The staff of The New York Times Book Review choose the year’s top fiction and nonfiction.
Credit…By Karan Singh
By The New York Times Books Staff
Dec. 3, 2024 (NYTimes.com)
Here they are — the 10 Best Books of 2024.
At the Book Review, we spend all year getting ready for this moment. We begin debating our annual best-of list in the spring, going to the mat for what we love. By fall, we’re preparing for rhetorical slugfests.
Ultimately, we aim to pick the books that made lasting impressions: the stories that imprinted on our hearts and psyches, the examining of lives that deepened what we thought we already knew.
July’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life? Read our review.
In Alderton’s brisk, witty novel, a 35-year-old struggling comedian in London tries to make sense of a recent breakup at the same moment when the majority of his friends seem to be pairing off for life. Cue snappy dialogue, awkward first dates and a memorable quest for a new home; toss clichéd gender roles, the traditional marriage plot and a ho-hum happily ever after. Not only does Alderton cement herself as a latter-day Nora Ephron, she also puts her own mark on the classic romantic comedy form. There are no second fiddles in “Good Material”; every character sings. And there is a deeper message, revealed in a surprise twist, having to do with independence, adventure and charting your own course. Read our review.
It takes a lot of ambition, skill and vision to reinvent one of the most iconic books in American letters, but Everett demonstrates he possesses those virtues in spades in “James.” The novel is a radical reworking of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” telling the story not from Huck’s perspective, but from the point of view of the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River: Jim (or, as he clarifies, James). From James’s eyes, we see he is no mere sidekick but rather a thinker and a writer who is code-switching as illiterate and fighting desperately for freedom. Everett’s novel is a literary hat trick — a book that highlights the horrors in American history and complicates an American classic, all while also emerging as a work of exquisite originality in its own right. Read our review.
Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering drug addict, wallows in a post-college malaise in a fictional Midwestern town. He’s working dead-end jobs and halfheartedly attending A.A., while grieving his parents’ deaths and, increasingly, fantasizing about his own. Cyrus is lost and sad, but this captivating first novel, by an author who is himself a poet, is anything but. As Akbar nudges Cyrus closer to uncovering a secret in his family’s past, he turns his protagonist’s quest for meaning — involving a road trip to New York and a revelatory encounter in the Brooklyn Museum — into an indelible affirmation of life, rife with inventive beauty, vivid characters and surprising twists of plot. Read our review.
History has long been Enrigue’s playground, and his latest novel takes readers to 16th-century Tenochtitlan, or what is now Mexico City. Hernán Cortés and his men have arrived at Moctezuma’s palace for a diplomatic — if tense and comically imbalanced — meeting of cultures and empires. In this telling, it’s Moctezuma’s people who have the upper hand, though the emperor himself is inconveniently prone to hallucinogenic reveries and domestic threats. The carnage here is devilishly brazen, the humor ample and bone-dry. Read our review.
Debreczeni, 39 when he was deported from his native Hungary to what he calls “the Land of Auschwitz,” would later memorialize the experience in a book that defies easy classification. First published in 1950, “Cold Crematorium” is a masterpiece of clinical, mordant observation. In a cattle car he watches a fellow deportee whose hand retains the gestures of a chain-smoker; newly arrived at Auschwitz, he encounters the lousy barroom piano player he avoided back home. This is more than gallows humor; it’s a stubborn fight to stay human and place the unimaginable in the context of the known. Look elsewhere for platitudes — Debreczeni witnessed, and reported, the best and worst of mankind and showed it to us to use as we will. Read our review.
Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presents a timely analysis of the situation at America’s southern border, placing the blame for today’s screaming headlines, detainee camps and unaccompanied minors firmly on post-Cold War U.S. policy. His kaleidoscopic narrative moves between the Central American insurgencies that flooded this country with refugees, and the shifting and frequently incoherent policies that worsened the fallout. We meet morally pragmatic domestic politicians, a tireless activist who’s moved from El Salvador to Chicago, Los Angeles teenagers ensnared in gang pipelines. None of it is simple; all of it has a terrible cost. Blitzer handles his vast topic with assurance and grace, never losing sight of the human element behind the global crisis. Read our review.
