Book Ban or Legitimate Political Discourse?

Review by Bill Doughty––

When some parents and politicians moved to ban Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” from school curricula and libraries, it moved me to read her award-winning novel about an escaped slave family and the nearly unimaginable horrors they endured.

“Beloved” contains references to explicit sex, violent rape, child murder, and bestiality. It’s definitely not a book for very young and immature readers. Some call it a “dirty” book. Others consider it a masterpiece of American literature by a Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning author. 

The book is based loosely on a true story. According to essayist Walter Johnson, it is set in “the moment when the Indians were removed, the woodlands stripped of trees, and the Lower South put under the dominion of a single plant –– king cotton.” 

Johnson adds, “Morrison presents her readers with the terrifying excesses of violence imposed upon enslaved people.”

Essayist Tiya Miles writes, “‘Beloved’ is a spiritual and psychological drama about the lasting wounds of cruelty and the wrenching difficulty of holding together damaged selves and human relationships in the aftermath of unspeakable tragedy.”

The book depicts the depravity of slavery: “White wardens treated these black men worse than chattel, locking them up nights in wooden pens dug into a trench, forcing them to perform unwanted sex acts, humiliating them with caustic words of defilement, and working them in an unrelenting grind,” according to Miles.

In “Beloved,” Morrison describes how one chained man, Paul D, felt locked in one of those pens in a trench, along with 45 other slaves:

“A flutter of a kind, in the chest, then the shoulder blades. It felt like rippling –– gentle at first and then wild. As though the further south they led him the more his blood, frozen like an ice-on for twenty years, began thawing, breaking into pieces that, once melted, had no choice but to swirl and eddy.”

“All forty-six men woke to rifle shot. All forty-six. Three whitemen walked along the trench unlocking the doors one by one. No one stepped through. When the last lock was opened, the three returned and lifted the bars, one by one. And one by one the blackmen emerged –– promptly and without the poke of a rifle butt if they had been there more than a day; promptly with the butt if, like Paul D, they had just arrived. When all forty-six were standing in a line in the trench, another rifle shot signaled the climb out and up to the ground above, where one thousand feet of the best hand-forged chain in Georgia stretched. Each man bent and waited.  The first man picked up the end and threaded it through the loop on his leg iron. He stood up then, and, shuffling a little, brought the chain tip to the next prisoner, who did likewise. As the chain was passed on and each man stood in the other’s place, the line of men turned around, facing the boxes the had come out of. Not one spoke to the other. At least not with words.”

Morrison further paints the scene, within nature but unnatural: “Chain-up completed, they knelt down. The dew, more likely than not, was mist by then. Heavy sometimes and if the dogs were quiet and just breathing you could hear doves.”

Those who seek to ban Morrison’s book(s) and other works of art base their opinions on alleged "sexually explicit language,” "LGBTQIA+ content," "anti-police messages,” "divisive language,” and themes of race, according to the American Library Association. 

Another of Morrison’s books, “The Bluest Eye” is on the ALA’s top ten list of challenged books. So are Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” Mark Twain’s works have long been “canceled” before “cancel culture” was part of the vernacular.

Last month Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust, came under attack. And last week, a Christian pastor led a book burning in Tennessee. Books thrown into a bonfire included young adult fantasy fiction including from J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series.

Book burnings: Germany 1933 and Tennessee 2022.

‘Beloved’ Found Haiku

On my Navy Reads blog I've featured unintentional "found" haiku from Senator John McCain, President Abraham Lincoln, Coach Mike Krzyzewski, and others. I found this Toni Morrison haiku from “Beloved”:

Who would have thought that

a little old baby could

harbor so much rage

That quote is used as an epigraph to a chapter about Morrison’s novel in the funny and rewarding “25 Great Sentences: And How They Got That Way” by Geraldine Woods (Norton, 2020): Woods picks apart the words and focuses understandably on the phrase “little old baby.” The baby and its spirit is at the heart of Morrison’s magical and “impossible” realism.

After reading “Beloved,” I turned to a relatively recent book of essays edited by Davîd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard titled “Toni Morrison: Goodness and the Literary Imagination” (University of Virginia Press, 2019). The collection contains the Walter Johnson and Tiya Miles quotes at the beginning of this review.

