Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Reader

Turning the Pages Together: A Lifelong Reader’s Guide to Essential Reading Essays

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Writing about books is many times rarely about the books themselves.

Rather, it’s about the quiet transformation that occurs in the space between the page and the reader. For many years on 27gen, I have explored books not merely as objects on a shelf, but as engines of continuous learning, tools for leadership, and companions through the various seasons of life.

If you are new to 27gen – or if you are looking to revisit the foundational essays that define our collective journey through the printed word – this landing page serves as a curated guide to our key posts on reading. Here, you will find summaries and direct links to these essays, organized by theme to help you navigate through the reflections, strategies, and stories that have shaped my reading journey.

The Evolution of a Reader’s Library: Downsizing & Discovery

A library is a living organism; it grows, shifts, and inevitably contracts as our lives change. These posts examine what happens when we confront our physical shelves and re-evaluate our relationship with book collecting.

Masterclass Strategies: How to Read for Mastery

Reading deeply requires intention and method. Moving beyond simple consumption, these essays break down strategic frameworks for cross-referencing ideas, building expertise, and reading across multiple texts simultaneously.

Leadership & Continuous Learning

Great leadership is fueled by continuous learning. These essays highlight how reading acts as an essential engine for perspective, empathy, and executive decision-making.

Reflections on the Joy & Transformative Power of Reading

At its heart, reading is an act of delight and human connection. These posts celebrate book culture, seasonal milestones, and the profound mental shifts that happen when a powerful writer meets an open mind.

Where to Start?

If you’re unsure where to dive in:

Thank you for being part of the 27gen reading community.

Pick a post, pull up a chair, and let’s keep learning together.

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

The Shop That Keeps Reinventing Itself

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Every book I own was bought somewhere, from someone, on a particular day. I rarely think about that part. The book itself takes over, its subject and its spine and the weight of it in the hand, and the shop where I found it mostly fades into the background of the transaction. 

Evan Friss has written a history that puts the shop back in front.

The Bookshop, published by Viking in August 2024 at 416 pages, asks what the American bookstore has been, who stood behind its counters, and what the rest of us were doing when we walked through the door.

I came to it as a synoptical collector first and a reader second, which may be the wrong order for a reviewer but is the honest one. Over five decades I have built shelves on Walt Disney and the company that carries his name, on America’s founding era, on hospitality, on leadership, and many more topics. Much of that collection was assembled one store visit at a time. Right now I am doing the reverse, sending books back out into the world, and Friss’s history landed on my desk at a moment when I was thinking hard about where books come from and where they go.

The Author and the Approach

Friss is a professor of history at James Madison University, and his earlier books on bicycles and American cities suggest a writer who likes ordinary objects that turn out to carry large stories. The bookstore suits him. It is a commercial enterprise and a civic one at once, and it is easy to overlook because it is always right there on the corner.

He built the book on solid ground. He drew on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers. You can feel that range in his words. Some passages read like social history, others like a trade-journal profile, and a few have the intimacy of a conversation across a counter.

The structure deserves attention because it is the book’s most deliberate choice. Friss does not march from the colonial period to the present in a single line. Instead, each chapter is set in a particular bookshop or book-delivery system that stands for a theme in American bookselling, and that single place anchors a larger argument. A reviewer noted that the author’s definition of “bookstore” is generous enough to take in mobile bookselling and the sidewalk vendors of New York City. I think that generosity is right. A history confined to the tidy storefront with a bell on the door would miss half the story.

Boston, Chicago, and the Making of an Institution

The book opens in Boston, at the Old Corner Bookstore, run by Ticknor and Fields. Friss treats it as the birth of the American bookstore, and the claim is persuasive. Before shops like this, bookselling in the colonies and the young republic was a loose affair of printers who sold their own output, importers, and itinerant peddlers. What Ticknor and Fields built, and James Fields in particular, was a place where publishing, retail, and literary society overlapped. Authors came by to talk. The shop was a destination as much as a business.

I have spent enough time researching the founding generation to find this part of the story familiar in its outline. The men who wrote the Declaration and argued over the Constitution lived in a world where a book was scarce, expensive, and passed hand to hand. Their libraries were statements of intent. The modern bookstore is a nineteenth-century invention in many respects, and it came into being because enough Americans wanted to read, and wanted somewhere respectable to do it.

From there Friss moves to Chicago and the book department at Marshall Field’s, where Marcella Burns Hahner served as buyer, manager, and public face of the store. This is among the book’s better choices. It brings in the department store as a bookselling venue, a woman running a major retail operation in an era when few did, and the idea that books could be sold to a mass audience in the same building as gloves and furniture. Friss describes Marshall Field’s as a critical moment in the trade, and the department store era does mark a turn toward bookselling as a business of volume and display.

True to my previous readings about the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era (spanning from the late 19th century through the early decades of the 20th century), I thought the book would  have more about the economics of that period. The pages on the mechanics of buying, discounting, and the pressure that large retailers put on small shops are interesting but brief. This is a personal note, and actually it points to a quality of the whole book: Friss prefers people to spreadsheets, and the reader mostly benefits from that preference.

The Shop as Gathering Place

If the book has a single idea running through it, it is that the bookstore has never been only a place to buy books. One reviewer put it plainly, observing that the central theme is that the bookshop tends to serve several functions at once. That strikes me as accurate, and it is where the book earns its keep.

Friss gives considerable space to bookshops that served particular communities. He takes up feminist, Black, gay, and radical bookshops, and these chapters carry the most emotional force. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village is the clearest case. According to one reviewer, it shows how a bookstore can be far more than a place where books are sold. Such a shop gave people who had few safe public places a room where they could be among their own. Friss also writes about Julie Morse’s Amazon Bookstore, a feminist shop whose name has nothing to do with the online giant that later claimed the word.

He is also willing to look at shops that most readers will find uncomfortable. One chapter concerns a movement bookstore that operated as a de facto headquarters of American Nazism. Including it was a risk,  but a historically correct one. If the bookstore can be a refuge, it can also be a recruiting office. A history that celebrated only the shops we admire would be a kind of advertisement. Friss lets the institution show its full range, and he does so without sensationalism.

I think this is the most important thing a history like this can teach, and it is relevant to the civic themes I often write about on 27gen. Printed material shapes communities for good and for ill, and the shop is where that shaping happens in public. The books on the shelf are only half of what a store is. The other half is the conversation, the notices on the cork-board, and the people who come in on a Saturday because they know others will be there.

The Human Cast

The brick and mortar bookstore may be the primary topic, but Friss writes best when he is writing about individuals. He profiles booksellers across the book, and several of them are memorable. Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, gets the label “the Convener” for his work in building a place where readers could gather. Donna Paz Kaufman, who has run seminars for people hoping to open bookstores, appears alongside her husband, with whom she owns a shop on Amelia Island.

