Booooks

So I'm reading several very interesting books right now.  One is about the Lehman Brothers collapse in '08, called A Colossal Failure of Common Sense.  It is really very dense going so after getting a concentrated lesson on convertible bonds and securitization, I literally have to stop reading for a little while to let it sink in.  But I am following most of it thanks to the book's readibility.  Ghost-written or not, it's still fascinating, although apparently somewhat polarizing among the cogniscenti. 

Also, via the ever-helpful Columbia library system (A Thing of Beauty), I got my hot little historian hands on a copy of James W. Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society.  I read this book back in college--Silver was a professor of history at Ole Miss and personally witnessed the riot the night James Meredith (the first black student at Ole Miss) arrived on campus.  He wrote this book in response, a book-length treatment of a speech he made when stepping down from Ole Miss.  And so (like the Michener book below) it's very much of the time, which is fantastic.  When he wrote it, the Civil Rights bill hadn't yet been passed so he didn't yet know how things would turn out.  This is why I love reading contemporary accounts--it's great to read people's thoughtful analysis of what HAS happened, and very useful, but it is genuinely thrilling to read a running account of what IS happening.  Some fascinating, and relevant, analysis of the political insanity and the lengths to which people will go to justify their positions.  Of course we see some of the same thing today, only it's more coded and covert.

It occurs to me that Silver must've been at Ole Miss when Florence King was there, and I think her Master's was in history.  I wonder if she worked with him?

I also bought a great copy of James Michener's Kent State: What Happened and Why on Amazon Marketplace.  Such an excellent book--this is another book I read back in college that sparked my interest in Kent State.  KS is one of those historical incidents that, as shocking as it was, people seem to have closed the door on.  And this was indeed truly shocking--four students were murdered, shot dead during a peaceful protest (and two of them weren't even involved in the protest, they were walking to class).  My theory is that it was so terrible and unexpected, there was a kind of sea change of consciousness--students and activists decided that if that was the potential price for activism, it wasn't worth it.  So terribly sad. I find the opinions posted on Amazon interesting--most people who are still interested in KS tend to be (in my experience) liberal, probably because of what I said above, that KS hasn't been meaningfully addressed in our national history, it is still unresolved.  And a great many Amazon posters see the Michener book is conservative and therefore biased--I'm not sure I agree.  He sure doesn't have much regard for the SDS but the last part of his book is taken up by a kind of "where do we go from here?" manifesto and it is very sympathetic to the counter-culture. He also lists numerous examples of how badly the "other side" (non-hippies, conservatives) acted in the wake of the massacre, spreading all sorts of terrible stories about the dead, and sending "you should've died" cards to the wounded and even saying things like "the score is four/and next time more."  Just unbelievable.  Reading that book radicalized me to some extent (well, as far as Kent State is concerned--radical is always a relative term with me!); I don't see it as particularly conservative.  One thing I'm enjoying is the historically coded language--early on in the book he talks about people who'd appeared in the KS campus, non-students (in the contemporary lingo, outside agitators--no one's son or daughter ever came up with anything bad on their own, it was always blamed on outside agitators).  He describes them, and says something kind of throwaway about how they resembled "those monsters in California."  And that's it.  Of course he was talking about the Manson murderers--that casual reference, which apparently needed no explanation, tells how much the Manson killings two years before terrified the nation.  They killed the counter-culture as much as anybody.

Another book, also a contemporary piece--The Summer That Didn't End: The Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Project of 1964.  This is a first-hand account of Freedom Summer, when a large group of trained activists, black and white, went down to the Magnolia State for a multi-pronged offensive:  to register more blacks to vote, to educate black kids and generally to raise consciousness--all without protection from the federal givernment.  This is of course the setting for the notorious murders in Neshoba County, when the sheriff and his hee haw thug deputy and their ilk, arrested three civil rights workers, jailed them and beat them, set them loose and then followed them out of town and murdered them and hid the bodies.  Undoubtedly because two of them were white, the case aroused an enormous amount of attention and the Feds came down (FINALLY), combed the area, finally found the bodies due to a tipster, and prosecuted the case.  The case inspired the (somewhat romanticized) movie Mississippi Burning and also a poster (this image is from their trial) with the sardonic slogan "Support Your Local Sheriff."

As you can see by the books, I've really been immersing myself in the history of the '50s/'60s/'70s.  It's riveting.  We post-Civil Rights babies take for granted what an amazing thing took place--when you read about pre-civil rights Missiissippi and Alabama, how utterly hostile and awful those societies were towards blacks and anyone who wasn't absolutely conformist to a specific orthodoxy, how literally savagely they behaved towards those who challenged the orthodoxy in any way--you start to comprehend what an incredible sea change happened--and in less than a generation.