Storytelling and (tangentially) Social Studies
I’ve recently rediscovered my passion for books.
It all started during Spring Break. I took with me two books: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith. Both books made me fall in love with reading all over again for very different reasons.
Little Brother is a blisteringly-paced story in post-9/11 America about a bunch of hacker kids who band together to rage against the machine following a terrorist attack when the government’s heavy-handed tactics victimize them and their city. I burned through the book’s nearly 400 pages in 3 days of beach reading.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on the other hand, is a delightful mashup that’s just like it sounds. It takes the classic Austen text and throws in a smattering of Zombie mayhem to liven it up a bit for those of us who would otherwise avoid that sort of thing. My wife greatly enjoys Austen’s work, and so we both found great excitement in being able to share our thoughts on Pride and Prejudice. The conversations we’d have as I read the book were very interesting to me. Sometimes I would just quote the fun zombie bits to get a feeling from her how the scene differed in the original text. A greater portion of the time, though, we would actually discuss the stuff that was all Austen, with me lamenting Elizabeth’s travails with Mr. Darcy, or my shock at finding out how much of a scoundrel Mr. Wickham really is, or how badly I felt for Lydia as she was ignored by Mr. Bingley.
From there, I spent the summer reading first The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s Hugo and Newbery Award winning book for children about Nobody Owens, a boy raised by ghosts after his family’s murder while he was a baby, and then I read the complete Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. It makes me wonder sometimes if part of the draw of Middle School for me is my great affection for books written for children in that age group.
I then moved on to Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper, about a blind cat. I’m currently back on Austen with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I can’t believe the nerve of how Willoughby treated Marianne in Sub-Marine Station Beta.
But that’s only half of where my love for books comes from right now.
The other half comes from audiobooks. My listening habits are very different from my reading habits. I prefer to listen only to non-fiction books and essays on my morning and afternoon commutes. This past year I’ve listened to the large portions of the works of David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace, Bonk by Mary Roach, The Last Lecture by Randy Pauch, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, and several books that reminded me why I love history so much: A People’s History of the United States: 20th Century by Howard Zinn, The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell, and Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
I felt compelled to write this post because of my completion this morning of Team of Rivals.
The biggest problem with attempting to teach history out of a textbook, is, by far, the inherent dryness of textbook writing. Too interested in statements of fact, not interesting at all. But Goodwin is interested in good storytelling. She paints a picture for the reader of Lincoln and his cabinet as passionate people who debated and oftentimes strongly disagreed with each other about how to handle the issues of the Civil War. The book is almost entirely about Lincoln and his inner circle, so the villains of the piece aren’t the Confederates, but those on the Union’s side who stand in the way of beating the confederates due to their own insecurities and lust for power. At some points, I couldn’t believe the Union actually ended up winning. I got chills from The Gettysburg Address, practically shouted at Lincoln to not go to Ford’s Theater, and got a little teary at the outpouring of emotion by those closest to him on his death.
At the very end of the book, there was one specific passage that blew me away, and reminded me that the storytelling of history is what can grab the interest of even the most surprising sort of person. Everybody loves a good story, even more so when the story is real. In the passage, Leo Tolstoy was describing a visit of his to the North Caucasus, where he became the guest of a tribal chief and regaled them with stories of great men of history.
When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”
Who wouldn’t want to hear about that man?
January 7th, 2010 at 10:51 am
[...] Storytelling And (Tangentially) Social Studies [...]
February 5th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
I too share that leaning towards nonfiction audio books. Perhaps it is because they use story but in a sense are as captivating and relevant as what one would hear on a good talk radio station?
Geoff Sheehy´s last blog ..Hooked: How John Adams became my favorite founder