And then there is Vaughn, the UPS driver. Friss includes a tribute to the delivery man at Three Lives & Company, where the author’s wife once worked as a bookseller. This passage  resonated with me more than any of the many other good set pieces. It is the kind of detail that only someone who has been inside a bookshop on an ordinary Tuesday would think to record. Every shop depends on people like Vaughn, and almost no history ever mentions them.

The personal touch has a cost; Friss tells us openly that he could not cover every important shop. Readers who want an encyclopedia of American bookstores will not find it here, and readers who care about a favorite shop in their own town may feel overlooked. Friss is not trying to be complete. He is trying to be representative, and by that standard the book mostly succeeds.

The Numbers and the Mood

The closing chapters turn toward the present, and the tone shifts.  According to U.S. Census numbers, between 2012 and 2021 the number of bookstores fell by 34 percent and bookstore employment fell by 53 percent. The average American spent roughly thirty dollars a year on books, and nearly half of adults read no book outside of work or school.

Friss does not settle into despair, though. He captured his larger argument in a sentence I kept returning to: the bookstore survives by redefining itself. That is the pattern the earlier chapters set up. The shop became a department store counter, then a chain, then a community center, then a coffee-and-events destination. Each reinvention was a response to pressure. The institution has been declared dying many times, and it has adapted each time. The reader is left to judge whether the next adaptation will arrive in time.

Because they reflect my early book-buying, the chain era is where I would have liked more reflection. Borders, which started in Ann Arbor in 1971, went bankrupt in 2011, and Barnes & Noble shut down a large number of its stores in 2023, though their store numbers have rebounded above 750 as of this year. Along with Waldenbooks, these were the shops that most of my generation of readers knew best. They were large, bright, and well stocked, and they let you sit on the floor for an hour without anyone minding. When they went, something went with them that the independents could not entirely replace. Friss treats the chains fairly, but the book’s focus tilts toward the smaller shops, and rightly so.

What I Brought With Me

A brief pause to say something about my own shelves, because the book kept sending me back to them.

The Disney collection is the largest, well over five hundred books built across fifty years. I did not buy them in a single place. They came from used shops in towns I was passing through, from the tables at conventions, from catalogs that arrived in the mail, and from the occasional new-release display where I would pick up a title I had been waiting on. Looking at the Disney

shelves now, I can nearly sort them by where I found them. This one was a lucky discovery in a back room. That one I special-ordered and waited weeks for. Several of my unique finds came from a wonderful afternoon spent in John K. King Used and Rare Books in Detroit. 

The leadership shelves tell another story. At one time that library held over two thousand books. It now holds fewer than two hundred. The downsizing has been deliberate, and it has taught me something that Friss’s book explains from the other side. A book that has finished its work for you has to go somewhere. In the old model, it went to a used shop, which resold it to the next reader, and the cycle continued. The shop was the circulatory system of the book trade. When I take a box of books out of the house, I am relying on that system, and I find it a comfort that somewhere a person behind a counter will look at what I brought and decide whether it deserves a second reader.

Reading Friss as an amateur historian of the founding era, which is how I have mostly been reading the past year, I noticed how many of his themes echo the civic questions that occupied my other writing earlier this year. The founders believed an informed public was the foundation of self-government. They did not say where the public would buy its books, but the bookshop became that place by default. When a shop closes, a town loses a piece of its civic infrastructure, quietly and without a vote. I think about the heritage work I have done on Mecklenburg County, and how much of local memory lives in the places where people gather and the printed material they pass around. A bookstore is one of the few commercial spaces that doubles as an archive of its neighborhood’s interests.

There is a family angle developing as well. Though I don’t come from a large extended family, it was a well-read one, and the books I have kept are in part a way of keeping the family’s habits of mind in one place. Genealogy has made me aware that most of my ancestors left almost nothing in print. They left land records, church registers, and the occasional Bible with names in the front. The Great Wagon Road journey, which I followed on a journey of my own, carried families who owned very few books and who carried the ones they had with great care. A shelf of books is a luxury of recent centuries, and the shop that filled it is a luxury of a more recent one still.

My Two Cents Worth

The Bookshop is a warm book, and warmth often has a way of making a reviewer suspicious. Not for me! Friss’s affection for his subject sometimes softens the critical edge. The coverage of the digital era is thinner than the coverage of the earlier periods, which is natural for a historian but leaves the most pressing questions to the final pages. And as earlier noted, the selection of shops is bound to disappoint anyone looking for their own favorite.

The book has real strengths which easily outweigh any weak spots The unusual thematic structure works. The research is deep and easy to read. Friss has a good eye for the telling detail, whether it is the UPS driver or the department store buyer, and he is honest enough to include the uncomfortable chapters alongside the celebratory ones.

Who should read it? Anyone who has ever lost an hour in a shop without noticing. Anyone who collects, as I do, and has wondered about the chain of hands that brought each volume to the shelf. And readers of American history who want to see how an ordinary institution reflected the larger changes around it, from the growth of literacy and the rise of mass retail to the push for civil rights and the long contest over what Americans should be free to read.

I closed the book with a short list in my head of shops I want to visit, and a longer one of shops I wish I had visited before they closed. That seems to me the right effect for a history like this. It sends you back out the door and down the street, toward a room where books are kept and where someone is likely to ask what you are looking for.

Book Buyers, my favorite local book shop.

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

A Library Finds Its Next Readers

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A few weeks after I wrote about the slow work of downsizing my personal library, I received a comment that stuck with me longer than I expected. A friend said he’d benefited over the years from the ideas in my shelves, the writing that came from them, and, eventually, some of the hard copies themselves – books that had passed from me to him at exactly the moment he needed them. I hadn’t set out to make that point in the original piece, but he found it anyway: a book doesn’t stop working when it leaves your hands. Sometimes that’s when it starts.

That comment has been on my mind while I’ve packed the next round of boxes, because this round is different from the last. The beginning of culling was mostly about subtraction – deciding what no longer served me and letting it go to a used bookstore or donated for charity. The next round involved about 300 volumes on a specific topic to a good friend who knew everything in them, but still took them on for use in his expanded role.

This one has a different destination. Somewhere north of a thousand volumes on leadership and vision, trimmed down from a collection that once ran closer to two thousand several years ago, are headed to the amazing staff members of my church. And the more I’ve thought about who’s going to be reading them, the less this has felt like my story to tell.

So I’ll keep this part short: over several decades, I built a leadership shelf the same way I built the others – one book leading to the next, one author’s argument prompting a search for someone who’d answer it differently. Vision, organizational culture, the specific discipline of leading people who didn’t have to follow you but chose to. It grew because the questions never really stopped being useful. What’s changed is that I’m no longer the only person those questions belong to.

Who Actually Needs These Books

Church staff members, especially the younger ones, tend to be leadership-rich and leadership-resource-poor. Someone in their twenties or early thirties gets handed real responsibility fast – a ministry area, a team of volunteers twice their age, a budget, a Sunday morning that will not run itself – and very little formal preparation for the part of the job that has nothing to do with theology. Seminary teaches you to read a text. It doesn’t always teach you how to run a staff meeting, manage conflict between two volunteers who’ve served together for twenty years, or figure out why a team that agrees on the mission still can’t agree on the plan. That’s a different kind of literacy, and it’s the kind this collection was built to develop.

