By James W. Finck
I have been tasked with suggesting books to read in the coming year — books which can help make you a better-informed citizen. I amust warn you that as a history professor, every book on my list is historical. I am of the strong belief that understanding our past better prepares us for the future. History is not just interesting to read, but it can be a tool to teach us about the present. With that in mind, let’s look at these 11 books and what you might learn from reading them in the new year.
11. “On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle” by Hampton Sides
I know these lists are usually top ten, but this was a recent read and I was moved by the writing and characters. The story mainly focuses on the First Marine Division during the Korean War and their harrowing attack and breakout from a mountaintop reservoir named Chosin.
Sides makes a convincing argument that the Marines were forced to fight four different enemies in this battle: the Chinese, the mountain, the cold, and their superior officers. Sides makes heroes of men like Privates Hector Cafferata and Kenneth Benson, and officers like Captain William Barber and Lieutenants Kurt Chew-Een Lee and John Yancy. He saved his greatest praise for General Oliver Smith who commanded the men on the ground. Yet, at the same time, he was extremely critical of Smith’s superiors: Generals Edward Almond and Douglas MacArthur. Both men were completely out of touch with what was happening on the ground. MacArthur was more concerned with photo ops and fame. Almond was naive about the situation and more concerned with pleasing MacArthur.
One thing I learned from this book which should worry everyone was that the Chinese military had over 19,000 killed in this one battle. Sides described how even though they were being slaughtered, Chinese soldiers continued to attack. It was so bad, and the ground was so frozen, that American Marines were using the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers as barricades. Chinese solders even charged without weapons. Men had to climb over the bodies of their dead fellow soldiers to attack, yet they continued to do so night after night after night. Sides makes the point that the Chinese government did not care about the body count because they did not see them as human, just soldiers, and so had no issue with sending wave after wave to die.
10. “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” by Timothy Egan
Being that I am writing for an Oklahoma newspaper, this is the first of two Oklahoma-centered books I’ve selected.
I have noticed this past year a new term that has crept into our vocabulary, ‘COVID gap.’ The term is used in discussions on education. The gap describes a situation where students basically missed a year while they were quarantining and doing school online. There has also been talk about how COVID has hurt the economy, especially with a 10% unemployment rate.
While COVID has greatly affected us, as a historian it has made me think a great deal about the Great Depression and the effects these 10 years had on the generation that grew up with 25% unemployment and a level of poverty we have not seen since.
In “The Worst Hard Times,” Egan takes on just one remote corner of the globe that suffered possibly worse than any other region in the U.S. He looks at the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles as well as western Kansas and eastern Colorado and how the Dust Bowl made the region unlivable. Farmers in this region had come from around the world looking for a better life only to have that dream crushed when the land itself betrayed them.
Egan describes plagues that would fit nicely in the Old Testament, such as 50-foot walls of dust that covered or destroyed everything in their path and the swarms of grasshoppers that devoured what was left. He described the conditions for those who did not pack up and move to California, like the subjects in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” but instead stayed and forced themselves to eat salted tumbleweed to stay alive.
Books like these are important because they show what people, especially Okies, are made of and that we can endure more than we ever thought possible. It is helpful when withstanding our own trials to put them into perspective as well as to know we can survive even the worst of times.
9. “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
This is the first of three Civil War books I chose. While I do think the Civil War is our nation’s most important event, only three are on the list because we are currently reevaluating how we remember this particular struggle.
I am also suggesting this particular book because if we are not, we should be reevaluating who we choose as leaders. I have not yet read Jon Meacham’s new Lincoln biography “And Then There was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle,” but for the Lincoln books I have read, my money is on “Team of Rivals” as the best.
I have read many books on Lincoln, but where this one made its mark was looking at how he dealt with other people. I came away from this book with a new appreciation of the man. In fact, I found this book made me want to be a better person. Goodwin brilliantly documents how Lincoln had a knack of making enemies into friends. Instead of just getting angry at every slight towards him — and there were many — he found ways to get those making the slights to eventually support him. Bridges most people would have burned down were not burned by Lincoln, so later in life he was able to cross them again for his own benefit. I will give one example.
Lincoln struggled early in his administration as he appointed men, as the book title suggests, who were his rivals for the presidency and thought themselves more deserving. One of the men he most struggled with was Secretary of War Simon Cameron.
