Type Writer
To the Editor:
In her letter to the editor (June 27), inspired by a review of Danielle Dreilinger’s “The Secret History of Home Economics,” Jane Feder relates how as an eighth grader she regretted being automatically assigned to a sewing class while boys were placed in “shop” class.
I grew up in Long Beach, N.Y., where Feder now lives. In our high school, boys took shop and girls typing. My father advised me to transfer. “You will never be a carpenter,” he said, but typing was a valuable skill to acquire (especially for someone with indecipherable handwriting — just ask my own students). I did manage to switch and learned more of practical use in typing than any other class. And who could object to being the only boy in a class of 30?
Eric Foner
New York
The writer is the author of “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.”
Church of the Enlightenment
To the Editor:
Toward the end of Emily Bazelon’s review (June 20) of George Packer’s “Last Best Hope” and Jonathan Rauch’s “The Constitution of Knowledge,” she writes, “I also wanted Rauch and Packer to consider why the Enlightenment figures and values they love don’t speak to everyone.”
If there is one statement that might summarize the fundamental conflict that has torn apart the United States, I’d say hers comes pretty close. And that is the reason I no longer read books like Packer’s and Rauch’s. They all preach to the choir while the people who need to be reached remain outside the church of the Enlightenment.
Seventy-four million Americans voted for Donald Trump last November. To the vast majority of them, Enlightenment values mean literally nothing. If we, collectively, on the Enlightenment side cannot find a strategy for engaging and convincing all of those Trump voters of the value of the scientific method, of critical thinking, then we should stop wasting one another’s time by writing endless books and articles to flatter one another’s educated egos and stroke one another’s intellectual vanity and just go watch TV.
Arthur Moss
Wilmington, Del.
Past Additions
To the Editor:
I was surprised and disappointed that Jonathan Lee’s essay on the renaissance in historical fiction (June 20) made no mention of Patrick O’Brian’s now-revered and loved Aubrey-Maturin series. Set during the Napoleonic wars, these 20 novels about a gregarious British naval officer who is extremely competent at sea but a naïve and bumbling aristocrat on land, and his naval surgeon who also is a clandestine intelligence officer but who can never remember starboard from port, are excellent examples of historical fiction by a writer who can stand next to all the marvelous authors mentioned in Lee’s essay.
The O’Brian books make one feel the roll and pitch of the frigate and the roar of the “great guns,” and also the loneliness and despair of sitting for days in a damp and smelly French prison or the boredom of stodgy British culture and class. But great historical fiction also must reveal the humanity of friendship, hatred, suspicion, love and more, all of which O’Brian demonstrates with exquisite writing.
William F. Causey
Washington
♦
To the Editor:
To the many recent works of historical fiction Jonathan Lee mentions in his essay, I’d like to add Jess Walter’s wonderful “The Cold Millions.”
Set in 1909 in the hard-edge mining and logging town of Spokane, Wash., Walter’s historically accurate novel depicts the Industrial Workers of the World, then known as the Wobblies, and its fiery union organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, later a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and a member of the Communist Party of the United States, along with a host of well-drawn, captivating fictional characters. With a plot that surges ahead, “The Cold Millions” takes the reader to an urgent but forgotten time that is not dissimilar to our own.
Jeff Zilka
Santa Fe, N.M.
A Better World
To the Editor:
In her Inside the List column (June 27), Elisabeth Egan describes Ashley C. Ford’s serendipitous discovery of the poignant epigraph that she ultimately used in her new book, “Somebody’s Daughter.” The lines are haunting, and remind me of another not-to-be-missed preliminary page in a book — the dedication from Edward P. Jones’s grand Pulitzer-winning novel “The Known World.” He dedicated the book to his brother and their mother, who, he says, “could have done much more in a better world.” Talk about setting a tone.
Joan DeNatale Green
West Hartford, Conn.