What a shelf like this offers a young leader isn’t a single right answer – it’s range. One book on vision will tell you to cast it boldly and repeat it until people live it out in front of you. Another will tell you vision emerges from listening, not proclamation, and that leaders who arrive with the answer already formed miss what their people actually need. Both are right, in different seasons, with different teams. A twenty-six-year-old three months into their first real leadership role doesn’t yet have the experience to know which season they’re in. What they can have, if the books are sitting on a shelf down the hall instead of in a secluded and unused collection, is quick access to people who’ve already worked that question through.

That’s really the whole case for donating a library like this instead of simply letting it disperse. A used bookstore will always find a buyer eventually. What it won’t do is put the right book in front of the right twenty-eight-year-old the week she’s staring down her first genuinely hard personnel decision, unsure whether to be more patient or more direct. Proximity is the value here as much as content. A resource you have to seek out gets used rarely. A resource sitting in a newly-commissioned staff library gets picked up on a Tuesday afternoon by someone who didn’t know they needed it until they saw the spine.

What I Hope Happens Next

I don’t expect every book to get read cover to cover, and honestly, that was never the standard for me either. Some of these were read in full three times over the years; others got mined for a single chapter and then sat, still useful, waiting for the next question that would send someone back to them. I’d rather see this collection get treated that way by its next owners than sit unopened out of some misplaced obligation to finish what I started. A leadership library is a reference tool as much as a reading list. Its job is to be there when the specific problem shows up, not to be completed.

What I’m hoping for more than anything is that a few of these books become to somebody on that staff what certain books became to me at their age – not just information, but a kind of company. The comfort of knowing someone else has wrestled with the exact frustration you’re wrestling with this week, and wrote it down clearly enough that you can borrow their thinking until yours catches up. That’s what a good leadership book actually offers a young leader: not a script, but companionship in a job that can feel isolating even when you’re surrounded by people all day.

The shelves in my house will be lighter for it. I’m entirely at peace with that trade. A library that sits still and simply accumulates was never really the point – mine included. The point was always what the books could do once they reached the person who needed them most.

For the next chapter of this particular collection, that person just happens to be someone who is much younger than me, standing in front of a room full of volunteers and trying to figure out what to say next. I love and respect them deeply, and hope this collection of ideas can help them on their journey.

I know one of these books will say it for them like it said it for me.

A special thanks to Rick, Anita, Debbie, and Carroll for loading up, moving, unloading, and shelving the library in a little over an hour!

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

Letting Go of the Library: What Downsizing Is Teaching Me About Why I Read

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I have a confession that may surprise people who have seen my bookshelves: I did not build my library on purpose from young adulthood. Not many people set out at twenty-two to accumulate thousands of books. It happens one Tuesday at a time, one impulse purchase at a used bookstore, one “I’ll just order this too while I’m at it” click, until one day you look up and realize you have built something. A collection. A record, almost, of every question you’ve ever chased.

That’s the part people miss about book love. They think it’s about the reading – and it is, mostly – but it’s also about the keeping. The shelf is a kind of memory you can touch.

So when I tell you I’ve begun the slow, painful process of downsizing that library, I want to start further back than the boxes currently stacked in my garage. I want to start with where the habit came from, because you can’t understand why parting with a book feels like parting with a small piece of yourself unless you understand how it got there in the first place.

Where It Started

I grew up looking forward to My Weekly Reader landing on my desk every week in first grade – a thin, newsprint magazine of current events written for kids, and about as far from a leather-bound classic as you can get. But it did something classics rarely do, especially for a six-year-old: it made the outside world feel worth paying attention to. That’s an underrated function of reading. Long before it teaches you anything specific, reading teaches you that there’s more to know, and that knowing it is a pleasure rather than a chore.

The habit had a model at home, too. My father would pull a book down from the various shelves around our house most evenings after the workday was done – not performatively, not as a lesson for the children watching, just as a quiet, consistent fact of who he was. I didn’t articulate it this way at the time, but I absorbed something important: reading wasn’t an activity you scheduled around your life. It was part of the architecture of an ordinary evening, as normal as dinner. In my mid-thirties, I noticed I’d fallen into the same rhythm without deciding to. Some inheritances aren’t houses or watches. Some are just habits, passed down so quietly you don’t notice the transfer until you’re the one carrying them.

How a Shelf Becomes a Library

Here is where I’ll admit something that sounds like an exaggeration but isn’t: My “library” is in fact made up of multiple libraries on various topics. The single largest cohesive library is my collection of books about Walt Disney and the company he built, now over five hundred volumes, spanning releases from 1939 up through  a much anticipated purchase coming in a few weeks. Five decades of buying, one book at a time, on a single subject.

Nobody plans that, at least not in the beginning. 

What happens instead is something closer to what Mortimer Adler called synoptical reading – the practice of putting multiple books on the same subject in conversation with each other rather than reading any single one as the final word. You read one author’s account of how Walt Disney approached storytelling, and it raises a question the book doesn’t answer, so you go find another author who tackles it from a different angle. Then a third. You’re not collecting books so much as collecting arguments, perspectives, and blind spots that only become visible once you’ve got enough voices in the room together.

The trouble – if you can call it that – is that this kind of reading is inherently accumulative by design. You can’t practice synoptical reading with three books. You need enough of them to reveal the patterns and the contradictions, and “enough” tends to keep redefining itself upward. My Disney library isn’t really about Walt Disney anymore, not entirely. It’s about vision and leadership and and hospitality and how an organization sustains a creative culture across generations – Disney just happens to be the case study deep enough to keep teaching me something new after fifty years. 

And it’s not the only synoptical library in the house. 

There are shelves built over the last year for founding-era American history that grew the same way, one book answering a question the last one raised. There are three large vertical shelves on hospitality rooted in the home, with another two shelves containing books on the subject that I have written about. There’s a large selection of books about the hospitality industry seen through a culinary lens. And many more smaller ones: Hamburgers. Donuts. Bridges. J.R.R. Tolkien. Sherlock Holmes. Reading. Shepherding. And not surprisingly, Books. There’s a couple of fiction shelves: All of Stephen Hunter’s books, and the original Tom Clancy works.

Though not technically synoptical, the biggest of all is the general topic of Leadership and Vision – slowly built over at least forty years, first in graduate school, then gaining momentum in three church staff positions, then accelerating 2012-2025 when my job at the time required reading – lots of reading! At one time, that library numbered over two thousand books, but I’ve trimmed it down over the last few years to just under one thousand books.

A personal library, it turns out, is rarely one collection. It’s several, growing at different speeds, for different reasons, until they’ve filled every room that will hold them (plus a garage, plus – until recently – a storage unit).