When the veteran literary and cultural critic came out as transgender in 2021 at the age of 66, she described in an email to her loved ones the devastating realization that her “parallel life” — the one presented to her by a “gender-swapping” app that showed her how she would have looked as a girl and then a woman at various junctures in her life — had passed her by. “Fifty years were under water, and I’d never get them back.” As she reflects on her upbringing as the “only child of isolated immigrants,” her early adulthood in 1970s New York and her career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself, Sante fearlessly documents a transformation both internal and external, one that is also a kind of homecoming. Read our review.
This elegant biography of the 40th president stands out for its deep authority and nimble style. Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan, but after a decade of interviews and research, he finds himself asking whether his onetime hero paved the way for Donald Trump, the man whose ascent to power led Boot to abandon the right. The book is a landmark work that shows how Reagan emerged from his New Deal roots to become a practiced Red baiter and racist dog whistler before settling into the role of the optimistic all-American elder statesman. “It is no exaggeration,” Boot writes, “to say that you cannot fully comprehend what happened to America in the 20th century without first understanding what happened to Ronald Reagan.” Read our review.
In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English naval officer James Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait that blends generations of scholarship with the firsthand accounts of European seafarers as well as the oral traditions of Indigenous Pacific islanders. The story begins in Britain as the last embers of the Enlightenment are going out, a time when curiosity and empathy gave way to imperial ambition and moral zeal. Between tales of adventure on the open ocean, complex depictions of Polynesian culture and colorful scenes of a subarctic frost littered with animal life, Sides expertly probes the causes of Cook’s growing anger and violence as the journey wears on and the explorer reckons with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. Read our review.
Lester Callaway Hunt, Sr. (July 8, 1892 – June 19, 1954), was an American Democratic politician from the state of Wyoming. Hunt was the first to be elected to two consecutive terms as Wyoming’s governor, serving as its 19th governor from January 4, 1943, to January 3, 1949. In 1948, he was elected by a decisive margin to the U.S. Senate, and began his term on January 3, 1949.
Hunt supported a number of federal social programs and advocated for federal support of low-cost health and dental insurance policies. He also supported a variety of programs proposed by the Eisenhower administration following the Republican landslide in the 1952 elections, including the abolition of racial segregation in the District of Columbia, and the expansion of Social Security.
An outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s anti-Communist campaign, Hunt challenged McCarthy and his senatorial allies by championing a proposed law restricting Congressional immunity and allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements. In June 1953, Hunt’s son was arrested in Washington, D.C., on charges of soliciting sex from an undercover male police officer (homosexual acts were prohibited by law at the time). Some Republican senators, including McCarthy, threatened Hunt with prosecution of his son and wide publication of the event unless he abandoned plans to run for re-election and resigned immediately, which Hunt refused to do. His son was convicted and fined on October 6, 1953. On April 15, 1954, Hunt announced his intention to run for re-election. He changed his mind, however, after McCarthy renewed the threat to use his son’s arrest against him. On June 19, Hunt died by suicide in his Senate office; his death dealt a serious blow to McCarthy’s image and was one of the factors that led to his censure by the Senate later in 1954.[1]
Early years
Lester C. Hunt was born in Isabel, Illinois on July 8, 1892, a son of William Hunt and Viola (Callaway) Hunt.[2] He was raised in Atlanta, Illinois, and graduated from Atlanta’s high school in 1912.[3][4] Hunt played semi-professional baseball in Illinois, and visited Wyoming for the first time at age 19, when he joined a team in Lander.[5]
Hunt attended Illinois Wesleyan University from 1912 to 1913, where he was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, and then worked as a railroad switchman to put himself through dental school at Saint Louis University.[6][7] After graduating with a DDS degree in 1917, he moved to Lander to establish a practice.[8] He joined the United States Army Dental Corps when the United States entered World War I, and served as a lieutenant from 1917 to 1919. After postgraduate study at Northwestern University in 1920, Hunt resumed his practice in Lander. He was president of the Wyoming State Dental Society and began his career in government when appointed as president of the Wyoming State Board of Dental Examiners, serving from 1924 to 1928.[5][9]
