Category Archives: my favorite books

Children’s and Young Adult Books: My Favorites; Thoughts About Reading

 

children’s and young adult books

 

My mother always loved to read and had great taste in literature.

She told me that she read avidly as a child. She was a voracious reader. She loved Little Women, a classic and a real girl’s book. She was very affected by the scene where the character Beth dies.

My other also loved Heidi.

My exposure to such literature was through my mother. She had such good taste and read to me a lot. She chose splendid books for us. It was such a pleasure to be read to (in bed) by her because she enjoyed it so much herself, and, of course, my Mom was so warm and nurturing anyway.

How did she find the time to read to me? (It was always to me alone.)

One of our first books was Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne. When The House at Pooh Corner, a sequel, came out, my mom was delighted and read that to me too. How I loved the nonsense rhymes of Pooh:

The more it snows (Tiddely pom)
The more it goes  (Tiddely pom)
The more it goes  (Tiddely pom)
On snowing

And nobody knows  (Tiddely pom)
How cold my toes (Tiddely pom)
How cold my toes (Tiddely pom)
Are growing

 

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can’t bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.”

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fish can’t whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.”

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken, I don’t know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
“Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.”

the idiosyncrasies of characters like Piglet and Eyore, and funny touches like the character (Owl) who had a sign on his door, “knock if an answer is required, ring if an answer is not required.” My mother and I used to laugh out loud. I had such a warm and fuzzy feeling when she was reading to me.

We had several wonderful books compiled by the children’s book editor Olive Beaupré Miller. These included a multi volume set, My Book House, and the book Nursery Friends from France. I especially liked the latter book, which my mother took great pleasure in reading to us from. It had wonderful color illustrations. It was a compilation of songs, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales.

We had The Arabian Nights in a nice edition (which I still have). I particularly liked the story of Aladdin and his magic lamp.

At a fairly early age, I read the classic Black Beauty (originally published in 1877) by Anna Sewell. This book made a very strong impression me. Not long ago, as an adult, I purchased it as an audiobook and “read” it again. It is very well written. The story is told in the first person by the horse, Black Beauty, who is the narrator. The novel recounts the story of Black Beauty’s life as it is experienced under a succession of different owners, or “masters.” Some of the owners are cruel.

All I recall from reading the book as a child, the impression the book made on me then was that Black Beauty’s life was one of unremitting misery: an unending progression from one cruel master to another, with the course of the horse’s life leading to an inevitable decline. This characterization is true of a lot of the plot, but not all of it, as it turns out. When I first read the book, though I was greatly impressed by it, it seemed to me unbearably sad and gloomy. That it undeniably is, in places, in the sections where the horse is overworked and mistreated. But why did this impression predominate with me? I think because that view of Black Beauty’s life jibed with my view of own life as a sad one in which I was often mistreated. The scenes in the book of this nature were the ones that stuck in my mind.

Much to my surprise, I discovered, when I listened to the audiobook later, as an adult, that the novel actually ends happily, with Black Beauty in good circumstances, and that in other sections of the book, Black Beauty does have good masters (in contrast to many sections of the book in which the horse is cruelly mistreated).

I started visiting the Cambridge Public Library children’s room when I was very young. My mother and father were very liberal about giving us independence and let me walk there myself after a certain age. It was sort of a long walk. I loved being able to find and take out my own books.

At the library at around this time (fifth grade), I borrowed a science fiction book the title of which I do not remember. The story was about people who were involved in time travel. There were two main parts to the book. In the first, the main character or characters traveled back in time to the Stone Age. They encountered two hostile groups, the Cro-Magnons and the Neandertals. The time traveler(s) were befriended by the wise Cro-Magnons, who helped them to escape perils. In the second part of the book, the time traveler(s) went forward in time, in a rocket ship, overcoming things like aging with the aid of Einsteinian physics. I was totally engrossed in this young adult novel.

I also read a Tarzan book — I think it was in the sixth grade. It involved a tribe of African warrior women who took men (or threatened to) as prisoners in their fortress.

There was a popular, respected series of history books for young readers, the Landmark Books. In the sixth grade, I read the one on Benjamin Franklin and loved it. Around that time, the animated Disney film Ben and Me, which I liked, was popular.

Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, is a wonderful novel by James Otis. I read it when I was around 11 or 12. Toby runs away to join the circus. At the end of the book, his pet monkey, Mr. Stubbs, dies. It was such an incredibly sad scene. How it moved me!

When I was about eleven, I started reading young adult sports fiction, mostly about baseball, though I do remember reading one about sandlot football players. The books would frequently have a moral. For example, I read one which concludes with the protagonist, in a key game, admitting to the umpire, who had called him safe, that he was really out. The protagonist gains in moral stature.

Around this time, I read a series of baseball books for young adults by Duane Decker, the Blue Sox series, about a fictional professional baseball team.

I also read the Black Stallion books by Walter Farley and enjoyed them very much.

 

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Some additional items from my childhood and young adult reading.

“Little Black Sambo.” This is story which we took delight in that my Mom would read to us. The Story of Little Black Sambo is a children’s book written and illustrated by Helen Bannerman, and first published by Grant Richards [who, by the way, was an editor for Theodore Dreiser] in October 1899 as one in a series of small-format books called The Dumpy Books for Children. The story was a children’s favorite for more than half a century though criticism began as early as 1932. The word sambo was deemed a racial slur in some countries and the illustrations considered reminiscent of “darky iconography.” Both text and illustrations have undergone considerable revision since. (Wikipedia)

The Story of Little Black Sambo is a simple, illustrated children’s story about a young Indian boy who outsmarts four tigers that threaten to eat him. After Sambo saves himself by giving each tiger an article of his gaudy outfit, the tigers argue among themselves over which of them is the grandest. Eventually, the tigers chase each other around a tree so fast that they simply blur into butter, which Sambo takes home and uses on 169 pancakes that his mother, Black Mumbo, makes for him. (from a plot summary on another website)

I recall there was something about pancakes. My mother liked pancakes. She often made them for us.

Uncle Wiggily was a series of children’s books by Howard R. Garris. My mom introduced us to them. I loved them. Uncle Wiggily is an elderly, avuncular rabbit who wears spectacles, and there are a lot of other animal characters. The books are lighthearted and fun. The color illustrations were superb.

Make Way for Ducklings is a children’s picture book written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey. It was my  mother (you guessed it) who introduced us to the book. The story is about a duck family led by a mother duck that walks around Boston. They wind up at the Boston Common and ride on the swan boats. The plot is simple and charming; the black and white illustrations are superb (very realistic but simple and just right for children). The book won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for McCloskey’s illustrations.

The book was excellent in every respect, but what made it particularly enjoyable was that it was set in Boston and ends with the ducklings on the Boston Common. I used to love to go to the Boston Common and loved the swan boats.

Babar the Elephant by Jean de Brunhoff. My mother purchased Babar and read it to me numerous times. I was absolutely charmed by it. The color illustrations were wonderful. My Mom loved Babar too, naturally.

Dr. Seuss. These books were a kind of late discovery in my elementary school years. My mother introduced me to them, I believe. The ones I liked were The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Scrambled Eggs Super! Many of his most famous classics hadn’t come out yet.

 

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A final comment about reading. It goes without saying how pleasurable and profitable it can be. How you can do it anytime, anywhere at little expense. (I think that books at current prices are still a great bargain.) How great it is to curl up with a book and how it is something you can always resort to when you are lonely or can’t sleep.

I think that to love reading, you have to begin by doing it because of intrinsic interest in the topic and because you are anticipating pleasure, not because you regard it as a duty. You should read whatever you like to; it could be books about sports, entertainment figures, lowbrow fiction, whatever you really and truly want to read.

Whenever (and this comment pertains mainly to classics) you are restricted to encountering good books only as school assignments, when that’s the only place where you encounter them, the game is lost. If you think that classic books are those that you are required to analyze and write essay exam questions on, and nothing more, you will probably not enjoy them in later life. My counsel to all readers, especially young ones, is read whatever you want to read, as much as you can. Seek a level where you have a genuine interest and read at that level. An interest in the best books will often follow.

I am very appreciative that my parents established a sound foundation for enjoyment of reading. They communicated it naturally, like one might convey to one’s offspring an enthusiasm for sports. Reading was seldom a chore for me, and only then, infrequently, from assignments in school. Good literature was something I came to appreciate naturally, while at the same time feeling I could read whatever I liked. I was able to develop my own interests this way, like reading baseball books, for example. I developed highbrow tastes gradually, without being aware that I was doing so.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   March 2023

 

a page from Nursery Friends from France

 

“Sorokin” («Сорокин»)

русский перевод см ниже

Для загружаемого документа Word, содержащего текст этого сообщения, см. Ниже.

 

My essay about the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin which follows is approximately 4,000 words long. A downloadable Word document, which contains the text of the essay in both English and Russian — is available above.

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Sorokin

by Roger W. Smith

The following essay about the Russian-American sociologist and social philosopher Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968) comprises an email of mine which was occasioned by a message I received a few days ago from a reader of this blog.

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Thanks for contacting me about Pitirim A. Sorokin. I am glad you discovered my blog posts about him.

Sorokin is one of my intellectual and personal heroes. I have always admired him. Greatly. He is one of my intellectual idols. I revere him on account of his works; his deep and earnest thought; his sincerity; his originality; the excitement which I felt upon encountering his works as an intellectually curious and intellectually hungry adolescent; and the fact that he always gave me the feeling of being a kindred spirit, one whose views could not be pigeonholed and who wasn’t afraid to take unpopular positions. (Sorokin used the oxymoron Conservative Christian Anarchist to describe his Weltanschauung — world view. Conservative Christian Anarchist was used by Henry Adams to describe himself, as Sorokin noted.)

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I discovered Sorokin in my local public library at age 17 when I was a senior in high school. (It seems that practically every important book I ever read was discovered by serendipity, as was the case in this instance.) There was a book on the library’s shelves which caught my eye: “The Crisis of Our Age” by one P. A. Sorokin, whom I had never heard of.

“This looks interesting,” I thought.

Philosophy of history.

“The Crisis of Our Age” was an intensely stimulating and exciting read for a 17 year old with an interest in history and, especially, the history of ideas (in contrast to event-based history, which has never had much interest for me).

I could not put the book down, devoured it. It was a very rewarding intellectual exercise for me at that stage in my intellectual development. It challenged me, stimulated me mentally, and greatly expanded my intellectual horizons. I was introduced to numerous big words which I dutifully looked up, greatly expanding my knowledge of abstract words used in academic writing and discourse. (“Syncretism” is one I recall.) The book enlarged for me the mental landscape and scope of my knowledge of intellectual history.

History was one of my best subjects, and I wound up majoring in it in college. The book was not actually history, and it was anything but the usual dry academic tome or fact-laden historical monograph. It was a mélange of historical, cultural, social, and intellectual history plus interpretive analysis by Sorokin. It was supposedly an objective sociological work, a condensed version of the author’s four volume magnum opus, “Social and Cultural Dynamics.”

It was anything but objective, despite the statistical charts and data, collected laboriously by the author and research assistants, which supposedly provided the “scientific” (or social scientific) underpinnings for his findings. For “findings,” one should perhaps substitute pronouncements or sweeping assessments.

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Over the course of time, I learned about Pitirim A. Sorokin’s personal life.

He was born in 1889 among the Komi, a Uralic ethnic group in the northeast of European Russia. He was orphaned at an early age and eventually became a student at a teacher’s college. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1906 for anti-czarist revolutionary political activities. Upon the outbreak of the so called February Revolution (in March 1917), he became a founder of the Russian Peasant Soviet, which was dispersed by the Communists. He was, from the beginning of the Revolution, vehemently opposed to Communist leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky.