Part of what fuels the accumulation is simply the hunting. There’s a particular satisfaction in walking into a used bookstore with no list and no agenda, just an open question you’ve been carrying around, and finding the one volume that happens to answer it. I’ve spent whole afternoons doing exactly that, working through curated shelves at a favorite spot and walking out with  a book or two I didn’t know existed that morning. When my former occupation carried me all over the country, you can be sure the first search I performed was “used bookstores near me”. A retailer can get you a specific title in two days. It cannot replicate that particular kind of luck, and I suspect the luck is half of why collectors keep collecting long after the shelves have stopped having room to spare.

The Day That Keeps Finding Me

The beginning of this downsizing project falls near a very auspicious day on the calendar.

August 9th does something odd to my calendar every year. It’s my father’s birthday. It’s also National Book Lovers Day. I’ve written about that coincidence before, and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything more than calendar arithmetic – but coincidences earn their keep when they keep making you think, and this one has never stopped.

Book Lovers Day, at its best, isn’t really about celebrating volume. Plenty of people can point to towering shelves without having been changed much by what’s on them. The day is worth marking because it asks a better question: not how many books have you read, but which ones actually shaped you. For me, that question and my father’s birthday have become impossible to separate. He didn’t hand me a reading list. He handed me an evening habit, and the habit did the rest of the work over the next fifty+ years.

He used to say something I’ve quoted before and will probably keep quoting: “I never made much money, but I made a lot of friends, and that’s what’s important.” He wasn’t talking about books when he said it. But it’s the same instinct, really – the belief that the things worth accumulating in a life are relational, not material. Friends, in his case. In mine, apparently, over five hundred books about a fascinating man who built an empire on curiosity.

Arguing With Your Own Shelves

Which brings me, finally, to the boxes in the garage.

Downsizing a personal library sounds like a logistics problem – what fits on the shelves, what doesn’t – and at the surface it is. But the harder work isn’t physical. It’s that every book on those shelves represents a decision you made once, for a reason that felt sound at the time, and downsizing means reopening every one of those decisions and asking whether you’d make the same call today.

Some of that is easy. The duplicate copies. The books bought for projects that finished years ago and will never be revisited. The reference material now more useful as a searchable PDF than as eleven pounds of hardcover. Letting those go doesn’t cost much.

I started, for what it’s worth, with the “easiest” shelf in the library – a collection of almost three hundred books from a long-practiced career phase that’s behind me now. Once I made the decision, it was relatively easy to call my friend Danny who is the most knowledgeable person in the field, and he graciously agreed to accept the library. Dropping off the books a few days later was gratifying as he perused the books and some of his staff began sorting them for immediate use. This decision was only “easy” in light of the fact that I knew the volumes were going to  a fellow “book nerd” who respected them and would use them appropriately.

Starting there wasn’t strategy so much as self-preservation. If I’d opened with the shelf that holds my father’s books, I’d have quit the whole project in an afternoon. There’s something to be said for building momentum on the boxes that don’t hurt (much), so that by the time you reach the ones that do, you’ve at least got some practice at making the call.

What costs something is the rest of the pile – the books that aren’t really about their contents anymore. The ones your father gave you. The ones you bought the week you started a new chapter of your life and haven’t opened since, but can’t quite explain why you’re still keeping. The signed first edition that will probably never appreciate in value but represents an afternoon you remember more clearly than the book’s actual argument. Synoptical reading taught me to keep gathering perspectives until the picture got clearer. Downsizing is the opposite exercise: learning to let a single memory be enough justification to keep something, without needing to defend it against the logic that says you should let it go.

I’ve started with a simple, imperfect rule: I ask whether I’m keeping the book or keeping the version of myself that bought it. If it’s the second one, I try to find another way to hold onto that memory – a photograph of the shelf before it changes, a note in a journal about why the book mattered – so the object can go without the memory going with it. It doesn’t always work. Some books I’ve picked up to donate and quietly put back, unconvinced by my own argument. That’s fine. This isn’t a project with a deadline. It’s a negotiation, and negotiations take as long as they take.

What I haven’t done, and don’t intend to do, is treat this as pure subtraction. The Disney collection will  stay intact, and even grow – that’s not sentiment, that’s an active research project with decades of momentum behind it. The founding-era shelf is slowly growing, not shrinking, alongside the  current interest and writing it supports. For now, many of the syntopical shelves will remain the same. Downsizing, done honestly, isn’t about arriving at some minimalist ideal where the shelves are bare and the mind is supposedly clearer for it. It’s about being honest for the first time in years about which books are still doing work in your life and which ones are just doing time.

What Stays With You

My father’s books – the actual physical volumes that sat on his shelves – mostly didn’t make it into my collection intact. Estates get divided, and books, unlike heirloom furniture, rarely survive the process as a set. But a handful did make the trip, and they sit now in spots I chose for them deliberately, not filed with everything else. I don’t reread them often. I don’t need to. Their presence is the point, not their content – a small, physical reminder that the habit I’ve spent a lifetime indulging didn’t start with me.

That’s the thing about a personal library that a spreadsheet of titles will never capture. It’s not an inventory. It’s a kind of autobiography written in other people’s words – which books you reached for during which years, which arguments changed your mind, which ones you kept even after you stopped needing them, just because you remembered who you were when you bought them.

Downsizing doesn’t erase that autobiography. If you do it with any care at all, it just edits it – cutting the passages that no longer serve the story and keeping the ones that do. My shelves are smaller than they were a few months ago, and they’ll keep shrinking more before I’m satisfied. But the books that remain are, if anything, a more honest account of who I am than the fuller shelves ever were.

There’s a version of this essay that ends with a tidy lesson about minimalism, or about letting go, or about how less is somehow more. I don’t believe that version, and I don’t think you should either. Some libraries deserve to keep growing – mine will, on the shelves that are still doing active work. The point was never the size of the collection. It was always whether the books on it could still tell you something true about the person who kept them.

My father taught me to read before he taught me anything else worth remembering. Figuring out which of his books, and which of my own, are worth keeping turns out to be one more thing he taught me – just later than I expected, and the hard way. If you’re standing in front of your own shelves right now, wondering where to start, I’d tell you what I wish someone had told me: start with the easy shelf, be honest about the hard one, and don’t mistake a smaller library for a smaller life. 

The books that matter will let you know.

They always do.

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

40 Years in the Making: How “Act of Defiance” Reclaims the High-Energy Thrills of Tom Clancy’s “The Hunt for Red October”

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There was a distinct, technical shift on the fiction shelves of bookstores in the early 1980s. It was an era when the Cold War hung over our collective consciousness like a low, gray Atlantic cloud, and a new breed of fiction was emerging to chart its subterranean depths. 

If the metaphors are bringing a nautical image to mind, they’ve achieved their purpose.

While finishing graduate school and getting started in a new job, my “relaxing” reading was spent hunting down the early masterpieces of the techno-thriller genre – those dense, meticulously detailed novels where the technology was as much a character as the men operating it. 