Political career
Wyoming
Hunt was elected in 1933 to the Wyoming House of Representatives from Fremont County.[10] He sponsored eugenics legislation that would have permitted the sterilization of inmates at Wyoming institutions if “afflicted with insanity, idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness, or epilepsy”. The legislation, though similar to that enacted in several neighboring states in the 1920s, failed, and he later stated that he regretted sponsoring it.[11] He was elected as Wyoming Secretary of State in 1934 and 1938, serving from 1935 to 1943.[12] In 1935, he commissioned muralist Allen Tupper True to design the Bucking Horse and Rider that has appeared on Wyoming license plates since 1936.[13] While serving as Secretary of State, Hunt personally claimed the copyright of the Wyoming Guidebook, a Work Projects Administration publication, after the Governor and legislature failed to act to preserve the bucking horse and rider design as the state’s intellectual property.[14] The book proved popular, and there were questions as to whether Hunt benefited personally from its sales. He was able to demonstrate that he had endorsed all quarterly royalty checks and turned them over to the state treasurer, and he transferred the copyright to the State of Wyoming in 1942.[15]
Hunt became the first person elected to two consecutive four-year terms as governor, serving from 1943 to 1949.[5] He faced hostile majorities in both houses of the legislature throughout his years as governor.[16] The principal legislative accomplishment of his first term was the enactment of a retirement system for teachers.[17] He repeatedly proposed a retirement system for state workers in his second term without success.[18] During his first term, Republican U.S. Senator Edward V. Robertson charged that the Japanese citizens interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, were leading pampered lives and hoarding supplies. The Denver Post wrote an exposé backing his complaints. Hunt dismissed that as a “political story” and said that “food stuffs cannot be brought into a city to feed 13,500 people in a wheel barrow and it would not be good business to bring it in every day.” He toured the camp and said the internees’ “living standard was, to my way of thinking, rather disgraceful.”[19] At the end of the war, he wrote to the War Relocation Authority that “We do not want a single one of these evacuees to remain in Wyoming.”[20]
When President Roosevelt issued an executive order on March 16, 1943, creating Jackson Hole National Monument, Hunt joined in mobilizing opposition and said he would use state police to remove any federal official who tried to exert authority in the Monument’s lands. Congress refused to fund the Monument until 1950, when Wyoming’s two U.S. Senators, Joseph C. O’Mahoney and Hunt, reached a compromise with the Truman administration. It merged most of the Monument’s lands into Grand Teton National Park, provided compensation for lost revenue, and protected local property owners.[21]
Hunt was a Wyoming delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1940, 1944, and 1948. He chaired the National Governors Association in 1948. His official gubernatorial portrait was painted by artist Michele Rushworth and hangs in the state capitol building in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Hunt was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948 to a term beginning January 3, 1949, defeating incumbent Republican E.V. Robertson by a comfortable margin.[22] His political positions combined fiscal conservatism and opposition to big government with support for public housing and increased federal aid to education.[23] During his tenure in the Senate, Hunt became a bitter enemy of Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and his criticism of McCarthy’s tactics marked him as a prime target in the 1954 election.[24] For example, he campaigned for a law to restrict Congressional immunity by allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements.[5] He called for reform of Senate rules: “If situations confront the Congress in which it can no longer control its members by the rules of society, justice and fair play, then Congress has, I feel, a moral obligation to take drastic steps to remedy those situations.”[5]
U.S. Senate tenure
In 1949, he recommended that the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Dental Association (ADA) consider endorsing a plan for the federal government to offer health insurance policies with low deductibles to cover “medical, surgical, hospital, laboratory, nursing and dental services.” He told an ADA convention:[25]
We cannot preserve the freedom of the practice of dentistry and medicine, we cannot keep dentistry and medicine uncontrolled and unregimented by the Federal Government, we cannot maintain our American free and independent practice in the health services by simply denouncing socialization or by a stand-pat opposition.