Cameron was able to push Lincoln around by threatening to quit if he did not get his way. Lincoln was no pushover, but he kept Cameron as long as he thought he was the best man for the job. Yet, when Lincoln finally realized Cameron was not right for the position, he accepted his next resignation to Cameron’s surprise and appointed him ambassador to Russia. Cameron was crushed by the news and worried about public humiliation. He treated the president very badly while in office, including publicly insulting him. Yet now that Lincoln had a chance for revenge, he did not take it.
In letters to the press, Lincoln set himself up for disgrace, taking all the blame on himself. He even met with Cameron asking advice on his replacement. Cameron suggested Edwin Stanton, who Lincoln had already decided on, but let Cameron leave thinking Stanton was his idea. Cameron was a man who detested Lincoln, who was fired by Lincoln, yet as Goodwin writes, “Cameron would never forget this generous act. Filled with gratitude and admiration, he would become … one of the most intimate and devoted of Lincoln’s personal friends. He appreciated the courage it took for Lincoln to share the blame at a time when everyone else had deserted him.” Most other men in Lincoln’s situation, Cameron wrote, “would have permitted an innocent man to suffer rather than incur responsibility.”
Lincoln was not like most other men, as each cabinet member, including the new war secretary, would soon come to understand.
We are long removed from leaders like Lincoln. I am not sure I can remember the last time a president took responsibility for anything instead of blaming others. Lincoln was far from perfect, but he was the right man for the time. Not only is this book good for history buffs, but I would also assign it for any leadership class. It was also the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which I would add if I were writing about movies instead of books.
8. “Night” by Elie Wiesel
“Night” is the autobiographical account of a young 14-year-old Elie Wiesel, his trials and eventually triumph over the Holocaust. In this short account, Wiesel will lose his mother, sister, and eventually his father to the camps.
There are many accounts of this horrific time, but there is something special about “Night.” I think it is Wiesel’s honesty. Not only did he lose his family, but at some moments he even lost his god. One haunting line was, “Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”
One of the most interesting conversations I have with students when reading “Night” is the subject of God. Wiesel had to battle with what every believer has at some point: why does God let bad things happen? Believers often ask this question. In his case, it is easy to understand why he lost his faith. Yet, at the same time, he never really did. If anything, this is a story of faith.
Wiesel wrote this as a warning that we must be ever vigilant. I think one of the most powerful lines came early in the book when the Jews in Wiesel’s camp were questioning the existence of the Final Solution. “Was he [Hitler] going to wipe out a whole people?” Wiesel wrote. “Could he exterminate a population scattered throughout so many countries? So many millions! What methods could he use? And in the middle of the twentieth century!”
I think we can fall into this trap. There is no way that something like this can happen now; this stuff happened in the past. What Wiesel said is yes! It can if we let it. We must always remember the Holocaust and the lessons it taught.
7. “After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam” by Lesley Hazleton
This is the first of three books on the Middle East, an area that is vital for us to understand and yet most Americans still know so little about these cultures and faiths.
Hazleton has lived in the Middle East for years and has experience with the culture and stories of the prophet Muhammad. As a journalist, she writes differently from most historians, which can be refreshing as at times it reads like a novel. Hazleton starts by telling the beginnings of Islam. It’s the story of an orphan boy, Muhammad, who works his way up through hard work. He is fortunate to marry Khadija, a woman of some means, and he becomes a successful trader. Yet Muhammad is troubled by the way the people of Mecca are living, putting riches before people. He climbs the hills behind Mecca and prays in a cave until one evening he is visited by the angel Gabriel. This visit, and others like it, become the foundation of Islam.
Hazleton continued to chronicle the prophet’s life but then spends the second half of the book explaining the great division in Islam between the Shi’a and the Sunni.
Muhammad did not name a successor at his death. The way Hazleton tells it, while Muhammad’s favorite follower, his cousin Ali, was preparing his body for burial, Abu Bakr claimed leadership of the Ummah. This began a series of events that would eventually turned into full-scale war between the Sunni and the Shiite Ali.
Even if it was not describing a major world religion most Americans do not know much about, it is a fascinating tale of love, betrayal, loyalty — really everything needed for a good story. One thing I suggest watching for as you read this book is to pay attention to Muhammad’s wives, especially Khadija and Aisha. There is nothing subservient about either of these women, and anyone who suggests Muhammad treated them as second class does not understand this story.