Another “found haiku” by Toni Morrison comes from the "Goodness" collection. It is from Morrison herself, captured in her Ingersoll address of 2012, and it happens to be a pivotal point arguing against book banning and for teaching about slavery, racism, and other evils of America’s past:

Thinking about good-

ness implies, indeed requires, a view

of its opposite

The argument for studying the past while not wearing rose-colored glasses is this: confront what was wrong in order to do what is right. Reject racism, misogyny, and imperialism; embrace equality, respect, and freedom. Repel hate; stick with love.

A slave cabin in Barbour County, Alabama (LOC)

On Feeling Uncomfortable

Book-banning groups want to protect children’s self-esteem and not make them uncomfortable: White children should not be made to feel bad that their ancestors may have been oppressors, and children of color should not be made to feel like victims. Children (even, apparently college advanced-placement literature students) should be protected from what they consider obscene “dirty” books.

But, isn’t it necessary to know where the real dirt is in order to become clean?

Jonathan L. Walton explores the Morrison concept of "dirty" in his essay “Luminous Darkness.”

“…Morrison refers to the dirtying process of slavery in her novel 'Beloved.' Black Folk are dirtied, first by the racial imagination of white supremacy. Racial visions are then transformed into laws, statues, and cultural practices that dehumanize and dirty their targets. These are the conditions from which those on the underside of freedom and autonomy, and power seek to break free. These are the conditions from which Morrison seeks to reconsider goodness by reframing who and what we deem as inherently evil.”

The institution of slavery, itself, was a dirty shame. Some could argue that we didn’t start to live up to the ideals in the Constitution until the mid-1960s with the passing of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which were brought about by President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson (both U.S. Navy veterans).

      From Civil War to Civil Rights (NPS)

Parents and politicians who want to ban books say teaching about slavery will divide people along racial lines. But studying the truth of the past can show how much progress we’ve made in the past hundred years –– which can be a uniting force.

Tenured Professor of Women and Gender Studies Brittney Cooper appeared on Ari Melber’s “The Beat” on MSNBC on January 28 and spoke about slavery, book banning, and what makes people uncomfortable. She notes that black people were kidnapped and brought to America to make white  people “more comfortable.”

Brittney Cooper

Cooper says, “Sure, racism –– learning about racism –– is perhaps uncomfortable. But you know what`s more uncomfortable? Racism. Learning about slavery might be a bit uncomfortable. But you know what was more uncomfortable? Slavery.”

Fighting the Civil War to end slavery was more than uncomfortable. Marching for civil rights and voting rights was uncomfortable.

Cooper adds, “Learning that one is ignorant might be a bit uncomfortable. But you know what`s more uncomfortable, ultimately? Remaining ignorant, even as these problems continue to encroach upon our lives.” Legislating against books and learning, she says, “is nothing but a return to the very history we fought to get out of.”

Shouldn’t the freedom to read and discuss literature be protected as truly “legitimate political discourse?” Choosing to learn more about Toni Morrison and her books is especially legitimate during Black History Month.

'Tides' Turn

St. Mary's lighthouse, Whitley Bay, Northumberland.

Review by Bill Doughty

"Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean" by Jonathan White (Trinity University Press, 2017):

"Although we think of ourselves as sailing across the ocean's surface, we are also sailing down the low tide's valleys and up the high tide's mountains."

"Large or small, the tide is always on the move, swelling against one coast while shrinking from another. It never begins and never ends."

Can we fully understand the mysteries of time and tides?

Aristotle was mesmerized and "perplexed" by tides and currents. Maori of New Zealand believed a woman-god who lived on the moon caused the rise and fall of the tides. Ancient Chinese saw the Milky Way as a great waterwheel that filled the oceans, and the tides as "caused by a sea serpent slithering in and out of its cave."

For the Mayans, a giant crab stirring caused the tides. Plato believed the earth was a large animal and "the tides were the sloshing of its inner fluids."

Superstitions ruled the world before the age of enlightenment, when science began to explain some of the mysteries of the universe, including the nature of the planets and the powerful relationship between our planet and its moon.

Newton discovered the "ghostly force called gravity" as the unseen cause of the tides.

Leonardo da Vinci (and recently Adm. James Stavridis) compared the oceans to lungs, vital to life on earth.

In "Tides" Jonathan White explores the history, science and study of tides, with short detours to examine Newton's death mask, contemplate gifted Polynesian navigators, listen to acoustic resonance in the ocean, observe a coming-of-age ceremony in the Caribbean, and jump in for discussion of big-wave surfing at Mavericks, California. 