He was arrested twice by the Bolsheviks and was condemned to death, but was freed on Lenin’s orders and allowed to return to his academic activities as a professor at the University of St. Petersburg. In 1922, he was banished from the Soviet Union. He emigrated to the United States in 1923 and, in 1930, was invited to become the first professor and chairman of the Sociology Department at Harvard University. He retired from teaching duties in 1955, but continued to write. He was a controversial figure and vigorously opposed trends in the Harvard sociology department after stepping down as chairman.

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Sorokin had pretensions to be a scientist – a social scientist – and believed he was using the scientific method. He larded his books with statistics; but the “science” and statistical analysis somehow never seemed convincing, and it appeared that what he really was, was a social philosopher, not a social scientist.

The scientific slant, such as it was, in his thinking and writing undoubtedly came from his studies at the Psycho-Neurological Institute in Petrograd and the University of St. Petersburg under scholars such as Ivan Pavlov. He became, in the words of Sorokin biographer Barry V. Johnston, “an empirical neopositivist.”

I agree with critics such as Arnold Toynbee who found fault with Sorokin’s methodology and accused him of creating a tautological work, a massive tautology. Essentially, they said, he decided what he was going to say first, then engaged in pseudoscientific research to prove what was for him a foregone conclusion, with shoddy methodology and biases that predetermined what his research would find. Then, the critics seemed to be saying, he propagated simplistic, self-evident conclusions. The art of the Idealistic period (e.g., the Middle Ages) was spiritual in its focus and nature. The art of our present, Sensate era is not spiritual; there is much nudity and erotic content. And so on. The present, Sensate era is overly materialistic and has become decadent (plus the factor of aggression and bloodshed between nations), but a new, more spiritual era will right things, so to speak, because history is cyclical. The focus of the Idealistic Middle Ages was otherworldly. The Ideational period shows a mixture of Idealistic and Sensate elements and represents a transitional phase.

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Sorokin saw history as cyclical and as alternating periodically between recurring phases: Ideational, Idealistic, and Sensate. To illustrate what Sorokin meant by these three types of cultures or cultural phases predominating at various periods in history, a timeframe helps:

Ideational — the High Middle Ages represented such a culture in full flower. “Its major principle or value was God.”

Sensate — it began roughly with the sixteenth century and is based on the premise or ethos that “True reality and value is sensory”; it reached its apogee (and unleashed monstrous destructive forces) in the twentieth century.

Idealistic — a mix of the above two cultural types; represented by European culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. “Its major premise was that true reality is partly super sensory and partly sensory.” St. Thomas Aquinas is one exemplar of such thinking.

It should be noted that Sorokin believed that these three cultural forms alternated rhythmically over all historical time. He includes examples from antiquity as well.

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Shoddy methodology? I would say yes. But, for an intellectually curious high school student, this was indeed exciting stuff — it seemed profound. And, I have great respect, as stated above, for Sorokin the man and scholar. He wasn’t afraid to attack big themes, and some of his work is profoundly original and important in its implications.

Sorokin counterattacked his critics caustically. He loved a good fight. Despite expressing profound admiration for Arnold Toynbee’s oeuvre, he felt, not surprisingly, that Toynbee’s works were conceptually and methodologically flawed in several important respects wherein Sorokin thought his own works surpassed Toynbee’s. (Ditto for the work of another philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, whose works Sorokin found to be unpersuasive and methodologically flawed.)

It has been said that Sorokin was an arrogant scholar. Perhaps so. Nevertheless, I found much to like and admire about him.

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On the first day of freshman orientation at Brandeis University, my mother accompanied me to the campus and spent the day with me. We sort of took in the whole place. Among other things, I had to check out the library, which met with my approval. The first thing I did was to go to the card catalogue. “Let’s see if they have Sorokin’s works,” I said to her. They did, several works. I was pleased, and my mother beamed, showing that she shared my enthusiasm vicariously.

In my freshman year, I took English Composition. For our first assignment, we were told to write a paper in which we were instructed to “define style,” which I tried mightily to do. (I didn’t quite understand what underlay the assignment.) In the next class, the instructor singled out my paper for criticism. I thought it was pretty good, and one or two other students in the class (notably Ricardo Millett, an exchange student from Panama who went on to have a distinguished academic career) felt so too.

In the paper, I quoted a passage from “The Crisis of Our Age” as an example of what I considered an excellent, distinctive style:

The crisis is here in all its stark and unquestionable reality. We are in the midst of an enormous conflagration burning everything into ashes. In a few weeks millions of human lives are uprooted; in a few hours century-old cities are demolished; in a few days kingdoms are erased. Red human blood flows in broad streams from one end of the earth to the other. Ever expanding misery spreads its gloomy shadow over larger eras. The fortunes, happiness and comfort of untold millions have disappeared. Peace, security and safety have vanished. Prosperity and well-being have become in many countries but a memory; freedom a mere myth. Western culture is covered by a blackout. A great tornado sweeps over the whole of mankind. (“The Crisis of Our Age,” pp. 14-15; note: the book was published at the beginning of World War II)

The instructor, Robert Stein (a chain smoker known to students as “C plus Stein”), read the passage out loud in class and pounced on me for making such a claim. He drew a red line through my paper and wrote something like “No!” in the margin. Purple prose, he said. Exactly the OPPOSITE of excellence of style. (The freshman comp Bible in those days was Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” Sorokin would probably have had difficulty passing a course of theirs.) I was taken aback by Stein’s criticisms and his take on Sorokin the writer.

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Sorokin does have a characteristic style which could easily be parodied, should one care to. He uses jargon and his own private verbiage, “Sorokinisms” (“intellectual chewing gum” for example), when he feels it will serve his purposes. He will use big words (which is not necessarily a “sin”), actual or near neologisms, and words and phrases drawn from various languages, especially (and notably) Latin — he was addicted to Latin mottoes. He can be guilty of “overwriting.” Yet, his style is basically clear, punchy, and arresting. He wants, above all, to communicate.

He obviously had linguistic ability. His native language was Komi (a language spoken in the northeastern European part of Russia). I was interested to read that, as Sorokin wrote, in later life, he had forgotten it. He was, of course, fluent in Russian from his school days on. He knew both German and Latin — knowledge of the former served him well for sociological studies — and undoubtedly other languages (apparently including Italian) as well. He learned English after emigrating in the mid-1920’s. Some of his faults as a stylist — and I feel that in many respects he was actually an excellent writer — may have been attributable to imperfect knowledge of English.

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I wrote a research paper on Sorokin for the freshman comp course. One day I encountered Mr. Stein in the college snack bar. Despite being regarded as a prickly and difficult teacher, he found my writing to be good and showed respect for me. “Why are you so hung up on Sorokin?” he asked. He apparently knew a former Harvard student who had studied under Sorokin (or knew someone who had) and from that person had learned that Sorokin was regarded as something of a crackpot at Harvard. This surprised me, and though I was not about to alter my views, I did later learn more about Sorokin that seemed in accord with what Mr. Stein had said. A few anecdotal factoids emerged:

— Sorokin could be “over the top” as a lecturer in that the whole course – he taught a required course at Harvard, Social Relations, which was popular and heavily subscribed – was devoted to his theories. He was said to regard himself as a great thinker up there with Aristotle and who knows else?

— Some graduate students (according to their reminiscences) found him difficult to have as an academic advisor. (But not all; he was beloved by some former students.)

— Sorokin had been ousted as department chairman in a bitter power struggle with Talcott Parsons. They detested one another and each had contempt for the other’s theories and methodologies. Their approaches were diametrically opposed, Parsons being the classic dry social scientist, Sorokin the quixotic figure writing jeremiads. (“Quixotic” was a term my former therapist actually used to describe him.)

— Sorokin wasn’t even teaching by the time I took Mr. Stein’s course. He was still writing and lecturing, but he had already retired from Harvard. (He retired from teaching in 1955 and continued on as director of a research institute at Harvard which he had founded until 1959).

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Not knowing that Sorokin had already retired, I asked my older brother, who was attending Harvard, whether he knew of Sorokin. He did not, but he said that if Sorokin was still teaching at Harvard, we would certainly attend one of his lectures together. Needless to say, this never came about.

My father also attended Harvard at a time when Sorokin, who taught at Harvard from 1930–1955, was teaching there. My father’s transcript indicates that he took Social Relations 1a and Social Relations 1b, a two semester sequence comprising a required core course, in the 1948-1949 academic year. I am certain that the course would have been taught by Sorokin. But my father (who may or may not have been aware of my interest in Sorokin, I don’t recall) and I never discussed Sorokin.

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Influenced by Sorokin, I chose sociology as my major at Brandeis. I had some excellent sociology professors (notably Gordon Fellman and Lewis A. Coser, whom Sorokin new personally), but the courses were a letdown and I changed my major to history. Sorokin was NEVER mentioned. Sociology on a grand scale it was not (although we did read sociologists such as Durkheim and Max Weber who wrote seminal works of a similar scope).

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Insofar as my extracurricular reading of Sorokin was concerned, I progressed from theoretical works, e.g., “The Crisis of Our Age” — which was based on the Lowell Lectures which Sorokin delivered at Harvard University in 1941; the book was actually a condensed version, aimed at the general reading public, of what Sorokin considered his major scholarly work — to reading autobiographical works of his.

“Leaves from A Russian Diary” (1924; enlarged edition with afterword, 1950), which details Sorokin’s experiences as a revolutionary opponent of the Czarist government, an official in the short lived Kerensky government, and an anti-Bolshevik, was a work that I could not put down. It has a cogency and dramatic interest, being written at white heat, so to speak, that make it compelling. It reads like a novel, a sort of “Les Misérables” minus about a thousand pages. l feel that it is an underrated book and could never understand why it never achieved a wide readership. For me, it is the best book on the Russian Revolution, the only one I practically ever read about it, in fact. It made me feel what the revolution must have been like. I regard it as a classic, and I felt it was very well written, much more so than when Sorokin was writing as a scholar.

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“Russia and the United States” was another one of my first Sorokin books. It was not readily available, but our college library had it and, as was customary for me, I read it on my own, independently of coursework. The book held my interest from start to finish.

I have always felt that “Russia and the United States” is one of Sorokin’s best books, modest though it may be in scope. In fact, I think that the fact that Sorokin was not overreaching in this book is part of its value and appeal. Also, Sorokin got it right. It’s a sensible book, written at a time when the Soviet Union was regraded with outright hostility, fear, and suspicion, and written by a scholar (Sorokin) who had been banished from the USSR, barely escaping execution, because of his fervent anti-Communism.

I read the book at a time, the mid-1960’s, when the Cold War was at or near its zenith, when the USSR was regarded as our mortal enemy. I myself had rarely harbored anti-Russian feelings, but I was keenly aware, along with everyone else, of the political undertones. When Khrushchev stood beaming in a cornfield during a visit to the USA in the late 1950’s and pictures were published in newspapers the next day, one of our teachers told us, “Don’t let him fool you. You can never and should never trust him.”

What Sorokin said, basically, in “Russia and the United States,” which was published in 1941 — meaning that it was written before the USSR became our wartime ally — was that a careful study of the lineaments, so to speak, of the two countries would reveal that they actually had much in common as countries and societies, and that the two nations would eventually become less hostile to one another over time because of commonalities.

As Sorokin put it, the two countries “exhibit an essential similarity or congeniality in a number of important psychological, cultural, and social values”: vast territories with all that implies (such as various climates, topography, and regional characteristics); rich natural and human resources; major cultural and urban centers; the fact that both countries were world powers; and so on.

This seemed counterintuitive at the time, but I sensed then that Sorokin was right, and history proved him right, insofar that the Cold War came to an unexpected end. I myself had always admired the USSR – if not as a political entity – as a country with vast expanses like us and a multiplicity of nationalities and ethnic groups with a rich, continually growing culture ranging from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. Just like America. Huge, diverse, all encompassing, culturally fertile; and with a vibrant economy.

