Duty, Honor, Country & Life by William H. McRaven

DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY & LIFE by William H. McRaven (Sea Stories, Make Your Bed, and others) takes its title in part from a speech by General MacArthur. In fact, this new book is filled with speeches that McRaven himself has delivered over the last decade or two. In that sense, it harkens to a more hopeful time and lives up to its subtitle: “A Tribute to the American Spirit.” Examples of the texts that appear include a National Football Foundation Speech (2016), a New York Historical Society speech (2023), and commencement speeches from MIT (2020), UT Southwestern Medical School (2015), and University of Texas at Austin (2014) to name just a few. McRaven had an amazing 37-year career as a Navy SEAL followed by time as the Chancellor of the University of Texas. A patriotic and thoughtful person, he prefaces each speech with a brief commentary and has also included several pieces of his own poetry, plus some from his grandmother. Readers will readily see the values, including family, which are so important to him and those he feels define the country (“liberty, equality, self-government, individualism, the rule of law, and religious freedom”). 

Like McRaven’s other writings, this is an inspirational text – in fact, I was at a local Barnes & Noble yesterday where a customer was requesting it. PBS NewsHour also filmed a recent interview:

If your spirits need a lift, look for DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY & LIFE and other titles by McRaven.

Genius at Scale by Hill, Tedards, and Wild

GENIUS AT SCALE by Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild is an in-depth, thoughtful look at “How Great Leaders Drive Innovation.” The authors’ credentials are impressive: Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS); Tedards is a graduate researcher in organizational behavior at HBS; and Wild is he former Global Vice President of CEO Co-Innovation and Customer Engagement at Microsoft. Together, they essentially use case studies and real-world examples to talk about Architects, Bridgers, and Catalysts effecting change in their organizations. Some of the companies and groups mentioned are P&G, Pfizer, Mastercard, Delta Airlines, as well as food organizations in Africa and Italy and the Sampark Foundation which promoted educational advancements in India.  

GENIUS AT SCALE is very accessible, with differently sized helpful headers, a conversational tone, and a focus on individuals and their stories. Much of this necessitates a new way of thinking, like Mastercard’s emphasis on a Framework to Grow, Diversify and Build in the “World Beyond Cash” or P&G’s increasing recognition that “the product economy was shifting to an experience economy.” The authors note that “as much as leaders would like to plan their way to innovation, their job as architects is to help their teams and organizations act their way instead,” referencing a vivid descriptor from previous research: “it's like shifting from leading an orchestra to a jazz ensemble: while their sheet music provides some guardrails, the musicians have to improvise, listen, and adapt to each other as they perform.” Another chapter looks at the establishment of the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi, stressing the importance of continuous learning and adapting to local practices, needing “to create an environment where all caregivers could be ‘contemplative and creative rather than reactive problem solvers’.” While reading, I found many insightful comments like when the Sampark leadership opined “If you launch a decision as an initiative, people wait for it to fail. If you launch it as an experiment -- indicating that you will reverse it if it doesn't go right -- people participate in shaping it. They own it.” The authors and those they studied repeatedly point out how critical it is to have a “foundation of shared purposes and values -- a sense of community." GENIUS AT SCALE is clearly extensively researched with notes comprising at least ten percent of the book; there's also a helpful index and the online bibliography contains a list of over 700 books and articles.  Highly recommended.

The Cradle of Citizenship by James Traub

THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP by James Traub is subtitled “How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy” and Traub spent over a year visiting schools around the country. He rightly notes that “we no longer have common criteria for truth” and “we have very few civic levers other that school left to pull.” In general, however, I honestly found the arguments in this text difficult to interpret. Traub has a view, but he buries it in so much talk about standards and classroom experience that it was difficult for me (a former teacher) to summarize. I did find it interesting that the Wall Street Journal (strong pro-charter school stance) published both an excerpt (promoting classical education) and a review by Meghan Cox Gurdon. She seems to believe that Traub was too progressive in his approach, but I found him to be negative towards standards and teaching pedagogy. It is disquieting to think about the divergence (both in content knowledge and methodology) between teachers from different generations and the likely impact on students. Although I had hoped to purchase THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP and to encourage our Social Studies Department teachers to read this text, I am hesitant to do so after struggling with the preview. Traub did make me think and he encouraged me to look at the bipartisan effort named Educating for American Democracy and their Roadmap. He clearly cares about America and its citizens.

