At work, there is an Internet site where we were asked to name the books that have affected our lives. When I initially considered what books, I thought of one, two, then three, but the more I thought about the subject, the more complex it became. What about books of my childhood when I was a voracious reader? Can I estimate the effect of Freddie the Pig or Mr. Popper’s Penguins? So I found myself digging back into my past, past Oliver Twist and past A Child’s Garden of Verses. The first book of my childhood I picked was Fisherman Sims, illustrated with lovely watercolors, and which I had loved as a young child (and which I still have). Fisherman Sims was tall and thin like my grandfather, although unlike him, Sims had round apple cheeks. He lived in a small town and decided to move farther and farther out and closer to the pond where he fished, until in the winter he lived by the pond (a genuine Thoreau!) and cut a hole in the ice to catch the fish. Inevitably, he returned to the town and to the two small children who were his friends. I remember the story especially for one picture where the tall, lanky fisherman is sitting in the woods, a bird (I believe) is eating out of his hand, and other wild animals surround him. This was the
The next specific book that I remember its effect was Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels, which was read to us in the fifth grade, and to which I associate my love of travel and the exhilarating expectation of adventure in foreign lands. I still remember how he stole into
Next I would pick two series of books I read avidly as a child, the Random House Landmark history books and a series in red-orange (I believe) illustrated with silhouettes on the childhood of American heroes, of which the one I best remember told about Davy Crockett, Young Rifleman, a book I read parallel to the release of Walt Disney’s movie of which I was a great fan, even having the record of the song, which I played over and over: “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free…” Those were different times, when each morning we clapped our right hands over our hearts and pledged allegiance “to the flag of the
But it is the next book I thought of immediately (much to my initial surprise) when I first considered making my list: Black Like Me. Black Like Me described the experiences of a white man who disguised himself as an Afro-American and spent six weeks on a Greyhound bus travelling through the American South. The book conclusively portrayed the bigotries of the South, made bitterly ironic by the fact that the man being ridiculed was actually white. But, moreover, for me it displayed my father’s axiom that there are always two sides to every story – here, the false side seen by the whites and the truer side (yet still a mask) of the black man they faced. It was, of course, a paean to equality and a convincing argument that no man should be judged by the color of his skin. It was, moreover, a remarkable anthropological endeavor – j an attempt at a fully empathetic imagination, for
Alongside this book, I would place both Poverty in America and the essays of James Baldwin as conclusive for me at that period in my life. They helped form my Weltanschauung, my world view. One taught me that poverty was a social condition capable of reproducing over generations; the other gave me the voice of the outsider and enunciated the pain of the minority who suffered from prejudice.
When I was 20 and living in
Other books no doubt affected me. I often read The Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew. When I am depressed, I would read Shakespeare whose language, intelligence, and human empathy would revive my spirits. I am surprised that there are no books of poetry – perhaps I should add “The Raven,” by Poe, which I memorized in the fourth or fifth grade – or Poe’s “The Bells,” which introduced me to the musical possibilities of language. Or “The Four Quartets” by Eliot – or “Song of Myself” by Whitman, which I read one ecstatic evening.