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Sorokin’s autobiography, “A Long Journey,” came out when I was in college. I had to read it. I am so glad I acquired and read it when I did. It is truthful and revelatory, not in the sense of a confessional, but in the sense that Sorokin is straightforward and unafraid to tell it as he saw and experienced it, without worrying about how this or that comment or remark about others might be received. Underneath the academic theorizing, he was a simple man with simple tastes and plain, unvarnished, almost childlike, feelings. (He took great pride in a garden of his at his home in Winchester, Massachusetts, which won awards from horticultural societies; he came of peasant stock and was proud of it.)

It ranges in subject matter from Sorokin’s days as a revolutionary, to his becoming an emigre, his early teaching career in Minnesota, his Harvard years, and, interestingly, his family life, his love of music (he was a good friend of Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Serge Koussevitzky), his love of the outdoors, and disputes with scholars. He was miffed when, as an emeritus, he submitted a paper to the American Sociological Review that was rejected. He is unapologetic about opinions of his which often ran counter to prevailing academic and intellectual fashions. It makes for interesting reading. Dull he is not.

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I have perused over the years but have never read as carefully as I would have liked “Social and Cultural Mobility” and “The Sociology of Revolution.” The latter work, written by Sorokin in the early 1920’s when he was a refugee in Czechoslovakia, asserts that all revolutions are disasters in the making which result in the unleashing of violent and destructive forces in lieu of social amelioration. “A society which has never known how to live,” Sorokin wrote, “which has been incapable of carrying through adequate reforms, but has thrown itself in the arms of revolution, has to pay the penalty for its sins by the death of a considerable proportion of its members.” This is characteristic Sorokin. He was not given to dry summations or mealy-mouthed pronouncements. (Note: I have, since this writing, read “The Sociology of Revolution.” It is a remarkable work which, despite somewhat “old fashioned’ scholarship, has not become outdated or less valid despite having been published almost a hundred years ago.)

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In the mid-1970’s, I was in a second rate bookstore in lower Manhattan one Sunday and found a remaindered copy of a book of Sorokin’s that had been posthumously published by a university press: “Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs.” T. Lynn Smith, a former academic colleague and friend of Sorokin’s, had lovingly prepared the book for publication, along with Sorokin’s widow, Elena P. Sorokin, the translator. The book contained wonderful illustrations of Sorokin and his family from his wife’s collection. What’s more, it was a compelling read.

“[Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs] was written by Sorokin during the Russian famine of 1919-1921 while he was still in Russia. It was written by a starving and freezing scholar in the midst of a famine that he felt was caused by the revolution to which he was very hostile. Banished from the Soviet Union in 1922, Sorokin managed to smuggle out some proofs which lay untouched until 1972 when Sorokin’s wife Elena began [a] translation.” (http://www.sociosite.net/sociologists/sorokin_pitirim.php)

“Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs” — titled in the original Russian “Golod kak faktor: vliyaniye goloda na povedeniye cheloveka i sotsial’nuyu organizatsiyu zhizni” (Hunger as a factor: the impact of hunger on people’s behavior, social organization of life) — was a compelling book not simply because of the circumstances under which it was written but owing in part to conclusions derived from them. Sorokin, then a professor at the University of Leningrad, wrote it under conditions of great privation during the Russian famine. The book concludes with remarks by Sorokin that seem to have wide applicability: that, when food is scarce, government control and repression increase. Sorokin, noted for his colorful, pithy phrasing, concludes with the words “Caveat consules!” (let the consuls beware).

The book was a revelation for me. Often, I have found with writers in general that their early works are among their best. This was certainly true of Sorokin. One could see him here, in one of his first books, in a “pristine” state — when he was perhaps less preachy and less addicted to writing in a sometimes overblown fashion, in the manner of a grand scholar — at his best. It is a provocative, original, and groundbreaking work, and one from which the conclusions can be extrapolated and applied to various governments and economic conditions. Sorokin’s main point was stated as follows on the penultimate page:

Ceteris paribus, with the increase of the wealth of a country and a decrease of famine, and if there is an average proprietary differentiation, the curve of compulsory statism will decrease under any power and form of government, and vice versa.

In other words, there is an inverse relationship between scarcity or abundance of food and the degree of individual freedoms permitted versus the lack of it. Think of the United States, where food has always been abundant, famine conditions have never been known, and individual freedoms are greater than those permitted in most of the world.

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I also read “The American Sex Revolution,” also while in college, which is a hopelessly outdated book. But, at least Sorokin was bold enough to tackle the subject.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   February 2017; updated April 2019

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Addendum: The same points which Sorokin made in his seminal work “Golod kak factor” (translated into English by his wife and published posthumously in the United States in 1975 as “Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs”) are made in an article by Sorokin entitled “Impoverishment and the Expansion of Governmental Control” which was published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1926 (American Journal of Sociology, vol. 32, no. 2, Sept. 1926) shortly after Sorokin had arrived in the United States and been appointed a professor at the University of Minnesota.

In the article, drawing on examples from various historical periods and civilizations, Sorokin makes incisive points with wide applicability about governmental control, noting that, when there is a yawning gap between the relative economic conditions of the rich and the poor and when food is scarce, government control and repression increase.

This article is posted here as a downloadable PDF file.

sorokin-impoverishment-the-expansion-of-governmental-control1

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Addendum: Please note that I have many articles about Pitirim A. Sorokin and some articles by Sorokin that I would be willing to share. My email address is available in the “About” section of this site. — Roger W. Smith

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Pitirim A. Sorokin, autobiographical (from “Sociology of My Mental Life”)

Pitirim A. Sorokin, autobiographical (from “Sociology of My Mental Life”)

 

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«Сорокин»

 Роджер У. Смит

 В представленном ниже эссе о русско-американском социологе и социальном философе Питириме Александровиче Сорокине (1889-1968) приведено электронное письмо, написанное мной в ответ на сообщение, полученное несколько дней назад от читателя этого блога.

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Спасибо, что написали мне о Питириме Александровиче Сорокине. Я рад, что вы прочли посты о нем в моем блоге.

Сорокин – мой герой, как ученый и как личность. Я всегда им восхищался. Он один из моих интеллектуальных идолов. Я преклоняюсь перед ним за его работы; глубину и серьезность его мысли; его искренность; его оригинальность; воодушевление, которое я ощутил, познакомившись с его работами, которые оказались интересными в интеллектуальном плане, они утоляли мой юношеский интеллектуальный голод; я как будто встретил родственную душу, человека, взгляды которого и сегодня не потеряли свою актуальность и который не боялся отстаивать непопулярные мнения. (Сорокин описывал свое Weltanschauung (мировоззрение) при помощи оксюморона «консервативный христианский анархист». Как отмечал Сорокин, «консервативным христианским анархистом» называл себя Генри Адамс.)

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Я впервые познакомился с работами Сорокина в местной публичной библиотеке, когда мне было 17 лет, и я учился в старших классах. (Наверное, практически все стоящие книги, которые я когда-либо читал, попались мне под руку совершенно случайно, и это как раз такой случай.) На полке в библиотеке мое внимание привлекла книга с названием «Кризис нашего времени» П.А. Сорокина, о котором я никогда не слышал.

«Это интересно», – подумал я.

Философия истории.

Книга «Кризис нашего времени» оказалась мотивирующим и захватывающим чтением для 17-летнего юноши, интересующегося историей и, в частности, историей идеологии (в отличие от истории на основе событий, которая меня никогда не интересовала).

Я не мог оторваться от этой книги, наслаждался ею. На том этапе моего интеллектуального развития это был чрезвычайно полезный опыт. Книга стала вызовом, мотивировала меня, позволила расширить интеллектуальные горизонты. Я старательно искал в словарях значения новых слов, и в результате существенно расширил словарный запас за счет абстрактных слов, которые используются при написании научных работ и ведении интеллектуальных дискуссий. («синкретизм» – одно из таких слов.) Книга расширила мой кругозор и знания в области интеллектуальной истории.

История – один из моих любимых предметов, который я выбрал в колледже в качестве профильного. Нельзя сказать, что это книга по истории, она точно не похожа на привычный сухой академический труд или перегруженную фактами историческую монографию. Это синтез исторической, культурной, социальной и интеллектуальной истории с интерпретативным анализом Сорокина. Предположительно, это объективное социологическое исследование, краткая версия четырехтомной монографии автора «Социальная и культурная динамика».

Но эта книга – точно не объективная работа, несмотря на все статистические таблицы и данные, кропотливо собранные автором и его ассистентами, которые, вероятно, предоставили «научную» (или социально-научную) базу полученных им результатов. «Результатами» стоит, наверное, считать высказывания или радикальные оценки автора.

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С течением времени я узнал о личной жизни Питирима А. Сорокина.

Сорокин родился в 1889 году в республике Коми, уральской этнической группе на северо-востоке европейской России. Он осиротел в раннем возрасте, а повзрослев стал студентом учительского колледжа. В 1906 году он был арестован и заключён за анти царскую революционно-политическую деятельность. В начале так называемой февральской революции (в марте 1917 года) он стал основателем Русско-крестьянского Совета, который был отменён коммунистами. В начале революции Сорокин был ярым противником коммунистических лидеров как Ленин и Троцкий.

Сорокин дважды был арестован большевиками и был приговорён к смертной казни, но по приказу Ленина он был освобождён и получил разрешение вернуться к своей научной деятельности в качестве профессора в Санкт-Петербургском университете. В 1922 году он был выслан из Советского Союза. Он эмигрировал в Соединённые Штаты Америки в 1923 году, и стал профессором социологии в Университете Миннесоты, где он преподавал с 1924 по 1930 год. В 1930 году он был приглашен президентом Гарвардского университета Абботтом Лоуренсом Лоуэллом, чтобы стать председателем и основателем нового отдела Социологии в Гарвардском университете. В 1955 году он ушёл с преподавательской деятельности, но продолжал писать. Он был спорной фигурой и активно выступал против тенденций в социологическом отделе Гарварда даже после ухода с поста председателя.

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Сорокин претендовал на звание ученого – социолога – и полагал, что использует научный метод. Его книги переполнены статистикой; но «наука» и статистический анализ никогда не казались убедительными, поэтому на самом деле он был социальным философом, а не ученым-социологом.

Научный уклон в его размышлениях и работах, несомненно, связан с его учебой в Психоневрологическом институте в Петрограде и в Санкт-Петербургском университете под руководством таких ученых, как Иван Павлов. Он стал, по словам биографа Сорокина Барри В. Джонстона, «эмпирическим неопозитивистом».

Я согласен с критиками, такими как Арнольд Тойнби, который раскритиковал методологию Сорокина и обвинил его в создании тавтологических работ, серьезной тавтологии. По сути, они говорили, что он сначала решал, что именно хочет сказать, затем приступал к псевдонаучному исследованию, чтобы доказать заранее известный вывод, используя ненаучную методологию и ошибочные суждения, которые заранее предопределяли, какой именно результат будет получен в ходе исследования. Затем, говорили критики, он выдавал банальные и очевидные выводы. Искусство идеалистического периода (например, Средних веков) было духовным по своей цели и сути. Искусство настоящей, чувственной эпохи не духовно; в нем много обнаженного и эротического содержания. И так далее. Настоящая, чувственная эпоха чрезмерно пропитана духом материализма и декадентства (плюс фактор агрессии и кровавой вражды между нациями), но новая, более духовная эра все исправит, так сказать, потому что история циклична. Идеалистическое Средневековье было сосредоточено на потустороннем мире. Идеациональный период – это смесь идеалистических и чувственных элементов, это переходная фаза.

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Сорокин видел историю как цикличное развитие, как периодическую смену повторяющихся фаз: идеациональной, идеалистической и чувственной. Проиллюстрировать, что именно Сорокин подразумевал под этими тремя типами культур или культурными фазами, преобладающими в разные периоды истории, можно при помощи временных рамок:

Идеациональная культура – Классическое Средневековье стало периодом расцвета такой культуры. «Его основной принцип и ценность – Бог».

Чувственная культура – этот период начался примерно в шестнадцатом веке, главная идея чувственной культуры: «Настоящая реальность и ценность лежит в сфере чувственности»; своего апогея она достигла в двадцатом веке (и выпустила на волю чудовищные разрушительные силы).

