We don’t know

     how it’s going to turn out…

Book review:

These Truths:

    A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

932 pages, including fabulous extended note, bibliography, index

Jill Lepore makes it easy to read authoritative accounts of our history as a nation. She is already a venerable historian.

These Truths offers two things that I crave when I’m reading/learning history: context, and a penetrating commitment to seek truth in terms of what they were thinking and what they knew way back when.

One of the thrilling and challenging realities of studying history is this humdinger: pick your time in history, and you can say “They didn’t know how it would turn out.”

Barely weeks away from the November 1864 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln expected that he would lose his bid to stay in office.

Hannibal didn’t know what the other side of the Alps looked like, and didn’t know what he would find there, if he made it across.

Eli Whitney was tinkering in the shop in 1793, watching a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence, when he invented the cotton gin—he didn’t know that the machine would make slave-based cotton agriculture a booming industry in the 19th century before the American Civil War.

Lepore puts a lot of history into These Truths. Her scholarship and her insights make it obvious that every reader has a lot to learn.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

Book review: Shawshank Redemption

A world I do not want to know…

by Stephen King

click here

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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