Lessons From History Biographies

There's never an "ideal" time to confront injustice--you just need to do it.      Lately I've been on a roll reading great books, but Paul Kix's new book recounting Martin Luther King's most famous protest campaign is a real page-turner, and one that feels deeply relevant in an era where people feel injustice happening on a global scale. As a man who has an interracial family, Kix tells a deeply personal story of how MLK, whose Civil Rights Movement had faltered and struggled for years to make major progress, finally awoke the conscious of America (and its ruling brothers JFK and RFK) with his Birmingham Campaign of 1963. Many of the Civil Rights Movement's most iconic moments came in the wake of Birmingham, and what was ironic about its success was that everyone told MLK it was an "ill-timed" protest--that he was better off waiting and hoping for more gradual progress.     MLK took on great personal risk when he and his fellow civil rights leade...

  Success means nothing if it’s not built to last.             It was a bit of a surreal and fascinating experience reading Colette Shade’s wonderful new book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything , as it was the first book that attempts to tell a history of the decade when I became an adult (time never stops marching on and will eventually consume us all). Shade tells the story of the famous “Aughts” through a deeply personal lens, combining her own experiences living through that decade with a deeper analysis of the trends of American culture, many of which were shaped by larger global changes that ordinary Americans were completely unaware of.             Shade’s book seems partly inspired by the wave of 2000’s nostalgia that has arrived on cue in this decade, which she compellingly argues is not so much nostalgia for “things were so much better back then!” (I was the...