When Tom Clancy burst onto the scene, he didn’t just join the fray; he redefined it. From that autumn in 1984 when I first cracked open a hardback copy of The Hunt for Red October, I was hooked. For nearly three decades, I eagerly bought every work Clancy put his name to, building a dedicated Clancy library that stood intact right up until his passing in 2013. 

Yet as many of you who shared that particular passion, the years that followed were disappointing. The subsequent novels released under the family estate umbrella, penned by a revolving door of franchise continuators, lacked that vital spark. They felt like carbon copies of carbon copies – hollowed out, formulaic, and missing the authentic, heavy-metal weight of Clancy’s original vision. I checked them out of the library, but read them with waning enthusiasm.

I eventually stopped looking at, and checking out, the novels under the “Tom Clancy” name.

Then came a rainy day during a recent vacation. On a grocery trip to complete our food stocks for the week, I idly scanned a disorganized bargain shelf. There, tucked between forgotten paperbacks, was a copy of Act of Defiance by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson. Published in 2024 to mark the forty-year anniversary of Jack Ryan’s debut, it didn’t look like much at first glance and I almost overlooked it. But the names and bios of the authors caught my eye; both are Navy veterans, a detail that usually guarantees at least a baseline of structural accuracy. 

I pulled it down, opened to the first page, and within just a few minutes realized I had a brand new vacation read. I was flung straight back to 1984, transported into the freezing, pressurized hulls of the North Atlantic. It was a sensation I hadn’t felt in over a decade: the authors had delivered on Clancy’s original premise and the genuine ghost of Marko Ramius was whispering through the pages.

The Blueprint of a Revolution

To understand why this accidental discovery felt so profound, you have to look closely at what made The Hunt for Red October an architectural marvel of popular fiction. Clancy’s plot was elegantly simple yet agonizingly tense. 

Captain First Rank Marko Ramius, a brilliant, grieving Lithuanian commander within the Soviet Navy, takes the crown jewel of the Soviet fleet – a heavily modified Typhoon-class submarine named the Red October – and turns her toward the American coast. His weapon isn’t a payload of ballistic missiles, but the ship itself. Equipped with a revolutionary, silent “caterpillar drive,” the vessel is capable of sneaking past the SOSUS underwater listening grids undetected. Ramius isn’t looking to spark an apocalypse; he is looking for an exit from a rotting totalitarian empire, carrying a hand-picked crew of officers who have burned their bridges behind them.

The brilliance of the book lies in how Clancy handles the escalation. The Soviet Union cannot afford to let its ultimate secret slip into Western hands, nor can it stomach the humiliation of a high-ranking defection. So, they send their entire Atlantic Fleet into a frenzied search-and-rescue masquerade, telling the Americans that Ramius is a rogue madman intent on launching a preemptive strike.

Enter Jack Ryan. 

In 1984, Ryan wasn’t the veteran statesman or the action hero he eventually became in later books and film adaptations. He was a young, somewhat vulnerable CIA analyst with a bad back, an eye for detail, and a deep understanding of historical motivations. By reading the subtle patterns of Soviet naval movements and analyzing Ramius’s personal history, Ryan realizes the unimaginable truth: the Soviet captain is trying to surrender. The narrative turns into a multi-layered chess match, culminating in the control room of the USS Dallas under the command of Bart Mancuso, where a brilliant young sonar technician named Jonesy filters out the ocean’s noise to hear the impossible heartbeat of a silent ship.

The Mirror Across Forty Years

What Andrews and Wilson have accomplished in Act of Defiance is not a lazy rehash, but a brilliant structural inversion of Clancy’s original blueprint. The novel opens with a prologue set precisely in 1984, introducing Dimitri Gorov, a Soviet naval architect who tries to barter the secrets of the Red October to the West, only to find that Ramius has already delivered the prize. This prologue serves as the anchor for a modern narrative that takes place forty years later. 

Dimitri’s son Konstantin Gorov has grown up to become a radicalized, fiercely ideological Russian Captain First Rank. He commands the Belgorod, an incredibly sophisticated, stealth-modified Oscar II submarine operating under the shadow of a rogue military cabal within a fractured, volatile modern Russia.

Here is where the authors show their literary craftsmanship. Where Ramius used a silent submarine to escape a totalitarian regime in the name of peace, Konstantin Gorov uses his silent vessel to execute a terrifying act of geopolitical vengeance. His goal is to execute a devastating rogue strike on the American Atlantic Fleet base at Norfolk using autonomous nuclear torpedoes, framing the disaster in a way that forces a hardline regime change back home in Moscow. The engine of the plot is flipped: it is no longer an individual fleeing tyranny, but a rogue fragment of an old empire striking back at the modern world.

The symmetry deepens with the protagonist. Decades have passed, and Jack Ryan now occupies the Oval Office, burdened by the macro-political weight of an unstable world. The analytical heavy lifting falls to his youngest daughter, Naval Intelligence Lieutenant Kathleen “Katie” Ryan. 

In a beautiful homage to her father’s origins, Katie is the one who spots minuscule anomalies in satellite imagery and maritime data that her senior colleagues dismiss. She doesn’t conquer her adversaries with physical bravado; she defeats them by doing what her father did forty years ago – putting herself inside the mind of a Russian captain, deciphering his personal history, and charting his path through the dark trenches of the Atlantic.

  • The Technological Threat: Clancy explored the dawn of mechanical silence via the Red October’s caterpillar drive. Andrews & Wilson masterfully update this to the digital era, focusing on the Belgorod’s autonomous underwater drones and cyber-warfare capabilities.
  • The Analytical Legacy: Jack Ryan’s 1984 deduction was based on psychological profiling and geopolitical intuition. In 2024, Katie Ryan combines that same psychological acumen with modern satellite reconnaissance and high-frequency data streams.
  • The Scope of Conflict: While the original masterpiece remained a localized, claustrophobic naval chess match, the modern sequel expands the canvas, weaving the submarine hunt with global black-ops missions led by franchise veterans John Clark and Ding Chavez.

The Resonance of Truth

Why does Act of Defiance succeed where so many other post-2013 Clancy extensions failed? The answer lies in the pacing and the profound respect for technical realism. Andrews and Wilson understand that a great techno-thriller doesn’t move at the frantic speed of a modern Hollywood action film. It moves with the deliberate, heavy momentum of a capital ship. They take their time building the technical foundations, explaining the physics of water pressure, the intricacies of modern sonar arrays, and the terrifying isolation of undersea command. The sentences vary naturally – brief, sharp commands during moments of tactical crisis alternating with longer, contemplative paragraphs that explore the historical weight resting on the shoulders of these characters.

More importantly, the book captures the emotional core of the original Ryanverse. It recognizes that the most compelling conflicts are not between faceless nations, but between individuals burdened by history. The interactions between President Jack Ryan and his daughter are handled with an understated gravity. There is no cheap melodrama, only the quiet understanding of two people who share the same analytical curse and the same profound sense of duty.

