Jefferson Hour Reading List
If we mention books or letters or documents on the Jefferson Hour, this space will be the location of our postings of those titles. Many requests have been sent for Clay's Recommended Reading about Thomas Jefferson. Following is the the list from show 676 "Current Events"
Show 781 Alaska
Coming into the Country by John McPhee
Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
Show 779 Cicero
Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt
Tacitus: The Annals of Imperial Rome
Show 776 Barns and Parks
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Show 771 Colorado
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson
Show 768 Humans and Nature
Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
Show 767 Pirates and Treaties
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
Show 766 Adam Smith
Recommended books this week: The Life of Adam Smith
On Adam Smith by Jack Russell Weinstein
Show 764 Walden
Show 762 The State of Jefferson
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
Show 761 The Long Now
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
Show 759 Priestley
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
Show 750 New Years Days
Sheheke, Mandan Indian Diplomat
Show 748 Oh Canada
The House of Morgan:
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Show 746 Common Sense
Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations by Craig Nelson
Show 739 Gift Books 1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 2. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson 3. The Unsettling of America by Wendell Barry
Show 731 "Influential Books"
2. The Annals by Tacitus 3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 4. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 5. The Spirit of Laws by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu 6. The Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio
Show 726 "The Nature of War"
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Show 710 Dispossession"On the Rez by Ian Frazier
Show 708 "Economics"
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Show 707 "Stateside"
Thomas Jefferson's Cook Book Dining at Monticello: In Good Taste and Abundance
Show 703 "Empty Prairie"
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner Miles from Nowhere: In Search of the American Frontier Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Declineof America's Man-made Landscape
Show 700 "Lamentations"
His Excellency: George Washington Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation Washington's Secret War:
Show 699 "Latin"The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment
Show 684 "Wine" A History of Wine in America: From Prohibition to the Present By Thomas Pinney
Show 681 "Reading Greek"
The Iliad of Homer by Richard Lattimore Homeric Greek by Clyde Pharr, John Wright, and J. Wright
Show 681 "Mister Potter
Sheheke: Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark
by Tracy Potter
From Show 676 "Current Events" After many requests, Clay Jenkinson offers the following (partial) list of his favorite books about Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson The Sage of Monticello Thomas Jefferson: The Strange Case of Mistaken Identity Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History
Books Mentioned on Previous Shows Victory in Tripoli by Joshua London. The Pirate Coast by Richard Zachs. I haven’t had the opportunity to read these books yet, but I have seen the reviews and they seem to be very well regarded. I know only this. Recent attempts by conservatives and security obsessives to characterize the Barbary Pirates war as “America’s first confrontation with radical Islam,” is just pretty silly. Pirates were ubiquitous in Jefferson’s day. Jefferson saw the pirates as barbarians and the nations that tacitly supported them as rogue nations. But he was more likely to think of this in geopolitical terms than religious or theological. Jefferson was actually quite fascinated by the theology of Islam. I don’t know if he ever actually read the Koran. If he did, I don’t know quite what he thought of it. It’s a hard book for non-Islamic people to make sense of, because we don’t share in the rich tradition of commentary that provides a context for Koranic verses. The only really useful theme to take from the Barbary Pirates affair is the paradox of the war powers in the American Constitution. Nobody was more timid about defeating the separation of powers doctrine than Jefferson. As a student of history and an ideologue, he was always a believer in legislative supremacy. As President he worked assiduously to make sure the legislature always took the lead, even when he was prompting it behind the scenes about what lead to take. Still, when the crisis came in the spring of 1801, Jefferson felt that he had not choice but to act without the benefit of Congress and he began what I suppose could be called an undeclared naval and marine action against the pirates. He tried to involve Congress as soon as possible and as fully as possible. Jefferson abhorred war, generally speaking, but he could be very bellicose at times, particularly with respect to Spain. His attitude toward the north African states was that of impatience and dudgeon. He believed they were violating the code of honest commerce and international law, and it is very clear that he had run out of patience by the time he was inaugurated in 1801. Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt. This is a Great Plains classic. John Neihardt was a historian who went to the Pine Ridge reservation to learn more about the Ghost Dance phenomenon that swept the American west in the late 1880s. He met Black Elk. Eventually Black Elk agreed to tell his story to Neihardt, who took it down as carefully as he could, with the help of his daughters, and then shaped the discourse to form Black Elk Speaks. The opening chapters contrast in extraordinary ways with the Book of Genesis. If you want to know more about Indian ways of seeing, you cannot go wrong by reading this book. You need to keep in mind, though, that this is in many ways John Neihardt’s lens on Native American culture. The Long Death by Ralph K. Andrist. This is a comprehensive study of the Plains Indians Wars. It is an exceedingly upsetting book, but one essential to any understanding of White-Indian relations at the beginning of the 21st Century. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. This is one of the books that helped launch renewed interest in Native American history and culture. It is an angry and sentimental book that regards Indians as victims of United States imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s pretty dated by now, and the methodology is no longer fully respected, but it is a must-read. Fools Crow by James Welch. This novel by Montana Blackfeet writer James Welch is one of the best books ever written about the Great Plains. It is a tragedy of white-Indians relations. It is also one of the very best books ever written about how one culture comes to terms with a new, violent, heavily-armed and in many respects fundamentally alien culture. Example. For years the Blackfeet called the horse (introduced in the mid 18th century) the Elk Dog. They did not have a term for horse, of course. So they came to terms with this marvelous new creature by way of the worldview and the vocabulary that they already possessed. Stiffed by Susan Faludi. To put it in an over-simplified nutshell. Now that women are more liberated and independent than at any time in human history, two interesting developments have occurred. 1. Women may be liberated economically and politically, but they are strangely still fixated on pre-liberations ways of coming to terms with men. 2. Now that women are more autonomous than ever before, men are lost, confused, bewildered, bitter, and angry, but all those profound energies don’t seem to be enough to get them away from Barcaloungers, beer, and pro football on television. The Devil Drives by Fawn Brodie. Brodie wrote a number of really interesting and controversial biographies: on Nixon, on Jefferson, on Joseph Smith. This one is about one of the most remarkable men who ever lived, Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian orientalist and explorer. Burton was one of the searchers for the Nile, one of the first “foreigners” to penetrate to Mecca and Medina, the translator of the 1001 Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, and the master of at least 30 languages, including Arabic, Hindustani, Farsi, Greek, Latin, and on and on and on. Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads With an Indian Elder by Kent Nerburn. "A Non-Indian theologian and editor Nerburn attempts to 'bridge the gap between the world into which I had been born and the world of a people I had grown to know and love' by narrating the fascinating toils and truths of Dan, a 78-year-old Lakota man." The Minneapolis Star Tribune's review reads, "An imaginative leap that encompasses several genres in its successful attempt to convey some asepects of American Indian life and truth to American readers." On the Rez by Ian Frazier. From Publishers Weekly: When telling non-Indians that he was writing a book about the American Indian, Frazier (Great Plains, etc.) received a nearly unanimous reaction: that the subject sounds bleak. "Oddly," he says, "it is a word I never heard used by Indians themselves." Frazier builds his narrative--or, more deliberately, unpacks it, since he has no discernable plot, chronology or conclusion--around his 20-year friendship with the Indian Le War Lance and the Oglala Sioux of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. Though no "wannabe" or "buckskinner," Frazier emulates and reveres "the self-possessed sense of freedom" that he claims is the Indian contribution to the American character, adopted by the earliest European settlers and preserved in our system of government. Frazier's record of his travels with Le War Lance includes the tolls of alcohol, fights and car wrecks (Le claims to have survived 11 of them) and acknowledges the realities as well as the clich?s of reservation life. But in his rendering, the calamities of American Indian life are outweighed by the pervasiveness and endurance of that same sense of freedom, a feeling that Frazier captures in his style, his organization, his wonderful eye for detail. Probably no book since Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star has so imaginatively evoked the spirit of the American Indian in American life; like Connell's tours of the Little Bighorn battlefield, Frazier's visits to Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee, and to the descendants of Red Cloud and Black Elk, frame a broad meditation on American history, myth and misconception. Funny and sad, but never bleak, his meandering narrative is, in fact, the composite of many voices and many kinds of history. Agent, Andrew Wylie. Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation by Paul VanDevelder. From Publishers Weekly: Raymond Cross is a Yale-educated attorney and the youngest son of Martin Cross, an American Indian tribal chairman who spent the bulk of his life fighting a losing battle against the construction of a post–WWII dam near the upper Missouri River that would forcibly remove hundreds of families from their ancestral lands. VanDevelder's exhaustively researched book uses the Cross family story—and Raymond Cross's eventual transformation into Coyote Warrior, the term given to a growing group of Ivy League–trained lawyers working on American Indian rights issues—to help trace the century-long struggle of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes to protect their North Dakota homelands. The author, an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker, provides a glimpse into the vagaries of federal Indian law and its effects that avoids preachiness, preferring to let research and recollections by the Cross family tell the story. "It doesn't take long with Indian law before you realize you're breathing a different kind of air," notes one attorney who oversaw legislation to terminate federal wardship over American Indian tribes. The book is at its most accessible when it chronicles the personal struggles of the Cross family, but its sometimes tedious descent into legal jargon and switchback chronology may put off general readers. |
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