He examines treacherous tides, rapids and passages, including Vancouver's Ripple Rock, which claimed the U.S. Navy steamer Saranac in 1875. "A crewmember wrote, 'Here the contending currents take a vessel by the nose and swing her from port to starboard and from starboard to port as a terrier shakes a rat.'" Over the decades Ripple Rock killed at least 144 people, until the rock was blown up and obliterated in 1958.

Rene Descartes

The quality of White's prose and his exploration of science are a joy for readers. Books/authors in epigraphs and text include:

• John Steinbeck's "The Log from the Sea of Cortez"
• Sir Walter Scott's "Redgauntlet"
• The Bible -- story of Moses [in Bruce Parker's "The Power of the Sea"]
• James Frazer's "The Golden Bough"
• Pliny's "Natural History"
• Benjamin Franklin's observation about wind and waves
• Newton, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hugo, Bacon, Milton, Laplace, Whewel, Harris, "and scores of others" who championed science in the face of religious persecution

Some of the interesting science revealed in "Tides":

• Four zones of tidal exposure
• Grunion runs in southern California and northern Baja
• The fact that the Atlantic is tied to the moon, and the Pacific is tied to the sun (Tied tides?)
• The Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, off France's Normandy coast, with its 45-foot tidal range
• Qiantang River bore-watching in China, where the tide comes in not in six hours but in six seconds.
• One can be killed fighting a tide
• The tide always turns.
• Friction and energy run deep:

"Through friction, (the tide) loses energy – lots of it. Some is absorbed in the ocean floor as heat, but most of it exerts a torque on the earth's rotation, slowing ever so slightly the length of our days and, in turn, causing the moon to speed up and spiral away. Thus, the moon, which causes the tide, is in turn pushed away by the tide. What we witness when we sail through narrows is friction at work. Every whirlpool, every eddy, every dimple of tension is evidence of energy moving from the moon to the water and back to the moon."

White explores the potential of renewable energy and the future possibilities of tide, wind and wave energy.

The Kennedy administration examined tide energy possibilities in the early 1960s in coordination with Canada to address the energy needs of New England. 

"Harnessing the energy of the tides," Kennedy said, "is an exciting technological undertaking ... Each day, over a million kilowatts of power surge in and out of he Passamaquoddy Bay. Man needs only to exercise his engineering ingenuity to convert the ocean's surge into a great national asset."

According to White, "Kennedy's bold advocacy of tide energy ended abruptly with his assassination in November 1963, just four months after his groundbreaking speech at the White House." That speech included this insight from former naval officer President Kennedy: "The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need people who can dream of things that never were."

Does a nautilus shell transcribe the nature of tides?

White explores not only the evolution of nature as discovered by Charles Darwin, but also the nature of evolution in dynamic environments, including the early formation of life. "What if we were born in a tidepool and our attraction to the sea is a coming home."

He asks: Can evidence of the earth's rotational history be found in coral and nautilus sea creatures? Can accelerating climate change be stopped in time to prevent increasing rises in sea level?

"Sea level itself is a slippery concept – not at all easy to distill into definitive measurements or predictions. The sea, in fact, is not level. It doesn't lie flat like undisturbed water in a bathtub or pool but piles up in one place and retreats from another. The western Pacific is about three feet higher than the eastern Pacific (due to the northeast trade winds), and the eastern Pacific is ten inches higher than the Atlantic. On the U.S. Atlantic coast, sea levels slope downward from south to north by four or five inches. Different landmasses, due to variations in density and gravitational pull, force seawater this way or that. The oceans are lifted by the Himalayas and Andes and sucked downward by undersea mountain ranges. In the Pacific during El Niño years, when the trade winds relax, seawater that had been pushed westward sloshes back eastward, bringing higher ocean levels to the U.S. west coast."

Kircher's 1646 "shadowdial" shows the yin and yang of moon phases.

White takes us from Alaska and the Arctic, to India and China; from France and UK, to Suriname and Venice; and to oceans, rivers and bays, including the Bay of Fundy in Canada. 

Science and spirit: He examines how tides were described by ancient monks and scholars, including in "The Selenic Shadowdial or the Process of Lunation" from Athanasius Kircher's "Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae" (1646). And he contemplates how the tides influence biology.

The book begins and ends with what can be revealed in the life, bodies and "internal clocks" of mudshrimp, Corophium, that are the size of rice grains. These translucent organisms' lifecycles are tied to tides, as is are the lives of the sandpipers who feed on the tiny shrimp. 

Marine animals and birds aren't the only ones influenced by the tides; "More than half the world's population lives on or near the coast, and there is no coast or ocean without a tide," White writes.

