All posts filed under: Recommended Readings

Why architecture matters: I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb’s Hancock Tower

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I’m reading Paul Goldberger’s new book Why Architecture Matters. As you would expect from Paul, it is a smart, well-written work that is designed to help the reader interested in buildings “come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually.” I’ve already come across numerous passages and examples that resonate, but last evening I was reading his take on I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower on Copley Square in Boston and was reminded of my last impression of that building when Andrew, Claire and I were visiting the city in March 2008. Paul, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and a trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is describing the Hancock Tower in comparison to New York’s Seagram Building and G.M. Building.  All three are postwar American landmarks. It was great fun to introduce Claire and Andrew to Copley Square when we visited Boston in 2008.  We toured the great H.H. Richardson-designed Trinity Church, of course, and took …

All the King’s Men…and the Health Care Debate

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On Saturday of our vacation it rained hard all day as the remnants of Hurricane Bill sent showers our way.  With no opportunity for biking or canoeing, Candice and I pulled out the 1949 Academy Award winning movie All the King’s Men starring Broderick Crawford and settled in for an afternoon with Willie Stark, Sadie Burke, and Jack Burden. I had a high school English teacher who loved Southern literature, so my first introduction to this powerful Robert Penn Warren novel came early in life.  I’ve read it on several occasions since then but it has been a long time since I’ve revisited the tale of political idealism gone wrong.  Seeing the movie – which won Best Movie, a Best Actor award for Crawford and a Best Supporting Actress award for Mercedes McCambridge as Sadie Burke – was a timely reminder that demagoguery is part of the American experience and not something new as part of the current health care debate. Willie has many memorable lines in the movie.  One that I’ve always remembered is …

Summer Reading – 2009 Version

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Last August I wrote a blog on summer reading lists, where I opined that summers are for checking out lighter topics than war, death and other such critical issues. But this summer I’ve back-tracked a bit on that perspective.  Perhaps it is the reality of the economy.  Perhaps it was the good reviews.  But in any case, I began my time off this summer with In Fed We Trust:  Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic. David Wessel’s insightful look at how the Federal Reserve responded to the recession and Great Panic of 2007-2009 is informative, sobering – and a very good read.  Wessel is the economics editor for the The Wall Street Journal and writes with clarity and urgency.  It is all here – the rescue of Bear Stearns, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the government moves to take over AIG and Fannie Mae.  And the story is as fresh as today’s headlines.  For those of us who are not economics majors, this is a great introduction to understanding one part of the …

On the trail of Uncle Dave Macon

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Andrew, Claire, and I spent much of today in Readyville, Tennessee, with my brother Joe, sister-in-law Kerry, and their family (more on our visit in a later post).  Joe is an ornamental blacksmith and fellow lover of bluegrass and old-time music.  So it seemed fitting – after a day of playing Old Joe Clark and other tunes with Joe and his son Joseph – that I take Andrew & Claire on an educational trip by hallowed ground:  the burial place of Uncle Dave Macon. Affectionately known as the “Dixie Dew Drop,” Uncle Dave was a vaudeville performer and one of the first stars of the Grand Ole Opry.  He came out of a 19th century performing sensibility, but also was one of the first country musicians to take advantage of the new technology of radio. After his death in 1952, Macon was buried between Murfreesboro and Readyville in the Coleman Cemetery.  A new road to Cannon County now bypasses the cemetery, but I turned off the four lane and went over to the Old Woodbury …

PNC in 2013

Monday night thoughts – about baseball

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“It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.  You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. “The Green Fields of the Mind” by A. Bartlett Giamatti While channel surfing past the opening telecast of Monday Night Football, my thoughts naturally turn to the winding down of the baseball season. This year I picked up a new book by Garrett Park, Maryland author Paul Dickson entitled Baseball’s Greatest Quotations . Here are some samples to whet the appetite: Choo-Choo Coleman would…give you the sign and then look down to see what it was. – Roger Craig quoted in “Bad Beyond Belief” Blind people come …

Practicing

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Four restful days on the Patuxent River in Southern Maryland brought our summer holiday to a close.  We used this time for unwinding from our western travels, reading, talking as a family – but mostly for being.  The sunset on the river was illustrative of the four wonderful days of weather we experienced…nary a day when the AC was required…but it also struck us as appropriate for an end-of-summer-holiday post. We’ve been fortunate enough to have access to this retreat for nine years, and there are some traditional activities we’ve taken on during that time.  While our visit was shortened this year, we were still able to visit Cone Island at Solomon’s to buy the traditional “Monster” ice cream cones that Andrew and Claire showcase below.  It just wouldn’t be a summer without a Monster! Candice and I were also able to finish some reading over the weekend.  Candice completed an out-of-print book she bought on Amazon entitled Nourishing the Soul:  Discovering the Sacred in Everyday Life and said it was transformative in its insights.  …

Charles Wolfe Inducted into IBMA Hall of Fame

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When I was a young undergraduate student at Middle Tennessee in the late 1970s, there were two English professors who influenced my life in ways that I’m still only understanding.  One was Ralph Hyde, who was serving as editor of the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin.  Ralph published the first articles of mine in a professional journal or magazine, introduced me to the rich cultural traditions of the mid-South, and gave me my first bottle of moonshine.  I still think all three are significant in shaping my life (although that’s the first and only time I drank moonshine!) The other was Charles Wolfe, who taught English, succeeded Ralph as the editor of the TFS Bulletin, and – most importantly – brought scholarship and love to old time and bluegrass music.  Charles was an avid collector, writer, and recorder of music from the mid-South, and I was lucky enough to be with him on occasions when he was recording or interviewing some of the area’s old-time musicians. Just the other day my father sent me a note saying that Charles – who …

Summer Reading

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An email from the husband of a friend who shall remain nameless showed up in my home email in-box recently with a list of books on his table ready for his summer reading.  There were a lot of very serious titles—some of which I’ve read and many of which I’ve missed—but the one that caught my eye was War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.  Now I’ve read that book, and I don’t consider it light reading.  In fact, it is pretty depressing.  For while Hedges calls for humility, love, and compassion as the only chance for the human race, he writes of the addiction of war and its unifying force.  When you read this, our chances seem pretty slim. But that’s NOT why I’m writing about Summer Reading Lists.  There are 9 other months of the year to read books like War is a Force…  Summer reading is different.  Here are three books (two on baseball; one only tangentially on architecture but really on love) I think are great for …