Tag: history

#REVIEW: The Barn, by Wright Thompson

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

I probably shouldn’t write this tonight. I spent the first hundred pages of this book thinking about putting it down, not because it was bad but because it wasn’t exactly the book I thought it was when I picked it up. I bought this book on sight in Barnes and Noble, and I didn’t know it existed prior to finding it, and I had to flip it over and look at the back to be certain it was about Emmett Till’s murder. There are a lot of barns in Mississippi, and there have been a lot of murders. And the title of the book does not mention Till.

It becomes clear fairly quickly upon starting to read it that The Barn is not only a history of the Till murder. It’s a memoir before anything else, I think, and if it’s a history of anything it’s a history of Mississippi, framed around the young man’s murder and the barn he was killed in. Often when places are mentioned, their distance from the barn is the first thing you find out about them, carefully measured down to the tenth of a mile. “Secret history” makes it sound like it’s going to be digging up long-buried stories, which actually is accurate, but mostly because Mississippi has never been interested in the truth. Mississippi buries history like a fucking professional, you see. Lying about itself is in the state’s blood.

And, well. About that.

Here’s the cover of the UK version of this book:

I literally made this discovery five minutes ago, as I sat down to write this; the first thing I do whenever I’m writing a book review is find a high-res copy of the cover, of course, and … well.

I am surprisingly angry about the title change, and I really want to know which one was the original title. I feel like the UK subtitle has to be the original one; I can see changing the title from that to the more sensationalistic, less specific US version despite how fucking awful a decision I think it was, but altering the title from the US version, especially the way the cover emphasizes Till’s name, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like the average British citizen, or even the average British reader of nonfiction about America, probably doesn’t know who Emmett Till is? Or, at the very least, his name has significantly less salience over there than it does here? I could be wrong, I suppose, and it might be worth pointing out that we have one cover that does not mention Till and one cover that does not mention Mississippi. And, again, this book is more about Mississippi than it is about Emmett Till.

I’ll do some digging tomorrow and see if I can find out the story of the title change. It’s 2026; maybe Wright Thompson is on Bluesky. You never know.

One way or another, once I got out of my own head and started judging the book for what it was, rather than what I thought it was going to be, it’s a phenomenal piece of work, and even if the title was changed for the most base and cowardly reasons– and, Christ, the title of a book about Emmett Till getting changed to omit Till’s name is the most Mississippi thing that could possibly have happened– I can’t blame the book for that. And the third section of the book, called 1955, tells the story of the murder well enough. I don’t know that there’s enough in a straight history to fill 400 pages, but the way Thompson weaves hundreds of years of Mississippi and US history around the events of a single night in a crumbling barn in a shithole town in the middle of nowhere makes it an impressively hard book to put down. The research that went into this book is detailed and exacting, the prose soars, and I sat down and tore through the last 170 pages in one sitting immediately after finishing dinner tonight. This is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this year. You should read it.

#REVIEW: The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, by Andrew Scott Cooper

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

WordPress just inserted an apostrophe into “Pahlavis,” and did it again right there, and it makes me want to fight someone.

I finished this tonight, and I got home from work intending to finish it quickly, but got sidetracked by some– ahem– electrical work in the shell of our old closet, so when I say “I finished this tonight,” a more accurate statement would be “I finished this ten minutes ago,” and given that it’s already almost 9:00 I maybe should have found something else to post about, because this book probably deserves more careful consideration than I’m about to give it. So take that into account; I’m kind of rushing here.

The short review: this was an excellent read, and right on the edge of being detailed enough that I constantly felt like I was learning things without burying me in details and Farsi words and names– although the fact that the two Shah Reza Pahlavis and the Crown Prince Reza have nearly identical names definitely caused some trouble at times– but I am not convinced that Andrew Scott Cooper is as unbiased as perhaps a historian might strive to be. Entertainingly, this has managed to slip into the official Goodreads description of the book:

The book’s page on Amazon has “immersive, gripping” before “account,” and otherwise is identical, so someone is playing shenanigans here, but the fact is that Cooper really seems to like the Shah, and tries really hard to make everything that happened in Iran seem like it wasn’t his fault. (To be clear: every time in this post I say “the Shah,” I’m referring to the middle Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the first Shah Pahlavi and the father of the Crown Prince. He occupies most of the book’s attention.)