6. “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror” by Stephen Kinzer
This second Middle Eastern book I chose deals with a fascinating subject that is just as unknown to Americans as the first but is general knowledge to Iranians.
In 1952, the very popular Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh became prime minister through a democratic revolution. Not only was Mossadegh strong enough to take on the tyrannical Shah and implement democratic reforms, he also took on the British, who had been exploiting Iran for years and making millions from Iranian oil while Iranians remained in poverty.
When Mossadegh took office, he made the popular decision to nationalize the oil industry and kick out the British. While most of the nation cheered him, the British were furious. They claimed the oil was theirs and took them to the International Court of Justice and the United Nations. Both institutions instructed Britain to compromise, giving Iran a more equal share in the profits and day-to-day operations. When the British refused, both the U.N. and the World Court sided with Iran. With their golden goose lost the only option left for the British was to overthrow the democratic government and help the shah retain his authoritarian control. The only problem was after the British were kicked out, they could not pull off the coup alone, so they turned to their American friends.
In an exceptionally written narrative, Kinzer gives the history of modern Iran and its struggle with democracy, the British, America and the Shah. He details the fight to achieve a constitutional government and the rise of Mossadegh, a man who finally put Iran’s interest above his own. Kinzer also details the British attitude of supremacy, including from one of my personal historical favorites, Winston Churchill, who believed all other nations’ interests were secondary to their own. British exploitation of the Iranian people and their resources was deplorable. Worst yet, it was America operating out of the U.S. embassy that led the coup against Mossadegh. Kinzer claims America’s betrayal set up a series of events, including the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, which is responsible for many of Iran’s problems today.
Kinzer wrote, “The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and the Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and towards dictatorship.”
To understand the American-Iranian relationship, you must understand this event. And in a time when Iran is again trying to fight against authoritarianism “All the Shah’s Men” is well worth reading.
5. “When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory (The Civil War in the West)” by Mary Jane Warde
In my opinion “When the Wolf Came” is the book on the Civil War in Indian Territory.
The second of the two Oklahoma and three Civil War books listed, it has a couple of themes that are important today. First it helps explain the Civil War, especially how it played out differently in Indian Territory. Secondly it explains the role of Native Americans and how the war affected them moving forward.
The Civil War in Indian Territory was much different than most areas. The largest battle in the state only had 9,000 men involved. Instead of large engagements, it was more guerilla-like action of neighbor against neighbor. It was not so much tribe versus tribe, but more like intertribal fighting. Warde traces the cause of the infighting back to Indian Removal, where some tribes were divided over removal. The fracture remained in subsequent years. When the war broke out, some within the tribes fought for the North and some for the South. They used the war to kill the other side. It was a complicated history that Warde does an excellent job sorting through.
Most Native Americans fought for the Confederacy. After they war, the Union declared their treaties with the tribes broken and used the Natives’ allegiance with the South as an excuse to take their land.
With courts today deciding many tribal sovereignty and treaty issues, understanding the war in Oklahoma can give readers some background into these cases.
4. “Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America” by Ira Berlin
This is the first of three books dealing with the subject of race that can help us better understand America’s long and difficult relationship with slavery.
The 1619 Project, The New York Times’ “long-form journalism endeavor… to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ narrative,” did a good job of getting Americans talking about this difficult subject. Yet, I also felt it had flaws being more political than historical. If you want a better understanding of slavery in America from start to finish and its changing nature along the way, this is the book.
Written years before 2019’s first issue of The 1619 Project, “Many Thousands Gone” even questions the “Twenty and odd Negroes” from John Rolfe’s letter as to whether they were even slaves or what Berlin called Atlantic Creoles. Berlin believes these Creoles were not enslaved but were people who had learned to work within the Atlantic World trade.
Berlin does not deny the mistreatment of slaves. Nor does he disregard how vital slaves were to the creation of America. He puts slavery in the context of the Atlantic World and gives the history of how America changed from a society with slaves to a slave society. In other words, slavery became worse instead of better as the nation progressed.
The only way to understand slavery’s role in America is from a historical not political perspective.