Seeing John Clark and Ding Chavez in covert action again immediately brings back those characters from the early novels, matured in the decades since but losing none of their stealthy efficiency in completing the most impossible missions.

For those of us who have spent decades tracking the literature of the Cold War and its modern echoes, finding a book like this on a bargain shelf is a rare gift. It reminds us that while authors pass away and empires crumble, a perfectly constructed narrative framework can endure across generations. Andrews and Wilson didn’t just write a sequel; they proved that the literary traditions born in the early 1980s still have the power to grip us, hold us under, and leave us breathless for the next chapter.

Their contribution to the Ryanverse begins with this singular gripping sequel of sorts, and continues with two other novels. When I return from vacation, you can be sure I will be looking to complete this triple play. I also plan to look into the other stories and adventures written by Andrews and Wilson.

I hope to be pleasantly surprised!

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

It’s Worth It: Uncovering How One Week Can Transform Your Church

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Reflections on Vacation Bible School while in the middle of serving as a leader for 17 2nd graders in our church’s Vacation Bible Extreme…

The screen door slams behind you, and for a second you’re not an adult anymore. You’re ten years old, walking down into the church basement, and the heat of June outside has been replaced by something cooler and a little damp. Elmer’s glue is drying on a stack of construction paper somewhere nearby. Someone is pouring orange Kool-Aid into plastic cups that will be reused all week. Fifty kids are trying to find their pew, and the noise of it all has a kind of rhythm you’d recognize anywhere.

If you grew up in a certain era, Vacation Bible School wasn’t just a week on the calendar. It was the event. You wore the shoes you didn’t mind ruining. You memorized verses for plastic trinkets you’d lose by August. And for five days, you belonged to something bigger than your own street.

A Different Kind of Summer

That world is mostly gone now. Summers today run on a tighter, more digital schedule. Kids scroll through algorithmic feeds before breakfast. Parents juggle remote work calls with the kind of logistical math that never quite balances. And underneath all that convenience sits something researchers keep coming back to: loneliness has become a genuine public health concern, for kids and adults alike. We have a dozen ways to send a message and almost no front porches left to send it from.

This is the gap Landry Holmes writes into in It’s Worth It. His argument is fairly direct: VBS isn’t a leftover from a simpler church era, waiting to be replaced by something sleeker and more online. A loud, chaotic week built around handmade theme sets and shared snacks is, if anything, exactly what a disconnected culture is hungry for – a real place, with real people, to belong to.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Every church budget meeting eventually lands on the VBS line item, and it’s easy to wince. Curriculum kits, paint for the stage sets, enough snacks to stock a small grocery aisle – the costs add up fast, and so does the volunteer exhaustion. Judge the program purely by how tired everyone looks on Thursday, and it can start to feel like an outdated tradition the church keeps funding out of nostalgia.

Holmes pushes back on that read using research from Lifeway. The data points in a pretty clear direction: VBS still outperforms nearly everything else on the church calendar as an evangelistic tool, even now.

A few numbers stand out. About half the children who show up to a church’s VBS – 51 percent, according to Lifeway Research – don’t have a regular church home. Meanwhile, 69 percent of American parents, whatever their own beliefs or church history, say they’d let their child attend a VBS at a church they don’t belong to, as long as a friend invited them personally. And looking back, nine out of ten adults who went to VBS as kids remember it fondly, with 89 percent saying it shaped their early faith in some real way.

Holmes sets those figures against a harder truth: 80 percent of churchgoers say they feel personally responsible for sharing their faith, yet more than 60 percent haven’t actually invited anyone to church or shared the gospel in the past six months. VBS closes that gap without requiring anyone to have an awkward one-on-one conversation. It gives the whole congregation a shared project instead of an individual burden, and for one week, the church stops waiting for the neighborhood to come find it.

Watching It From the Parking Lot

There’s a strange moment that hits every parent eventually: you’re no longer the kid receiving the ministry. You’re the one packing sunscreen, paying for gas, and watching the clock so you don’t miss drop-off.

As a kid, your only job was to show up and eat a popsicle-stick birdhouse into existence. As a parent, VBS week means rushed breakfasts – cold cereal, granola bars, the occasional drive-thru run – because the drop-off line closes at 9:00 sharp. Your backseat picks up a permanent layer of graham cracker crumbs and stray name tags. You spend most mornings nagging someone to put on real shoes and stop losing their team color band before they’ve even made it through the door.

And then the drive home happens, and something shifts. The exhaustion up front meets an explosion of energy in the back seat. They’re recounting the day’s skit in full detail, explaining how their team won at the glow stick game, belting out the theme song with hand motions you can see in the rearview mirror. Watching that, you stop thinking of the morning chaos as a cost. It starts to look more like the price of something you actually wanted to give them – a faith that exists outside your living room, in a community that’s theirs and not just yours.

The View From the Volunteer Side

If parenting through VBS week is a logistics problem, volunteering is closer to manual labor. By Wednesday night the adrenaline is gone and you’re running on coffee and whatever sense of purpose got you to sign up in the first place. You’re in a humid fellowship hall wrangling a dozen first-graders who seem to have discovered a new source of energy nobody told you about. Green marker doesn’t come off your hands easily. Glitter gets into your clothes and stays there through several wash cycles. Your voice goes scratchy from leading cheers over box fans that aren’t doing much.

Holmes makes the case, though, that this exhausting week does something most of the church year can’t: it breaks down the generational walls that quietly build up between Sundays. On a normal week, the retirees, the young parents, the college kids, and the high schoolers pass each other in the hallway and nod. During VBS, that distance disappears. A high school sophomore ends up shoulder-to-shoulder with you in a shaving cream fight from some game that got out of hand, both of you laughing too hard to care. Across the room, a church elder is patiently helping a six-year-old thread yarn through a cardboard cross.

It’s in those moments – sweaty, slightly ridiculous moments – that you actually see the church functioning the way it’s supposed to. Not in theory. In a craft room, with glue on the table and a six-year-old who needs help. And somewhere in there, watching the kids finally land the hand motions to a song they’ve heard fifty times that week, it hits you that someone did this same thing for you, years ago. Wore the costume, wiped the table, came back the next day. Now it’s your turn. Your feet hurt and you mean it when you say it was worth it.

The Part You Can’t Measure on the Last Day

When the closing program ends and the last family pulls out of the lot, the building goes quiet in a way that feels almost sacred. Volunteers walk the empty halls picking up stray name tags and bits of craft foam. The physical mess is easy to see. The actual impact isn’t.

It’s tempting to measure the week by what you can count – juice boxes gone through, dollars raised for missions, Wednesday’s attendance peak. But Holmes argues the real payoff doesn’t show up that fast. It shows up years later, in a college dorm room when someone’s faith gets challenged for the first time, or in a quiet stretch of adulthood when life gets heavier than expected. What surfaces in those moments is a memory: a church that rearranged itself for a week just for them, and a handful of adults who knew their names and meant it.