Идеалистическая культура – это смесь двух описанных выше типов; примером является европейская культура тринадцатого и четырнадцатого веков. «Основная идея в том, что в настоящей реальности сочетаются сверхчувственная и чувственная стороны». Св. Фома Аквинский – один из примеров такого мировоззрения.

Сорокин считал, что эти три типа культуры циклично сменяют друг друга в ходе исторического развития. Он также приводит примеры из античности.

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Ненаучная методология? С этим я бы согласился. Но для любознательного учащегося старшей школы это был действительно интересный материал – он казался мудрым и глубоким. И, как я писал выше, я уважаю Сорокина как личность и как ученого. Он не боялся работать с крупными темами, некоторые его работы и выводы являются действительно оригинальными и глубокими.

Сорокин саркастично нападал на своих критиков. Он любил хорошие схватки. Естественно, он чувствовал, что работы Тойнби не выдерживают критики. (То же касается и другого специалиста в философии истории, Освальда Шпенглера, чьи труды Сорокин считал, что неудивительно, неубедительными и методологически слабыми.)

Говорили, что Сорокин был заносчивым ученым. Возможно. Но я вижу много причин, чтобы им восхищаться.

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В день знакомства для первокурсников в Брандейском университете моя мама сопровождала меня в студенческий городок и провела со мной целый день. Мы хотели разведать обстановку. В частности, я должен был ознакомится с библиотекой и я оценил ее по достоинству. Первое, что я сделал – пошел в картотеку. «Разрешите посмотреть, есть ли у вас работы Сорокина»,– сказал я сотруднице. У них было несколько работ. Я обрадовался, а мама просто просияла, почувствовав мой энтузиазм.

На первом году обучения я выбрал курс литературной композиции на английском языке. Нашим первым заданием было написать работу, в которой нужно было «дать определение стиля». Я выполнил задание с большим усердием (я не очень понял суть задания). На следующем уроке преподаватель выбрал мою работу для анализа. Я решил, что это хороший знак, еще пару студентов в классе подумали то же самое (в частности, Рикардо Миллет, студент по обмену из Панамы, который впоследствии сделал успешную научную карьеру).

В работе я процитировал отрывок из книги «Кризис нашего времени» как пример того, что я считал отличным, выразительным стилем:

Кризис наступил во всей своей суровой и бесспорной реальности. Мы находимся в эпицентре бушующего пожара, который сжигает все дотла. За несколько недель разрушаются миллионы человеческих жизней; за несколько часов уничтожаются древние города; за несколько дней исчезают с лица земли целые королевства. Красные реки человеческой крови разливаются по всей земле. Под мрачную тень горя и страданий попадают все большие и большие территории. Благосостояние, счастье и комфорт миллионов людей исчезают. Мира и безопасности больше не существует. Во многих странах благосостояние и процветание – не более чем воспоминание, а свобода – всего лишь миф. Это полное затмение Западной культуры. Мощное торнадо захлестнуло все человечество. («Кризис нашего времени», стр. 14-15; примечание: книга была опубликована в начале Второй мировой войны.)

Преподаватель, Роберт Штайн (заядлый курильщик, которого студенты называли «C плюс Штайн»), вслух прочел отрывок на уроке и набросился на меня за такое утверждение. Он красной ручкой перечеркнул мою работу и написал что-то вроде «Нет!» на полях. «Высокопарный слог, – сказал он. – Нечто ПРОТИВОПОЛОЖНОЕ совершенству стиля». (В те времена библией первокурсника, изучавшего литературную композицию, была книга «Элементы стиля» Странка и Уайта. Сорокин вряд ли успешно прошел бы этот курс.) Меня застигла врасплох критика Штайна и его мнение о Сорокине как о писателе.

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У Сорокина нет характерного стиля, который при желании можно было бы легко скопировать. При необходимости он использует жаргон и им самим придуманные слова, «сорокинизмы» («интеллектуальная жвачка», например). Он использует сложные слова (что само по себе не является прегрешением), неологизмы или нечто похожее на них, а также слова и фразы, взятые из разных языков, в частности (чаще всего) из латыни – он обожал латинские изречения. Его можно обвинить в «витиеватости». Но его стиль в целом можно охарактеризовать как понятный, эффектный и запоминающийся. Прежде всего, он стремится донести информацию.

У него, очевидно, были хорошо развитые лингвистические способности. Его родным языком был язык коми (используется на северо-востоке Европейской части России). Мне было интересно узнать, что как писал сам Сорокин, он с годами забыл этот язык. Конечно, еще со школьных лет он свободно говорил на русском языке. Он знал немецкий и латинский – знание последнего пригодилось ему при проведении социологических исследований, – а также другие языки (в том числе итальянский). После эмиграции в середине 1920-х он приступил к изучению английского. Некоторые его стилистические ошибки – а я убежден, что во многих аспектах он был замечательным писателем – можно объяснить его недостаточными познаниями в английском.

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В рамках курса литературной композиции я написал исследование о Сорокине. Однажды я встретил г-на Штайна в буфете колледжа. Несмотря на репутацию строгого и придирчивого учителя, он хорошо отозвался о моей работе и уважительно отнесся ко мне. «Почему вы так увлечены Сорокиным?» – спросил он. Он, видимо, был знаком с бывшим студентом Гарварда, который учился у Сорокина (или знал кого-то, кто учился у него), и от него узнал, что Сорокина в Гарварде считали чудаком. Это удивило меня и хотя я не был готов изменить свои взгляды, позже мне стало известно больше о Сорокине, что подтверждало слова г-на Штайна. Появилось несколько отдельных неподтвержденных фактов:

– Сорокин мог «перегибать палку как лектор», в результате чего весь курс – а он преподавал в Гарварде обязательный курс, общественные отношения, который был популярен у студентов

– был посвящен его собственным теориям. Говорили, что он считал себя великим мыслителем, наравне с Аристотелем и неизвестно кем еще…

– Некоторые студенты-аспиранты вспоминали, что с ним сложно было общаться как с научным руководителем. (Но не все; некоторые из его бывших студентов любили его.)

– Сорокина сняли с должности заведующего кафедрой в результате сложного противостояния с Толкоттом Парсонсом. Они с презрением относились к теориям и методологиям друг друга. Их подходы были диаметрально противоположными: Парсонс был классическим сухим социологом, а Сорокин – эксцентричным чудаком, который писал наполненные эмоциями работы (мой бывший врач называл его «сумасбродом».)

– Когда я записался на курс г-на Штайна, Сорокин уже не преподавал. Он все еще писал и читал лекции, но уже ушел из Гарварда (он перестал преподавать в 1955 году и продолжал работать директором исследовательского института в Гарварде, который был основан им в 1959 году).

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Я не знал, что Сорокин уже не преподает, и спросил старшего брата, который учился в

Гарварде, знает ли он Сорокина. Он не знал, но сказал, что если он все еще преподает в Гарварде, мы обязательно сходим на одну из его лекций вместе. Стоит ли говорить о том, что сделать это нам не удалось.

Мой отец также учился в Гарварде в тот период, когда там преподавал Сорокин (он преподавал в Гарварде с 1930 по 1955). Судя по записям отца, он посещал 2-семестровый курс общественных отношений 1a и 1b, в который входил обязательный базовый курс, в 1948-1949 учебном году. Я уверен, что этот курс вел Сорокин. Но мы с отцом (я не помню, знал ли он о моем интересе к Сорокину) никогда не обсуждали Сорокина.

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Находясь под влиянием Сорокина, я выбрал социологию своей основной специальностью в Брандейском университете. Я учился у замечательных профессоров-социологов (в частности, у Гордона Феллмана и Льюиса А. Козера, которых Сорокин знал лично), но курсы меня разочаровали, и я сменил специальность, выбрав историю. Сорокина НИКОГДА не упоминали. Фактически, это не была социология в полном масштабе (хотя мы читали аналогичные по области действия фундаментальные труды таких социологов, как Дюркгейм и Макс Вебер).

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Что касается моего знакомства с трудами Сорокина вне учебного курса, после прочтения теоретических работ, таких как «Кризис нашего времени» — которая была основана на лекциях Ловела которые Сорокин читал в Гарвардском университете в 1941 году; книга книга была фактически является предназначенной для широкого круга читателей краткой версией книги, которую Сорокин считал своей фундаментальной научной работой — я приступил к чтению работ, написанных им собственноручно.

Я не мог оторваться от книги «Страницы из русского дневника», в которой Сорокин описывает свой опыт революционно настроенного оппонента царского режима, чиновника временного правительства Керенского и антибольшевика. Книга убедительна и драматична, в ней чувствуется напряжение, которое делает ее интересной. Это практически роман, можно сказать «Отверженные» без пары тысяч страниц. Я считаю, что эту книгу недооценивают, и не понимаю, почему ею не заинтересовалась широкая аудитория читателей. Как по мне, это лучшая книга о российской революции, фактически единственная книга, которую я прочел на эту тему. Благодаря ей я почувствовал, какой была революция. Я считаю эту книгу классикой, к тому же она отлично написана, гораздо лучше, чем Сорокин писал, как ученый.

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«Россия и Соединенные Штаты» – следующая из первых прочитанных мной работ Сорокина. Ее не было в свободном доступе, но я нашел ее в библиотеке нашего колледжа и, как обычно, прочел самостоятельно, не в рамках учебы. Я с интересом прочел книгу от начала до конца.

Я всегда считал, что «Россия и Соединенные Штаты» – это одна из лучших работ Сорокина, хоть и небольшая по объему. Тот факт, что Сорокин тут не перегибает палку, повышает ее ценность и привлекательность. Сорокин все правильно изложил. Это разумная работа, написанная в период, когда Советский Союз ассоциировался с открытой враждебностью, страхом и подозрительностью, написанная ученым (Сорокиным), которого выслали из СССР, которому едва удалось избежать казни, так как он был ярым антикоммунистом.

Я прочел эту работу в середине 1960-х, на пике холодной войны, когда СССР считался смертельным врагом. Я едва ли испытывал антироссийские чувства, но, как и все вокруг, был в курсе политических настроений. Во время визита в США в 1950-х Хрущев с широкой улыбкой стоял посреди кукурузного поля, а на следующий день эти фотографии были во всех газетах. Тогда один из наших преподавателей сказал нам: «Не позволяйте ему обмануть вас. Ему нельзя доверять».

В работе «Россия и Соединенные Штаты», которая была опубликована в 1941 году – то есть до того, как в военное время СССР стал нашим союзником – говорится, что если тщательно изучить особенности двух стран, то окажется, что между этими странами и их общественной жизнью очень много общего, благодаря чему их народы через время станут менее враждебными друг другу.

Сорокин утверждал, что две страны «обладают похожими или одинаковыми психологическими, культурными и общественными ценностями»: обширные территории со всем, что к ним прилагается (разные климатические зоны, рельеф и региональные характеристики); богатые природные и людские ресурсы; крупные культурные центры и города; тот факт, что обе страны являются мировыми державами; и так далее.

В то время это звучало парадоксально, но я чувствовал, что Сорокин был прав, а впоследствии его правоту доказала сама история, когда холодная война неожиданно прекратилась. Я всегда восхищался СССР, если не как политической единицей, то как страной с обширными территориями, как и наша страна, с многообразием национальностей и этнических групп, с богатой развивающейся культурой, начиная с Толстого и Достоевского и заканчивая Мусоргским и Чайковским. Точно как Америка. Огромная, разнообразная, всеобъемлющая, с богатой культурой и бурно развивающейся экономикой.

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Автобиография Сорокина «Долгое путешествие» была опубликована, когда я учился в колледже. Я просто обязан был ее прочитать. Я очень рад, что приобрел и прочел ее. Это правдивая и откровенная работа, речь не о признаниях, а об откровенности автора – он не боится рассказывать правду о событиях, не переживая о том, как будут восприняты те или иные комментарии или замечания о других людях. Если отвлечься от научных теорий, он был простым человеком с простыми вкусами и простыми, открытыми, почти детскими чувствами. (Он гордился своим садом в Винчестере, Массачусетс, который был удостоен наград от садоводческих сообществ; он гордился своими крестьянскими корнями.)

