Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
Zaakir Tameez ’24JD
(Henry Holt, $38.99)
Largely forgotten today, Charles Sumner, a Boston lawyer, US senator, and adviser to Abraham Lincoln, was “the most famous civil rights leader of the nineteenth century, much like Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth century,” writes constitutional law scholar Tameez in a compelling biography aimed at returning Sumner “to the place he deserves in the pantheon of American heroes.” Sumner is perhaps best known as the object of a near-fatal assault by a Southern congressman in 1856 in the Senate chambers. Drawing on a wealth of “long-neglected archival material,” the author presents him as, to use the apt words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “a seer of democracy.” His antislavery and pro–human rights work attempted to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s promise “to guarantee racial equality on every civil, social, and political plane of public life that was governed by law.”
And to Think We Started as a Book Club
Tom Toro ’04
(Andrews McMeel, $19.99)
It took 610 tries, but in 2010, cartoonist Toro sold his first drawing to The New Yorker. In this masterful collection, the artist presents that debut panel about an inordinately bow-legged cowboy, along with many more of the witty and wise Toro cartoons that have graced the magazine since then. From the book’s cover, in which a getaway car full of bank robbers reminisce about their start, to a bittersweet climate-geddon classic in which a tattered guy sits around a fire and tells three waifs, “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders,” Toro will have readers simultaneously laughing and pondering as they scan each handsomely drawn look at modern life.
It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground
David Litt ’08
(Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster, $29.99)
“Only three categories of people made it through Covid without succumbing to despair: happy warriors, pathological narcissists, and Taylor Swift,” writes the author, who didn’t fit in any of the slots. To avoid succumbing to the “situational depression” that was threatening to drown him, Litt, who had been a successful speechwriter for Barack Obama, decided in his mid-thirties to take a fourth path. He would become a surfer. This unlikely “geriatric” journey—“to pick up a board at thirty-five, as I did, is the rough equivalent of signing up for guitar lessons on your deathbed”—helped him bridge a seemingly unbridgeable political chasm between him and his brother-in-law. The two men fulfill an impossible dream—surfing enormous waves on Hawaii’s North Shore—and harness what his first surfing teacher Katie called “the flower of fear” to transform his riding and his life.
Apple: The First 50 Years
David Pogue ’85
(Simon and Schuster, $50)
Love ’em or hate ’em, elegantly designed Apple products—from Mac computers to the iPhone—have propelled a startup launched on April Fool’s Day in 1976 into a global colossus, with current revenues of around $400 billion and a market capitalization of $3.7 trillion. In an equally elegant history of Apple’s first half century, veteran tech journalist Pogue presents the company, warts and all, that Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and the often overlooked Ron Wayne created. Pogue follows Apple and its products through growth, near disaster, and current triumph in an examination, says Pogue, of “how Apple changed not only the devices we use, but us: how we communicate, consume, and create, in complicated ways we’re still trying to understand and control.”
Inbal Megiddo: Bach Cello Suites
Inbal Megiddo ’98, ’01MusM, ’02AD
(Atoll Records)
Inbal Megiddo studied at Yale with renowned cellist Aldo Parisot ’48Mus and is now an associate professor in cello at the New Zealand School of Music. This recording is dedicated to Parisot, and the packaging contains an endorsement from him calling it “a superior presentation of these works,” but Megiddo tackles Bach’s six cello suites in a style very much her own. Her rich layered recordings, vibrating in a way that feels raw and passionate, defy comparison with other cellists. Intricate emotional worlds form within these suites. What emerges from Megiddo’s playing is an extraordinary range of feeling. Bach too often can become background music, tamed and sweetened. Megiddo, who also recorded solo cello works by Bach on an earlier album in 2018, makes you pay attention to the nuances, the sharp jabs, and the smooth swirls.
loading
Print
Email