Skip to main content

The Peabody Sisters of Salem by Luise Hall Tharp

Slow, stately biography of three sisters from 1800s-era Massachusetts. The eldest, Elizabeth Peabody, was a well-regarded educator; the middle sister, Mary Peabody, was a teacher and author who became the wife of educator and congressman Horace Mann; and the youngest, Sophia Peabody, was an artist who married author Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

It's not my favorite style of biography when the author attributes thoughts and feelings to each of the characters when there's no way the author can know their thoughts and feelings. This is "James Michener" history, not real history. At the same time, the book gives a competent tour of a kind of birth and early gestation of American literary and artistic culture. 

You'll meet a shy and weird Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was Elizabeth's Greek tutor. You'll learn the circumstances of Nathaniel Hawthorne surprise breakthrough to worldwide literary fame with The Scarlet Letter. You'll meet general (later President) Franklin Pierce, as Hawthorne writes a controversial biography of him. You'll see educator and congressman Horace Mann's career arc as he befriends Elizabeth, marries Mary, wins a seat in Congress, and then goes on to Ohio to found Antioch College. 

You'll see the Peabody sisters mingle with prime movers in the public education movement in the early USA, you'll meet key New England abolitionists, and you'll meet leaders of the socio-philosophical "Transcendentalism" movement, as they attempt to create a self-sustaining agricultural community (the result was about what you'd expect if a group of Brooklyn soy-hipsters tried the same thing today).

Finally, you'll see dynamics common to all families: manipulation, sibling rivalry, and angry disputes over the political issues of the day. Slavery, for example, became a wedge issue in the Peabody family when the youngest sister's abolitionism wasn't sufficiently pure and aggressive enough for the oldest sister's taste. They "ruined their Thanksgiving dinners" arguing about politics too, and I'm unsure if it makes me depressed or sympathetic to know it. 

To read:
Conyers Middleton: Letter from Rome
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun

More Posts

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre [fictionalized bio of Jesse Livermore]

"History repeats itself all the time in Wall Street." A fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of history's most famous speculators. This is an enriching book, worth reading every decade or so across your investment career. And it's a genuinely fun read, conveying the free-wheeling investment culture of the days before the Securities and Exchange Act. When you're young and beginning to invest, this book thrills you with all the bravado of speculating. When you're older, after you've seen a few things and learned many of the manipulations and other techniques the investment industry uses to extract money from you, the book becomes more of a cautionary tale of things not to do, traps not to step in, things to avoid. This is the third time I've read this book (I'm now in my fourth decade as an investor, so I guess that makes me one reading behind schedule), and what struck me most this time around was Livermore's self-admitted weaknesses:...
Read more

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...
Read more

Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...
Read more