I fell off the wagon a couple of weeks ago, but it’s one that has nothing to do with alcohol. Earlier this year, it dawned on me for the 1,000th time how plentiful the holes are in my education, notably in the history department.
When I didn’t know exactly when the Roman Empire fell — despite devouring every episode of Rome and Spartacus — I knew drastic measures needed to be taken. As well, I have a niece currently doing a masters degree in history (her focus is studying the Royal Society’s 17th century Repository catalogue) whose vast knowledge only serves to amplify my lack of it. I’m older. I should know more than her, shouldn’t I?
And as Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (To which Kurt Vonnegut brilliantly retorted: “We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”)
To start filling in the chasms, I made a pact with myself: Out with the fiction, in with the non-fiction. I need to fill in the many gaps in my pot-holed pedagogic formation already.
It didn’t matter what kind of non-fiction it was as long as I was going to learn something, which is why I picked up Jeff Rubin’s The End of Growth, which examines how cheap oil drives economies and what will happen when that cheap oil runs out leaving no easy answers to renewing prosperity. Until this book, my main interest in global oil prices started and stopped at the gas pumps and my guilt over commuting to work in a minivan. I’d heard of crude, but I’d never heard of the term Brent crude. See why I needed to get more informed? Rubin’s fluid writing style and ease with explaining global markets and how the pain of Greece’s financial troubles eventually trickle down to my doorstep make it a must read for those wanting to understand how our dysfunctional economic world functions. It’s not pretty, but it’s important to know.
Rubin even cites the Roman Empire in Chapter 2 (Debt is Energy Intensive), noting how the ruins of Italy, which survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages and two world wars only to crumble in the 21st-century due to a lack of government funds (thanks to austerity measures) to maintain ancient monuments.
As with many books of non-fiction, however, this one sits half-finished on my night table. Rubin’s fine work has been usurped by Max I. Dimont’s 1962 book Jews, God and History, which sat on a shelf at my parents’ house after its original owner, my Auntie Erna, passed away. When I flipped through the pages and stumbled on the word Visigoths, I knew I’d found my Holy Grail so to speak— a date-laden book that would fill my historic vacuum. Dimont spans the centuries and circles the globe to tell the 4,000-year odyssey of the Jewish people from Babylonia to 1960s Israel. He obviously can’t tell the Jewish story without putting it into a wider historical context that includes pagan history from 4500 BC, Greco-Roman history, Christianity, the Islamic period and modern history. What’s not to like? And who knew “Christianity” actually existed 200 years before Jesus was on the scene? (page 133) Did that get your attention? Well, you’d better read Dimont’s book, but be prepared. It’s so loaded with information, you — if you’re short on memory like I am — will have to reread passages before the information sticks.
I had no plan to stop reading Dimont, but out of the blue an old friend called and said she wanted to give me Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom. It reminded her of me, she said. I was intrigued. I’m also a sucker for a good story and Franzen, whose earlier novel The Corrections remains one of my favourite reads of all time, was too good to pass up. I got pulled in from page one, though I am now wondering exactly what it is about Patty Berglund that reminds my friend of me? In any case, nighttime reading returned to the blissful experience I remember. My fall from the non-fiction wagon was complete, though I will dip back into Rubin’s and Dimont’s books when ignorance rears its ugly head. For now Franzen is my man. His skill at capturing contemporary life is unparalleled and merciless. And I still do learn things. It’s also summer. A person can only take so much heavy reading on hot summer nights.
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