Gary Marvin Davison’s Late Spring and Summer Reading, with comments

My reading extending from late spring through summer 2023 has included, listed with comments, the following books  >>>>>

 

William Shakespeare:  The Complete Plays (New York:  Fall River Press, Compiled in 2012), 1,194 pages.

King Lear  

(Read for the fifteenth time in May as preparation for student performance at the Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet)

As You Like It

(Read for the fifth time in June as I anticipated attendance at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in July)

The Winter’s Tale

 

(Read for the third time in June as I anticipated attendance at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in July)

 

 

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Victor Luckerson Built from the Fire:  The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wallstreet;  One Hundred Years in the Neighborhood that Refused to Be Erased (New York:  Random House, 2023), 656 pages.

 

Luckerson gives copious coverage to the Greenwood Massacre of 1921, replete with interviews of those in the African American community who either experienced the Massacre themselves or who are relatives and friends of those who did.

 

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Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology:  An Introduction (West Sussex, England:  John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 479 pages.

 

McGrath provides the definitive textbook for students of theology, tracing the development of Christian thought and institutions from the first three centuries of the Common Era (A. D.) to the present.

 

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Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory:  An Introduction (New York:  New York University Press, 2023, Fourth Edition), 199 pages.

 

Delgado and Stefancic have updated  their classic introduction to Critical Race Theory, tracing the development from the 1970s the present.

 

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Michellle Alexander, The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York:  The New Press, 2020 [10^th Anniversary Edition]), 377 pages.

 

Alexander makes the case that mass incarceration due to the War on Drugs from the Reagan era forward constitutes a system of control reminiscent to those of the systems of slavery and Jim Crow.

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Isabel Wilkerson, Caste:  The Origins of Our Discontents (New York:  New York University Press, 2023), 199 pages. (New York:  Random House, 2020), 507 pages.

 

Wilkerson conceptualizes the racial hierarchy in the United States as a caste system that has been in place from the colonial era throughout all stages of the nation’s history to the present.

 

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Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York:  Random House, 2010), 199 pages. (New York:  Random House, 2020), 622 pages.

 

Wilkerson confronts her readers with the conditions of life in the Old South that led six million African Americans to leave the region for still imperfect conditions of the North.

 

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Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny:  Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York:  Tim Duggan Books/Crown Publishing, 2017), 126 pages.

 

Snyder presents a succinct account of tyranny in history and how to forestall the destruction of democracy in the United States.

 

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Thomas A. Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power:  A Political Biography (New York:  Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020), 548 pages.

 

Schwartz provides and even-handed account of the strengths and weaknesses of the character and policies of Henry Kissinger.

 

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Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York:  Twelve/New Left Books, 2002)

 

Hitchens, the leading nemesis of Kissinger, makes the case for the foreign affairs professional’s status as a war criminal who advocated policies with wanton disregard for the human cost.

 

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Walter Milton Jr. and Joel A. Freeman, Black History 365 (Arlington, Texas:  CGW365 Publishing, 2021)

 

This is a six-volume series texts for grades three (3) through eight (8), as follows >>>>>

 

 

Grade 3   >>>>>       African American Life and Culture

 

Grade 4   >>>>>       African Americans Shaping a Nation

 

Grade 5   >>>>>       African Americans and the Arts Throughout History

 

Grade 6   >>>>>       Modern Day Africa

 

Grade 7   >>>>>       Black Influence from Ancient Africa to Modern Times

 

Grade 8   >>>>>       The Black Experience in America:  Early 1600s-Late 1800s