Holmes frames the payoff in eternal terms, which is a big claim, but it’s the claim the whole book is built on – that we’re not just running a kids’ program, we’re planting something that outlasts the summer it was planted in. In a culture that’s lonelier and more screen-bound every year, that’s not a small thing for a church to hold onto.

VBS, at its best, is one of the few weeks a year where a church actually looks like what it claims to be – messy, multigenerational, and genuinely glad you showed up. So when the planning meeting rolls around next fall and someone raises the cost and the exhaustion of it all, the honest answer is still the same one Holmes lands on:

It’s worth it.

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

The Foamy, Medicinal, Gloriously American Story of Root Beer

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There is a distinct, short-lived musical performance that occurs every time you drop a scoop of vanilla ice cream into a heavy glass mug of root beer. It begins with a sharp hiss, moves immediately into a frantic, crackling fizz, and culminates in a rich, silent crescendo of thick, tan foam creeping over the glass rim. If you are of a certain age, or if you simply possess a deep affection for the more eccentric corners of American culinary history, that sound is pure nostalgia.

With National Root Beer Day upon us, it felt like the perfect moment to pull a slender, delightfully specific volume off the shelf: The Root Beer Book: A Celebration of America’s Best-Loved Soft Drink by Laura E. Quarantiello.

Originally published in 1997, this 96-page appreciation is exactly the kind of book I love to discover. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet it treats its subject with the historical dignity that a century-and-a-half-old American staple deserves. Quarantiello unpacks the drink’s journey from indigenous herbal remedy to nineteenth-century temperance miracle, offering recipes, trivia, and a tour through the golden age of soda fountain culture.

My own deep affection for this beverage, however, goes beyond mere historical curiosity; it is rooted in a strange, 2-year-long sensory journey that began during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Like millions of others, I woke up one morning to find my world entirely muted. The virus had struck my olfactory system, leaving me with a profound and disorienting loss of taste and smell. Suddenly, Coke tasted like bitter water, Mountain Dew was disgusting, and favorite meals were reduced to mere textures.

The science behind this phenomenon is fascinating, if frustrating. The virus doesn’t actually destroy the taste buds on your tongue; instead, it attacks the sustentacular cells – the crucial support cells in the nasal cavity that protect and nurture our olfactory sensory neurons. When these cells are compromised, the brain loses its ability to process aroma. Because up to 80% of what we perceive as flavor actually comes from our sense of smell, losing this connection flattens the culinary world completely. For months, eating was a chore.

But then came the breakthrough. On a whim, I cracked open a cold bottle of craft root beer, and my palate suddenly woke up. It turns out there is a reason root beer can pierce through that post-viral fog when other foods fail. Unlike a cola or a fruit soda, which relies on a single dominant flavor profile, an authentic root beer is a botanical powerhouse. It hits multiple sensory receptors simultaneously. The sharp, cooling sensation of wintergreen and mint triggers the trigeminal nerve – the nerve responsible for detecting chemical cold and irritation – which bypasses the damaged olfactory support cells entirely. Combined with the deep, pungent bite of anise, the earthy sweetness of licorice, and the warm, distinct spice of real vanilla, root beer delivers an overwhelming, multi-layered sensory assault. It was the only thing that actually tasted good, launching me into a quest to track down and taste every classic, regional root beer formulation I could find as my senses slowly mended. Over the next 18 months, I tasted over 20 different brands of root beer from around the country.

From childhood memories of Frostie and A&W Root Beers to college favorite IBC Root Beer (courtesy of my Brownsville friends) to many more, I revisited regional and national brands. Key to the process was a local hardware store (Blackhawk Hardware in Charlotte) that carried many brands I had never heard of. Factor in the readily-available brands from all over the country via Amazon, and I was in root beer heaven.

Ultimately, Hank’s Gourmet Root Beer proved to be one of my favorites – but the journey was definitely fun, and all of them were better than soft drinks! After about two years, my taste slowly begin to come back, and now most things taste normal. But I still like root beer – especially with a burger or a hot dog or a cold root beer float on a hot summer day.

To understand root beer, you have to understand that it is essentially a forest in a glass. Unlike cola, which relies heavily on the citrusy, caffeinated notes of the kola nut and traditional spice oils, authentic root beer is an agricultural tapestry. Historically, it was brewed from whatever bark, roots, and berries could be foraged from the forest floor. Early colonial settlers looked at the wilderness and saw an apothecary. They gathered sassafras root, sarsaparilla, birch bark, dandelion, wintergreen, wild cherry bark, ginger, and juniper.

When these ingredients were boiled down, sweetened with molasses or honey, and fermented with a bit of yeast, the result was a bubbling, slightly alcoholic “small beer.” It was consumed not for luxury, but for survival; the brewing process made the water safe to drink, and the herbs offered a rustic shot of vitamins to hardy souls clearing the early frontier.

The man who transformed this colonial survival potion into a commercial empire was a Philadelphia pharmacist named Charles Elmer Hires. As Quarantiello recounts, Hires was on his honeymoon in New Jersey in the early 1870s when his landlady served him an exceptionally delicious, deeply flavorful herbal tea made from gathered roots. Being an enterprising pharmacist, Hires begged for the recipe, took it back to his laboratory, and began tinkering.

His original plan was to market the dry, powdered blend of sixteen roots, barks, and berries as “Hires’ Herb Tea.” He envisioned it as a dry mix that housewives could buy for a few cents, boil at home, and serve to their families as a wholesome, purifying health tonic.

Fortunately for us, Hires had a friend named Russell Conwell – the founder of Temple University – who possessed a keen eye for marketing. Conwell looked at the target audience of rugged Pennsylvania miners, laborers, and farmers and gave Hires a crucial piece of advice: “They won’t drink tea. Call it beer.”

It was a stroke of genius. Renamed “Hires Improved Root Beer,” the drink made its grand public debut at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Hires poured cold, foaming glasses of his concoction for fairgoers sweltering under the summer sun. It was an instant sensation. By positioning a completely non-alcoholic drink as a “beer,” Hires pulled off a spectacular marketing double-play. He won over the hard-working working class who wanted a robust, refreshing drink that felt like a beer, while simultaneously earning the passionate backing of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who hailed it as the ultimate alternative to the saloon.

Quarantiello’s book shines brightest when she dives into the sheer variety of the root beer landscape that followed Hires’ success. The market exploded with competitors, each tweaking the botanical balance to create a distinct regional identity.

Think about the modern survivors of that boom. A&W, born at a roadside stand in Lodi, California, in 1919 to welcome home returning World War I veterans, leans heavily on a smooth, creamy vanilla profile. It was designed to be served in frosted glass mugs kept in a freezer until the exact moment of pouring. Contrast that with Barq’s, which arrived out of Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1898. Edward Barq’s formulation was sharp, bitey, relied on sarsaparilla rather than traditional sassafras, and – crucially – included caffeine, making it a distinct outlier in the root beer world. Then you have IBC, founded in St. Louis during the height of Prohibition, offering a rich, dark, traditional flavor that felt so much like a premium beverage they packaged it in amber glass bottles resembling beer.

