Robert W. Stock's 3 favorite reads in 2023

One of the major missions assigned our governments, national and local, is to keep us in line, on the straight and narrow; but who keeps tabs on the governments? The courts, of course, and the press – especially the investigative reporters. They hold the feet of mayors and presidents to the fire. For many years, Seymour Hersh has been the most celebrated and contentious of foot holders. 

In his book, Reporting, Hersh tells the delicious back stories of some of his many scoops, including: The government was developing chemical and biological weapons while denying it. U.S. troops murdered 109 civilians in the Vietnam village of My Lai. Iraqi prisoners were being tortured and sexually abused in secret U.S. interrogation centers.

For me, as a journalist myself, the book was like catnip. Through the pages of this book march the military and civilian leaders of the nation, determined to keep Hersh from learning about their errors and misbehavior. Against all this power stands Hersh: brash, unkempt, arrogant, and enormously efficient, persistent, inventive, and intrepid.  

Trying to find Lt. William L. Calley, Jr., who presided over the My Lai horror, Hersh copied an upside-down document on a lawyer’s desk…marched into a prison in Fort Benning, demanding in a “brassy voice” that Calley be produced…won a foot race with a sergeant who wanted to detain him for asking questions about Calley.  

Hersh tells his stories in matter-of-fact prose, with a touch of wit and more than a touch of anger over the machinations of Nixon, Kissinger, Cheney, and so many other major figures.

We learn how the editors of The New Yorker and The New York Times responded to government pressure to restrain Hersh, and how they dealt with their my-way-or-the-highway reporter. We also learn about stories Hersh never found enough evidence to print, including a scheme to put America in charge of the whole Middle East. 

Reporter is a great introduction to the secretive, competitive, high-stakes world of the investigative reporter.      

I came to The Comfort of Crows with the expectation that it would be well written. I had read Margaret Renkl’s columns in The New York Times.

I stayed with the book in awe of the author’s graceful, evocative language, yes, but also of her remarkable ability to share her imaginative, nourishing vision of the natural world and her place in it.  

As the title suggests, the book covers a single year, season by season, in and around Renkl’s house in Tennessee. It starts in winter, and that’s when we learn about crows, whom she loves because they are “kindred creatures.” They slide down snow-covered roofs on flat objects they find. They live in families, create tools, and when they quarrel, they make up. 

Spring arrives. The songbirds, she writes, “have registered the mild light, and their courtship season has begun.” But three weeks of Covid have left Renkl exhausted and hopelessly scrolling through the terrible news bulletins on her computer: “I began to think that the fever in my body had somehow leached into the world, burning it into unrecognizability.”

She steps outside and remembers “how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me, too.”

In these pages, Renkl engages in “a raging internal debate.” Will she or won’t she countermand nature. The red wasps are decimating the black swallowtail caterpillars; only three remain on her parsley. Renkl knows it’s almost always a mistake to interfere with natural systems. On the other hand, human fingerprints are so universal, she argues, that natural systems are no longer natural.

She lifts the three caterpillars on their leaves and carries them into her house and safety. In time, the butterflies emerge, and Renkl recalls releasing one of them to fly over the roof and into the sky. “This one caterpillar,” she writes. “This one butterfly.”

This is a delightful book, to be read all at once or sampled over time as one would a rare vintage.

I bought Shakespeare in a Divided America in the misguided belief that the author was the son of an old friend and colleague. The other attraction was Shakespeare himself: My mother was a high school English teacher, and the words of the Bard were a lingua franca at our dinner table. The book did not disappoint! 

In a series of chapters that carry the reader from the 1830s to the 2020s, Shapiro shows how Shakespeare’s plays have been entwined with the politics and culture of the nation on subjects ranging from race to manifest destiny, from immigration to same sex love.

The author is a professor of English at Columbia University who has written award-winning books about Shakespeare. What he offers here is an exciting intellectual journey. Drawing from original sources, he connects the dots to show how Othello was used by John Quincy Adams to support his opposition to miscegenation.

Abraham Lincoln’s attachment to "Macbeth" served him as solace while "Julius Caesar" provided Lincoln’s assassin with pretext. In 1916 the semi-human character Caliban, from "The Tempest," became a poster boy for a campaign to stop the influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

In the book, Shakespeare’s plays inspire discussions of major trends in American life, but Shapiro also pauses here and there to describe a particular circumstance in fascinating detail. His treatment of "The Taming of the Shrew," for example, leads him to a 14-page account of the making of "Kiss Me Kate," the musical, including the squabbles among its three primary creators as they struggle to understand the then-current public attitude toward marriage. 

This book was both fun to read and intellectually challenging. I greatly enjoyed the experience.