On June 9, 1953, Hunt’s 25-year-old son Lester Jr., known as “Buddy”, who was a student and president of the student body at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[24][a] was arrested in Washington, D.C., for soliciting sex from a male undercover police officer in Lafayette Square, just north of and adjacent to the White House property. It was his first offense, which police normally handled quietly as a matter for the offender’s family to address, but the arrest became known to Senate Republicans.[29] According to Drew Pearson‘s “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column published after Hunt’s death, Senators Styles Bridges and Herman Welker threatened that if Hunt did not immediately retire from the Senate and agree not to seek his seat in the 1954 election, they would see that his son was prosecuted and would widely publicize his son’s arrest.[30][31]
In a closely divided Senate, Hunt’s resignation would have allowed Wyoming’s Republican governor to appoint a Republican to fill the remainder of Hunt’s term and to run as an incumbent in the 1954 election, possibly affecting the balance of power in the Senate in favor of Republicans.[32] Hunt refused, and in response, Republican Senators threatened Inspector Roy Blick of the Morals Division of the Washington Police Department with the loss of his job for failing to prosecute Buddy Hunt.[30][31] Buddy Hunt was prosecuted, and Senator Hunt attended the trial. On October 7, 1953, Buddy Hunt paid a fine for soliciting a plainclothes policeman “for lewd and immoral purposes”, and on the same day, The Washington Post published the story. Buddy Hunt’s attorney was quoted in an October 8 New York Times account as saying his client preferred “to avoid any further publicity.”[33] Aside from these brief media accounts, the arrest and prosecution of Buddy Hunt was not widely publicized at the time.[34]
In December 1953, Hunt told journalist Pearson that he would not stand for re-election if the opposition used his son’s arrest against him,[30][31] fearing that the publicity would have a negative effect on his wife’s health.[35] Despite the threats of publicity from his political opponents, including a specific threat to distribute in Wyoming 25,000 leaflets about his son’s arrest,[10] Hunt did announce on April 15, 1954, that he would be a candidate for re-election.[36][37] A poll taken on April 5, 1954, gave Hunt 54.5% support, with his nearest opponent at 19.3%.[24]
In May 1954, as a member of the Senate’s “liberal bloc”, he proposed rules for Senate committees designed to eliminate some of McCarthy’s tactics.[38] Later that month, Bridges renewed his threat to publicize Hunt Jr.’s offense to Wyoming voters.[39][40] The Eisenhower administration, taking a different tack, offered Hunt a high-paying position on the U.S. Tariff Commission if he agreed never to run for the Senate again.[10] On June 8, following a medical examination at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Hunt changed his mind about running again, and wrote to the chair of the Wyoming Democratic party, citing health concerns as the reason: “I shall never again be a candidate for an elective office.”[41] He did not, however, resign from the Senate.
On June 19, 1954, Hunt shot himself at his desk in his Senate office, using a .22 caliber rifle he apparently brought from home. He was taken to Casualty Hospital, where he died a few hours later at age 61.[42][43][24]The New York Times reported that he acted “in apparent despondency over his health” and left four sealed notes.[44]
Just one day before Hunt’s suicide, McCarthy had accused an unnamed member of the Senate of “just plain wrong doing”. After Hunt’s suicide, McCarthy’s ally Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota denied that McCarthy was referring to Hunt.[44][45]
Aftermath
The day after Hunt’s suicide, Pearson published his charges about how Republican Senators had threatened Hunt, but described Hunt’s motives as complex:[30]
Two weeks ago he went to the hospital for a physical check and announced that he would not run again. It was no secret that he had been having kidney trouble for some time, but I am sure that on top of this, Lester Hunt, a much more sensitive soul than his colleagues realized, just could not bear the thought of having his son’s misfortunes become the subject of whispers in his re-election campaign.
In private, he confirmed that Hunt had no serious health problem and wrote in his diary that “Unfortunately I am afraid that the morals charge against his son and the experience Hunt suffered was the main factor.”[46][47]
Hunt was buried on June 22 in Cheyenne at Beth El Cemetery following a brief church service.[48] At the time of his death, Hunt was a major in the Army Reserve Corps.[5]
On June 24, acting Wyoming Governor C.J. Rogers appointed Republican Edward D. Crippa to fill the remainder of Hunt’s Senate term, which expired in January.[49] On July 4, the conservative Washington Times-Herald reported Buddy Hunt’s arrest and conviction from the previous year, with Hunt’s death giving the story wider circulation than it had previously received.[50][51]
On July 9, Blick signed an affidavit exonerating Bridges and Welker of pressuring him, but his decision to prosecute Buddy Hunt under circumstances which did not normally warrant prosecution remained unexplained.[52] On November 9, the Senate eulogized its members who had died recently and Bridges called Hunt “a man who demonstrated the best qualities of an American. He was loyal and he served well”.[53] Hunt’s cousin, William M. Spencer, president of the North American Car Corporation in Chicago, wrote Welker after learning he had eulogized Hunt:[54]
I was shocked when I read this. It recalled to my mind so vividly the conversation with Senator Hunt a few weeks before he died, wherein he recited in great detail the diabolical part you played following the unfortunate and widely publicized episode in which his son was involved. Senator Hunt, a close personal friend of mine, told me without reservation the details of the tactics you used in endeavoring to induce him to withdraw from the Senate, or at least not to be a candidate again. It seems apparent that you took every advantage of the misery which the poor fellow was suffering at the time in your endeavor to turn it to political advantage. Such procedure is as low a blow as could be conceived. I understood, too, from Senator Hunt, that Senator Bridges had been consulted by you and approved of your action in the matter.
