A True Change of Pace
Normally I choose a movie by the director. Sometimes subject matter plays a part, but if I find a filmmaker that, for lack of a better phrase, “speaks to me,” I’ll no doubt buy a ticket. I worked in the film business for a quarter of a century and had seen hundreds of films and shared my opinions as a film critic. These days, I’ll click on an icon, put in my code, pour a glass of wine or brew a cup of tea, dim the living room lights, and settle in. On rare occasions, I’ll post a review.
Now my attention is drawn to the written word and I zero in on specific authors. In my youth, John Steinbeck’s works were favorites. Of course, “Grapes of Wrath,” “In Dubious Battle,” “East of Eden” were on my bookshelf. I still have a very tattered, yellowed paperback of “My Travels with Charley” that I contributed greatly to my wanderlust.
My writing career over the years has varied. When I was working as a newspaper critic and freelance journalist, my casual reading focused on fictional work. However, when I decided to concentrate on writing novels and short stories, my bookshelves ballooned with non-fiction tomes. Isabel Wilkerson (“Caste” and “The Warmth of Other Suns”) is a current favorite author.
Something caught my attention about Erik Larson’s most recent work, “The Demon of Unrest.” Hundreds of books have been written about the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, none of which can be found in my home library. Other than the perfunctory knowledge one hones from high school classes and the occasional inspiring movie (“Glory”) and a mediocre telling (“Lincoln”), I realized I had a great deal to learn about that time in history.
I’m not wild about Larson’s title. For days my mind went blank, and I had to have the book in front of me to refer it to friends, but the content and especially the pace of his work intrigued me. We are so conditioned to having instantaneous communication. Speed dial a friend in another state? No problem. Have a strange rash? Google it. (No one said instantaneous=accurate.) But back in the mid-1800s, orders from the White House often took days to be received, officers never knew when food and arms supplies might arrive, and messengers traveled by train to hand deliver urgent (?) communiques.
Larson introduces us to dozens of people who journaled or wrote in diaries. He shared military personnel situations from both sides who took the time to write about their actions, plowing forward into the time of Lincoln’s inauguration and the South’s secession where there were a multitude of unknowns revealed at a painstaking pace.
Some of us look upon taking the time to read at our leisure a luxury. Even writing My 3 Cents, (which I’ve been doing now for more than seven years) is a luxury for me delivered without any deadline, or restriction of length, or assigned topic.
I read a book on a topic I knew little about, written in a unique style, that piqued my interest, so I thought I’d share.