Iranian history, even fairly recent Iranian history, is fantastically complicated, and I think particularly for Americans, who maybe like things to be able to be boiled down to “who is the good guy?” and “who is the bad guy?” too much, it’s already difficult enough to sort out motivations and moral culpability in Iran in the twentieth century without an author putting his thumb on the scale. Every novel I’ve ever read about Iran during this time period has more or less treated the Ayatollah Khomeini as an irredeemable evil, which I don’t have a problem with, and have cast Mohammad Mossadegh as a sort of savior figure who almost saved Iran from the Shah. Pahlavi managed to be perhaps the best example history has of the “enlightened despot,” someone who genuinely wanted to liberalize and modernize his country, educating his people, raising the standard of living, and ensuring rights for women and religious minorities … except he did it by forbidding dissent and trampling all over most people who disagreed with him … except when he didn’t, and The Fall of Heaven is really quick to assert that the Shah was almost pacifistic in his refusal to shed Iranian blood in the pursuit of his goals.

I think a lot of the Iranian novelists whose books I have read– not that there are a ton, but there have been several– would disagree with that, but then the biggest counterpoint is that he let Khomeini live, which … God damn, having that fucker shot in the sixties would have saved Iran, Pahlavi and the entire world a whole lot of trouble. And there was a weird overlap between leftist critics of Pahlavi, who tended to like the liberalization stuff except they didn’t really believe he meant it, and wanted democracy, and the religious lunatics who thought he was too liberal and wanted Iran to be the theocratic hellhole that it eventually became under the Ayatollahs. It’s messy as fuck, is what I’m saying, and when you throw in things like leftist women walking around in chador to demonstrate that they were against the regime, and the fact that somehow the CIA thought that Khomeini would lead a moderate, secular government … God, nobody knows anything about this place.

One way or another: this was a worthy read, despite having some issues. I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Iran that you start with some fiction– I’d recommend anything by Marjan Kamali— and maybe then move on to this. But it’s well worth the time you’ll invest in it.

#REVIEW: Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Every time I say this, I expect to get some pushback from someone, and I never do: World War I was a war that was fought for absolutely no reason at all, and every single person who died in it died for nothing. World War II is widely regarded as The Last Good War; its predecessor may have been the most wanton waste of human life I’m aware of. It was fought at a time where the technology to kill people far outstripped the technology to defend them, and every single thing about it was horrible.

Daniel Kraus, author of Whalefall, has written a book about World War I, where a group of American soldiers discover an angel dying in the mud in no-man’s-land between American and German positions. I read Whalefall when it came out in 2024, and I was surprised just now to discover that I five-starred it when I read it; my memories of it are not especially positive and I was expecting to discover I hadn’t liked it very much. I almost didn’t pick this book up, and then it won a Pulitzer, and FOMO kicked in, and to hell with it, it was cheap.

But I didn’t almost not buy it because I didn’t like Whalefall. I almost didn’t buy it because the book is structured as a single sentence, 304 pages long.

And the thing is, call me a philistine if you want, I’m generally not fond of people who try to fuck with structure too much in books. I like my narratives straightforward and my narrators reliable. I like dialogue to have quotation marks around it. I like all the text in a book pointed the same way. And I like sentences and paragraphs to be reasonable in length. I like a good long sentence once in a while, anyone who has read me for more than a few days knows that; 304 pages is Too Long.

So here’s the good news: if you have avoided this book because of the single-sentence thing, it’s absolutely a gimmick, and it’s almost unworthy of the book, to be honest. Here’s a randomly-chosen two-page spread:

You will note that there are, if not precisely paragraph breaks, certainly gaps between clauses that serve as such, and note the image break in the top left as well. The book also has chapters. Now, you’ll also notice that every paragraph starts with “and,” which you should expect to see a lot of, and all of those “paragraphs” end with commas, so technically this is all one sentence, or at least part of it.

But, c’mon. One of the reasons for paragraph and sentence breaks is to give the eye a place to rest, and the commas do that perfectly well. You will not notice, as you’re reading, that this book is one long sentence.

You will also notice that it never slows down, and it never lets up, but that’s more a function of the writing than the structure. Kraus could have sprinkled periods at reasonable places throughout this text without changing a single word and the character of the narrative itself would not have changed one whit. And, honestly, read those few paragraphs, and you’ll know whether you want to read this or not; follow that instinct.