Buddy Hunt later worked on the staff of Catholic Charities in Chicago and then for the Industrial Areas Foundation of Chicago. With his co-worker there, Nicholas von Hoffman, he co-authored a paper, “The Meanings of ‘Democracy’: Puerto Rican Organizations in Chicago”, that appeared in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, an academic journal of linguistics in 1956.[56] In October 2015, Buddy completed his first on-camera interview about his arrest and his father’s suicide, for the Yahoo News documentary “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays.”[57] Buddy Hunt died in Chicago on January 6, 2020, at the age of 92.[58]
Later references
Allen Drury, a journalist who covered the U.S. Senate for United Press International, used Hunt’s blackmail and suicide as the basis for his 1959 best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Advise and Consent.[59] In the novel, Senator Fred Van Ackerman from Wyoming uses a homosexual affair to blackmail Utah Senator Brigham Anderson. In 1962, the novel was made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and directed by Otto Preminger.
University of Wyoming historian T.A. Larson, author of a history of the state, wrote an account of Hunt’s suicide and submitted it to Hunt’s widow Nathelle, seeking her permission to publish it. Instead she threatened him with a lawsuit and he never published the results of his research.[10][60]
Hunt’s anti-McCarthyism and his son’s arrest appear in fictionalized form in Thomas Mallon‘s Fellow Travelers (2007), a novel that describes a young man’s introduction to hardball Washington politics in the 1950s as he discovers his gay identity.[61] It is included as well in the 2023 television miniseries based on the novel.[62]
In 2013, at a mock trial of Hunt’s Senate colleagues McCarthy, Welker, and Bridges, all three were “found guilty of a variety of charges, including blackmail and causing bodily injury”.[10] Former Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal, who played the prosecuting attorney in the Cheyenne event, said: “This particular part of Wyoming history had been swept under the rug. So I’m really delighted to participate in drawing attention to it.”[63] The event was organized to coincide with the publication of a new study of Hunt’s death, Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins by Rodger McDaniel, a Presbyterian pastor, former Wyoming legislator (1971–1981), and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1982. He used some of Larson’s research.
Every year, as the first hints of spring arrive, I hand a list of words to artist Leah Palmer Preiss (curiousartlab at gmail.com). That’s where my role ends and her magic begins.
I imagine her poring over each word, carefully measuring humor and whimsy, adding a pinch of mischief and a generous dose of playfulness to create a unique visual recipe.
By the year’s end, a digital package of five paintings arrives, each pixel brimming with magic and much more.
This week we feature those five words and the paintings. Leah’s work transforms words into visual poetry, blending charm, creativity, and boundless imagination. See her previous creations for A.Word.A.Day, here.
mimetic
PRONUNCIATION:
(mi/muh/my-MET-ik)
MEANING:
adjective: Copying the behavior, appearance, or characteristics of others.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Greek mimetikos (imitation), from mimesis, from mimeisthai (to imitate). Earliest documented use: 1632.
Historian Peter C. Mancall writes on what 17th-century religious dissenters teach us about modern-day thought police. | Cropped version of “Pilgrims Going To Church” (1867) by George Henry Boughton. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
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Efforts to ban books come and go in American life. Today, they have returned with a vengeance, with parents and school boards singling out certain works as inappropriate for modern students. Many of these deal with human sexuality; violence, including sexual assault; or our nation’s tragic history of race-based hatred.