The Pursuit of Liberty by Jeffrey Rosen

THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTY by Jeffrey Rosen describes “How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America.”  Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center and Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School, has written numerous books about democracy and the Supreme Court (such as Conversations with RBG). In his latest, he explores close to 250 years of United States history to show the impact of the fundamental debate over the role of the federal government between Jefferson and Hamilton. The text which utilizes ten chronological chapters and a conclusion based on the present day is quite scholarly and assumes a strong knowledge of American history and its players. Full of details, this work is somewhat reminiscent of Richard Hofstadter’s dense commentary on American history which was often assigned as undergraduate reading fifty years ago. For those who are interested in learning more, Rosen will be speaking via Zoom on Monday, November 10 in a program sponsored by Family Action Network: more details here.

We the People by Jill Lepore

WE THE PEOPLE by Jill Lepore (the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School) offers a history of the U.S. Constitution. Stressing the ability to endure through adaptation, she divides the lengthy text chronologically, looking first at the “Invention” of the Constitution during the end of the eighteenth century. Next, covering almost the entire nineteenth century, including the Civil War and its aftermath, is a section titled “The Contest over Interpretation.” Subsequently, Lepore describes the “Pattern of Amendment” from 1905 to 1959. The final part (through 2016) is called “The End of Amendment.” Each section is full of anecdotes and careful analysis. In her introduction, Lepore notes, “This book aims to chronicle the origins of amendment, to identify the conditions under which amendment is possible, to examine why the practice of amendment has been abandoned, and to reckon with the question of whether the constitution can endure without it.” It seems particularly critical for Americans to become familiar with texts such as this, especially as we encounter ongoing debate over rights enshrined in the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Lepore’s WE THE PEOPLE is the notable nonfiction Library Reads selection for September and it received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly (“galvanizing and paradigm-shifting”), Kirkus (interview here), and Booklist (“phenomenally researched, eminently accessible, and acutely relevant history”). She was also featured recently on PBS NewsHour; here is a video of that interview:

Also highly recommended: The Words We Live by from Linda R. Monk; even at twenty years old, this text is a wonderful summary of a core American document. And look for The Bill of Obligations by Richard Haass wherein he describes “The Ten Habits of Good Citizens” and offers multiple related resources, including teaching notes.  Constitution Day is celebrated on September 17 and offers a reminder to honor American values and rule of law. 

The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus

                                         Happy Father's Day!

THE FAMILY DYNAMIC by Susan Dominus is subtitled “A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success” and was favorably reviewed in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal  written respectively by Ezekiel and Rahm Emmanuel, high-achieving brothers briefly mentioned in the book. Dominus, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and lecturer at Yale, spent years researching a half dozen families whose stories she shares, interspersed with chapters titled Generators, Expectations, Luck and Fate, Finding Nurture, Openness, and Better, Better, Best. As I read about best-selling novelist Lauren Groff and her brother Adam (a successful entrepreneur in the health-care field) and sister Sarah (a world class triathlete and Ironman competitor), I was struck by their family “slogan:” You are so tough!, reminiscent in some ways of the Harbaughs’: Who’s got it better than us?  Dominus describes her own book by writing, “It is safe to say that if this is a book about high achieving families, it is often also about the real costs of having that kind of drive, the sacrifices that having that kind of focus sometimes entails or even the emotional anguish.” And Dominus does more than talk about the supportive role of parents, siblings, and mentors; she also introduces scientists and their research, often providing additional background on their own children. Referencing a “vast body of well-respected research,” Dominus indicates that “parenting effects on children's outcomes … are likely much less dramatic than we have all been led to believe.” THE FAMILY DYNAMIC is a thoughtful work that may require slow, careful reading, but that should spark important conversations on helping children best achieve their potential. The Washington Post reviewer Judith Warner says, “THE FAMILY DYNAMIC will no doubt disappoint readers looking for bullet-pointed parenting-for-success tips. It’s just not that kind of book. It’s better.” 

