Five books I'm reading

Four that cover tumultuous historical moments, one that brings peace in times of torment.

RE with colleagues at Shinjuku station, Tokyo, Japan, 1989.

I’m one of those people who reads many books simultaneously — an approach that some would argue isn’t really “reading” at all. There are exceptions to that rule, including novels and especially gripping historical narratives. Typically, though, books are to my brain as Christmas lights are to a fir tree: bright, colorful, and flashing on and off in irregular sequences.

I’m also a big re-reader of books, especially historical ones. The same paragraph can often offer new insights a few years later. It may not have changed, but I probably have.

My recent historical reading has tended to focus on periods when imperial systems were in decline, or when revolutionary change — spiritual and social, as well as political and economic — seemed possible, even if it never came to fruition. I’m not certain we’re entering an era like that again, but it certainly seems possible.

Of the 20 or so currently on the electric wire, here are five that remain at or near the top of the pile random choices:

Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Dan Jones, 2010. (Republished in 2016 as Summer of Blood: England’s First Revolution.)

One of the striking characteristics of revolutionary moments is the speed with which they can appear and the extreme violence that can quickly follow.

Jones’ style of popular history has become very successful in the UK, which is a trade-off: his interpretations can be misguided, but he’s eminently readable. His greatest misinterpretation of the 1381 uprising is that he appears to see it, at least in part, as an anti-tax rebellion. It wasn’t, at least not as we see such things today. The taxes of the time were imposed by the wealthy on everybody else, often to finance wars that further enriched the wealthy. Today’s taxes are (or should be) redistributive, and used to serve the common good. But the book is a great read, and the tax issue isn’t overplayed.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Christopher Hill, 1972.

Hill was a Marxist historian who took the English civil uprising of the 1600s as the focus of this book. As with the 1381 rebellion, the 17th-century revolution was spiritual as well as political. Along with a proliferation of redistributive groups like the Diggers and Levellers, there were a variety of itinerant preachers and religious groups preaching everything from free love to the idea that God was six feet tall and walking on the earth.

Here the trade-off is very different: depth of scholarship and acuity of interpretation, but it’s not an easy read. Hill also assumes a depth of knowledge that this reader doesn’t possess, and that can even be in short supply on the internet. (I’m still not entirely clear on “mechanical preachers,” for example.)

Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. E. J. Hobsbawm, 1959.

It’s time to break out of England. Most people in this country are not of English descent (I am, one-fourth), and the English are a small part of the world’s population. English history, while fascinating and important, should not be the sun around which our view of history revolves.

Primitive Rebels is not a study of “primitive” cultures, a label I’m pretty sure Hobsbawm would reject. The title refers to primitive states of rebellion — that is, ones that were not yet revolutionary, but might have evolved in that direction under different circumstances. His examples include the millenarian movement of Tuscany preacher David Lazzarretti, the early Mafia, the Sicilian Fasci, and broader movements he names “city mobs,” “social bandits,” “peasant communists,” and “labor sects.”

Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900. William Ivy Hair, 1976.

Robert Charles was a Black laborer who was aggressively questioned, and then assaulted, by white police officers while sitting on some front porch steps with a friend. There was an exchange of gunfire, which wounded both Charles and one of the officers. He then shot and killed two other police officers when they came to his home to arrest him.

The “race riot” of the subtitle was a wave of white mob violence against Black residents in the days that followed. Charles himself was eventually captured, but not before killing or wounding five more people officers. He also wounded nineteen other people before being killed. Charles became a hero to many antiracism activists and a figure of preternatural evil to segregationists. Both sides of this divide tended to see him in larger-than-life terms.

The parallels to current events are probably too obvious to mention, with one exception: it’s striking, at least to me, how much patience and forbearance we have seen from most of today’s victims of police violence. That’s not guaranteed to last forever.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Bashō, 1689.

Bashō (the pen name means “banana tree”), who lived in the Edo period, is one of Japan’s most revered poets. He was also a practitioner of Zen meditation. I reread this book of travel writing every couple of years or so — for its evocation of a very different time and place, and because it’s beautiful.

I traveled to Japan in the late 1980s as an employee of AIG. One of my Japanese colleagues was moved that I had even heard of Bashō, much less appreciated him, that he presented me with a work of calligraphy his grandfather had created as a Zen student: a Bashō poem.