{"id":573892337,"date":"2020-07-02T21:53:53","date_gmt":"2020-07-03T01:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573892337"},"modified":"2020-07-04T19:42:03","modified_gmt":"2020-07-04T23:42:03","slug":"things-i-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2020\/07\/02\/things-i-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I read"},"content":{"rendered":"

I subscribe to Bookbub<\/a>, a service that sends me emails about books I might like. You sign up, pick your genres, and they send you daily links to Kindle books onsale. I’ve gotten some decent books off the list. Certainly each of them have been worth the money I’ve paid. All of the books range from $.99 to $2.99. And aside from the algorithm sometimes wandering around, it’s been a great service. I tell all of the readers I know about it. No one seems as excited by it as I do, which is fine, but it is a mystery. <\/p>\n

Two years ago I got an offer for a complete set of James MacGregor Burns’ three-volume masterpiece, “The American Experiment.” It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Club award. It was 4,000 pages of reading. It was on sale for $2.99. <\/p>\n

The modern world is weird.<\/p>\n

I didn’t buy it, but as I type this, I regret that. I do see a lot of books come back around so if that series shows up again, I’ll jump on it. Though, honestly, that feels more like a bookshelf book than a Kindle book. <\/p>\n

Anyway, I generally read the Kindle books at night, which makes it slow going. I stay up until I’m exhausted, then get ready for bed and then read myself to sleep. So it’s a few pages here, a few pages there. Meaning it took a while for me to finish this book.<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Wrapped it up last night. Coolidge<\/a> tells you a lot about the former president you didn’t know, because you don’t know a lot about Coolidge. That’s a product of the man and our educational system, I guess. But here you get a lot of his economic politics, which makes sense given the author. It’s also a complimentary book, perhaps just a tiny bit fawning, which makes sense given that Amity Shlaes is also chair of the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. <\/p>\n

I’m sure it glosses over some of the contemporary criticism. Teapot Dome is in there, and sure, that’s Harding, but it resonated over Coolidge’s administration, but we don’t get what was surely the real heft of it. And perhaps there are other things, too. Which, hey, to a degree that’s fine. I paid $2.14 after tax and it isn’t an exhaustive biography or the most authoritative scholarship, but it’s a decent enough primer. I’d like to find out about the man as anything and there are parts of his life where you’re put in the room. <\/p>\n

I love this part. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone — the vagabonds, they called themselves — have made the pilgrimage to Vermont to see Coolidge before the reelection in 1924. There was the need to give a gift.<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Love that line. It’s so New England. Shopworn and perfect.<\/p>\n

Coolidge, who was so often a man of few words, probably didn’t say anything like that. Maybe it’s all Shlaes, but the ethos and pathos there say so much. I should make a present-tense version of that and brand it into things I make. <\/p>\n

I found photographs<\/a> of the event<\/a>. But then I found this:<\/p>\n