Seeking a gift for the American who has everything? (And don’t so many of us.) Let me suggest two of my favorite books published in 2017: Carl Cannon’s On This Date: From the Pilgrims to Today, Discovering America One Day at a Time or the late Antonin Scalia’s Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived. Better yet, give them both as a kind of comfort and joy package for the dark winter nights ahead.
On This Day is a many-splendored delight. It instructs, inspires, and charms—often at the same time. In an age when the people with the loudest opinions often seem to know the least about American history, the Washington bureau chief and executive editor of RealClearPolitics is an unapologetic member of the David McCullough school of history. That is, he believes there’s nothing wrong with writing a work of history that’s “something someone would want to read.”
Cannon has achieved this—one date at a time—while sacrificing nothing in terms of scholarship and balance.
Along with politics and public life, On This Date covers technology, science, sports, and culture (both high and pop). Readers will learn about the Declaration of Independence and the Civil War, World War II and Watergate, but they’ll also learn about Eddie Kantor, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the March of Dimes (January 3, 1938), Jonas E. Salk (February 23, 1954), the USO (February 4, 1941) Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (January 7, 1947), and Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” (December 16, 1943).
You’ll find quotations, familiar and unfamiliar and, dare we say, fake—all explicated with the care and craft of a popular historian working at the top of his game. You’ll learn that the phrase “Follow the money” did not come from Watergate’s Deep Throat, but from screenwriter William Goldman’s All the President’s Men script. (August 13, 1974)
On This Date touches on the good, the bad, and the ugly of America’s past. Yet, when Cannon focuses on the bad and ugly—those dates when Americans and their government(s) failed to live up this special nation’s ideals—he manages to bring to life the grace notes in these tragedies.
Here is one of my favorites:
February 1, 1960 Franklin McCain was one of the “Greensboro Four.” They helped change America by engaging in a sit-it at the whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in North Carolina. Years later McCain talked about something that happened there that changed him. I’ll let Cannon tell the story:
You can read On This Date profitably in bite-sized bits—one day, one-date at time, or in bunches of dates as a traditional history. It’s a treasure either way.
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In Scalia Speaks, Edward Whelan and Christopher J. Scalia have gathered together the speeches and writings offered up when the late justice was not on the job. Oh, they include Scalia’s musings on the law, and these pieces are pure Scalia—incisive, tart, contrarian, funny, and accessible even to those unschooled in jurisprudence. For this lawyer’s money, however, it is the justice’s deathless words on life beyond the law that make Scalia Speaks so delightful.
Whether he’s addressing a graduating class, the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the National Italian American Foundation, or the National Wild Turkey Federation—or eulogizing a departed friend or speaking on a personal hero—Scalia’s words teem with grace, self-reflection, and joy. Here, in this collection, is the man in full.
He spares no one, least of all himself.
My favorites are the chapters on faith and the virtues. (Though his “Italian View of the Irish” is priceless, too.) So, in different ways, are his remarks upon the death of his long friend Al Ablondi. Scalia had not seen Ablondi regularly in recent years and his death came as a surprise—“a warning, perhaps, that good friends deserve constant attention.”
“I will miss Al Ablondi,” Scalia concluded, “and am sorry I was so poor a friend as not to say goodbye. But I have the sure hope that I will see him again where old friends will have an eternity to catch up and make amends.”
There’s also a forward by Scalia’s good friend and counterpoint on the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “If our friendship encourages others to appreciate that some very good people have ideas with which we disagree, and that, despite differences, people of goodwill can pull together for the institutions we serve and our country, I will be overjoyed, as I am confident Justice Scalia would be.”
Ginsburg’s last sentence are words for all seasons, but especially this political and holiday season. For which, Scalia Speaks and On This Date make perfect gifts.