"The economic and scientific, social and biological dynamics at play here are also at play for billions of people across our watery planet."

White concludes: The tide teaches. The tide vibrates. The tide lives. And the tide can kill.


The Kuna Yala people in Panama are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. (Courtesy Jonathan White)

Every Sailor a Leader, Each a Communicator

Review by Bill Doughty

Just as every Sailor is empowered and expected to be a leader, each is also a communicator, especially now in the Information Age, where the world is flatter and getting smaller and more connected.  Whether on Kindle, iPad or Nook or between hard covers and on paper, reading is a key to being better at both leading and communicating. 

In 2012 Navy Reads has offered lists of suggested reading by such notable authors and thinkers as James Hornfischer, Mary Roach, Eric Foner and Rear Adm. Kate Gregory, among others.  Today’s list comes from professors who facilitate and coach at the Center for Executive Education at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Here’s a suggested top ten reading list for leaders and communicators from Professors Gail Fann Thomas, Rebecca Weintraub, Patricia Riley and Thomas Hollihan and NPS research associate Anita Salem:

“Leading Up” by Michael Useem is a “call to action” toward macrothinking and good communication, where giving courageous advice from the bottom up can prevent problems.  This book opens with a compelling discussion of Lincoln and his generals.  It is a natural fit with “The Courageous Follower” by Ira Chaleff.

“Leading Change” by John P. Cotter, who encourages a sense of urgency, a promotion of good ideas, and a need for lifelong learning in individuals and organizations, where ideas and teams who build together as a coalition are more important than egos and uncooperative “snakes.” 

“Moneyball” by Michael Lewis, the baseball book brought to film starring Brad Pitt as Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, with Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, shows the importance of statistics and metrics used in rational thinking, communicating and decision making. 

“Talk, Inc.” by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind shows the importance for a boss to be a good listener as she or he communicates and to be willing to engage face-to-face and via social media to align the organization.

“Speed of Trust” by Stephen M. R. Covey was brought up in discussion and is on the reading lists of several top Navy commanders.  From the Speed of Trust website: “We believe that a powerful, global renaissance of trust has begun. Sparked by recent world events, business ethics, and the transparency of conversations enabled by the worldwide web, this call for a renaissance of high trust leadership is reverberating around the globe.”

“The Third Wave” by Alvin Toffler, a futurist who literally spans generations, from “Future Shock” published in 1970 to world changes he predicted in the past four decades.  Toffler reveals the value of innovation and integration.  According to the Associated Press, "Toffler has imagination and an ability to think of various future possibilities by transcending prevailing values, assumptions and myths."  

“If Mayors Ruled the World” by Benjamin R. Barber, also author of the prescient 1995 book “Jihad vs. McWorld” (another pre-2001 must-read to explain how and why we arrived at 9/11 and experienced the Arab Spring ten years later). “If Mayors Ruled the World” recognizes the importance of cities as a new paradigm in leadership, moderation and cooperation.

“Intrinsic Motivation at Work” by Kenneth W. Thomas, a book that fits in well with Covey’s “Seven Habits” and  Levitt and Dubner’s “Freakonomics,” proving that the best motivation comes from within.

“Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, is all about memes, urban legend and truth “stickiness.”  With so much information flowing and so little time to ingest and analyze, how can leaders get to the core of a message, ensure credibility and verify their message was successfully communicated and remembered?

“Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications” by Paul A. Argenti and Courtney M. Barnes is promoted as “a corporate survival guide for the Web 2.0 world.” It’s written for leaders who want to understand and engage in a rapidly networking flattened world of blogs, wikis and transparency.

The Naval Postgraduate School’s Dudley Knox library is rich with books about strategy, history, technology, science and engineering, as one would expect.   Also in the stacks, three copies of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” several copies of Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat,” Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner,” and books by Steinbeck and Eudora Welty. Students from dozens of countries, in a wide diversity of uniforms, come to read and learn and think.

Adm. (ret.) Mullen at NPS's Center for Executive Education.

According to former CNO and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. (ret.) Mike Mullen:

"The Naval Postgraduate School is a national - and international - treasure. With its rigorous curriculum, talented faculty and a diverse student body that includes students from all the U.S. armed forces, other federal agencies and more than 60 nations, NPS contributes greatly to enhanced joint, coalition and interagency effectiveness. Knowledge and imagination are the keys to dealing with the challenges of this new era, and here at NPS those keys are forged."