I will say that I did really enjoy this book– it’s not on my 2026 shortlist, but if there’s going to be a book that sneaks onto my end-of-year list without having been on the shortlist, this will be it; it just depends on how well it sticks with me. It’s a better book than my recollection of Whalefall, certainly, and I suspect if I reread Whalefall tomorrow I would still think so. The sheer hopelessness of the WWI setting and the idea of saving a downed angel was a good enough high concept for a book to begin with, and the voice of the novel is perfectly matched to the setting and the characters. There’s also one other narrative trick in the last part of the book that I’m not going to spoil but which works very well; the book ends perfectly.

Well, sort of. You’ll see when you read it.

I have another Daniel Kraus book on my TBR shelf, one that just came out; he wrote a science fiction novel called The Sixth Nik, which means I’ll have read three of his books and they’ll have been from three wildly different genres. I know he’s got a ton of other books; Nik will determine whether I start seeking out his back catalogue or not.

#REVIEW: The Death and Life of Malcolm X, by Peter Goldman

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This will be brief, as it’s been a stressful day; we had most of the rest of the work done on the bathroom (there are, sadly, still a couple of tasks to finish) and the guys were both an hour and a half late and then took much longer than they anticipated, which means I’ve spent the entire day waiting, and I’m currently chewing my arms off and climbing the walls at the same time.

The Standard Malcolm X Disclaimer: Malcolm is one of my favorite Americans; I nearly named my son after him (I had my wife talked into it and everything, and then we mutually decided to name him after his grandfather instead) and I have most of a shelf of books about him. “This book is about Malcolm X” means that I’m going to read it and unless it is tremendously poorly written, I’m going to enjoy it. It’s kinda baked in from the jump. And this book is certainly not poorly written.

Peter Goldman’s book was the first major biography of Malcolm X, coming out in 1973, with the edition I read dated 1979. I’m honestly surprised I’d never encountered it before, but I read The Afterlife of Malcolm X back in February and it got referenced enough times that I felt compelled as an amateur Malcolm scholar to pick it up.

And it’s a surprisingly solid biography, especially when one considers that it was written by a white guy in the early 1970s. Goldman appears to have had a good relationship with Malcolm and while the book isn’t as heavily footnoted as I might have liked, I didn’t encounter anything that smacked of shoddy historiography. He focuses heavily on the last year of Malcolm’s life, and then — and this is what made me decide to go ahead and write about it — also spends about a fifth of the book talking about the trial of the three men who were eventually convicted and sentenced for the assassination. Now, Afterlife covers that material as well, but that book is more interested in Malcolm as a cultural icon and I don’t think one book substitutes for another. The real interesting bit of the book is the 1979 addendum at the end, where Goldman says that he no longer believes two of the men convicted for the killing had anything to do with it.

I can’t really issue a blanket recommendation for this book, not because it’s bad but because it’s 2026 and there has been a ton written about Malcolm X in the years since he was killed. If you’re only going to read one book about him, you should read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book every single American should read anyway. If you want to read a biography, specifically, I’d recommend Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life Of Reinvention or Les and Tamara Payne’s The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. If you already read those books and you haven’t read this one? Definitely give it a read.

#REVIEW: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, by Adam Higginbotham

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In what might be the least surprising book recommendation in the history of the blog, I thoroughly enjoyed reading a history of the Challenger disaster. This is known; I’m an astronomy nerd, and I’m 50, so I was in fourth grade when the Challenger exploded, and I dressed up as Ellison Onizuka for some sort of history performance thing later that year that I can’t really remember the details of. I do remember several other people in my class were other Challenger astronauts; I don’t think we had all seven, but there were a good three or four of us, and the thing involved everyone standing around in the gym dressed as their chosen person and giving speeches about our lives and our contributions to society to whoever happened to walk past. A history fair of some kind? Maybe. We finagled matching fake space suits from somewhere, I remember that.

I also set part of the prologue of my book Skylights on January 28, 1986, and the Challenger disaster is what gets the main character interested in space. The book is dedicated to the fourteen astronauts we lost in the Challenger and Columbia explosions, but I had to look up the names of the Columbia astronauts. I have been able to rattle off the seven Challenger astronauts by name since 1986.