Critics interpret these recent book ban efforts as signs of American Puritanism, harkening back to the evergreen stereotype of dour souls trudging to church through 17th-century New England woods. The link between book banning and Puritans is not accidental. In the 1630s, Puritans in England managed to temporarily halt the publication of the Anglican lawyer and exiled colonist Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, which criticized the Pilgrims and the Puritans for rituals that violated Church of England norms, and for mistreatment of Native peoples.
Morton ultimately managed to get his book published in Amsterdam. Still, for this suppression—the first explicit banning of a book about North America—along with their moralizing, Puritans came to be known as self-righteous, anti-sex scolds. A New Yorker cartoon in November 2020 captured prevailing stereotypes about both the Puritans and their fellow New England-settling Protestants, the Pilgrims. Four men on a “Hot Pilgrims 1620 Calendar” bore revealing labels: “Stern!! Remote!! Pious!! Humorless!!” But the sexless Puritan stereotype does not conform to historical reality—and may take away from the real lesson of book bans, old and new.
Puritans had a lot of sex—and not just to make their large families of six-plus children. Local court records suggest that some, if not many, Puritans engaged in pre-marital fornication and adultery—activities that ran afoul of contemporary religious values.
In early New England, where church and state were closely connected, deviant behavior could have dire consequences. In 1642, a New Plymouth colony servant named Thomas Granger was accused of “buggery” with “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” The Pilgrims needed to know which individual beasts had partnered with Granger because the Book of Leviticus forbade eating such polluted creatures. Authorities paraded the animals in front of Granger, who identified his victims. Colonial leaders killed the animals first. Then they executed Granger, a boy of 16 or 17.
Did the Pilgrims kill Granger because he violated their notions about sex? Yes—and no. His behavior was unacceptable to authorities because the Bible had decreed bestiality a sin punishable by death. But his punishment tells us less about his sexual activity than about the general climate of fear that pervaded Puritan communities.
These religious dissenters were anxious about what they saw as unsettling changes in England and potential threats in America. At home, the Puritans and Pilgrims had opposed more vigorous enforcement of ritual practices embraced by the Church of England, such as kneeling to take communion and wearing a wedding ring. Punishments for objecting to these Catholic-leaning practices could include confiscation of one’s property, imprisonment, slicing off an ear, or having one’s head branded with “S. S.”—for “sower of sedition.” In New England, the Puritans and Pilgrims felt an all-encompassing sense of danger. Puritans were convinced that the Devil lurked in New England’s forests, eager to invade human bodies. Colonists often saw signs of witchcraft in the appearance and behavior of elderly and poor women, whom they then prosecuted and sometimes killed. They also condemned Quakers, who believed that God spoke to them directly—a notion the Puritans rejected. In 1659, Massachusetts authorities banished three Quakers from Boston for what the governor called their “presumptuousness and incorrigible contempt of authority”—and executed them upon their return.
The sexless Puritan stereotype does not conform to historical reality—and may take away from the real lesson of book bans, old and new.
The Pilgrims and Puritans felt many other threats from the Indigenous peoples whose lands they had invaded. New Plymouth Governor William Bradford wrote about “savage barbarians” roaming New England forests, “readier to fill [colonists’] sides full of arrows than otherwise.” Fears of Native peoples eventually grew so intense that the Pilgrims and Puritans launched a brutal assault on the Pequots, their neighbors to the southwest, in 1637. Bradford and others celebrated burning a Pequot town and shooting those who fled the flames—killing between 400 and 700 Indigenous people in a single night. Afterward, colonists rounded up the survivors and sold many into slavery.
Such actions—executions, witch trials, mass slaughters—sprang not from being dour or sexless. Those violent actions emanated from a climate of fear, which led Puritans to see every threat as a test of their faith and every response an attempt to please a stern God.
By the end of the 17th century, Puritanism was in retreat—a religious faith unable to adapt to changing circumstances. The original Puritans’ children and grandchildren began to bristle, often unwilling to be cross-examined by church elders about their faith. Many colonists re-examined their religious practices more deeply after local authorities killed 20 accused witches in Salem, Massachusetts, most of them women, in 1692. Within a generation, countless New England colonists embraced the religious revival of the Great Awakening—an effort to bring more people into the church—over excluding or punishing those with different views.
