"Ten books that stayed with me" is a post circulating on Facebook. A friend asked for my list, so here it is.
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling (favorites in series are Sorcerer's Stone & Half Blood Prince)
The Luck Factor, Dr. Richard Wiseman
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
Quiet - the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain
Chris Van Allsburg picture books (favorites are Sweetest Fig & Two Bad Ants)
Here's the problem with my list: a few haven't "stayed with me" long because I read them recently. Quiet and Quixote are recent reads and I have hope for the Man of La Mancha because, let's face it, we're still reading it 400 years later. Quiet, on the other hand, may topple off the list but Susan Cain gave me a priceless gift in this book, and that is enduring whether she remains in the top ten or not.
One FB post advised, don't overthink it.
That may have fallen on deaf ears. What I did do, is allow myself time because I like this exercise. I wrote a couple titles on my whiteboard and added to them over the last week or so, giving my middle-aged brain time to scan its dusty shelves, trek back along forgotten corridors, peek in hidden rooms, visit places from my childhood, from my children's childhood, and from different stages of my life.
It's easy to judge someone by her appearance, but there is a lot to be said about seeing her book shelf. Books, periodicals, movies, shows, social media, any content out there today, these make up our mental, spiritual, and emotional diet. What we choose to 'eat' reflects who we are.
Thank you Diane for asking and thank you also for sharing.
"Reading literature connects humanity across time, place and even cultures. It's our quest for what is lasting and real; through reading, we can hang out with the great, experience things we've never done or felt before, as well as identify and empathize with our own experience. (From earlier column here).
Below I listed information from network scientist Lada Adamic's research on this meme, (link to her full article here).
Here are the top 20 books, along with a percentage of all lists (having at least one of the top 500 books) that contained them.
21.08 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
14.48 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
13.86 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
7.48 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
7.28 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
7.21 The Holy Bible
5.97 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
5.82 The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
5.70 The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
5.63 The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
5.61 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
5.37 1984 - George Orwell
5.26 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
5.23 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
5.11 The Stand - Stephen King
4.95 Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
4.38 A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
4.27 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
4.05 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Poet Billy Collins, then U.S. Poet Laureate, was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem to remember the victims of 9/11 which he read at a special joint session in September 2002. It is titled "The Names" and is worth listening to or reading.
Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night. A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze, And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows, I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened, Then Baxter and Calabro, Davis and Eberling, names falling into place As droplets fell through the dark. Names printed on the ceiling of the night. Names slipping around a watery bend. Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream. In the morning, I walked out barefoot Among thousands of flowers Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears, And each had a name -- Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins. Names written in the air And stitched into the cloth of the day. A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox. Monogram on a torn shirt, I see you spelled out on storefront windows And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city. I say the syllables as I turn a corner -- Kelly and Lee, Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor. When I peer into the woods, I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden As in a puzzle concocted for children. Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash, Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton, Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple. Names written in the pale sky. Names rising in the updraft amid buildings. Names silent in stone Or cried out behind a door. Names blown over the earth and out to sea. In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows. A boy on a lake lifts his oars. A woman by a window puts a match to a candle, And the names are outlined on the rose clouds -- Vanacore and Wallace, (let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound) Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z. Names etched on the head of a pin. One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel. A blue name needled into the skin. Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers, The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son. Alphabet of names in a green field. Names in the small tracks of birds. Names lifted from a hat Or balanced on the tip of the tongue. Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory. So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
* Collins was the United States Poet Laureate and is Distinguished Professor at Lehman College (Link Poets.org Bio). He is one of the most popular, best selling, and well-regarded poets today. YouTube link: Billy Collins reads The Names
My father left Vietnam with
Ambassador Martin at the end, chronicled in that famous photo of the last
American helicopter leaving Saigon.And
that story merits its own letter.My mother,
brother, and I were sent home to the United States from Saigon earlier that
year because we knew what was coming.I
find it interesting that so many don't know about the helicopters pushed into
the sea. My father shared that with me as a young child and everyone who was
there knew.Some even jumped into the
water and swam to the ships because the choppers couldn't land.