3. “The Blood of Emmett Till” by Timothy B. Tyson
The most recent book on the list and the second dealing with important race issues, Tyson does a brilliant job using this one horrific crime, its trial and aftermath to explain conditions for Black Americans not only in the Jim Crow South, but also some of what it was like in Chicago during the time.
The emphasis of the story is the August 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was visiting his grandfather in Money, Mississippi. Even though he had been warned of how to behave in Mississippi, he did the unthinkable and broke the unwritten rule and either talked, winked or even possibly whistled at a white woman. That night the woman’s husband and his friends came to the home of Till’s grandfather and drug Till out of the home, never to be seen alive again. Till was severely beaten, tied to a large fan and dumped into a river. His body was found a few days later and returned to Chicago where his mother held an open casket funeral to show the world what happens to Black children who do not follow the racial rules in Mississippi.
This murder, the funeral, and the trial that followed was the spark that finally galvanized the nation to launch what we now see as the Civil Rights Movement. On Dec. 1, 1955, three months after Till’s death, a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her Montgomery, Alabama, municipal bus seat. Another peaceful protest occurred Feb. 1, 1960, as four Black college students staged a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.
“The Blood of Emmett Till” covers the sham trial of the two men charged with the murder. The prosecutors did the best they could in 1950s Mississippi trying to convict white men of killing a Black child. The defense attorneys had a much easier job. Their entire plan was to argue that the two men did not kill Till but if the overwhelming evidence proves they did, then they were justified because Till deserved it.
2. “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War” by Tony Horwitz
Popular several years ago, in light of recent events, I believe it needs to be reread. This book covers not only race but how we remember the Civil War.
In a time when monuments are being torn down its important to understand why they are there to start with. It’s important if we are going to read books like “The Blood of Emmitt Till” we also understand the other side. That is exactly what “Confederates in the Attic” does.
The book is made up of two parts. First Horwitz travels across the South trying to understand the region’s obsession with the war and continued devotion to the cause. The second aspect is woven throughout and deals with Horwitz befriending Civil War reenactors — one in particular — and their adventures together. It is a crazy journey that almost seems unbelievable to most.
The book needs a new edition covering more recent events. Unfortunately, Horwitz died in 2019. I was hoping he could speak at USAO’s Civil War Symposium when the pandemic ended, but now we will never know.
I want to mention I have just begun reading “Civil War Monuments and Memory: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War (Emerging Civil War Anniversary Series).” It is an edited volume of more than a dozen different historians’ perspectives on the idea of Civil War in memory and how this most important event in our history should be remembered and honored. I am excited to see how it treats this subject.
1. “The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East” by Sandy Tolan
This is number one because it is the best book I have read for some time and is my suggestion whenever I am asked what to read. In fact, the Ledger just ran my full review back on Dec. 5, if you want to read more.
Suffice it to say “The Lemon Tree” is the true story of two people: Dalia a Jew, and Bashir a Palestinian, who are connected by a house and the lemon tree in the yard. Bashir’s family was driven out of their home during the 1948 Israeli War for Independence. Later, after barely escaping the Holocaust, Dalia’s family arrived in Israel and was given the home to make theirs. All that Dalia knew of the previous owners was that they had abandoned it.
Everything changed for Dalia while she was home from college and there was a knock at her door. Standing in front of her were three young Palestinians — Bashir and his two cousins who had come to see his home after 19 years. As Dalia allowed them in, she would not only start a new friendship but a new journey of discovery that would open her eyes to the treatment and hardships of Palestinians.
Bashir’s only dream was to return to his home and his land, while Dalia’s was to have a land and security. The problem was both could not make their dream a reality at the same time. Bashir would go one way and become part of the resistance of Israel and would spend more than 17 years in and out of jail. Dalia would try to understand his struggle, but also struggle herself with his possible role in what she saw as terrorism, but Bashir saw as freedom.
The story of Dalia and Bashir brings a sense of humanity and a face to this difficulty, and helps shed a light on the struggle of those having to deal with the problem every day. When speaking with Bashir’s family, Dalia said, “It is either us or them? Dalia thought. “Either I live in their home while they are refugees, or they live in my house while I become a fugitive? There must be another possibility. But what is it?”
Tolan does not have answers to these most difficult questions, but it will open your eyes to the hardships of both sides and bring humanity to tragedies that are far removed from us here.