Not long afterward, at the time of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson crafted the Statute for Religious Freedom for the state of Virginia. He wrote that no civil authority should tell people what to think or what faith to embrace. Jefferson believed that the free exchange of ideas would improve society. His views on that topic had little in common with his European contemporaries, who often believed church and state should be linked—or with those of the Puritans.
Modern-day book banners who target “sexually explicit” material lack Jefferson’s faith that Americans can judge books for themselves. The New York Times recently reported that during the 2023-2024 school year, book banners identified 4,231 unique titles they wanted removed from school or public libraries. They succeeded in removing more than 10,000 books—including Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human—from shelves.
Censors seem to believe that taking a book off a library’s shelf or moving it to an adult section may somehow make things they fear—sex and violence, perhaps, but also diversity and freedom of thought—go away. If they were really afraid of sex and violence, perhaps they would try to ban William Bradford’s history of Plymouth, with its stories of bestiality and mass slaughter. Of course, if they ban that book, we would lose one of the few sources that described an early feast that became a national holiday. When critics refer to book banners as being Puritanical, they are right. Those who hope to stifle thought act out of fear—just like many of the religious migrants to early New England. Like the Puritans, today’s censors too may be destined for failure and ridicule.
Dana R. Fisher | TED Countdown: Overcoming Dilemmas in the Green Transition
• October 2024
Dana R. Fisher calls herself an “apocalyptic optimist” based on her research as a sociologist of large social movements. Her studies suggest that ever-increasing climate disasters will get people out in the streets demanding the action we need. She breaks down how to cultivate resilience to catastrophe in yourself and your community — and how to rally for change in the face of seemingly intractable problems.
The counting exercise introduced in November measured the frequency of our efforts while disregarding duration. Each time we remembered our work we ‘clicked’ on our counter regardless of whether our effort was short-lived or lasting. We will consider this distinction as we enter December, because the difference between a momentary realization of being asleep and remaining awake is like the difference between a spark and a flame. One is merely potential, the other actualization. The ambitious goals that inspire inner farming cannot be achieved through short-lived sparks. They require durable efforts sustained from one moment to the next.
The main challenge in sustaining prolonged effort is the uncontrolled nature of our functions. They live in constant argument with each other—even arguing within themselves—generating distracting impulses that impede our consistency. How can we keep a steady line of effort when our movements are restless, our thoughts race associatively and uncontrollably, and our emotions swing erratically with no obvious cause or relation to outward stimuli? Throughout the year, we represented these impulses as our yields: physical impulses were represented by hay, thoughts by wheat, and emotions by grapes. We drew an analogy between farming these yields and disciplining our three functions. Now, at the end of our cycle, having the results of the year’s harvests laid out on the farmer’s table implies the balanced and controlled government of our functions. Each has taken its rightful place without overstepping its bounds. They no longer argue among themselves, as they are accustomed to doing by nature, but have become subject to the farmer’s will.
How unified would we become if we could override our body’s appetite for comfort, restrain its urge for movement, and keep it attuned to the demands of the present? How focused would we become if we could restrict our mind’s wandering and entertain only what we need to think about? How empowered would we become if we could resist self-pity, self-deprecation, frustration – all negativity, and approach our responsibilities with interest and enthusiasm? Such an alignment of our functions would represent true Will, one that keeps its course without deviation until it accomplishes its aim. Little could stand in its way.
Each method presented throughout the year has aimed to develop this unity and focus. It is an ability that can only arise through slow and patient work. It can be pushed further by attempting more lasting efforts, even for short durations of time. For example, I can attempt to maintain the sense of ‘I am’ as separate from my movements, thoughts, and emotions for one minute. A mere minute seems a humble effort, but it represents a significant advance over a momentary spark, provided the practitioner attempts it properly. A common misunderstanding is that we should quiet our functions—sit still for a minute and resist moving, thinking, or feeling—but this will not teach self-government. We must learn to observe our functions as they manifest and introduce subtle corrections that maintain our self-observation. Only in this way will we align our functions with our will so that they can become of service to a higher aim.
In due course, a higher aim will emerge from our Essence. The more it matures through inner farming, the more its talents and tendencies will surface and, alongside them, a sense of individual purpose. The pressures of Personality will weaken and we will gain a sense of what we can best accomplish, an understanding of our talent as a vessel of service. The eventual triumph of Essence over Personality will connect us with our destiny and answer the question, “Why am I here?”
