Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #56

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Secret (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Watson Hobson (New York: Penguin, 2018).

Sarasate - Zigeunerweisen for Double Bass and String Orchestra (arr. Lau...

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #55

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by William Hobson (New York: Penguin, 2018).

"BARELY HELD STORIES"

Michael Ondaatje, Warlight: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2018). "We never know more than the surface of any relationship after a certain stage, just as those layers of chalk, built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures, work in almost limitless time. It is easier to understand the mercurial, unreliable relationship . . ." Id. at 256. "We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken . . . sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war." Id. at 284-285.

Voice coach reacts to Nina Simone: Brown baby

READING HISTORY

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018). "In order to honestly debate what our country should do, what policies it should adopt, we need a common basis of reality, including about our own past. History in a liberal democracy must be faithful to the norms of truth, yielding an accurate vision of the past, rather than a history provided for political reasons. Fascist politics, by contrast, characteristically contains within it a demand to mythologize the past, creating a version of national heritage that is weapon for political gain." Id. at 19-20.

Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York:Norton, 2018). From the book jacket: "Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. 'A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of history.' Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. 'The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden,' These Truths observes. 'It can't be shirked. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.'"

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Civilizing Torture An American Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts.& London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press 2018). "To know the history of torture in the United States, alas, provides no shield against future torture. But understanding the American tradition does provide precedents with which to anticipate the circumstances in which the nation may next debate torture an how apologists will justify torture, And an understanding of the tradition should inform the inevitable campaign to cleanse the nation of the stain of torture. To observe the subtle work of denial and erasure we need only look to the recent past when American media applied the neologism 'enhance interrogation' to acts performed by Americans that the same media described as 'torture' when carried out by other nationalities. Perhaps the most enduring characteristic of the American tradition is the compulsion to restore national innocence so that Americans can once again take comfort that torture is something done by other people elsewhere." Id. at 334. In short, another work putting the lie to "American Exceptionalism."

Monica Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018). Description of the Porvenir massacre: "In the early morning of January 28, 1918, Company B of the Texas Rangers and four local ranchmen--Buck Poole, John Poole, Tom Snyder, and Raymond Fitzgerald--surrounded the residents of Porvenir, a rural ranching community situated in the northeastern quadrant of the Big Bend region. With the help of the Eight U.S.Cavalry Regiment, the Rangers and cattlemen woke uptake residents and separated the fifteen able-bodied men and boys from the women, children, and elderly men. The posse then searched the homes for weapons. Ranger Captain James Monroe Fox then dismissed the cavalrymen. Without conducting interviews, the Rangers proceeded execute their fifteen prisoners, who ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-four years old. Cavalry private Robert Keil later described what he witnessed: 'For perhaps ten seconds we could't hear anything and then seemed that every woman down there screamed at the same time. It was an awful thing to hear in the dead of night, We could also hear what sounded like praying, and, of course, the small children were screaming with fright. Then we heard shots, rapid shots, echoing and blending in the dark.'" Id. at 121-122 (citation omitted). "In 1918 Texas courts failed to prosecute the Texas Rangers and civilians who participated in the massacre." Id. at 125.

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). "There is no greater voice of America's terrible transformation from slavery to freedom than Douglass's. For all who wish to escape from outward or inward captivity, they would do well to feel the pulses of this life, and to read the words of this voice. And then go act in the world." Id. at xix-xx.

Daniel T. Rodgers, As a City On a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018). Here is yet another book best not read by those with the juvenile view of America's history. From the book jacket: "As a City on a Hall reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop's words came to lodge in American conscienceless. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of 'timeless' texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past." In short, we make up stories (lies really), imbedding them in mis-restatement and mis-reinterpretations of old text, to make us feel better about the terrible things we have done in the process of nation building.

Mary Schmidt Campbell, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). "From the very moment first appeared before the people as a twenty-three-year-old in Sangamon County, Lincoln connected education and history, remembrance of the past and freedom, He singled out education 'as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in,' so that every man could 'thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries to appreciate the value of our free institutions.'" Id. at 367.

Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2018). "James Madison may not have been a stalwart antislavery champion when he told the Federal Convention that it would be wrong to admit into the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man. 'Of course it was wrong, 'Sumner exclaimed to the Senate. 'It was criminal and unpardonable. Thank God! it was not done.' That it was not done, though, made all the difference. Despite all the slaveholders won in 1787, despite all the ways the Constitution reinforced human bondage and thwarted its abolition, that exclusion would help inspire and legitimize the politics that, within a long lifetime's memory, brought slavery to its knees." Id. at 268.

Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Penguin Press, 2018). "Long after the fugitive slave crisis had receded into textbooks, the twentieth-century writer Dwight Macdonald remarked (without reference to any particular historical event) that 'it is a terrible fact, but it is fact, that few people have the imagination or the moral sensitivity to get very excited about actions which they don't participate in themselves. . . and hence about which they feel no personal responsibility.'" Id. at 317.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018). "Evaluating the violence of the US Civil War from the perspective of the participants' moral framework forces us to confront the war not as a tragic misunderstanding between brothers but as a violent conflict like so many others. It forces us to admit wrongdoing on both sides. This latter admission topples America from its perch--a city on a hill, a beacon of virtue, and a model democratic civility for the world to emulate. Instead, a full recognition of both the horror and the civility of the Civil War positions the United States within the mainstream of history." Id. at 10.

Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (New York: Harper, 2018). "'What was it all-out?' muses Walt Boomer. 'It bothers me that we didn't learn a lot. If we had, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq.'" Id. at 752.

Jorn Leonhard, Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War, translated from the German by Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2018).

Lindsey Hilsum, In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). "It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in war. --Marie Colvin, 2001" Id. at ix.

Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014). "Globalization is the process by which the world becomes more interconnected and more interdependent. The emphasis on interdependence is critical because it means that simple contact is not sufficient. Globalization did not occur the moment when Christopher Columbus set foot on an island in the Bahamas in 1492. Globalization occurred only when Europeans developed a taste or use for plants that grew in the Americas (tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chocolate, tobacco) or could be grown there (sugar and cotton with the development of plantation slavery). In other words, globalization increased when Europe and the Americas became dependent on each other, even if their interdependence was far from mutually or equally beneficial. Globalization is not limited to the exchange of goods or foodstuffs. It can be defined in economic, technological. social, political, cultural, or even biological terms." Id. at 52-53.

Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914-1948 (New York: Knopf, 2018).

Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018). "Belief that the world is imminently to end has been, paradoxically, one of the longest-lived convictions of Christian culture. [] The approach of the End has been repeatedly proclaimed by inspired millenarian movements,which especially flourished in nineteenth-century America. In the 1950s, a group of U.S. scholars had the opportunity to observe and to interview a Christian group that foretold the world's end for a certain December 25. The named date came and went. Time did not end. The world continued--but so did this group. In their study, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, the scholars explained how. "The group's prophecy was absolutely disconfirmed; and yet, members of the group were convinced that the prophecy was true. The sociologists described the members ' situation as one of extreme 'cognitive dissonance.' the mental great-grinding caused when a vital belief is at the same time both firmly held and yet also, unambiguously, disconfirmed. Intriguingly, the group responded to its disappointment by increasing its outreach efforts. Why? The better, conjectured these scholars, to reduce the 'cognitive dissonance." How so? The more you talk and convince others that you are right despite all evident to the contrary, these scholars suggested, the better, the more validated, you feel. The initial prophecy--disconfirmed but never discredited, retrieved and revived through reinterpretation--can thus continue to survive." Id. at 132-133.

Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, & Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, Radicalization in America Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Is Donald Trump Working For Russia?

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #54

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Doubts (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 2018).

TOLKIEN

Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth (Oxford: Bolleian Library/Oxford University Press, 2018).

Introducing the Baroque Double Bass

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #53

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Roz Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 2018).

SUGGESTED FICTION

Jonathan Lethem, The Feral Detective: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2018).

Elliot Ackerman, Green on Blue: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2015).

Elliot Ackerman, Dark at the Crossing: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2017).

Elliot Ackerman, Waiting for Eden: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2018).