Just pick up a book

 It has been a dreary summer in Baltimore, too damn hot to venture out of doors when it was not pouring down raining. Then a week of a vile summer cold, followed by a week of bronchitis. Thank God for books and the Enoch Pratt Free Library. 

Earlier this year I got hold of Daniel Okrent's The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. The account of the federally imposed immigration quotas of the 1920s seems like fresh reading today, with white people apprehensive of being overcome by a flood of non-white immigrants. (Take some comfort in progress: Over the past century Italians and other European immigrants got to be honorary white people.) 

Jill Lepore's The Deadline: Essays reprints 46 essays previously published in The New Yorker, each one a gem of insight and lucid writing. Once you start it, you will inevitably read it through. 

Nick Harkaway is the son of David Cornwell, whom you probably know as John le Carre. His book, Karla's Choice, slides neatly into the chronology of Le Carre's Smiley novels. If you enjoyed Tinker, Tailor and the others, you will find that Harkaway does not dishonor the tradition. 

Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power tends to play down Jefferson's inveterate duplicity as mainly a reflection of his reserved character, but he is on the mark in pointing out Jefferson's unfailing instinct to use power when it comes into his hands. And Meacham gives full credit to Jefferson's substantial accomplishments, which today we tend to overlook because his awareness of the evil of slavery did not stop him from benefiting from it. 

Rereading John Keegan's account of the Battle of Trafalgar in The Price of Admiralty, I realized that I had somehow neglected to look into Six Armies in Normandy, his account of the invasion to the liberation of Paris. We generally know it from The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, but Keegan pieces together the story from six different perspectives to give us a much fuller sense of what happened in the spring of 1944. (If you have access to A.J. Liebling's Normandy Revisited, which has been reprinted in the collection Liebling Abroad, read his account of being present at the liberation. "In the Place d'Orleans, just within the city limits, we came upon a sight unique in my experience--thousands of people, tens of thousands, all demonstrably happy. In any direction we looked, there was an unending vista of people. It was like an entry into Paradise. ...")

I'm not sure that we in the United States believe in education any longer, what with the universities ditching courses in the humanities on their headlong rush to become trade school limited to STEM and business administration. But Tara Westover's Educated, a memoir of a woman brought up in a survivalist Mormon family who, at great personal struggle, acquires for herself a college education, should remind you about the value to place on actual education rather than the simple-minded indoctrination our current masters advocate. 

Just for fun, I picked up Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. It's still hilarious.