Yet here I Am by Jonathan Capehart

YET HERE I AM by Jonathan Capehart is subtitled “Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home” and provides ample insight into the background and influences on this award-winning journalist who appears regularly on PBS NewsHour with David Brooks (How to Know a Person). Capehart shares stories about his childhood including being raised by a single mother and her re-marriage when he was a sophomore in high school (hard on any kid), “a suburban middle-class Black kid who grew up playing with white kids now back in a majority Black city [Newark] with no clue about how to relate or fit in.” Writing about college at Carleton, Capehart says, “without a doubt, just about every wonderful thing that has happened in my life can be traced back to my decision to go to that small liberal arts college in Minnesota.” He continues with engaging stories about his work in the news media, including Washington Post and MSNBC, and offers unique perspective on being gay and Black, commenting, “Blackness is always at the mercy of someone else’s judgment. You can be too Black, not Black enough, or not Black at all, and I have run the range my entire life.” YET HERE I AM received a starred review from Kirkus and praise from, among others, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Katie Couric, Michele Norris, and Jon Meacham. 

Conquering Crisis by William McRaven

CONQUERING CRISIS by best-selling author and retired Admiral William McRaven (Sea Stories and Make Your Bed amongst others) is subtitled “Ten Lessons to Learn Before You Need Them.”  McRaven once again shares insightful advice based largely on his varied military career where he says, “I learned early on what actions must be taken to resolve the crisis quickly and come out with one's professional and personal reputation intact.” In this new collection he describes what he sees as five phases of a crisis: assessment, reporting, containment, shaping the outcome, and managing. For example, his first lesson is “First Reports Are Always Wrong,” and he notes that in a chaotic crisis there frequently is early inaccurate or misleading information, using both the WWII Battle of the Bulge and a 1983 exercise near Chile to illustrate the point. Subsequent lessons include ideas like “Bad News Doesn't Get Better with Age” or “Weaponize the Truth.” In addition to the memorable examples (McRaven is a great storyteller), each chapter/lesson is summarized with a few key points. Publishers Weekly says, “leaders looking for an edge in high-pressure situations will find value here.” I concur.

The Ride by Kostya Kennedy

THE RIDE by Kostya Kennedy is subtitled “Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America,” but this book encompasses so much more. Kennedy, an award-winning author, writes about the others (William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, possibly Sybil Ludington) who rode that night and about the other rides which Revere undertook on behalf of the Sons of Liberty. This text is full of fascinating facts and additional insight into Revere’s character and motivation. For example, he describes Revere’s life as an adolescent and the friendships formed then (one of Revere’s sons is named for fellow Patriot Joseph Warren). Another interesting tangent is the discussion of the portrait by John Singleton Copley, saying “You step away from the portrait and you come back to it, and you recognize something of the irreverent. You get the strong feeling that Paul Revere is up to something.”. THE RIDE (which includes an extensive bibliography) received a starred review from Booklist and praise from other reviews like Library Journal (“An important book for readers seeking a deeper understanding of a crucial moment in American history. It will captivate history scholars, students, and enthusiasts from start to finish”). Definitely worth a read and reflection on America’s founding values.

The Last American Road Trip by Sarah Kendzior

As today is a National Day of Hands Off protest, I thought I would post about a new book from a prolific social commentator. She writes, “Lincoln warned in 1838 that if the United States of America died it would be by its own hand. But what we have is more like assisted suicide. It is easy to love your homeland and hate your government. I've done it all my life and consider myself in the company of patriots…. You love it like a child and you love it like a parent, with an irrational depth and the fiercest desire to protect it from harm. You mourn the lost leverage of the ordinary American -- of elections, of courts, of protest, of documentation. You remember when those things seemed to matter or at least when the powerful felt obligated to pretend they did.” THE LAST AMERICAN ROAD TRIP by Sarah Kendzior (The View from Flyover Country) is generally VERY well-written, but oh so sad as America experiences such an unnecessary demise.