В автобиографии описаны различные события – времена, когда Сорокин был революционером, эмиграция, начало преподавательской карьеры в Миннесоте, его годы в Гарварде и, что интересно, его семейная жизнь, любовь к музыке (он дружил с дирижером Бостонского симфонического оркестра, Сергеем Кусевицким), любовь к свежему воздуху, дискуссии c учеными. Он был раздражен, когда, будучи профессором в отставке, подал работу в American Sociological Review и получил отказ. Он не склонен извиняться за свои взгляды, которые часто идут вразрез с преобладающими научными и интеллектуальными настроениями. Книга получилось интересной, скучной ее точно не назовешь.

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Я просмотрел, но так и не прочел с должным вниманием, как бы того хотел, «Социальную и культурную мобильность» и «Социологию революции». В «Социологии революции», написанной Сорокиным в начале 1920-х, когда он был беженцем в Чехословакии, автор утверждает, что все революции являются катастрофами в действии, которые приводят к высвобождению мощных разрушительных сил вместо улучшения ситуации в обществе. «Общество, которое никогда не знает, как жить», — пишет Сорокин, — «которое неспособно провести адекватные реформы, а вместо этого бросается в объятия революции, должно заплатить за свои грехи смертью существенного количества людей». Это характерное для Сорокина высказывание. Он не любил сухих выводов или туманных высказываний. (Примечание: со времени написания этой статьи я прочитал «Социология революции». Это замечательная работа, которая, несмотря на несколько «старомодную» стипендию, не устарела и не стала менее действительной, несмотря на то, что была опубликована почти сто лет назад ». )

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Однажды в воскресенье в середине 1970-х я зашел в книжный магазин в Нижнем Манхеттене и обнаружил там уцененный экземпляр книги Сорокина, которая была опубликована посмертно университетским издательством — “Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs” («Голод как фактор, влияющий на поведение людей»). Т. Линн Смит, в прошлом коллега и друг Сорокина, подготовил книгу к печати вместе с вдовой Сорокина, Еленой Петровной Сорокиной, переводчиком. В книге размещены замечательные фото Сорокина и его семьи из коллекции его жены. Это захватывающая книга.

Сорокин написал «Голод как фактор, влияющий на поведение людей» во время голода в России в 1919-1921 гг., пока он все еще был в России. Книга написана страдающим от голода и холода ученым в разгар голода, который, по его мнению, начался из-за революции, к которой он относился крайне враждебно. Сорокин был выслан из Советского Союза в 1922 году и сумел вывезти доказательства, которые лежали без дела до 1972 года, когда его жена Елена начала их переводить [a]. (http://www.sociosite.net/sociologists/sorokin_pitirim.php)

«Голод как фактор: влияние голода на поведение людей, социальную организацию жизнЬ» (его оригинальное русское название) это потрясающая книга, не только из-за обстоятельств, в которых она была написана, но и частично из-за сделанных выводов. Сорокин, который на тот момент был профессором Ленинградского университета, написал эту работу во время голода в России в условиях строгой секретности. Книга заканчивается выводами Сорокина, которые можно считать универсальными: если пищи недостаточно, правительственный контроль и репрессии увеличиваются. Сорокин, известный своей любовью к цветистым фразам, завершает работу словами «Caveat consules!» (консулы, будьте бдительны).

Книга стала для меня откровением. Я неоднократно приходил к выводу, что зачастую ранние работы писателей являются одними из лучших их работ. И это конечно же касается работ Сорокина. Здесь, в одной из его первых книг, мы видим его в первоначальном виде — когда он был менее нравоучительным и менее склонным к высокопарному стилю, к стилю великого ученого — это его лучшее состояние. Это провокационная, оригинальная и новаторская работа, выводы которой можно экстраполировать и применить к разным правительствам и экономическим условиям. Главная мысль Сорокина изложена на предпоследней странице:

Ceteris paribus, по мере повышения благосостояния страны и ликвидации голода, при средней дифференциации собственности, принудительный государственный контроль ослабевает независимо от типа власти и формы государственности, и наоборот.

Иными словами, наблюдается обратная зависимость между дефицитом или изобилием пищи, степенью личных свобод и их нехваткой. Посмотрите на Соединенные Штаты, где пищи всегда достаточно, условия голода никогда не возникали, а личных свобод больше, чем где бы то ни было.

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Я также прочел книгу «Американская сексуальная революция», еще в колледже, которая оказалась безнадежно устаревшей. Но Сорокин хотя бы был достаточно смел, чтобы коснуться этой темы.

 

– Роджер У. Смит

   Февраль 2017 г.

 

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Приложение: Сорокин использовал те же идеи в своей конструктивной работе Голод как Фактор (переведён его женой на английский язык и опубликован посмертно в соединённых штатах в 1975 году как Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs) в написанной им статье озаглавленной “Обеднение и расширение государственного контроля” которая была опубликована В Американском журнале социологии в 1926 году (Американский журнал социологии 32, 2, сентябрь 1926 года) вскоре после того как Сорокин прибыл в Соединённые Штаты и был назначен профессором в университете Миннесоты.

В статье, описаны примеры из различных исторических периодов и цивилизаций, Сорокин использует острые идеи широко применимостью о государственным контролем, примечая,что, когда огромный разрыв между относительно экономических условий

богатых и бедных и когда не хватает еды, государственный контроль и рост репресий.

Эта статья размещена ниже как загружаемый файл PDF.

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смотрите также

Primitive A. Sorokin, autobiographical (from “Sociology of My Mental Life”)

Pitirim A. Sorokin, autobiographical (from “Sociology of My Mental Life”)

 

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Добавление: Обратите внимание, что у меня есть много статей о Питириме А. Сорокине и некоторых статьях Сорокина, которые я бы хотел поделиться. Мой адрес электронной почты доступен в разделе «About» этого сайта.

Большинство статей на английском языке.

– Роджер У. Смит

 

sorokin-impoverishment-the-expansion-of-governmental-control1

Roger W. Smith, “my treasured books”

 

An acquaintance asked me the other day what were some of my favorite, most treasured books. This spurred me on to make an “inventory,” as it were.

What follows is by no means a complete list, but, for my own sake, as a follow up to my friend’s query, I took a look at my bookshelves.

 

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Alexander Gilchrist, “Life of William Blake”; 2 volumes (1880). My parents bought me a beautiful reprint edition of this work as a birthday present in 1972. It cost $35 then, which seemed expensive.

Adrian Van Sinderen, “Blake: The Mystic Genius” (1949). My friend John Ferris bought this book in a used bookstore in the 1960’s. I had a keen desire to own my own copy, but could never find one. Then, a few years ago, I finally found an inexpensive copy in the Strand Bookstore.

Blake, “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” (Orion Press) with Blake’s original illustrations (plates). This is a gorgeous edition; the printing and colors are fantastic. It doesn’t seem to be available anymore. I bought it in 1968, just published, in a bookstore in Copley Square for $18. That seemed expensive then.

Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” A beautiful illustrated edition with introduction and commentary by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, published by Oxford University Press; purchased at the Strand Bookstore for $15.00.

Blake, “Poetical Sketches.” A slender facsimile edition, published in 1927, in good condition. I bought it for $7.50.

“William Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet” by Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Orion Press, 1964); priced at $15.00.

“William Blake’s Illustrations to the Grave.” A fragile oversized paperback which I bought in the 1970’s that I have had trouble finding shelf space for and which I am almost afraid to handle. It was not expensive and has marvelous monochrome illustrations.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “Innocence and Experience.” Criticism on William Blake, published in the 1960’s; one of the best and most interesting works of criticism I have read. I bought this book in paperback in 1968 when a senior in college. I lost it on a streetcar in Boston. I managed to find a hardcover edition in the Strand Bookstore a little while later. It cost me $3.50.

Horace Traubel, “With Walt Whitman in Camden.” I have eight of the nine volumes that exist; six of these nine volumes were published posthumously. (I have read all nine.) I believe I have one of the most complete sets that any person or institution, including libraries, has. I have been unable to find and purchase Volume 4.

Walt Whitman, the complete correspondence; seven volumes. I had a very hard time finding a couple of the earlier volumes to complete my collection, but finally succeeded in obtaining them.

“Walt Whitman’s Blue Book.” A facsimile edition of “Leaves of Grass” with Whitman’s own edits in his handwriting (with tipped in pages, very costly from a book production standpoint). This exquisite two volume book, published in the 1960’s, is very hard to find now. A priceless book with excellent commentary and textual material. On the Internet, there are a couple of editions available priced at around $300. I recently got it at the Strand Bookstore for $90, which I considered a steal.

“The Diary of Samuel Sewall.” A Capricorn Giant paperback priced at $1.95.

Herman Melville. “Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile.” Hardcover published in Boston in 1925; in excellent condition; bought used for $5.

Herman Melville. “Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile.” Paperback published by Sagamore Press in the American Century Series, with an introduction by Lewis Leary; bought used for 75 cents.

Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter”; Modern Library edition.

Theodore Dreiser, “An American Tragedy.” A first edition (two volumes) given to me by a friend whom I was visiting in Paris. The gift took me totally by surprise.

“A Sister Carrie Portfolio” by James L. W. West III (University Press of Virginia, 1985).

Floyd Dell, “Moon-Calf.” A Sagamore Press paperback in the American Century Series, published in 1957.

Walter Duranty, “The Curious Lottery and Other Tales of Russian Justice” (1929) in a reprint edition.

Langston Hughes, “The Big Sea” and “I Wonder as I Wander.” Two fine paperback editions published by Hill and Wang; priced at $12.95 and $14.00, respectively.

The complete O’Neill-O’Flaherty novels (five books) by James T Farrell, published by the University of Illinois Press in fine paperback editions.

Djuna Barnes, “Nightwood,” in hardback.

Henry Miller, “The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud”; a New Directions paperback, priced at $1.40, which I bought in the 1960’s.

Henry Miller, “Letters to Emil,” edited by George Wickes. A New Directions paperback priced at $12.95.

Alfred Perles, “My Friend Henry Miller” (1956). A rare book.

The novels of Richard Yates in fine Vintage paperback editions.

Charles Pierre, “Green Vistas” (Northpoint Press, 1981). A book of poems by a former friend who gave me two copies of the book upon publication.

Samuel Johnson, the complete essays, three volumes; published by Yale University Press.

“Johnsonian Gleanings,” 11 volumes. A collection of biographical miscellanies about Samuel Johnson. Hard to come by. I purchased it over the Internet at a very reasonable price.

Samuel Johnson, “The Lives of the Poets”; 3 volumes. I have been intending to read this work, but tried it recently and found it hard going. Still, I am very glad to own it. A new edition was published recently for something like $300. I got this edition, a very good one published in the 1960’s by Octagon Press, from the Strand Bookstore recently for around $60.

Penguin paperbacks of Shakespeare’s plays, published in the 1960’s. They cost 65 cents back then.

Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in a Folger Library edition (Washington Square Press); priced at 35 cents. I have three or four Folger Library paperbacks of Shakespeare. I treasure them, love the cover art.

Daniel Defoe, “A Journal of the Plague Year.” A Signet Classic paperback from my high school days that was priced at 50 cents.

William Wordsworth, “The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind” (text of 1805). Bought used in hardback; published by Oxford University Press.

Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield.” A nice edition with big print that was reasonably priced. I bought it in the early 1980’s in a now defunct bookstore on the Upper East Side, where I was living at the time. (I hate small print.)

Edgar Johnson, “Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph.” A two-volume biography that I bought in a Manhattan used bookstore for something like $3, in perfect condition.

Novels of George Gissing. Victorian novelist who should be better known. I have about eight or so of his novels in Harvest Press quality paperback editions which I treasure; they were hard to find and relatively expensive. I bought them one by one via the Internet.

