(SB) - I love to read and I especially love books that make me think and learn. Recently, I reviewed “Great Books: Everyone’s Inheritance” by Michael Gose for the American Library Association. The concept of “Great Books” is to offer to students, either during the last two years of high school or the first two years of college, the opportunity to read and to respond to literature from the past. Most “Great Books” curriculum begin with Homer and the Old Testament of the Bible and then moves forward through the Greeks, including Aeschylus and Sophocles, continuing chronologically through works by Chaucer, Machiavelli, Descartes, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Swift, Adam Smith, Balzac, Ibsen, Tolstoy and ending with the study of Nietzsche and Freud in a chronological pattern. Reading through this list, you can surmise that all “great” literature is written solely by dead, white men. Such programs (there is no perfect “Great Books” curriculum) are often reserved for elite students, thus condemning the “average” student to a life bereft of the thinking and actions of “great” authors in history. In his book, Michael Goss insists that all students should have the opportunity to read and to reflect on “great” literature, even if they can’t comprehend initially the antiquated works. A certain level of cognitive dissonance is anticipated, but the more students participate in discussions about literary works, the easier it will be for them to understand the content. Gose and others believe that “Great Books” should be studied ahistoricity, as if the work being studied were contemporary literature.
I have done a great deal of reading since my surgery and I would like to suggest that there be a “Great Books” curriculum of current books which would reflect contemporaneous issues. One book that I would include in such a study is “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride. Winner of the National Book Award for “The Good Lord Bird,” as well as several other books that mix history and mystery, McBride comes into his own in his latest work. The premise of “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” is a bird’s eye view of the three groups of people who inhabit the lower-class neighborhood of Chicken Hill in Pottsdown, Pennsylvania. United in their poverty, the blacks, Eastern European Jewish immigrants and “white trash” Christians, retain their own cultures, while still working together for the good of all who occupy the area post-World War II. The beauty of this novel is in the long descriptive passages that reveal the heart and soul of the three groups who are aligned only by the poverty that they share. Of particular interest is McBride’s portrayal of the local mental hospital where those who are damaged in their bodies must coexist with those with mental diseases.
Another book worth a “great books” discussion is “The Women” by Kristin Hannah. I don’t particularly like Hannah’s writing style, but this book features characters in a unique time frame. I grew up in the Vietnam era, but my only experiences were with men who were drafted and sent to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Two of Dale’s brothers and several of our friends took part in the war, most returning with few visible scars, but terrible mental conditions. Hannah’s book addresses the war from the perspective of women who served, as nurses, Red Cross Workers and “Donut Dollies.” Hannah’s book provides a realistic picture of the conditions under which the women served. Upon their return, all were treated even less well than their male counterparts. The theme, “No women served in Viet Nam” becomes the refrain of the time, as well as a depiction of what it was like not to be believed. It was many years before the women’s contribution to the war was even represented at the Viet Name memorial in Washington, DC.
Mitch Albom was first recognized as a “great” writer in his initial book, “Tuesdays with Morrie”, but much of what he has written since has been mediocre. That is not true of Albom’s latest offering, “The Little Liar” that involves the Greek city of Thessalonica during World War II. The town was home to over 50,000 Jews at the beginning of the war, but by its end, there were fewer than 1,000 Jewish men, women and children left in the city. The Holocaust destroyed them all. The central character in the book is a young Jewish boy who has the reputation of having never told a lie. The Nazis convince the boy that his family would be saved if he convinces the other Jewish people in the city to board the trains that take them to a certain death in Auschwitz. The “great” element in the book is a setting in a city that is not part of Europe and in the four central characters who survive the war.
There are several “great books” written every year, and it is up to you to determine what works suggest further study and which ones are simply “one (reading) and done.” I hope you will take the time to discover some of the gems in the months and years to come.