Ralph Blumenthal writes about this in an article
on the documentary.(Blumethal review link)
Desperate to rescue Vietnamese allies and their
families, some Americans quietly began an unauthorized airlift.
“Sometimes, there’s an issue, not of legal and
illegal, but right and wrong,” Stuart Herrington, an Army captain at the time,
says in the film.
A damaged helicopter being pushed overboard from the warship Blue Ridge to make room for more evacuation flights.Credit Associated Press
Even Mr. Kissinger seemed
affected, Ms. Kennedy said. She asked him about a State Department employee who
had defied orders and sneaked back into Vietnam to save Vietnamese comrades.
Mr. Kissinger told her that he had been forced to rebuke the man publicly but
privately greeted him in his office as “my greatest hero.”
As he related this, Ms. Kennedy said, Mr.
Kissinger teared up. The episode, and Mr. Kissinger’s reaction, did not make it
into the final cut.
Ms. Kennedy did not plan to
include the footage of Kissinger crying about the man who went back to help the
Vietnamese. My "greatest hero" Kissinger called him.
Reading this brings tears to my own eyes and my father always felt a debt
to the Marines who took him to safety. I wonder why she cut this
scene? Is there a sense of remorse and tone of regret in this film?
Because if you read the media reports at the time and for many years after,
there was no such thing.
Here's an excerpt from a review
by A.O. Scott.
The story is full of
emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful
retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage.(complete
NYTimes review here)
A tacit admission of their own previous
partisan reporting? The media and
the people refused to listen, obscured facts, misrepresented policy and
military objectives.
Dr. Kissinger says that he believed
Vietnam could be like South Korea today. Quite possibly.
We lost the war at home, the American people lost their resolve because of the
"media's willing self deception" (Jim Webb). My father
dedicated his professional life to this sliver of land in this far eastern part
of the world and we betrayed the confidence of the very people we committed
ourselves to. This is the truth, having experienced and suffered
from it first hand.
Vietnam was the first televised war
in a most liberal age with students across America doing drugs, relishing free
sex, and denouncing the war, a war started and escalated by Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon came into office to fix the mess, set up a withdrawal plan,
and was excoriated. He paid a price for what is laughable by current
administration's standards.
This may be the Kennedys' idea of an apology, so be it, but perhaps it is
an obligation to her uncle's conscience as well as her own almost 40 years
later. Our departure from this fledgling, struggling country in its hour
of need is a disgrace on many levels.
We did not lose on the battlefield during the war. We lost at home.
"You know you never beat us on the battlefield," I told my North Vietnamese Army (NVA) counterpart, Colonel Tu, during a meeting in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant." (Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. full article link)
Colonel Tu knew military victory was not possible, but he also knew America's Achilles heel was a generational shift in attitudes that shockingly was more sympathetic to the invading communists of the north than our democratic allies in the south. The NVA followed the Leninist playbook to win the propaganda war, and the cultural elites in our media, academia and entertainment were as Lenin would say, useful idiots.
As Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, said:
During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the
world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian
soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human
genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those
weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up
being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri
Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S.,
used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness. (Link to article)
Our actions had devastating
consequences.Hundreds of thousands of
South Vietnamese were murdered outright or died cruel deaths in the
concentration camps as the army of North Vietnam swept through the south.As many as a million more fled by any means
possible, the ‘boatpeople’ risking their lives in rickety boats on the high
seas, knowing what lay in store for them if they remained.Many thousands didn’t survive the
journey.Our abandonment of Vietnam
destabilized the region, as Laos and Cambodia quickly fell to brutal regimes
carrying the same communist flag as North Vietnam, resulting in the murder of
millions more. Comparisons to modern Iraq are appropriate as we watch the barbaric
ISIS rampaging through Syria and Iraq, filling the void left by our departure.