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Treasure Island” (Everyman’s Library paperback); priced at $1.95.

D. H. Lawrence, “Sons and Lovers.” Modern Library edition from my college days.

W. Somerset Maugham, “Cakes and Ale.” A Penguin paperback priced at $9.95.

Malcolm Muggeridge, “Winter in Moscow” (1934).

“Lyrics of the French Renaissance.” A beautiful bilingual edition published by Yale University Press that I purchased recently.

George Orwell, “A Collection of Essays.” A Doubleday Anchor Book priced at $1.45. It was required in my freshman composition course.

Arthurian Legends by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Ruth Harwood Cline. From the 12th century. I have all five of the paperback books of Chrétien’s poems in Cline’s magnificent translations.

Marcel Proust, “Jean Santeuil.” A precursor novel to “Remembrance of Things Past.” I got this real nice edition (English translation) in some used bookstore in Manhattan. I haven’t read it in its entirety, but am very glad to own it.

Marcel Proust, “Pleasures and Regrets.” Picked up by me in a used bookstore.

Marcel Proust, “On Reading.”

“Platero and I.” An old battered 1960’s paperback of mine of this prose poem by the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiménez, translated by William H. and Mary M. Roberts. The best translation, I believe; hard to come by now.

Francisco Garfias, “Juan Ramon Jiménez.” A biography in Spanish. I bought it in a Latin American bookstore in Manhattan in the mid-1970’s for $2.75.

Knut Hamsun, “On Overgrown Paths.” Picked up by me in a used bookstore.

“Poems of The Elder Edda” (University of Pennsylvania Press). Old Norse poetry in splendid translations.

Tolstoy, “War and Peace,” unabridged, 4 volumes, in Russian. I bought it in The Four Continents Bookstore, a Russian bookstore on lower Fifth Avenue. At that time, Soviet books were cheap.

Tolstoy, “Resurrection.” In Russian. One of my all time favorite novels. Also bought at the Four Continents Bookstore.

Tolstoy, “Master and Man and Other Parables and Tales” (Everyman’s Library). A friend borrowed this book from me and carried it around for a few days, ruining the dust jacket, which annoyed me considerably.

“Leo Tolstoy,” introduction by Michel-R. Hofmann. An album published as a slim volume in 1969 in Geneva and reissued in English translation. My younger brother gave me the book as a gift from his personal library.

Dostoyevsky, “Poor Folk and The Gambler” (Everyman’s Library).

Dostoyevsky, “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” (Criterion Books, 1955), with a foreword by Saul Bellow. Bought at the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan for $5.00.

“Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary” (1974) by Simon Karlinsky. Bought at a discount at the Columbia University Bookstore. A book which absolutely engrossed me, both Chekhov and the editorial commentary.

Chekhov, “Late Blooming Flowers.” A novella in paperback. Made into a fine Soviet film.

Chekhov’s stories in Russian. Another cheap Soviet edition from the Four Continents Bookstore.

Pushkin, poetry in Russian. Ditto.

Walter Arndt, “Pushkin Threefold.” Published in the UK in 1972. I bought it at the Strand Bookstore for $4.95.

“Fables of Aesop,” edited by Joseph Jacobs (Mayflower Books, 1979). A little book which I bought at Scribner’s Bookstore in Manhattan for $2.98.

Peter Abelard, “The Story of My Misfortunes.” I consider myself lucky to own this fine hardcover book. I can’t recall where I bought it. It was probably at the Strand Bookstore. I first learned about Abelard in a medieval history course with the great Norman F. Cantor.

“The Gospel According to Thomas” (Harper & Row, 1959). I bought this Gnostic gospel in the Harper & Row bookstore on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street using my employee discount.

Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, D.D. “Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible.” A treasured book with color illustrations that Mrs. Shedd, my Sunday School teacher in the sixth grade, introduced me to and which I have owned since boyhood.

“Meister Eckhart.” A collection of his writings in a translation by Raymond B. Blakney in a Harper & Row paperback; sadly, not read by me yet.

“The Journal of George Fox,” edited by Rufus M. Jones. Paperback published by Friends United Press.

Albert Schweitzer, “Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography.” Paperback priced at $12.95.

Dorothy Day, “The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography.” Paperback published by Harper & Row; priced at $7.95.

Aldous Huxley, “The Perennial Philosophy.” An ink stained paperback given to me by my friend Bill Dalzell, a printer. The book, which was sort of a Bible for my friend Bill, is a compendium of excerpts from the works of mystical writers.

Walter Ciszek, S.J. with Daniel L. Flaherty, S.J. “With God in Russia.” A paperback in the Image Books series of Doubleday; priced at $2.45. This book bowled me over; I couldn’t put it down.

Jean Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew.” A hardback that I bought at Salter’s book store in the Columbia University neighborhood.

“The Hours of Etienne Chevalier” by Jean Fouquet.” A gorgeous art book. One doesn’t seem to be able to find it anymore. I bought it as a Christmas present for my mother in the early 1970’s for the price of around twelve of thirteen dollars, which seemed expensive to me then.

Halsey Stevens, “The Life and Music of Bela Bartók.” A paperback which I purchased in the 1980’s for $4.50 and enjoyed reading very much.

“Little Pictures of Japan” (1925) and “Nursery Friends From France” (1927). Two treasured children’s books, inherited from my parents’ collection; edited by Olive Beaupré Miller.

Anna Sewall, “Black Beauty.” A nice Grosset & Dunlap edition.

“Medieval History” by my former professor Norman F. Cantor.

“Feudalism” by F. L. Ganshoff. A college history book of mine; priced at $1.65.

“The Making of the Middle Ages” by R. W. Southern; priced at $1.95.

“The Carolingian Empire” by Heinrich Fichtenau; priced at $1.45.

“The Barbarian West” by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill; priced at $1.25.

“The Historian’s Craft” by Marc Bloch. An old paperback of mine, a book I have read several times and underlined profusely.

Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “The Peasants of Languedoc.” An English translation in hardback, purchased by me in the early 1980’s when I was writing an article about the author. I consider myself fortunate to possess this interesting and innovative book.

A. J. P. Taylor, “English History 1914-1945” (Oxford University Press).

Cecil Woodham-Smith, “The Great Hunger.” This book was going out of print in the late 1970’s when I was employed by Harper & Row, its U.S. publisher. An Irish-American friend had recommended it to me. We had an employee discount of fifty percent on books in the Harper & Row bookstore. I was about to buy “The Great Hunger” and went to the register to pay, but the sales lady in charge would not sell it to me. She said this was because they had only three copies left in stock. I was always casing out books in the store during lunch hours, and this woman did not seem to like me. I was very disappointed, but was able to buy the book later when it went back into print.

Francis Parkman, the complete works (13 volumes). The set was published by Little, Brown, and Company in 1903, Beautiful books in splendid condition. I bought this set at Argosy Books on East 59th Street in Manhattan. Marcia at Argosy Books, who knew I loved Parkman, made a point of contacting me about the set when it became available. The price was $200, expensive for me in the 1980’s. She lowered it to $175 because she said she wanted me to have the set.

“The Education of Henry Adams.” A Sentry Edition paperback priced at $2.45.

“The Oxford History of the American People” by Samuel Eliot Morison. Given to me as a Christmas gift by my older brother and his wife. On the inside cover, they wrote an inscription to me: “To the effervescent pedant.”

“Builders of the Bay Colony” by Samuel Eliot Morison. A beautiful paperback edition (Sentry Edition). Mine got ruined, the cover torn. I was able to obtain a replacement edition over the Internet.

Perry Miller, “Errand Into the Wilderness.” Purchased for a colonial history course that I took with David Hackett Fischer; priced at $1.60. A Harper Torchbooks paperback.

Edmund S. Morgan, “Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea.” A paperback from my college days; priced at $1.45.

Edmund S. Morgan,” The Puritan Family.” A Harper Torchbooks paperback; priced at $1.95.

David Hackett Fischer (my former history professor), “Albion’s Seed.”

David Hackett Fischer, “Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.”

Richard C. Wade, “The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis” (1959). A Phoenix Books paperback published by the University of Chicago Press which I purchased in college; priced at $2.45.

Lewis Henry Morgan, “League of the Iroquois.” First published in 1851 and republished in paperback in 1962. I consider myself very fortunate to have this book in the paperback edition, which retains the original illustrations. It was priced at $8.95.

E. Douglas Branch, “The Hunting of the Buffalo.” A Bison Book paperback published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Pitirim A. Sorokin, “A Long Journey.” Autobiography of the Russian-born Harvard sociologist who was one of my early heroes.

Pitirim A. Sorokin, “Leaves from a Russian Diary.” About Sorokin’s experiences during the Russian Revolution. A book I couldn’t put down.

Pitirim A. Sorokin, “Social and Cultural Mobility.” A big quality paperback, priced at $2.95; long out of print.

Pitirim A. Sorokin, “Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs.” A posthumously published book that is hard to find. I have never liked Barnes & Noble, but I found this book in the Barnes & Noble store on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street, priced at $10. A book I treasure.

Jane Jacobs, “The Life and Death of Great American Cities.” A Vintage Book paperback priced at $8.95.

Tété-Michel Kpomassie, “An African in Greenland” (1983). A cheap paperback edition; priced at $4.95.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, “Greenland: (Doubleday Doran & Company, 1944). Bought used by me in excellent condition for $6.

Farley Mowat, “People of the Deer.” I read this book avidly, then lent it foolishly to a woman I was trying to get to know better; she never returned it. I was able to eventually obtain a replacement copy priced at $13.95. The book is about Mowat’s experiences living with Inuit people in 1946-47.

Paul Bergman with Henry Fitts, “I Begged for Bread in Russia: An Autobiography” (1976). I found this book by serendipity in a barn like used bookstore somewhere in New England. It was priced at $1.95. The book held my interest.

Jeffrey Tayler, “Siberian Dawn: A Journey across the New Russia” (1999). A paperback priced at $16.00. One of the best travel books I have ever read.

Thomas S. Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” A paperback which I purchased in college for $1.50. Kuhn’s theories are said by some critics to have not stood the test of time.

Ralph Colp, Jr., M.D., “To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin.” I think this book is better than the sequel (see below).

Ralph Colp, Jr., M.D., “Darwin’s Illness.”

“The Fireside Book of Baseball” and “The Second Fireside Book of Baseball.” From the 1950’s; gifts from my parents. Books that I devoured in my preadolescent years.

“The Long Season” by Jim Brosnan. A book that Brosnan, a Major League pitcher, actually wrote himself. I have an old battered paperback copy from the 1960’s, which I treasure. It was priced at 50 cents.

Peter Gammons, “Beyond the Sixth Game” (1985). I finally found this book in paperback (price, $5.95) after a long hunt. It had already gone out of print, but a bookstore in Manhattan still had a copy on their shelves. It’s mainly about the Boston Red Sox, but it also provides illuminating coverage of changes that were occurring in the game in the 1980’s.

John Thorn, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game” (2011). My younger brother gave me this book as a birthday gift, lifting me out of a temporary state of depression during which I hadn’t been reading at all.

“Official Major League Fact Book, 1998 Edition.” Published by The Sporting News, this book turned out to be very useful. It is crammed with historical facts about teams and players. It was priced at $19.95.

“An Encyclopedia of World History” by William Langer. Given to me as a gift by neighbors in Canton, Massachusetts upon my graduation from high school.

“Words into Type.” The all time greatest style manual by far. Leaves “The Chicago Manual of Style” far in its rear. I bought this book in the mid-1970’s, for about twelve dollars, on the recommendation of a publishing executive, an editor at Doubleday, who was teaching an adult education course on editing which I took at Hunter College. It is an indispensable book.

William Zinsser, “On Writing Well,” Second Edition. I wrote advertising copy for this book while working at Harper & Row, Publishers in the 1970’s.

