What are you reading now?

[Rob Wick]

After a drought in which I have been unable to focus on reading a book since March, I started reading The Fire Is Upon Us by Nicholas Buccola. It is a history of the Cambridge debate in 1965 between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on civil rights. Taking the book's title from a quote by Baldwin, Buccola spends a large amount of time on developing both Baldwin and Buckley's world view from their childhoods up to 1965, especially on civil rights. Buccola shows that Baldwin was intensely opposed to what he called "protest novels" such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he argued was written more to help whites feel better about themselves than to aid the cause of black freedom.

Buckley, on the other hand, was a patrician and deeply paternalistic (and racist) in his view of blacks and the civil rights movement. He mixed what he saw as constitutionalism and (white) authoritarianism to develop his intellectual arguments along with his deep and abiding faith in religion. Buccola shows that religion played a strong role in both Buckley and Baldwin's formation as Baldwin was a young storefront preacher and grew up the stepson of a preacher. Buckley, of course, was the young author of God and Man at Yale, which was his indictment of a university that he believed owed it to its alumni to indoctrinate their students (usually the sons of said alumni) into his view of the right way to live a moral life (overlooking the concept of academic freedom in the process). I haven't gotten to the debate yet, but so far the book in enthralling and for an academic, Buccola is a masterful storyteller.

Best
Rob