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Feasting is communal. The farmer spreads the fruits of his labors on a table for others to share. The same applies to inner farming: our work is healthiest when practiced communally. In such a setting, each practitioner brings their observations and questions to the table to form a rich and diverse feast. We hear questions we would never have thought to formulate or dared to ask. Others share observations we never considered, ones that instruct our own work. We witness efforts we hadn’t the courage to undertake, and we make efforts on other people’s behalf that we would never make for ourselves. The merriment in socializing with like-minded practitioners gives us the emotional charge so crucial for beginning a new cycle.
Closer To Truth • Oct 8, 2024 Donate to Closer To Truth and help us keep our content free and without paywalls: https://shorturl.at/OnyRq Follow Closer To Truth on Instagram for news, announcements, and exciting updates: https://shorturl.at/p2IhM Is the ‘real you’ a special substance that is nonphysical and immortal? Most regular people would agree, but most scientists would not. What are you? A body alone that is dead forever once it dies? A soul temporally inhabiting a body? A body unified with a nonphysical entity of some kind? What some theologians think may surprise you. Watch more videos on souls and the nature of our identity: https://bit.ly/47Z6Hd7 George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Get exciting member exclusives—like early access to new content—with a free Closer To Truth account: https://closertotruth.com/ Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
t’s quite easy to mistake the meaning of a card named the Lord of Virtue. We can easily be misled into thinking that this means being dutiful and ‘doing the right thing’. However there is a much deeper level to this card than is immediately apparent. Virtue is about excellence – ethically and personally.It is about developing and maintaining high standards of behaviour, and then learning to have the confidence, self belief and strength of character to live out those standards through our every act.When we fall short of our expectations of ourselves, we retreat, disappointed and ashamed of ourselves. We can then take a long time to climb back up to the higher ground from which we can regard our own acts as part of the grand pattern of life. And, in the meantime, we continue to disappoint ourselves.This is obviously not good for us, and neither is it good for life. So we need strategies to reduce the number of times we feel we let ourselves down, methods of forgiving ourselves when we do, and ways of recovering lost virtue as quickly as we can.This is where the Three of Wands comes in. So, on a day ruled by him, make yourself a promise… you will spend a little time moving back into the centre of yourself – do this by sitting quietly and gently drawing in breath, directing it to your heart centre and allowing it to fill you up with energy.When you have done that, spend a few more minutes thinking about your ethical standpoint. Ask yourself if you are out of alignment with yourself about anything. (Please avoid the trap of going “Absolutely EVERYTHING!!!!” This won’t help! Much better to work on one issue at a time, rather than allowing yourself to be overwhelmed.) If you find something you are unhappy about in your own behaviour, think the act, thought or feeling through without judging it.Work out why you have done/said/thought this thing. Go to the core of the problem, and do not blame anybody else. When you find the core reason, write it down on a piece of paper, tear the paper into several different pieces and throw them in the rubbish bin.Since you have now rid yourself of the core problem, you now have no further need to act out that problem. So forgive yourself and do it differently.
Affirmation: “I live out my beliefs in all my acts.”
New Thinking • Dec 1, 2024 Ronnie Pontiac was the personal research assistance for Manly P. Hall at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. He is author of American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World. He is coauthor with Tamra Lucid of The Magic of the Orphic Hymns: A New Translation for the Modern Mystic. This interview focuses primarily on three significant contributors to Renaissance esoteric culture: Marsilio Ficino, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Paracelsus. Their life spans covered a period of 100 years during which European culture experienced a great awakening, triggered initially by Ficino’s translations of lost texts from ancient Greece. Other important figures are also discussed including Pico Della Mirandola, John Dee, Trithemius – as well as the backlash against the Renaissance, triggered by the Dominican Friar Savonarola. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:05:53 Ficino’s early career 00:12:16 Rebirth of Plato’s Academy 00:33:38 Bonfires of the vanities 00:52:28 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa 00:58:07 Johannes Trithemius 01:15:16 Negative images of Agrippa 01:26:13 Paracelsus 01:49:58 Negative images of Paracelsus 02:03:45 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on November 16, 2024)
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