The Fall Branch Friends Network meeting will take place (via zoom) on Thursday, September 30th, from 4 to 5:30 pm. The Branch Friends Network is made up of members from each branch of the Oakland Public Library where there is a Friends group like our Friends of Piedmont Avenue Library -- Friends of PAL. On the agenda are presentations by Mercedes Rodriguez from the West Oakland Library Friends (WOLF) and reps from the Martin Luther King library describing its over 100 years of service to their community. To sign up for the zoom link, RSVP to Sara DuBois at sdubois@oaklandlibrary.org.

Some folks, including your faithful correspondent, find both consolation and wisdom in reading history. History, after all, is not just something that happens to us. History is also something that we can shape, from time to time, to make a better world.  We live now in perilous times, our polity is ripped asunder, and often it seems that we are sliding inextricably into paroxysms of violence. Books on the Civil War and Reconstruction can give us hope in these difficult times. I have found two books, along with Eric Foner’s The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019), reviewed in this column earlier this year, that inspire hope. Those books are Gary Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (1990) and David S. Reynold’s recent Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times (2020).

Wills’ book is short and elegant. He looks at the Gettysburg Address - delivered midway through the Civil War - as a moment of a profound transition in how the U. S. began to see itself as a singular union not a motley confederation of sovereignties and how our republic, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” began a move, albeit slowly, towards that more perfect union.  Along the way, Wills, a trained classicist, compares Lincoln’s speech with four other funeral orations, and reveals the common literary foundations - the Bible, Shakespeare and Blackstone’s Blackstone’s Legal Commentaries - between Lincoln and the US reading public. If you like this book, I commend you to read more of Wills. He’s a national treasure.

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times is long, inelegant, and, if you are a history buff, fascinating. Reynolds is a cultural historian and has written books on John Brown, Walt Whitman, and the American Renaissance. He is interested in exploring the links between high culture and popular culture and this is how he approaches his study of Lincoln. And so, he does: frontier humor, law and culture, the emergence of abolitionism and its effects on the ambitious and cautious Lincoln, trapeze artists, P.T. Barnum, theater, novels, the “Wide Awake” B’hoys, and the vagaries of war, all, are part of Reynold’s tapestry. At times Reynolds slips into hagiographic cliches of praise and I wish he had given props to Wills’ foundational book. But as we slouch towards bedlam in the pandemic’s solitude the republic’s discontents, this book might provide comfort and consolation. Read on!

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