The March 2007 Meeting

Our book for this meeting (Sunday, March 4) will be Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Feel free to add comments here as you read, especially if you can't make the meeting itself.

The October meeting

Our book for this meeting was Richard Zacks's The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines and the Secret Mission of 1805.

Here are the key issues we discussed:

• What is Zacks’s writing style? Sense of humor? Does this undermine the scholarly nature of the book?
• View of Eaton? Is he a tragic figure? A hero? Are his problems only of his own making? Would he have made it past the desert trek from Egypt to Derne without the stubbornness?
• What does Zacks think of Eaton? Is he objective enough?
• View of Jefferson? Of Tobias Lear? Of Yussef? Of Hamet?
• How much does this book fit into the larger trend of "humanizing" the Founding Fathers?
• What did you think of the use of extended excerpts (or complete) primary sources?
• What impression does this book leave of Tripoli and the other Barbary nations in North Africa?
• Of slavery and prisoners’ experiences there?
• What is Zacks’s view of Islamic culture? [Use of “Moslem” as term?]
• View of Capt. Bainbridge? [Isn’t this all his fault?]
• Sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the new American Nation? Federalists and Republicans?
• Why wasn’t Lear censured or condemned for his secret treaty about Hamet’s family? For his immense spending?
• We all caught ourselves thinking at some point that Zacks should have written a better ending for this historical event....
  
• Why did the Acknowledgements have the tone that they did?
• As one person pointed out, “I think the lyrics should be re-written. ‘From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores and walls of DERNE’ I have to say I was EXTREMELY disappointed to learn that they never actually landed at Tripoli!”
• Epilogue and Bin Laden? -- Are these reasonable connections? Is there something to be learned from comparing this mission to later covert missions (377-378)?
• Does Zacks have an overt modern political agenda?
  
• Overall view of the book? Success?

Whether you were at our meeting or not, please feel free to comment on what you thought of the book.

Thanks!

The first post -- The UMW Book Club goes online!

A number of alums of Mary Washington's History and American Studies Program have been meeting to discuss books we've read and picked together. This blog will be a place to continue those conversations and to allow other alums to participate in these discussions, even if they're far away from Fredericksburg.