Here is one of the singularly accurate and
best reviews of the media's role on the war. The Honorable James Webb has
served as senator, Secretary of the Navy, distinguished combat marine, professor, Emmy award winning journalist and author. (Jim Webb Bio link).
If
you want to understand the major factor why we "lost" the Vietnam War, read his
column which I pasted below in full. Webb begins with media tycoon
Ted Turner's public apology for just one of a multitude of lies
perpetrated by the media. (Link to article)
The Media's War on Vietnam Vets
July 15, 1998
by James Webb, The Wall Street Journal
Last week CNN founder Ted Turner issued a fervent apology to
Vietnam veterans for his network’s false report that the military had used
sarin nerve gas in Vietnam. “Nothing has upset me more probably in my whole
life,” Mr. Turner said, adding that he “would take my shirt off and beat myself
bloody in the back” if it would do any good.
Those who served in Vietnam should leap to accept this
apology. But a long line of journalists and scholars should follow Mr. Turner’s
lead in making amends for the persistent defamation of those who served
honorably and well in the Vietnam War.
This animus toward those who fought has now spanned a
generation. It has deep roots in the elites among the old antiwar left, whose
members not only avoided military service but openly derided those who went to
Vietnam as either stupid or evil. Having placed their bets and bet their place
in American history on the supposedly benign intentions of the Vietnamese
communists, their response to the Stalinist relative that befell Vietnam after
1975 was to push ever harder to discredit U.S. evolvement in the war. Routinely Ignored. Thus negative stories about the War and those who fought it
became de rigueur. Particularly, if one could tell them through the eyes of a
veteran. But facts were routinely ignored. Literally thousands of journalists have published lies,
exaggerations and misrepresentation that fit a preconceived notion that made a
story. I first became aware of the media’s willing self-deception in 1981, when
I was interviewed by Time magazine for what turned out to be a lengthy,
negative piece on those who had fought in Vietnam. The veteran who gave the
most damning testimony, including claims that he shot a pregnant woman and her
unborn child, was later shown never to have served in Vietnam at all. It is a
simple matter for any reporter to verify many aspects of a veteran’s combat
service by asking for a copy of his Form DD-214, a publicly available document.
But the Time reporter did not do so, and the magazine offered no reaction after
its story was disproved. Repeated, conscious misrepresentations have become
conventional wisdom. It is now axiomatic that the war was fought by the poor
and minorities dragged unwillingly into battle after being conscripted. The
truth is that for the first time in U.S. history, the country’s elites, who
have inordinate power in the media and academia, did not show up. The poor and
the minorities fought, but so did the middle class. Defense Department
statistics show that 86%, of those who died in Vietnam were white, and 12.5%
were black from an age group where blacks comprised 13.1%, of the population.
Volunteers accounted for 77% of combat deaths.
Another canard frequently cited during the Persian Gulf War
is that Vietnam servicemen were over-decorated. In his book National Defense,
James Follows claims that by 1971 the military had given 1.3 million medals for
bravery in Vietnam vs. 1.7 million for all of World War II.
But compare actual gallantry awards from World War II with
those in Vietnam:
The Army awarded 289 Medals of Honor vs. 155 in Vietnam,
4,434 Distinguished
Service Crosses vs. 846 and
73.651 Silver Star
Medals vs. 21,630
The Marine Corps,
which lost 102,000 killed or wounded out of some 400,000 sent to Vietnam,
awarded 47 Medals of Honor (34 posthumously),
362 Navy Crosses (139
posthumously) and,
2,592 Silver Star
Medals.
A 1980 Harris survey commissioned by the Veteran’s
Administration, the most comprehensive ever done regarding those who served in
Vietnam, revealed that
92% of those who served in combat were “glad they’d served
their country,”
74% “enjoyed their time in the military,” and80% disagreed with
the statement that “the U.S. took unfair advantage of me.”
