History Archives - Read. Think. Act.

Hope in the Dark – Rebecca Solnit

(June 2017) This book is a great reminder of how life is not a perfect arc. The greatest takeaway for me is that we must embrace paradox. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The opening line of A Tale of Two Cities was written by Charles Dickens in 1859. It could describe many years in many cities from then until 2017.

We tend to fall into the trap of seeing the world in terms of “either/or” – it’s all great or it’s all terrible. Realistically, it’s never all one thing or the other. We lose sight of that reality because we are not wired to embrace the paradoxical nature of many situations that ask us to see both the darkness and the light simultaneously.

This book was originally published in 2004 with additional updated chapters added in this 2017 audio edition. It’s a reminder of what life was like after 9/11, the global nature of the Iraqi War Protests, and how people reached out to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. There was great tragedy followed by moments where “citizens” found a way to come together as an empowered force for good.

Author Rebecca Solnit points out that we are overly focused on “regime change” as the answer to social and economic justice issues. She goes global in her examples of how CULTURE change is the most lasting of change and is not dependent on who is in power in any particular government. Often, people driven change is a reaction to an oppressive regime – it galvanizes disparate groups to come together in a way that makes their unified efforts a force to be reckoned with.

She gives concrete examples of how environmental activists in the western part of the United States found common ground with ranchers who despised them. It turned out they had overlapping interests on which they could work together. It took sitting down face-to-face, person-to-person, to overcome stereotypes and objectification of “otherness” to see how their alliance could serve each group’s agenda for protecting the environment.

This book is the needed antidote to the despair many feel as they wake up each day in a dramatically altered America. We cannot embrace despair. Doing so assures that we give up our personal power to affect change. As Alice Walker pointed out years ago, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” That is the battle we must fight each day.

I highly recommend this book. It shifted my paradigm in a positive way and reminded me we have seen great challenges before and we have experienced great victories. The minute “change” becomes our “new normal” we lose all memory of how we got there. Solnit wisely points out that if we are going to build monuments, they should be built to constantly remind us of what people can accomplish and HOW they accomplished it. We should not forget the journey in celebrating the outcomes. Life *is* the journey.

by Catherine Read

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why

Trainwreck - Sady Doyle (Jan. 2017) Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why is a fascinating book. It gives context – historical context – to well known “trainwrecks” from Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte & Sylvia Plath, to Billie Holliday and Marilyn Monroe, right up to Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

Here’s the thing: What they have in common is they are remarkable, talented and accomplished women. We look at them and want to believe they must somehow be “flawed.” It makes me think of how people believe that poverty is also a “character flaw” and not situational or circumstantial. We should just be able to fix what’s wrong with us and then we would know success and acceptance!

Sady Doyle has done a great job in her historical research. I was fascinated to learn about some of these women whose life stories I was unfamiliar with. She also draws a common thread from the 17th century to the 21st century to show the similarity in how women are viewed – by the media, in the context of the social norms of the day and always through the lens of impossible standards.

One of the most interesting chapters is about Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. This book is not an academic endeavor. I believe her research is credible and adds so much to the subject she’s trying to illuminate. But at the end of the day, it’s meant to be a contemporary work about where we are right now and the women and stories that are making headlines. This book is meant to shift our paradigm – to show us the commonplace hostility toward women through a different plane of the prism. Doyle does a good job with that.

I highly recommend the book. In fact, I recommended it to my oldest daughter and she loved it! It is time well invested. We need to consider more thoughtfully the signals we are sending to every generation of girls who become women.

by Catherine Read

The Family Tree – Author Karen Branan

(Nov. 14, 2016) Catherine Read interviews author Karen Branan about her recently published book The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, A Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth. A career journalist born and raised in Georgia, she became aware of a lynching in her family’s hometown of Hamilton through a comment made to her by her grandmother. It took over 25 years for the author to do the deep research necessary to uncover her family’s role in that tragic miscarriage of justice. Having come from a family of six Harris County Sheriffs, Ms. Branan was determined to find the truth of what happened on that fateful January night in 1912.