Bill Walsh, “Lapsing into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print — and How to Avoid Them.” A very cleverly written style guide by the Copy Desk Chief on the Washington Post Business Desk. My older brother, who was living in a Washington suburb, gave me the book as a gift. Otherwise, I would have never heard of it.

“Webster’s New World Dictionary.” The best, in my opinion. I have used it long (since the late 1960’s) and have purchased several editions, with previous ones becoming worn out from use. With it, one does not need an unabridged dictionary.

“Webster’s Biographical Dictionary.” Given to me as a going away present by my boss, a dean at Columbia University.

“Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary.”

“The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary.”

The Learner’s Russian-English and English-Russian Dictionaries (two volumes in paperback; MIT Press). Purchased at the Columbia University Bookstore.

Amsco’s French Dictionary. An inexpensive paperback dictionary for use in schools that I have found very useful and that has become worn from use. I have found that, for my purposes, it supersedes other French-English, English-French dictionaries that I have owned or consulted in the past.

Mario Pei, “The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages.” Published in 1976.

“Soviet Prison Camp Speech.” A bilingual glossary of Russian words and phrases, many obscene, used in novels such as those of Solzhenitsyn. I purchased this unusual book at the Strand Bookstore. It’s a fun book to browse.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   February 2016

“My Early Reading”

 

My mother always loved to read and had great taste in literature.

She told me that she read avidly as a child. She was a voracious reader.

She loved Little Women, a classic and a real girl’s book. She was very affected by the scene where the girl character Beth dies.

Another book that my mother particularly liked when she was growing up was The Swiss Family Robinson. It’s a story about a shipwrecked family on an island that has to start life all over again. It was first published in German in 1812 and was inspired by Robinson Crusoe.

I believe that my mother also loved Heidi.

 

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My mother’s all time favorite novel, she told me, was All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. I have the book but have never gotten around to reading it myself. I did skim a copy which my mother had. There was a striking sex scene a couple of pages long that was not that explicit but which I found interesting at the time when I read it. In it, a woman goes upstairs in a house and initiates sex with a man. She says to him, ‘I came up.” He has trouble getting her dress off, unloosening the hooks.

There was good literature on my mother and father’s bookshelf in the living room, most of it my mother’s. There were also excellent art history books that my mother had.

One of my mother’s books was a paperback anthology entitled New World Writing, a sort of literary magazine in book form. It was a compilation of short pieces representing the best new literature from the previous calendar year. I used to think, what is that book about? It was of interest to my mother.

One book on my parents’ bookshelf was the Modern Library edition of War and Peace in the translation by Constance Garnett. My father told me that he had read it in its entirety during a summer which he and my mother spent at Lake George in the 1940’s.

There was another book I recall on the living room bookshelf, a collection of short stories by Erskine Caldwell, a Southern writer who wrote about plain, simple people. He had a very simple, down to earth style. I read one of the stories, “A Swell-Looking Girl.” To put it succinctly, it shocked me (which does not mean that I thought it was necessarily a bad piece of fiction).

It’s a very simple story about a young man in a town somewhere in the South who has just gotten married. He is very proud of his young bride and wants to show her off to his male neighbors. So he has her come out on the porch and then (eventually) lifts up her dress. She is nude underneath and completely exposed. The men all say “that sure is some swell looking girl” and gradually leave. That’s the whole story.

The story seemed remarkable to me because of the thought of complete female nudity in the open. It was kind of understated the way it was written, but very daring.

Another book on my parents’ bookshelf was James Joyce’s Ulysses, in the Modern Library edition. I was intrigued by it without reading it (which would have been quite difficult for me then; it still is now). I asked my mother and father about it once at the dinner table. I doubt they had read much of it, but they did explain to me the use by Joyce of stream of consciousness. This interested, intrigued me very much.

Later, when I was in high school, my church youth group, Liberal Religious Youth (LRY), had a conference in which one of the workshops was on sexuality. In the flyer for the conference, in the place where there would be a description of the workshop, instead of a description of the workshop per se, they simply quoted the famous concluding words of Ulysses:

…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

This caused quite a stir. Some adults were alarmed. They already thought that these LRY conferences, with adolescents staying together away from home at a conference site with little or no supervision, were a de facto invitation to licentiousness.

My reaction to the Ulysses quote in the flyer was that this was powerful writing of a high order that impressed me. It did not arouse prurient feelings in me.

 

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There was a book on child development on their (Mom and Dad’s) bookshelf by an eminent child psychologist, I think it was Gesell.

I enjoyed skimming it. I liked to see what was expected of normal development in my age group. In the various chapters, there would be various lists, for example, common activities for a given age group.

When I was age 12, I looked at the appropriate chapter and noted an item: For boys that age, a common activity was playing baseball with oneself. I had been doing precisely that. At that age, I used to go into our front yard with a plastic bat and whiffle ball and hit the ball, tossing it out of my hand. I had made up a fantasy team with a fantasy lineup and I would announce — I can’t recall whether it was out loud or as a silent sort of interior monologue — the progress of the “game” as I took my swings. As noted, I had made up a fantasy team, but I think it included myself as one of the players. But I didn’t want to inflate my “role.” I pretended I was a shortstop with modest but decent power and a fair batting average.

 

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In my late high school years, I read Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller in a recently published Grove Press paperback with a bright red cover — the obscenity ban had just been lifted by the courts — which I found in my father’s room. I got interested in the book and eventually took it to my bedroom across the hall. I kept it for weeks. My father eventually noticed this and commented on it, but he did not insist on my returning the book.

The reason I kept the book in my room is that I liked Henry Miller. At first, I noticed the sexy parts. There were lots of them; they were quite explicit and erotic. They were well written, amusing, and fun. Soon I got caught up in the whole book and in Miller’s narrative style and I was no longer interested in the sexy parts alone. And, I enjoyed the sex scenes on two levels, for their explicit erotic content and for the good, zesty writing.

Tropic of Capricorn is part of a trilogy that also includes Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring. I have never read Black Spring, which features surrealistic writing. I have read goodly portions of Tropic of Cancer but never finished it.

Cancer is better known than Capricorn, but I prefer Tropic of Capricorn. It is a basically autobiographical novel taking you from a point where Miller is in New York working for a telegraph company modeled on Western Union (where Miller actually worked) to the end of the book, where Miller, who has become liberated, gives up the conventional life and leaves for Paris. The book has an irresistible narrative flow and momentum.

I kept reading Miller and spent a great deal of time reading him in my senior year in college, neglecting my studies, and then continued to read him avidly for another year or so. I read the first two books of the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, Sexus and  Plexus, and enjoyed them greatly.

Some critics thought these were disappointing books, poorly written and a big comedown from the Tropics. One of these critics was Miller’s (and  Anaïs Nin’s) friend Lawrence Durrell. But, as I have said, I liked them. There were plenty of rollicking sex scenes and lots of colorful characters drawn from Miller’s own life. I think Miller helped (note that I say helped) to liberate me sexually and give me a more healthy appreciation of sexuality. It was eroticism plus damned good writing.

I went on to read other works of Miller that did not have sexual content (including nonfiction) and got a real feeling for his range and scope (and an appreciation for his intellect, to an extent).

In the second semester of my senior year, I was shopping around to take some independent study English courses. (I needed some extra courses to graduate.) You had to get a professor to accept you and approve the course. I took Readings in D. H. Lawrence, a horrible course with a Professor Swiggart, and Readings in Henry Miller with Professor Sacvan Berkovitch.

Sacvan Berkovitch was a young, brilliant, up and coming, chain smoking American Studies professor who later migrated to Harvard. I had taken a survey course in American lit with him which I don’t recall much of. I do remember that we read Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. We were assigned The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. It was long and I couldn’t bring myself to read it.

Anyway, to get back to the Readings in Henry Miller course, two of my roommates at Brandeis decided that they wanted to take the course too. We had exactly one meeting with Professor Berkovitch, who was a nice guy, near the end of the semester, and that was the course. He could see from the discussion that we had some knowledge of Miller’s development and were seriously interested in him, and he said we could forgo writing a paper, which, per the norm, was required in independent study courses. He gave all three of us a grade of B.

I have a whole collection of books by and about Miller (some of them rare) and some by and about his literary circle, but find it hard now to get back into him. I recently tried to read Crazy Cock, one of his early trial novels, but gave up after a few pages.

Another erotic book that I eventually became acquainted with was Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I knew of the book but hadn’t read it until my senior year in high school. That year I attended a Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) conference in some nearby town in Massachusetts and was staying over the weekend in someone’s house. There was a paperback copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover in my room and, during downtime on a Sunday morning, I read some of it.

I grew to like and admire D. H. Lawrence, but I like several of his other novels a lot more than Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Nevertheless, when I first read it (parts of it, that is, the “good parts”), I was favorably impressed. It was my first exposure to Lawrence. And, some of the sexual language and sexual descriptions were new to me. It gave me a desire for sex and got me thinking about it in more explicit terms. Yet, I knew it was not just a “dirty book.”

 

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Some comments about children’s and young adult literature, from my experience.

My exposure to such literature was through my mother. She had such good taste and read to me a lot. She chose splendid books for us. It was such a pleasure to be read to (in bed) by her because she enjoyed it so much herself, and, of course, my Mom was so warm and nurturing anyway.

How did she find the time to read to me? (It was always to me alone.)

One of our first books was Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne. When The House at Pooh Corner, a sequel, came out, my mom was delighted and read that to me too. How I loved the nonsense rhymes of Pooh, the idiosyncracies of characters like Piglet and Eyore, and funny touches like the character who had a sign on his door, “knock if an answer is required, ring if an answer is not required.” My mother and I used to laugh out loud. I had such a warm and fuzzy feeling when she was reading to me.

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We had several wonderful books compiled by the children’s book editor Olive Beaupré Miller. These included a multi volume set, My Book House, and the book Nursery Friends from France. I especially liked the latter book, which my mother took great pleasure in reading to us from. It had wonderful color illustrations. It was a compilation of songs, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales.

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“Nursery Friends from France”

We had The Arabian Nights in a nice edition (which I still have). I particularly liked the story of Aladdin and his magic lamp.

In the second or third grade, I decided I wanted to read a real book. My parents had one on their bookshelf: The Flying Carpet by Richard Haliburton. It was a popular book by an aviator who flew around the world in the 1930’s. I “read” the whole book through, every page, but I did not (was incapable) understand it. But I was very proud to say that I had “read” a book.

There was a novel about gypsies that I read at that time. All throughout, I didn’t know what the word “gypsies” meant and couldn’t pronounce it.

The Book of Knowledge was an excellent encyclopedia for children. My father and mother bought a complete set from an encyclopedia salesman in around 1953. They were excited when the books arrived and I recall them opening the boxes. The encyclopedia had the usual articles and also literature. There was a story in it, “The Selfish Giant” by Oscar Wilde, that I loved. It made such an impression on me. It was so touching.

When I was around eight years old, I asked my father to explain baseball to me. He said, well, we have this new encyclopedia, that’s what we bought it for, so let’s do it the proper way. He turned to the article on baseball in The Book of Knowledge and began to explain the game to me. I recall that were diagrams showing the layout of the field and the positions. He might have explained the principle behind a force play, to give an example.

It was in the Agassiz School in Cambridge that I really began to read for myself, a lot. I loved being able to do it.

We were encouraged to read. In the front of the room, there was some kind of display on the top of the wall in colored paper which involved Indian headdresses and feathers. Kids’ names were on each headdress and you got another feather each time you completed a book. I was the leader. Most of the books I read, as I recall, were in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. They were popular biographies written especially for children that focused on the formative childhood years of the subjects. I loved those books. I recall reading the ones about Davy Crockett, Meriwether Lewis, Johnny Wanamaker, Lou Gehrig, and Babe Ruth, among others. I remember anecdotes about Lou Gehrig growing up in Yorkville in Manhattan and fighting a neighborhood bully and about Babe Ruth (called George as a youth) attending the Christian Brothers school where Brother Matthias encouraged him in baseball; I seem to recall that Ruth as a a schoolboy had the difficult task of playing catcher as a lefthander for a spell.

