For biography, Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe made for a great read about a complex man who, in his mid-twenties changed how we think of our world with his special theory of relativity, became a refugee from Hitler's Germany, lived in Princeton, New Jersey the last two decades of his life, wrote and spoke powerfully for global peace and a world order that enforced social collectivism but prized individual freedom, and rejected quantum mechanics until his end. I followed up with Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius sprung, in part, from an insatiable curiosity of all things, an uncanny power of observation, and an unrelentingly diligent yet often distracted approach to work.
I also read the collected poetry of five poets: Alan Dugan, Rita Dove, Mary Oliver, Frederick Seidel, and May Swenson. Dugan's vulgarity is easy to accept when he juxtaposes it with high art and exposes us at our core. Dove can write masterfully from so many viewpoints: as a curator of her cultural history, a concerned environmentalist, an arts aficionado, a spiritualist. Mary Oliver has a way of making a bird, fox, bush, or even an insect an extension of ourselves with the plainest language imaginable. Seidel is hilarious, if you can fathom wildly privileged, self-obsessed, paranoid contemporary men as hilarious. Swenson is Oliver's literary older sister, a great witness of our natural world, but she knows the city too and lives more in the mind than in the observable spectacle that Oliver beholds.
Albert Murray's Collected Essays & Memoirs, which along with James Baldwin's Collected Essays, shows that Black Lives Matter is far from new. Of course, Baldwin and Murray owe much to Frederick Douglass, whose autobiographical narrative graphically depicts a life that is at times painful to read but ultimately stands as a triumphant testament to the human spirit. Douglass rose from slavery to become a great influencer of Abraham Lincoln, more proof that critical race theory makes a lot of sense, as one cannot think about any political movement, social cause, educational approach, legislative action, court ruling, military or police action, or turning point of United States history without reflecting on how race intersects with it.
The Essential Tagore, a catalogue of fiction, drama, poetry, songs, autobiography, letters, humor, and travelogue by the first Asian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, is the bargain read at any price. The man was a remarkable writer, thinker, and spiritual leader of his fellow Bengalis, indeed, of humanity.
I have plenty more reading to do this summer: Adorno, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Derrida, Foucault, Gramsci, and Lukacs. After those guys, I'll likely look for some lighter reading. Joyce's Ulysses?
