Tuesday.  Hoping for inclement weather so I can begin to work on a stack of books due to be published in April and May.

One is a story of the reign of John, Angevin king of England and why he caused his barons to threaten war unless they were given a formal agreement to share power.  We call the agreement that was negotiated on 1215 Magna Carta.  Magna Carta is the cornerstone of the foundation of representative governance Europe and America.

Two books are explications of the United States Constitution, and another is about how corporate America invented the "Christian nations."

April also is the 150th anniversary of Robert E, Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia.  That surrender effectively brought an end to the American Civil War -- a challenge to the legitimacy of the Constitution.

So this year, we celebrate the 800th anniversary of the seed that made the Constitution possible and the end of an armed insurrection which threatened the continued existence of the Constitution and the United States itself.

To use a line from one of my wife's favorite movies, "It's a helluva a day at sea, sir!"

A Celebration of Libraries

As we anticipate the beginning of 2015, I choose to reflect on an important year for Roanoke Public Libraries.  The symbol of our successful campaign to expand and improve the public libraries was the November opening of the renovated mail library in Downtown Roanoke.

As president of the Roanoke Public Library Foundation, I have a vested interest in the continued success of public libraries.  The following statements about public libraries are extracted from The Quotable Book Lover, edited by Ben Jacobs & Helena Hjalmarsson [The Library Press, 2002]:

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library.  The only entrance requirement is interest.

Lady Bird Johnson

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.

John F. Kennedy

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Thomas Carlyle

My library was dukedom enough.

Prospero

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 

Tuesday 30 DEC 2014

As this week progresses, I am working on my Magna Carta presentation.  In 2015 we will celebrate the 8000th anniversary of the original Magna Carta, the cornerstone of the foundation of representative governance.

As I prepare my presentation, I have two new resources to guide my research.  In April 2015 Basic Books will publish two books related to this important event; they are:

• King John and the Road to Magna Carta by Stephen Church, and
  
• The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic by Akhil Reed Amar

These two books will allow readers to understand the beginnings of shared decision making and the current state of that cooperative governance as practiced in the United States.

Stephen Church is a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia (East Anglia is the ancestral home of the Ramseys) and a visiting professor at the University of London.  He is the author of The Household Knights of King John.

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University.  He is the author of America's Constitution and America's Unwritten Constitution.  He has received awards from the American Bar Association and Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.

Watch The Roanoke Times "Books" page for reviews of these two books in April.

CAPTIVE PARADISE: A History of Hawai’i.  James L. Haley.  St. Martin’s Press.  405 pages. $29.99

Reviewed by: Michael L. Ramsey

President, Roanoke Public Library Foundation

(published 21 DEC 2014 in The Roanoke Times)

James Haley’s Captive Paradise is a narrative history of Hawai’i, the fiftieth member of the United States.  He follows the dramatic changes from the 1778 visit by England’s Captain Cook until it became a state in mid-twentieth century.  In that relatively short time, the island nation moved from a feudal system ruled by King Kamehameha I (The Conqueror) to a democratic society.

When Hawai’i was first visited by Captain Cook, the islanders would make lopsided trades for anything containing iron.  They had no iron on the islands, but they did have a relatively sophisticated system of government which King Kamehameha I used to consolidate the separate chieftains under his central rule.  Soon he was collecting iron, too, to manufacture cannon for his ships.

When New England’s Congregational Church sent its first company of missionaries to Hawai’i in 1820, it was the first of eight companies of American missionaries who would facilitate the rapid evolution of the indigenous leadership class by introducing them to Christianity, educating their children, and giving them a written version of their language.

It took less than a century for the inhabitants of Cook’s Sandwich Islands (named for his patron the Earl of Sandwich) to abandon their traditional feudal economy, abandon their traditional religion and create a representative government.   By 1839, King Kamehameha III issued the Declaration of Rights and soon thereafter produced a constitution that formalized the sharing of power among his former subjects.  Recognition as an independent nation soon followed.

Along the way, Hawai’ians were forced to deal with the empire-building politics of France, the on-again-off-again help from the British and the steadfast support of the United States.  Haley notes that much has been written of “…American avarice in annexing Hawai’i … much less has been written of the fact that…it was French thuggery and British vacillation that drove Hawai’i into American arms.”

Haley provides a dispassionate, although sympathetic, history of the Hawai’ian islands.  He uses the indigenous language liberally, and introduces the reader to the rich traditions that helped Hawai’ians to adapt to the changes that were often forced upon them.  They not only adapted to those changes, but also leveraged the change to their advantage.

[One word familiar to Caucasian mainlander is haoli, meaning “without breath, i.e. unable to speak the language.]

America was not always the best ally, and some Hawai’ians struggle with that today, especially the history of economic exploitation and the diluting of the native culture.  According to Haley, they “…have often struggled to maintain the spirit of aloha – the ‘face of breath’ from the ancient greeting of inclining close in greeting and sharing the air.”

Another Hawai’ian concept, according to Haley, is “…Ho’oponopono – reconciling, the making right of a bad situation…” and in that Haley sees the opportunity “…to come together earnestly and in good faith to rectify and satisfy.”

Haley’s narrative is certainly satisfying.  In addition to the rich detail about the culture and the three-dimensional portraits of historical figures, the pace is quick and conveys the rapidity with which Hawai’i became a powerful part of the Pacific.

--30--

Why I Review Books (230 over the past 12 Years)

I am a book reviewer for my local newspaper.

I am also serving my tenth year as president of The Roanoke Public Library Foundation.  Before election to that post, I served four terms as president of the Roanoke Public Library Advisory Board.

As of December 2014, I have had 230 book reviews published by The Roanoke (VA) Times.  Of those, over 60 have been used to promote subsequent paperback editions and other reviews have been used by publishers in their promotional materials.

My area of interest is American history from 1607 up to the American Civil War.  I have reviewed books about World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, but my interests and my reviews are not limited to history and war.

I read and reviewed a wonderful memoir, The Good Luck Cat, by Lissa Warren.  I have read and reviewed many fascinating about mathematics and science.  And baseball!  Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year and Verona Gomez's Lefty are two of my favorites because they capture the sport before it became a mega-corporation -- a time when boys and men played the game because they loved the game.

I do not believe that reading books will succumb to other media.  I have a Kindle Fire, and I store some reference material there, but you cannot leaf through a document the same way you can when you are ho;dog book in front of you.

A case in point is a recent project of mine -- preparing a presentation about Magna Carta as the cornerstone of the foundation of representative government.  At one session, I had six reference documents on my desk s that I could cross-reference those documents as I developed a chain of events over decades following the issuance of Magna Carta.

It would have been cumbersome to have done that with  a Kindle and a computer.

So I will continue to read and review BOOKS and post some of those reviews here.

Michael L. Ramsey