2019 Books in Review

This is going to be a short list… I barely cleared four books in 2019. But as a newly-minted dad of twins, I consider this a sizeable accomplishment.

With time increasingly limited, I’m more focused on choosing the right books – quality over quantity. So I let go of an earlier effort to start as many books as possible and finish only the good ones. Instead, I’ve concentrated on a short list of historical non-fiction with a bit of writing self-help and faith-based work.

I also bulldozed my way through about 500 readings of The Pout-Pout fish, Zoe’s First Book of Seasons and a few other gems, but I’ll just award them five stars now, so we can move on.

(1) Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Summary

This reads like a textbook on management and emotional intelligence. It follows four presidents (Lincoln, both Roosevelts, LBJ) in each major stage of life with emphasis on the hard times and how they adapted.

What I liked most is that it didn’t sugarcoat their vulnerabilities and shortcomings. Their career trajectories weren’t linear; they were colored by numerous failures and setbacks along the way. So it’s remarkable how shrewd they proved, in particular, by acknowledging personal weaknesses that got in the way and working hard to improve upon them.

A couple of observations:

I wonder what impact these men would have in different eras. I strongly doubt, for instance, that LBJ would have succeeded in today’s more transparent political environment where playing both sides of an issue will quickly get you kicked out of the conversation. Would Lincoln have been discredited as a “flip-flopper” for changing his views on the Mexican-American War?

Each president undoubtedly held altruistic intentions when it came to public leadership. But these traits are arguably selfish rather than sacrificial as they’re often described. They were forced to ignore their families and prioritize their public life in what might appear to onlookers as noble. And it was to some degree, but the pleasure they received from “sacrifice” was indisputable. Not to diminish the value of their work or even their intentions, but it goes to show that our image and legacies can become an obsession at the cost of our family relationships.

This is an important book for the 2020 election year. You can’t help but notice the sharp contrasts in integrity, intellectual honesty and statesmanship (excluding, in part, LBJ and FDR) compared to our current batch of elected officials.

Notable excerpts

…Lincoln also pledged that if his opinions on any subject turned out to be erroneous, he stood ‘ready to renounce them.’ With this commitment, Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life – a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.

Historians generally consider Lincoln’s single term in Congress a failure, an assessment with which Lincoln himself would likely concur.

‘Leaders in every field,’ Roosevelt later wrote, ‘need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul’.

Ambition is an uncomfortable companion – LBJ

(2) No one wants to read your sh** by Steven Pressfield

I’m fascinated by the prospect of writing publicly. Online platforms like Twitter flatten traditional hierarchies (professional and cultural), unlocking opportunities to build an audience and share thoughtful ideas quickly. I love participating in this world, so I dove into this book over a holiday in Santa Barbara in hopes to sharpen my voice.

It’s mostly geared towards non-fiction writers, but the principles are applicable across all genres.

“No one wants to read anything…No one wants to hear your self-centered, ego-driven, unrefined demands for attention. Why should we? It’s boring. There’s nothing in it for us.”

This quote caused some healthy soul searching as I’ve wrestled with a desire to write and build an online presence. Grappling with this critique forced me to crystalize my purpose in writing, which itself made the book worth it. It’s also my new mantra for editing my own drafts.

If nothing else, the book is thought provoking for writers who feel they have something to say and reckon there might be interested readers out there who want to explore ideas and have their views and assumptions challenged.

“…writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention…in return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his gift to you…learn to ask yourself with every sentence…Is this interesting? Is it fun or challenging or inventive?”

My nature is to write long narratives, defending every angle of my view in anticipation of dissenting arguments. So this was an encouragement to fight against that feeling, leaving out good things to focus on the best things.

The soul judges a story’s truth by how closely it comports to the narrative templates that are part of our psyche from birth.

Connecting with audiences is hard. There’s so much out there to consume that it’s nearly impossible to attract readers, much less stand out among writers. But the discipline of whittling away at ideas until the most important messages emerge is worth it. Everyone stands to benefit.

Sometimes the simple ideas are the most profound. Other times value is unlocked by navigating the nuances. Either way, we’re constantly aiming to draw out the interesting from the mundane.

(3) Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

This one isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a raw and violent historic account of the western frontier through the 17th – 19th centuries. A history book at its core but scandalous enough to read like a novel.

The book does an incredible job of putting each scene or factoid into a larger historical context.

The continent at that time was effectively two separate civilizations with starkly different levels of progress and associated customs – the settled east and unsettled west. This book is about what happened at the borders where the two worlds collided.

America’s westward push was driven by farmers, preachers forty-niners and Texas rangers. The hardship and grit required to make it in the West is breathtaking.

The Comanches embodied the grisly, primitive and sometimes perverse culture that ruled the Great Plains during these times. Superior hunters and riders, the tribe had strong organization but little hierarchy to manage it. Their barbaric style of diplomacy and war was not easily matched and was widely respected by adversaries.

There were no horses on the continent until the Spanish introduced them in the sixteenth century.

What happened to the tribe between roughly 1625-1750 was one of the great social and military transformations in history…the agent of this astonishing change was the horse. Or, more precisely, what this backward tribe of Stone Age hunters did with the horse, an astonishing piece of transformative technology that had as much of an effect on the Great Plains as steam and electricity had on the rest of civilization.

Neither the Americans nor the Indians…had the remotest idea of the other’s geographical size or military power…the Comanche [empire]…covered some 240,000 square miles..Such imperial dominance was no accident…It was the product of more than 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat against a series of enemies over a singular piece of land that contained the country’s largest buffalo herds.

It is one of history’s great ironies that one of the main reasons Mexico had encouraged Americans to settle in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s was because they wanted a buffer against the Comanches, a sort of insurance policy on their borderlands.

(4) Prayer by Tim Keller

This book methodically defines, justifies and teaches prayer. Supplemented by the works of Augustine and Martin Luther, Keller dives into a word-by-word study of the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9-13) as an instruction template.

Fair warning that Keller’s writing style is a bit dense. He relies on robust logic to cater to his immediate audience in NYC, which often takes an intellectual approach to faith topics.

Prayer is not simply the solitary exploration of your own subjectivity. You are with Another, and He is unique. God is the only person from whom you can hide nothing. Before him you will unavoidably come to see yourself in a new, unique light. Prayer, therefore, leads to a self-knowledge that is impossible to achieve any other way.

I can think of nothing great that is also easy. Prayer must be, then, one of the hardest things in the world.

We are so used to being empty that we do not recognize the emptiness as such until we start to try to pray.

The Bible speaks of our relationship with God as knowing and being known (Gal 4:9; 1 Cor 13:12)… …because our definition understands prayer as a response to the knowledge of God, it means that prayer is profoundly altered by the amount and accuracy of that knowledge.

We should listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the Scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds…that response to God’s speech is then truly prayer