Toddler Literacy

An article from the UK Times, July 24, 2008, Authors Unite Against Drive for Toddler Literacy by Nicola Woolcock.

As the research increasingly seems to indicate that much of a child's future literacy, academic and economic success are determined by the values and behaviors they absorb in the first five years of life before they even arrive in school, the capacity of government to intervene successfully becomes much more challenging. Even in a country such as the UK, it is interesting to see the response to some of the initial efforts along this path.

The circumstance of Ulysses S. Grants' autobiography

Quoted from Nicholas A. Basbanes in his Every Book Its Reader, pages 144-145

. . . Ulysses S. Grant, whose Personal Memoirs (1885) are by common consent far and away the best, distinctive for their candor, honesty and incisive thought. "Although frequently urged by friends to write my memoirs," Grant wrote in his preface, "I had determined never to do so, nor to write anything for publication," and then explained why he changed his mind:

At the age of nearly sixty-two I received an injury from a fall, which confined me closely to the house while it did not apparently affect my general health. This made study a pleasant pastime. Shortly after, the rascality of a business partner developed itself by the announcement of failure. This was followed soon after by universal depression of all securities, which seemed to threaten the extinction of a good part of the income still retained, and for which I am indebted to the kindly acts of friends. At this juncture the editor of the Century Magazine asked me to write a few articles for him. I consented for the money it gave me; for at that moment I was living upon borrowed money. The work I found congenial and I determined to continue it. The event is an important one for me, good or evil; I hope for the former.

The editor and publisher of the memoirs was Mark Twain, whose selfless dedication to Grant and his welfare was extraordinary. Suffering grievously from throat cancer, Grant toiled on the book for eleven months, turning out in some instances ten thousand words in a single day, a level of production that amazed everyone who read his copy. On July 19, 1885, Grant dictated the final words, his voice barely a whisper. A few hours after declaring he had finished, Grant wrote a letter to John Hancock Douglas, the doctor who had been treating him through the ordeal, declaring his readiness to die. "I first wanted so many days to work on my book so the authorship would be clearly mine," he announced with obvious relief. Four days later, he died; published posthumously, Personal Memoirs sold 300,000 copies in less than two years.

Biblio-Presidents

Most important personal library - Thomas Jefferson's personal collection of 6,500 books which became the founding collection for the Library of Congress.

Fastest presidential reader - Jimmy Carter at 2,000 words per minute.

Largest personal collection of books - Probably Franklin Roosevelt with 15,000 volumes.

Most select personal collection - Probably Herbert Hoover with 1,000 original editions of major works from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, all of them collector's items.

Founder of the White House Library - Millard Fillmore, who, when taking up residence after his election, discovered that there were no books at all in the White House, not even a dictionary or Bible.

Correlation between Bibliophilia and Presidential Excellence* - 100% correlation for the top ten presidents (Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theordore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Eisenhower). Only two of the lowest ten rated presidents, Fillmore and Buchanan, were bibliophiles. The others making up the lowest rated ten were Tyler, Taylor, Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Arthur, Harding, Coolidge and Grant.

Presidential Authors - Presidents that wrote books that were not about themselves. Includes at least Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, John Kennedy, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Jimmy Carter, Richard M. Nixon, and Woodrow Wilson

Number of presidents to have authored an autobiography - Thirteen

Most touching autobiography - Ulysses S. Grant (see Thing-Finder post)

Most prolific presidential author - Theodore Roosevelt who authored twenty-six books.

Most prepared presidential reader - Perhaps Theodore Roosevelt who carried a portable library with him on all his journeys.

Bibliophiles in the White House - Per Harold Evans based on book collections and reading habbits as gleaned from biographies of all the Presidents through to Bill Clinton. Those that rated as bibliophiles (22 out of 42) were:

George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Millard Fillmore
James Buchanan
Abraham Lincoln
Rutherford Hayes
James Garfield
Theodore Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Herbert Hoover
Franklin Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Dwight Eisenhower
John Kennedy
Richard Nixon
Jimmy Carter
Bill Clinton

* Presidential Excellence based on a survey by the Siena Research Institute's survey of academic historians and political scientists.

Culled from the essay Paving the Way by Nicholas A. Basbanes in his Every Book Its Reader, and from an essay by Harold Evans in the New York Times, January 14, 2001, "White House Book Club."

Enduring Works

"The Aeneid is a cautionary tale. It is one we need to read today," Fagles said, amplifying his oft-stated conviction that readers of every generation need enduring works from the distant past available to them in their own idiom, freshly imbued with new vitality and insight. The Aeneid, in particular, he stressed, "speaks of the terrible price of victory in war, for Virgil knew that victory is finally impossible, that it always lies out of reach. He saw the unforeseen aftermath, the way war could go all wrong, whether from poor planning or because of the gods on high. He knew the sheer accumulation of death, the destruction, the pain we inflict when we use force to create empire. Even though in Virgil, as in Homer, you find great reservoirs of memory. You find the restorative power of love set against a world of violence. There is still an overriding sadness in the poem. There are countless losses. War rages on too long. The majority of books in the Aeneid end in death. Aeneas reaches out to the ghosts of those he loved, always beyond his grasp."


Quoted by Nicholas A. Basbanes in his Every Book Its Reader, page 155.

Translations

"A translation, if it is a really serious translation, becomes a new work of art in its own right, because it is a transplant in many ways." Robert Fagle

Quoted by Nicholas A. Basbanes in his Every Book Its Reader, page 152.

Blind trails

There is an update on recent research on the Antikythera Mechanism, an Ancient Greek "computer" for calculating calendrical and astronomical events. History is full of these blind trails where a technology was developed, sometimes to a surprising level of sophistication, and then, for unknown reasons, it peters out and is abandoned. The Chinese with their massive ocean-going junks in the Middle Ages is one example but somewhat explicable. More mysteriously (and much earlier), they developed the capability of producing steel which they did for a couple of hundred years before losing the technology completely.

As mysteriously, the ancient Aztecs had the concept of the wheel but used it only for children's toys and never developed it for transportation.

Mysteries of history.

Pliny - <em>nullum esse librum tam malum ut non ex aliqua parte prodesset</em>

No book so bad but some part may be of use. (nullum esse librum tam malum ut non ex aliqua parte prodesset)

Pliny the Younger, Epistles 3