Autumn Selections: 2 Great Books & 1 Great Opera

Several days ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed on National Public Radio by Washington DC host Michel Martin. In our conversation, we talked about politics, the literary world and a great deal about American history. As many of you may have heard, I promised to suggest unique topics that I thought would be of interest to NPR listeners who had a similar fascination with politics and history.

For those of you who are reading this today, and who are in search of books or theater works that will inspire and inform you on the American experience, I can recommend two wonderful new books and one great new opera.

The first book is Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea (Knopf), which is written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Kluger. With great detail, Kluger takes the history buff or novice through a timeline that explains how the United States acquired all 3.5 million square miles of its land. From the Louisiana Purchase negotiations with the French to the purchase of the Oregon territory from the British, Kluger lays out how each of our 50 states became a part of our great nation. I have written a much more lengthy review of this phenomenal work in an upcoming issue of the Princeton University alumni magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly, but I urge you to make this book a part of your Fall reading list if you want a great lesson in both geography and American history spanning the last 200 years.

The second book that you should consider for your Fall list is Jeffrey Toobin's new book about the Supreme Court, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Doubleday). Many of you probably enjoyed his book about the 2000 Presidential election and the court case that challenged its results, but I have been reading his work since the early 90s when he published a book about the controversial Oliver North, and then the trial of O.J. Simpson. Toobin's work appears regularly in The New Yorker. His newest book gives some interesting background on the current members of our nation's highest court, and I was most intrigued by what he says about the final months of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's service on the Court.

My final recommendation is not a book, but an opera. It may seem like an unusual medium to select when attempting to reveal a moment in American history---especially since most of our popular operas are set in Europe. But the opera, Margaret Garner, staged by the New York City Opera, and written by Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison and musician Richard Danielpour, recalls the history of slavery and race relations in the American South. Just as Morrison accomplished in her previous great works like "Song of Solomon" and "The Bluest Eye", she uses the character of Margaret Garner to demonstrate that even the least powerful individuals can find the strength to take a moral stand against the wrongs in society.

These two books and this great opera will make your Autumn quite a memorable one. Each of these works should introduce you to an important page of our nation's great history.