Ms. Branan’s journey is a deeply personal one. Her search into her own family’s history brought into focus the social, political and economic climate of the South that formed the backdrop for the series of events leading up to this lynching. One of the great strengths of her book is the well researched history that gives the central story some context. She was surprised to find the complex connections that existed in her family tree. In this interview she talks about recent DNA testing that has connected her to her African-American cousins in Harris County, Georgia.

This is an epic family drama at its core. In searching for the truth of what transpired at the Hamilton jail on that fateful night over 100 years ago, she had to address her own racism, the sense of responsibility for a great-grandfather who did not do his job in protecting those entrusted to his keeping, and the impact that decision made in that community.

Ms. Branan talks frankly in this interview about feeling that some acknowledgement needs to be made for the wrongs done to the African-American community. She understands the Black Lives Matter movement in the context of centuries of injustice done to generations of black Americans. Her own research, on so personal a level, has brought her face to face with her family’s role in the racial injustice perpetuated to this day.

This is a candid and thoughtful perspective on a dark aspect of our country’s history. I highly recommend reading her book The Family Tree.

by Catherine Read

Something Must Be Done about Prince Edward County

This book is about finding a way forward through reconciliation. Kristen Green writes a compelling book about a tragic and terrible part of Virginia’s history. There are many Virginians who don’t know the story of what happened in Prince Edward County or that plaintiffs from Moton High School were part of the Brown v. Board of Education case decided by the Supreme Court in 1954 that declared school segregation to be unconstitutional.

The author discovered that her grandfather was instrumental in the massive resistance movement that closed all the public schools and created a whites only private academy. Black school children were shut out of getting a public education from 1959 to 1964 while Green’s own parents attended the private all white academy funded by “tuition grants” paid out of county tax money. Her own education and that of her brothers was also in that same private academy. Her sense of guilt and her search for meaning is palpable throughout the entire book. I believe that in researching and writing this book, she is engaging in an act of atonement.

For those who have seen the Civil Rights memorial at the Virginia State Capitol, just a short distance from the Governor’s Mansion, you will recognize the name Barbara Johns who led a student walkout at Moton High School in 1951. The former Robert Russa Moton High School is now a Civil Rights Museum in Farmville – the only Civil Rights museum in Virginia. Quite ironically, the only Vice-Presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence will be held at Longwood University on Oct. 4th, just down the street from the Moton Museum.

The additional twist? That Civil Rights monument at the state capitol honoring Barbara Johns and acknowledging what happened in Prince Edward County was unveiled in 2008 by then Governor Tim Kaine.Read More

by Catherine Read

The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia – Karen Branan

screen-shot-2016-10-02-at-11-46-51-am (Aug. 2016) I decided to read this book after I saw that the author, Karen Branan, would be at Fall For the Book at George Mason University in September. It is a great follow up to two previous books I recently finished – The Warmth of Other Suns and Just Mercy.

The author was born and raised in Georgia and her grandfather and great-grandfather were Sheriffs there. In searching for more information about a story her father had told her about accidentally killing a young black woman in Hamilton, GA, she instead stumbles on the story of a lynching that took place there on Jan. 22, 1912. Her grandmother had mentioned the lynching in passing some years earlier, but it wasn’t until she started interviewing her extended family back in Georgia that she understood her Sheriff great-grandfather might have had a role in it.

The book is well written, which is not a surprise since the author is a journalist by profession. For those who have done some genealogy, following the many families and family members will likely not be a distraction from the story. I’ve seen other reviews saying the cast of characters is hard to follow and made it difficult to follow the threads of relations and family connections. This is truly an integral part of the story she is telling – the family relationships both acknowledged and unacknowledged that ran across the racial spectrum of black and white.

Karen Branan spent decades researching and writing this book. It is an important look at lynching in the context of race relations overlapped with familial relations. There is a lot of history in these pages that I was unfamiliar with and it helped to explain things like the race riot in Atlanta in 1906.Read More