Too Many Books

Two books that caught my eye this week. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote The Bully Pulpit, on the relationship between Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and their joint relationship with the press. Reviewer Bill Keller writes:

If you find the grubby spectacle of today’s Washington cause for shame and despair — and, really, how could you not? — then I suggest you turn off the TV and board Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest time machine. Let her transport you back to the turn of the 20th century, to a time when this country had politicians of stature and conscience, when the public believed that government could right great wrongs, when, before truncated attention spans, a 50,000-word exposé of corruption could sell out magazines and galvanize a reluctant Congress. The villains seemed bigger, too, or at least more brazen — industrial barons and political bosses who monopolized entire industries, strangled entire cities.

 And, in light of today’s strained relationship with Islam, a book on Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. Reviewer Kirk Davis Swinehart writes that:

In “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an,” her fascinating if somewhat meandering new book, Denise A. Spellberg traces the partial origins of American religious toleration to a single day in 1765 when Jefferson, then studying law at the College of William and Mary, acquired an English translation of Islam’s sacred text. He never claimed that the Quran shaped his political orientation. Yet Spellberg, an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, makes a persuasive case for its centrality. To oversimplify: What began as an academic interest in Islamic law and religion yielded a fascination with Islamic culture, which disposed him to include Muslims in his expansive vision of American citizenship. 

In both books, it seems there are lessons that would do us well today.