Sunday!

Tod Kelly says:

Not much in the way of viewing pleasures this week, but I have started two great books that I highly recommend to people here.

The first is Midnight Rising by Tony Horowitz. It’s a narrative history of John Brown, his raid on Harper’s Ferry, and it’s political and cultural impact, which (at least Horowitz argues) cumulated in a Civil War that might not have happened when it did without him. It’s an amazing read, especially right now when political extremism seems to be on the rise.

The second is David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, which is absolutely riveting. It’s essentially three stories wrapped into one: The meat of the story centers on the British explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared in the Amazon jungles looking for El Dorado in 1925; the second is the rather astounding story of an amateur scientist who tried to find his remains 70 years later; lastly, there is the story of Grann’s going into the Amazon himself to see if he could find out whatever happened to Fawcett’s expedition. It’s a combination of history and journalism, and it’s an absolute page turner.

One of the interesting things I’ve noted reading both side by side is how very culturally different things were a mere century prior to my birth, in ways that seem positively weird from a 21st century point of view.

For example, I learned in Midnight Rising that it was somewhat common in this country that if a criminal had transgressed you or your family sufficiently (murdering one of them, for example), after their execution they would cut off a chunk of the copse and send it to you. (Nat Turner, for example, was cut up into many, many pieces, each of which was delivered to different family members killed in his failed uprising.)

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in late 19th century Victorian England, if you were a teenage boy and your parents were wealthy enough to be member of the upper class but not so much so as to be considered aristocracy, you were sent to a military academy to be made into the *right* kind of Victorian gentleman. That part didn’t surprise me, obviously — but the methods used by these military academies to mold upstanding gentlemen very much did: flogging, having hot irons held against the boys’ flesh, forcing them to stick their naked arms outside windows in sub-frezzing temperatures for hours, or instructed a boy to put a stool on top of another stool on top of a table, then stand on it until an older boy was chosen to kick it all out from underneath you. All of this, by the way, not being hazing pranks pulled by older boys, but part of the actual intended curriculum.

I know of course that every generation foolishly looks back at previous ones and thinks how very much more civilized they are than those that came before, but… sheesh.Report