Just a couple of weeks into the new administration, Publishers Weekly described this text as a “poignant portrait of life in the Trump era.” I read (and listened to) a preview of THE LAST AMERICAN ROAD TRIP a few months ago and found then that I had to do so in shorts bursts – partly to reflect on her emotional writing and partly because this book can be upsetting. Given the events of the past two months, Kendzior’s comments seem even more prescient (and distressing) now. Kendzior writes at length and with much affection about Missouri, Mark Twain, and her efforts to expose her own children to the American Heartland between 2016 and now, saying, “A lot has changed since we first hit the road. My daughter went from being a fourth grader to a twelfth grader. My son went from being a kindergartner to an eighth grader. And the United States went from being a flawed democracy to a burgeoning autocracy; we drove past the point of no return and kept on driving.” She writes so expressively; for example, “raising children in the world running out of time means contending with two clocks ticking at once: the moments you spend with them as they grew up and the years left for your country, for the planet, for everyone. The first clock is a marvel of memory. The second a countdown to doom. You cannot live your life by these clocks, only alongside them. You forge ahead regardless of the odds because that is your obligation as a parent.”

I could keep quoting from THE LAST AMERICAN ROAD TRIP for quite a while, but end with this reflection: “The people who want to destroy my country are banking on us not missing America. To miss America is to remember America. To remember America is to explore America. To explore America is to see the best and worst in everything -- to reconcile, to repent.” 

Seven Social Movements that Changed America

SEVEN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THAT CHANGED AMERICA by Linda Gordon is a penetrating look at events and happenings during the twentieth century. Gordon, an author and historian who has won numerous prizes for her biography of Dorthea Lange, reflects on several movements that still reverberate today. For example, one is the early work on old age pensions, eventually included in the Social Security Act of 1935, and highlighting the elderly as an activist political force. Other chapters discuss the efforts to unionize farm workers, promote civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent women’s liberation movement. A more distressing example is the influence of the Ku Klux Klan (developed even further in Gordon’s 2017 text The Second Coming of the KKK) – and echoed, sadly, in the “very fine people on both sides” comments about the white nationalists protesting in Charlottesville. Gordon writes, “I am telling these stories [the seven social movements] in a way designed to reveal their commonalities as well as their distinctiveness.” Her tone is rather academic, and she argues that “‘followers’ often exerted vital but less often-recognized leadership.” Whether she is exploring early settlement houses and the fight against poverty, or efforts to establish job programs in the 1930s, her text offers researchers and scholars a thoughtful analysis and many details of value. At least a fourth of the book lists references and footnotes.

Good Reasonable People by Keith Payne

GOOD REASONABLE PEOPLE is the title of a recent text by Keith Payne, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He looks specifically at “The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide,” something which many of us are all trying desperately to understand. In fact, Payne writes that “other people we thought we knew don't just disagree with us; They see the world in a deeply different way than we do.” In attempting to answer why that it so, he explores ideas around how people think about politics, what influences political worldviews, and how hard it is to communicate about all of this. He writes movingly that “my research suggests that our political tribes are primarily the result not of our inner essences, but of our circumstances” and that his text is about “understanding our own minds, our own circumstances, and our own blind spots as much as understanding those of other people.” Kirkus describes GOOD REASONABLE PEOPLE as “Compelling, eye-opening research that humanizes political discord and encourages understanding and compassion.” It has a hopeful, though somewhat academic, tone and notes comprise slightly less than fifteen percent of this thought-provoking book.

Erasing History by Jason Stanley

ERASING HISTORY by Jason Stanley is subtitled “How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future” and we have certainly heard the term fascist quite frequently in this election cycle. According to the publisher, Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, “exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots.” Stanley points to the importance of multiple perspectives and says that “erasing history helps authoritarians because doing so allows them to represent it as a single story, a single perspective.” He is apparently not the only one to feel this way; one of the most chilling quotes is from Vladimir Putin: “Wars are won by teachers.” Stanley writes movingly and convincingly:

“Today we are unquestionably returning to something like the era of the Red Scare. Right-wing activists and politicians are targeting educators at all levels for their supposedly leftist ideologies, with the goal of suppressing any teaching that challenges racial hierarchy or patriarchy.”  And

“By removing the history of uprisings against the current status quo from the curriculum (or never allowing that history to be taught in the first place), authoritarians leave students with the impression that the status quo has never been -- and cannot be -- challenged.”

Student researchers will find much to ponder here, particularly about how education, knowledge, and critical thinking skills provide the foundation for democracy, agency, and self-rule. Unlike those who blame the “enemy within,” Stanley stresses the importance of educators and investigative journalists. Those concerned with the future of democracy will find this text to be very informative. Approximately fifteen percent of ERASING HISTORY is devoted to notes and an index.