Booktalk

   

     We have several volumes from the Library of America in our school library collection. I also have some in my personal library; namely, the multi-volume set about the Civil War. It was that introduction to the Library of America that humbled me with its breadth of authors, diaries, official correspondence, and every other literary form to paint for myself the enormous canvas of that historical moment; charging me to sort out bias, awakening me to intimate and enormous revelations, and challenging me to distill some perspective and wisdom from its great complexity. After reading it, I felt a more worthy citizen of my country.

    Now, thanks to the book exchange at our recent Winter Coffeehouse, I have been reading World War I and America from the same publisher. And again, I am in the thick of America 100 years ago; measuring the motives and heartbreak of eye-witnesses, listening to familiar bombast from orators, and being humbled and carried away by voices I have never heard speak before.

    I was moved by the unforgiving poetry of Mary Borden, by the sense of helplessness of consul Leslie Davis unable to stem the extermination of Armenians, by Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Carr, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, dissenting voices, reminding our citizens of human right short-comings at home. And Edith Wharton, touring the battlefields and open country, caught between the horrors of battle and the “beauty” of the amassed regimental machinery, as only a literary author can bring to life.

    Hope was hard to come by in that world of disillusionment. The sheer variety of texts illustrate the great knot of perspectives and agendas that they all struggled within and that they watched unravel before their eyes.