To kick off the first full week of summer, Zócalo asked 10 past guests – including economists, journalists, scholars and a video game designer – to tell us what we should be reading on the beach between now and Labor Day. No vampire romances or murder mysteries here: these nonfiction works will get you thinking hard about more than just your tan line…
by Nina Eliasoph
–Reviewed by Carren Jao
A robust civic life is essential to building a great country. It is no wonder, then, that former President John F. Kennedy’s call to the American people to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” still rings powerfully to this day. With a struggling economy, a broken health care system and economic bubbles popping left and right, the need for citizens willing to volunteer to help fix this nation’s ails is ever more crucial. But the question of how those volunteers can be most effective remains…
by Meghan O’Rourke
–Reviewed by Marc Jaffee
A memoir does not instruct. It searches. In 2008, Meghan O’Rourke’s mother died of cancer, at the age of fifty-five. In The Long Goodbye, a remarkable, probing chronicle of grief, O’Rourke not only articulates the experience of her mother’s illness and death but speaks of the impossibility of addressing something so difficult, sad, and strange…
–Reviewed by Lee Linderman
For decades, acclaimed writer Chris Hedges has worked as a journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in Middle East and American politics and wartime societies. He spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, including working with a team of reporters in 2002 that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of global terrorism…
by David Goldfield
–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher
Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address with victory in a long, brutal and bloody civil war at hand. The Union – and the American experiment – would be saved, the scourge of slavery eliminated, the North vindicated in its righteousness. Given this climate of triumph, historian David Goldfield suggests, Lincoln’s humble and magnanimous speech was something of a letdown. By speaking only of God’s inscrutability, and by treating “this terrible war” as punishment for the nation’s collective sin of slavery, Lincoln rejected the sentiments of a nation that “believed weighty political issues could be parsed into good or evil.” …
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