The book begins with the Apollo 1 disaster, where the pure-oxygen environment in the cabin caught fire and burned the three astronauts to death before the rocket even took off. Higginbotham then goes into the history of the development of the Space Shuttle, which, my God, was an incredible clusterfuck, and it’s amazing that any of them ever flew at all. There’s a fair amount of attention paid to the process used to select Christa McAuliffe as a payload specialist, some biographical information of each of the other six astronauts, and then once we get to about mid-January of 1986 the book shifts to practically an hour-by-hour description of the run-up to the explosion and the multiple investigations afterwards. Higginbotham is an impressive storyteller– I’m going to find his first book, which was about Chernobyl, as soon as I can– and the book is detailed and authoritative without ever getting dry, with an impressive amount of footnoting at the end for anyone who is interested in checking his sources.

This is– okay, I can’t say objectively, really, but I’m gonna do it anyway– objectively a good book, but it’s also a book that there was no way I was going to be able to put down once I picked it up unless it was an absolute travesty of a hack job, and it won a bunch of awards. I read it in a day, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. I learned some things, and I remembered some other things I’d forgotten, and I’m much angrier at 1980’s era NASA than I was before reading it. None of these people should have died. None of them.

I think a lot of you are like me and knew from the title whether you wanted to read this; I would recommend you follow that impulse if you do, and if your initial impulse wasn’t immediately “This book exists? I should read it!” you should read it anyway. I will talk about it again in December, there is no doubt of that.

On this Juneteenth

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Give this a watch. All of it. Well worth it, I promise you.

Unread Shelf: February 28, 2026

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Bought too many books this month and also didn’t read enough. The pile tomorrow is going to be the smallest in quite a while.

Well, that’s new and dumb

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I have talked about this before: possibly the most consistent aspect of my teaching career has been my weekly trivia question. It’s had a few different incarnations over the years, but the way it usually works is that I post a question on Monday and, for those who choose to participate, an answer is due by the end of the school day on Thursday. Anyone who gets it right gets a piece of chocolate or a Jolly Rancher or something similar on Friday. No one has to participate; it’s purely for an excuse to hand out candy.

The kids can find the answer to the question any way they want, including ways that might be considered cheating in other contexts. The only rule is that I will not tell them the right answer or confirm that their answer is right. They can look answers up however they want, they can ask each other— every so often I will seed a completely ridiculous answer to see how far I can get it to spread— or they can ask other teachers or staff members. Everything’s legal.

The picture above is not the exact same picture I used— it’s the same march, from a slightly different angle— but I can’t find a high-res version right now to use on the site, and the exact picture doesn’t really matter all that much anyway. The question is “Name any two people in this picture.” Which, okay, isn’t exactly trivia, but whatever, my game my rules.

Martin Luther King, obviously, is a gimme, although my students have shown the annoying habit of deciding any Black man in a black-and-white photo is King regardless of whether he looks anything like him. So they really only have to identify one other person, and the fact that King is linked arm-in-arm with the woman next to him (who has “Not Rosa Parks!” written in my handwriting underneath her) is kind of a hint as to who she might be.

Anyway, one of my girls turned in an answer on a half-sheet of paper. She wrote “Coretta Scott King” at the top of the paper, “Martin Luther King, Jr.” in the middle of the paper, and her own name— kind of important if you want your candy— at the bottom. Relevant: she is Latina and has a very obviously Latina name.

As I was going through the answers this afternoon, I discovered that one of my students in a different class period had obviously fished her paper out of the basket they get turned into and copied her answer. Now, again, technically this isn’t cheating. It’s kinda gross, but it’s not cheating. However, he’s not getting any candy tomorrow.

Why not? And how do I know his answer was copied from hers, specifically? Take a moment and think about it. See if you can come up with the reason. It’s cool, I’ll watch a video while you’re thinking about it:

This young man also wrote three names on his piece of paper. At the top was Martin Luther King, Jr. At the bottom was his name. And the third name? The one in the middle? Was the name of my other student, in all her Mexican glory. A fellow student in his grade at his school.

Now, I warn them: they can find out the answer however they want, but if I get an answer that I think betrays an exceptional lack of thought being put into the process, I reserve the right to make fun of them the next day. Usually this happens when I have a question beginning with the words “Which President …” and get someone who was never President as an answer.

I will have a grand fucking time mocking this answer tomorrow, I tell you.

(Also, left to right: Bayard Rustin (in the stocking cap), Philip Randolph, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Ruth Harris Bunche, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King Jr, Coretta Scott King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Hosea Williams in the dark coat with the child in front of him. I recognized Randolph, Lewis, Abernathy and both Kings without looking them up, and I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t recognize Rustin.)