On the Bedside Table/In the Backpack

In the time since last I wrote about my bedside table reading, I have been all over the map here in England, traipsing to Cambridge, back to Oxford, out to a friend’s birthday in Headington, then to London for a weekend, and finally back to Oxford, where my time wanes. Soon I’ll be back in the US with the nose of my car pointed toward the Lone Star State. All of this traveling had had a deleterious effect on my ability to read a whole lot, but I have had a bit of turnover.

I am still plugging away at these books that I am reviewing and need to get more serious about those efforts. I have always had the most bizarre tendency when it comes to the written page – if a book has been assigned to me, I tend to dilly-dally, putting it off and reading anything else that falls under my nose, even if in other circumstances I would have read the assigned project anyway. Thus in the last few days I have devoted myself to finishing a novel and a work of reportage while hoisting around these review books like some sort of burden.

The novel and the reporter’s accounts are books I mentioned in the last installment – Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim and Michael Dorman’s We Shall Overcome. I very much enjoyed both, albeit for different reasons.

I finally picked up Lucky Jim on the advice of my undergraduate advisor, Charles Dew, who recommended it as the greatest satirical work on the academic world that has been written. Still being pretty new to the profession, and not wanting to miss out on any anthropological insights, I found a dog-eared copy at a used bookstore, but it took me several months to work it into my rotation, and as so often happens, several fits and starts before gathering momentum in the past week.

Lucky Jim’s protagonist is James Dixon, a history lecturer of modest talents with marginal interest at an unnamed British university. He is insecure in his standing at the university, finds most of his colleagues and superiors distasteful, and has made enemies with at least one truly loathsome sort. His love life is not exactly in proper order either. Amis makes much of the pettiness of academics and the world they inhabit. The book is entertaining and enjoyable. There are moments when it is quite funny. But I am not certain that it is quite as uproariously funny as its supporters rave. Nonetheless, as incisive social/cultural criticism, it hits more than it misses, and it has aged rather well. It is a very British novel, which gives it a specific context, but one that nonetheless speaks to a certain universality of a side of academia that is all to easy to mock.

Michael Dorman’s book is far more serious. It is an account of a year on the frontlines reporting the Civil Rights Movement in the South. At its heart sits Oxford, Mississippi and the struggle to enroll James Meredith at Ole Miss. His main chapter on the riots takes a whopping 130 pages, and he revisits the beautiful, racially torn campus in two other chapters. He also spends ample time in Clemson, South Carolina, where the university had a quiet and dignified integration when Harvey Gantt registered, and Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace, the pugnacious Governor, made his famous stand in the schoolhouse door. He takes us inside a bizarre story about the killing of a white man marching for justice in Mississippi, is present for the Birmingham Campaign and the Jackson Movement, and has an interlude with the Attorney General. We Shall Overcome provides a remarkably enduring look at the movement as it played out through the eyes of a scrupulous journalist. It is also a useful primary source for historians, chock full of anecdotes that have not since been repeated often (or as well).

Finishing these two books allowed me to add a few new ones to the rotation, and I am looking forward to getting through as much of them as possible before I fly out. They are Richard Ben Cramer’s slight What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? that stems from an article he wrote in Esquire some years back. Cramer’s What It Takes is in my opinion the finest book on American elections, he has won the Pulitzer prize, and he has given us the best unflinching biography of Joe DiMaggio.

I am sitting down with Christopher Nicholson’s Permanent Removal: Who Killed the Cradock Four? both out of interest but also professional necessity. I have a project in the works on South Africa during the 1980s and one of my main case studies was a long account on the killing of the Cradock Four. This new book from Wits University Press will be useful but, fortunately, does not make my own work redundant. Nicholson will fill in some gaps, however.

Finally, and in a similar vein, I am re-reading William Doyle’s An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 for a project upon which I have been working for most of the summer. The work has not gone along as quickly as the ambition behind it, but I hope to finish a chapter before I leave, and I wanted to give Doyle a thorough rereading as I do.

So that’s what is in my backpack and on my bedside table in the guest bedroom of my friend Roger, alongside that same issue of Men’s Health that I had just begun last week, the latest Atlantic Monthly that I have here, and a World Report on South Africa that is a supplement from a newspaper. What are you reading now?