At a fairly early age, I read the classic Black Beauty (originally published in 1877) by Anna Sewell. This book made a very strong impression me. Not long ago, as an adult, I purchased it as an audiobook and “read” it again. It is very well written.

The story is told in the first person by the horse, Black Beauty, who is the narrator. The novel recounts the story of Black Beauty’s life as it is experienced under a succession of different owners, or “masters.” Some of the owners are cruel.

All I recall from reading the book as a child, the impression the book made on me then was that Black Beauty’s life was one of unremitting misery: an unending progression from one cruel master to another, with the course of the horse’s life leading to an inevitable decline. This characterization is true of a lot of the plot, but not all of it, as it turns out. When I first read the book, though I was greatly impressed by it, it seemed to me unbearably sad and gloomy. That it undeniably is, in places, in the sections where the horse is overworked and mistreated. But why did this impression predominate with me? I think because that view of Black Beauty’s life jibed with my view of own life as a sad one in which I was often mistreated. The scenes in the book of this nature were the ones that stuck in my mind.

Much to my surprise, I discovered, when I listened to the audiobook later, as an adult, that the novel actually ends happily, with Black Beauty in good circumstances, and that in other sections of the book, Black Beauty does have good masters (in contrast to many sections of the book in which the horse is cruelly mistreated).

I started visiting the Cambridge Public Library children’s room when I was very young. My mother and father were very liberal about giving us independence and let me walk there myself after a certain age. It was sort of a long walk. I loved being able to find and take out my own books.

At the library at around this time (fifth grade), I borrowed a science fiction book the title of which I do not remember. The story was about people who were involved in time travel. There were two main parts to the book. In the first, the main character or characters traveled back in time to the Stone Age. They encountered two hostile groups, the Cro-Magnons and the Neandertals. The time traveler(s) were befriended by the wise Cro-Magnons, who helped them to escape perils. In the second part of the book, the time traveler(s) went forward in time, in a rocket ship, overcoming things like aging with the aid of Einsteinian physics. I was totally engrossed in this young adult novel.

I also read a Tarzan book by Edgar Rice Burroughs (probably Tarzan and the City of Gold) — I think it was in the sixth grade. It involved a tribe of African warrior women who took men (or threatened to) as prisoners in their fortress. There was something titillating about this to me. Imagine being in the hands and under the power of an exotic woman!

There was a popular, respected series of history books for young readers, the Landmark Books. In the sixth grade, I read the one on Benjamin Franklin and loved it. Around that time, the animated Disney film Ben and Me, which I liked, was popular.

In the sixth grade, I read my first classic work of fiction, Oliver Twist. I can date this because I recall we were still living in Cambridge at the time. I don’t believe I finished it.

There is a key section in the novel where Oliver Twist, who had been forced to join the arch villain Fagin and his gang of boy pickpockets, escapes. He is taken in in a house where he is comfortable and protected. But then he looks out the window one day and there is Fagin peering in at him. Fagin has found out where Oliver is and gets him back. This scene really scared me.

Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, is a wonderful novel by James Otis. I read it when I was around 11 or 12. Toby runs away to join the circus. At the end of the book, his pet monkey, Mr. Stubbs, dies. It was such an incredibly sad scene. How it moved me!

Around this time (sixth grade), I had thoughts about becoming a forest ranger. I was a fan of Smokey the Bear. I think, in retrospect, that I may have been attracted to the career of forest ranger because I was a bit of a loner and the idea of a career with a lot of solitude appealed to me. Anyway, my parents gave me as a gift a young adult book about forest ranger careers.

 

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Also at this time, when we were still living in Cambridge, my parents gave me as a gift The Fireside Book of Baseball, an anthology, and later they gave me The Second Fireside Book of Baseball. I still have these books and treasure them.

These two anthologies were full of great baseball writing, from journalism to fiction. There was work by outstanding sportswriters, like W. C. Heinz’s “The Strange Career of Pistol Pete,” about Dodger outfielder Pete Reiser whose brilliant career ended abruptly due to injuries. There was a spellbinding story by Zane Grey, “The Redheaded Outfield,” which is lyrical and poetic.

There were wonderful photographs. One, for example, showed second basemen Bobby Avila and Red Schoendienst completing  double plays. Scheondienst is leaping over the runner at second base and leaning on the runner’s shoulders, draped over him, as he makes the throw to first. The photo made such an impression on me that I tried to reenact the play with a friend.

Bobby Avila doubleplay

Red Schoendienst doubleplay.jpg

There were great editorial cartoons. One, for example, by Willard Mullin of the New York World-Telegram, was about the “phantom double play.” There was a depiction of an infielder pirouetting around second base like a ballet dancer while making the throw to first and neglecting to put his foot on the bag. The caption read, “The double play is a thing of real beauty. …  Let’s not cheapen it with the phantom phonies.” See my post at

the phantom double play

I spent hours with the Fireside books and derived great pleasure from them.

When I was about 11, I started reading young adult sports fiction, mostly about baseball, though I do remember reading one about sandlot football players. The books would frequently have a moral. For example, I read one which concludes with the protagonist, in a key game, admitting to the umpire, who had called him safe, that he was really out. The protagonist gains in moral stature.

Around this time, I read a series of baseball books for young adults by Duane Decker, the Blue Sox series, about a fictional professional baseball team.

 

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I also read the Black Stallion books by Walter Farley and enjoyed them very much.

When I was around 12, we had a dog, Missy, a shepherd collie who had puppies and who died suddenly and tragically, devastating me; I was so devoted to her.

Missy ca. 1958

Missy

There was an excellent series of factual, how to books for young adults published by Random House, the All-About Books. I read the one on dogs, avidly and studiously. The different sections (topics) would always have a subsection: if you have a dog in the city. I wondered what that would be like.

There was a lot of material, as would be expected, on how to care for your dog. There was also a lot of information about the different breeds. I became expert at identifying them.

 

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Some additional items from my childhood and young adult reading.

“Little Black Sambo.” This is story which we took delight in that my Mom would read to us:

The Story of Little Black Sambo is a children’s book written and illustrated by Helen Bannerman, and first published by Grant Richards [who, by the way, was an editor for Theodore Dreiser] in October 1899 as one in a series of small-format books called The Dumpy Books for Children. The story was a children’s favorite for more than half a century though criticism began as early as 1932. The word sambo was deemed a racial slur in some countries and the illustrations considered reminiscent of “darky iconography.” Both text and illustrations have undergone considerable revision since. (Wikipedia)

The Story of Little Black Sambo is a simple, illustrated children’s story about a young Indian boy who outsmarts four tigers that threaten to eat him. After Sambo saves himself by giving each tiger an article of his gaudy outfit, the tigers argue among themselves over which of them is the grandest. Eventually, the tigers chase each other around a tree so fast that they simply blur into butter, which Sambo takes home and uses on 169 pancakes that his mother, Black Mumbo, makes for him. (from a plot summary on another website)

I recall there was something about pancakes. My mother liked pancakes. She often made them for us.

Uncle Wiggily was a series of children’s books by Howard R. Garris. My mom introduced us to them. I loved them.

Uncle Wiggily is an elderly, avuncular rabbit who wears spectacles, and there are a lot of other animal characters. The books are lighthearted and fun. The color illustrations were superb.

Make Way for Ducklings is a children’s picture book written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey. It was my  mother (you guessed it) who introduced us to the book. The story is about a duck family led by a mother duck that walks around Boston. They wind up at the Boston Common and ride on the swan boats. The plot is simple and charming; the black and white illustrations are superb (very realistic but simple and just right for children). The book won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for McCloskey’s illustrations.

The book was excellent in every respect, but what made it particularly enjoyable was that it was set in Boston and ends with the ducklings on the Boston Common. I used to love to go to the Boston Common and loved the swan boats.

Babar the Elephant by Jean de Brunhoff. My mother purchased Babar and read it to me numerous times. I was absolutely charmed by it. The color illustrations were wonderful. My Mom loved Babar too, naturally.

Dr. Seuss. These books were a kind of late discovery in my elementary school years. My mother introduced me to them, I believe. The ones I liked were The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Scrambled Eggs Super! Many of his most famous classics hadn’t come out yet.

 

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Some of my other favorite boyhood reading.

The short story “Alibi Ike” by Ring Lardner. It was in the Fireside Book of Baseball, which I have discussed above.

“Alibi Ike” is a gem of a story. I believe it is one of the best short stories ever written. It is told in the first person by an illiterate baseball player, one of Alibi Ike’s teammates. (Ring Lardner was a sports columnist.) The tone of the story is pitch perfect, and it has an irresistible narrative flow. It ends with the memorable words (spoken by Alibi Ike) “they claim it helps a cold.” (One has to read the story to know why this is a perfect ending.)

When I was a sophomore in high school, I wrote a short story that I modeled closely on “Alibi Ike,” writing in the same run-on narrative style. It was about a one armed pitcher. Our teacher let me read part of it to the class. They liked it.

Also in the anthology The Fireside Book of Baseball there was an excerpt from Mark Harris’s novel The Southpaw. It’s a baseball novel, written, as is “Alibi Ike,” in the first person. The narrator, Henry Wiggen, is a star rookie pitcher for the New York Mammoths, a team modeled on the Yankees. The narrative style, the prose, the rhythm and pacing are, again, infectious. Harris invents a whole team, and in an appendix there is a roster. There is a lot of humor. The first baseman on the fictional team, the Mammoths, is Sid Goldman (modeled on Hank Greenberg?), who is Jewish. The main character, Henry Wiggen, gets invited to the Goldman family home in the Bronx for dinner. He eats strange (for him) Jewish food such as what he calls “filter fish.”

There are two or three sequels that Harris wrote to The Southpaw. Recently, I tried to read one or two, but didn’t find them nearly as good.

 

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A final comment about reading. It goes without saying how pleasurable and profitable it can be. How you can do it anytime, anywhere at little expense. (I think that books at current prices are still a great bargain.) How great it is to curl up with a book and how it is something you can always resort to when you are lonely or can’t sleep.

I think that to love reading, you have to begin by doing it because of intrinsic interest in the topic and because you are anticipating pleasure, not because you regard it as a duty. You should read whatever you like to; it could be books about sports, entertainment figures, lowbrow fiction, whatever you really and truly want to read.

Whenever (and this comment pertains mainly to classics) you are restricted to encountering good books only as school assignments, when that’s the only place where you encounter them, the game is lost. If you think that classic books are those that you are required to analyze and write essay exam questions on, and nothing more, you will probably not enjoy them in later life. My counsel to all readers, especially young ones, is read whatever you want to read, as much as you can. Seek a level where you have a genuine interest and read at that level. An interest in the best books will often follow.

I am very appreciative that my parents established a sound foundation for enjoyment of reading. They communicated it naturally, like one might convey to one’s offspring an enthusiasm for sports. Reading was seldom a chore for me, and only then, infrequently, from assignments in school. Good literature was something I came to appreciate naturally, while at the same time feeling I could read whatever I liked. I was able to develop my own interests this way, like reading baseball books, for example. I developed highbrow tastes gradually, without being aware that I was doing so.

 

— Roger W. Smith,

   August 2015

 

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addendum

Not that I’m a literary snob, mind you. I also read all of Harold Robbins’s trashy novels in junior high, much to the furrowed brow of my mother. One night, while I was reading “The Carpetbaggers” by flashlight under my covers, I overheard her say to my father: “Should we be letting her read those books?”

To my everlasting gratitude, he replied: “I don’t care what she reads as long as she’s reading.” Hurrah! Quite a concession from a man whose own father was an English professor who recited Beowulf (though surely not all 3,182 alliterative lines) in Old English on Christmas Eve. Mind you I wasn’t reading Robbins for school, nor did my extracurricular reading habits preclude my teacher-assigned readings. But we all drift toward what we like.

— “Don’t cancel Shakespeare,” By Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post, February 16, 2021