Nearly two out of three would go to Vietnam again even if
they knew how the war would end.
The only national media report on the survey’s results was
an Associated Press story headlined, “One in three would not serve again if
asked.”
In 1986 the New England Journal of Medicine published a
study claiming that veterans were 86% more likely to commit suicide than
non-veterans. The study’s authors, betraying their own political views,
lamented that “men of low socioeconomic status may be less adept at avoiding
military service.” The study was junk science: a blind analysis of 14,145 men
born between 1950 and 1952 who died between 1974 and 1983. By comparing their birth
dates to the dates on the draft lottery, the study assumed but never verified
who had served and who had not. Those with high draft lottery numbers had a 13%
higher suicide rate, which the study then “extrapolated” into 86% – again
without identifying a single veteran. The study ignored the fact that most of
those who went to Vietnam volunteered for military service (among those born in
1952: 273,110 men enlisted and only 43,706 were drafted). The media predictably embraced the study’s flawed findings:
“CBS Evening News” credited it with “documenting that there is a
cause-and-effect relationship between having served in the military during
Vietnam and problems later, including suicide.” Mothers, hide your daughters,
the crazy vet is at the door.
Hollywood, too, has manifested a historically unprecedented,
ugly pathology when it comes to the Vietnam War and the people who fought it.
If you want camaraderie, dignity, heroism and sacrifice, better check out a
World War II flick, or “Star Wars.” But what can one expect from the community
that gave the producers of the vicious documentary “Hearts and Minds” a
standing ovation at the 1975 Oscars when they read a telegram from Hanoi that
announced the “liberation” of South Vietnam?
The extensive coverage of the 20th anniversary of South
Vietnam’s 1975 demise was rife with former foreign correspondents
congratulating themselves on their courage under fire. But the coverage all but
ignored the accomplishments of an American military that was transported halfway
around the world where it met a determined enemy on its own terms. The coverage
seldom discussed the many tragedies that befell Vietnam once the communists
took over. And it ignored the most significant announcement of that anniversary
period: Hanoi’s admission that it had lost 1.1 million soldiers dead in the
war, plus another 300,000 missing in action, compared with U.S. losses of
58,000 and South Vietnamese losses of 254,000. Earlier this year, CBS’s “60 Minutes” marked the 30th
anniversary of the bloodiest year of the war with a feature on the My Lai
massacre. Ostensibly designed to recognize the humanity of two helicopter
pilots who saved several civilians during the killing, the piece was instead a
gruesome rehash of America’s darkest moment in Vietnam. In deciding to revisit
1968 CBS might have looked at the bravery of American soldiers under attack on
battlefields across South Vietnam. If it was interested in ugliness, it could
have examined afresh the systematic executions of more than 3,000 South Vietnamese
civilians in Hue by communist cadres during the Tet offensive. But its intent
was clearly elsewhere.
Shattered Lives
This unending agenda has shattered many lives, but there are
indications that an accounting may be at hand. Today’s best young scholars tend
to question the dogma of an antiwar left that has grown gray without abandoning
its animus toward those who served. As one example: Mark Mayor won the 1993
prize for historical research at Harvard University by peeling away the
shibboleths that have surrounded the Phoenix Program, an effort directed
against Vietcong leaders. Mr. Moyar’s book, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey
(Naval Institute 1997), is a product of that research and a groundbreaking
piece of revisionist history on the war. Of equal import, next month B.G. Burkett, a Dallas
businessman and Army veteran of Vietnam, will self-publish one the most
courageous books of the decade, Stolen Valor (Verity Press www.stolenvalor.com)
looks at the cases of more than 1,700 people who have distorted or lied about
their service in Vietnam, often distorting the public’s understanding of the
war. His book constitutes a damnation of the major media so great that the CNN
Time story on saran will take its right context as a rare moment when the purveyors
of dishonesty got caught, rather than as the journalistic aberration many would
like to term it.
