I understand. For the past two years — and especially since my time last March and April at the American Academy in Rome — friends have enthused over Anthony Doerr‘s writing. My only experience was through his short memoir Four Seasons in Rome, which while an interesting read struck me as something he did because he had journals from his time at AAR and decided to make something of them. Not a terrible thing to do, but also not up to the level of the reviews of Doerr’s work I was hearing from friends. Then over the first two weeks of August, I read All the Light We Cannot See. I’ll repeat myself. Now I understand. What a lovely, rich, engrossing, and uplifting book. First of all, Doerr is a poet with words, but he has a scientist’s mind. This is as finely crafted a story as I’ve ever read, with the shifts in time and character all put together in an amazing sequence that pulls the reader forward with anticipation. I can easily …

New Collection of Essays Looks to Preservation’s Future

Published by DJB

(In a recent post on the National Trust’s Preservation Forum blog, I highlighted the recent publication of 50 essays with ideas for the next 50 years of preservation. I’ve excerpted portions of that post for More to Come…. You can read the entire post here. Full disclosure: I was one of the contributors.) The 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA)—the cornerstone of preservation practice in the United States—has spurred conferences, articles, and celebrations throughout 2016. One of the most lasting and influential looks to the future to emerge from this year could well be a new work from the University of Massachusetts Press, Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation in the United States. Edited by Max Page and Marla R. Miller, professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bending the Future features visions of the next five decades from some of the nation’s leading preservation professionals, historians, scholars, activists, and journalists. The editors invited “provocations,” and they certainly received a few. But what is almost universal …

National memory and the forgotten First Emancipator

Published by DJB

The story of Virginian Robert Carter III and the emancipation of 450 enslaved individuals shortly after the founding of the United States is one of the forgotten stories of American history. However, in our current period of political unrest — much of it centered on racism and questions around who owns the American story — this is an appropriate time to look at how this act of emancipation, and similar acts that took place throughout the South before the Civil War, were buried and forgotten. Thankfully, Andrew Levy’s complex and largely satisfying book The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter brought this story the attention it deserves. Levy claims — powerfully and in a way that challenges our core national narrative — that Carter “did something that transcends our ability to listen to our own past.” A recent tour of the National Trust Historic Site Oatlands outside Leesburg, Virginia, with several senior staff led to a discussion of the story of slavery at the plantation. Robert Carter III was the …

Think before you speak. Read before you think

Published by DJB

Author Fran Lebowitz once wrote, “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” I’ve been thinking about reading recently, because I will be out of the office as I complete the final two weeks of my sabbatical and link that with some personal days off. I have the opinion that summer reading lists should be light, but that may simply be an excuse to read another baseball book. Since this time is tied to my sabbatical, I’m going a bit more serious this August and I thought I’d share a few of the books which will be on night stand. (Regular readers can expect “mini reviews” in the coming weeks.) Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation in the United States (Edited by Max Page and Marla R. Miller) – This brand new work from the University of Massachusetts Press contains a wonderful introductory essay and then 50 short contributions from practitioners, academicians, journalists, community activists and more. I’m looking forward to digging into this work as one more …

The Age of Wonder

Published by DJB

During high school graduation ceremonies for Andrew, one of the speakers built her remarks around a relatively new work at the time that captured the love of knowledge and learning. Five years later, I finally picked up Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder (first published in 2008). Sometimes it takes a while, but I try never to pass up a good book recommendation. And I’m so glad I did. The Age of Wonder is a terrific work which looks at the growth of science in the Romantic Age. Holmes tackles this broad topic with a blend of history, biography, art, science, and philosophy. In 500 pages that seem to fly by, the reader follows the intertwined stories of such historical luminaries as astronomer William Herschel and his sister Caroline, botanist Joseph Banks, chemist Humphry Davy, and writers such as Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats. The book rightly received stellar reviews from the start, which I cannot top. “Flat-out fascinating,” “groundbreaking,” and “superlative” are just a few of the descriptions applied to this …

Letting experience be larger than knowledge

Published by DJB

I just completed reading a thoughtful collection of essays by the writer Rebecca Solnit. Titled after the first in the collection and her best-known essay – Men Explain Things to Me – these nine pieces written between 2008 and 2014 explore multiple topics including the gender wars and male privilege, the use of violence as a way of silencing speech, abuse of power, a new twist on marriage equality, and more. Through them all, Solnit pushes the reader to consider perspectives that are likely to be outside their comfort zone. A colleague forwarded the link to the Men Explain Things to Me essay several weeks ago after I referenced Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. (Also highly recommended.) The essay begins with the comic scene of a man explaining Solnit’s most recent book to her – even though he never read anything more than the New York Times book review of her work. But as noted on Solnit’s website, she ends this essay “on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing …

Observations from the road: Scenes from Holy Week in Rome

Published by DJB

Sorry. No pope sightings (or even attempts at pope sightings). We have had a relatively low-key Holy Week while in Rome, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had its memorable moments. Olive Trees and Palm Sunday: Our week began last Sunday with a Palm Sunday processional at the neighborhood Basilica di San Pancrazio in Monteverde. A 6th century basilica that was extensively renovated following Garibaldi’s 1849 attack on Rome, San Pancrazio was a lively place last Sunday. We met about a block away from the basilica and followed priests and musicians through the streets, waving olive branches in place of the palms we see in the United States. During the service, conducted (of course) entirely in Italian, we only understood the occasional word. But we knew the shape of the liturgy and could follow along without getting lost. The nave was filled with worshipers, while the aisles were used by parents and nuns to walk or stroll young children throughout the service. The music was similar to Catholic folk masses in the U.S. these days …

My Own Personal Spring Training

Published by DJB

As I post this, the clock on Spring Training Countdown (motto: Winter Bad. Baseball Good.) reads: 4 days, 7 hours, 37 minutes, 7 seconds. It is clear I don’t have much time to get in shape for the season! My own personal spring training generally consists of reading a new baseball book and re-watching Bull Durham (best baseball movie ever). However, our tape/CD player is broken (I know, we’re old school), and so I had to improvise and instead read two baseball books. It is tough duty, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get into shape. I began with 2015’s Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-year Losing Streak by Pittsburgh writer Travis Sawchik. This is a terrific book about how the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates, stumbling along in a 20-year losing streak (remember Sid Bream and Barry Bonds and Skip Carey’s classic 1992 “They may have to hospitalize Sid Bream” call) turned around their fortune as a baseball club. The Pirates did it using big-data …