Reading through Quarantiello’s collection of recipes and home-brewing tips reminds us that root beer is a living piece of Americana. It survived the mid-twentieth century shift toward homogenized, mass-produced colas because it remained fiercely local. 30 years after her book was published, walking down the soda aisle, dropping in a local brewery, or visiting a local hardware store often reveals small-batch, regional root beers brewed with pure cane sugar and local water.

If you want to truly honor National Root Beer Day as a reader and a culinary enthusiast, skip the plastic two-liter bottles. Find a brand packaged in glass. Look for one that proudly lists real wintergreen, anise, or licorice on the label. Pour it deliberately into a heavy, chilled glass mug, watch the tan foam rise to a magnificent, trembling head, and take a sip of a beverage that was born in American forests, perfected in Philadelphia pharmacies, and served at roadside drive-ins across a changing continent.

It is sweet, sharp, complex, and entirely our own. Happy reading, and happy sipping!

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

Beyond the Bunting

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Reclaiming the American Narrative

The machinery of American commemoration is running at full speed, and it is not pretty. Coffee mugs, lawn chairs, car insurance campaigns – all of it draped in red, white, and blue, stamped with some variation of a “250” logo.

That the country’s 250th birthday would generate commercial noise was never in doubt. What stings is the scale of it, the way the actual event – a group of men in Philadelphia signing a document that could have gotten them hanged – gets buried under promotional codes and pop-up advertisements. If you’re looking for something more than that, you have to step away from the marketplace entirely.

The place to go is the historians. Not all of them – but the ones who spent their careers thinking hard about what this country actually is, warts and self-correction included. David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose are two of the obvious candidates, and three of their books in particular speak directly to this moment: Ambrose’s final work, To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (2002), and McCullough’s The American Spirit (2017) and the posthumous History Matters (2025). Read together, they form something more useful than a reading list. They form a rebuttal.

Two Historians, Two Very Different Urgencies

Ambrose wrote To America knowing he was dying. He completed it just before his death in October 2002, in the shadow of September 11, when the country was still sorting through its grief and its anger. That context matters. He wasn’t writing a textbook or a legacy project – he was writing a confession. Having spent decades in the archives of World War II and the Lewis and Clark expedition, he had developed a clear-eyed, sometimes painful sense of what America had done well and what it had willfully refused to do. This book was his chance to say it plainly, without the apparatus of academic argument.

McCullough’s situation was different. He published The American Spirit in 2017, watching the country fragment in ways that alarmed him. A two-time Pulitzer winner, he had earned the status of the nation’s go-to narrator – the voice people trusted to explain the founding generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wright Brothers. But what he kept encountering, in classrooms and public life alike, was a creeping historical amnesia. The American Spirit collected his best speeches – talks given at universities, historic sites, and before Congress – as a kind of intervention. History Matters appeared three years after his death in 2022, assembled by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and long-time researcher Michael Hill, with a foreword by Jon Meacham. It brings together previously unpublished essays that show how McCullough’s thinking developed over decades. The two volumes, read alongside Ambrose, make a complete picture.

What They’re Actually Arguing

The surface agreement between these writers is easy to summarize: America is neither the paradise its boosters claim nor the irredeemable project its critics insist upon. It’s something harder to hold – a country founded on promises its founders couldn’t keep, which subsequent generations have been, fitfully and incompletely, trying to honor ever since. But the surface agreement conceals real differences in emphasis.

Ambrose’s core argument is about the gap. The founders wrote magnificent things – Jefferson’s declaration of human equality is, by any measure, one of the most radical sentences in political history – and then failed to live by them. Slavery. The expulsion of Native Americans. The long exclusion of women from civic life. For Ambrose, these aren’t embarrassing footnotes. They’re the central drama. The true American story is the multi-generational attempt to close the distance between what the country proclaimed and what it actually did.

McCullough’s argument in The American Spirit is more temperamentally optimistic, focused less on the gap and more on the human qualities that have, at crucial moments, narrowed it. Curiosity. Cooperative effort. The refusal to accept that circumstances are fixed. He pushes back hard against the idea that history moves by impersonal forces – his consistent position is that individuals, acting from character, shape outcomes. History Matters deepens this into something more pedagogical: the case that historical literacy isn’t optional for citizens, that it provides the only reliable antidote to the kind of shallow, ahistorical cynicism that makes genuine democratic participation impossible.

The Passages That Stay With You

Ambrose writes the way a trusted professor talks – direct, unpretentious, willing to state the uncomfortable thing without dressing it up. On the central paradox of the founding, he wrote:

We are a people who have achieved much, but we have also sinned much. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were progressive thinkers who lived a profound contradiction… They gave the world a model of democracy while practicing the ultimate tyranny of human bondage. Our history is the story of trying to live up to the words they wrote, a journey that is far from over.

That last clause is doing a lot of work. It refuses both the triumphalist reading and the despairing one. The journey isn’t over – which means it’s still ours to continue or abandon.

McCullough operates on a different register. His prose has a symphonic quality, built for public delivery, designed to stir rather than prod. In The American Spirit, speaking to a graduating class, he offered a warning:

History is a spacious country of the mind, and if you do not know your own history, you are like a leaf that doesn’t know it’s part of a tree. We must remember that our founders were not gods; they were human beings, flawed and uncertain, yet they achieved something miraculous because they possessed a sense of purpose larger than themselves. If we lose that sense of purpose, if we become a nation of spectators rather than participants, our democracy will wither from within.

The leaf metaphor is the kind of thing that sounds obvious until you sit with it. And the distinction between spectators and participants is where his argument gets genuinely sharp – democracy doesn’t run on sentiment. It runs on people who show up. In History Matters, McCullough’s voice becomes quieter, more reflective, less oratorical:

Real history is never just about politics or war; it is about the human heart, about character, about the books people read and the art they created. When we look at Harry Truman or George Washington, we are looking at men whose strength came from an old-fashioned adherence to honor, honesty, and hard work. History matters because it reminds us, in the darkest of times, that we have been through worse, and that decent, determined people can prevail.

Where They Agree and Where They Diverge

Both men are categorically opposed to the twin temptations of American historical thinking: the whitewash that erases genuine national sins, and the overcorrection that reduces the entire story to an indictment. Both hold pride and repentance in tension, and both treat human character as the hinge on which history turns. Whether Ambrose is writing about a nineteen-year-old at Omaha Beach or McCullough is tracing John Adams’s obstinate integrity, the argument is the same: what people do, and why they do it, is what history actually is.

But their temperaments differ, and so do their methods. Ambrose is grittier, more political, more attuned to friction. He’s interested in military strategy, in the mechanics of presidential power, in how Eisenhower differed from Nixon and why it mattered. His work has the texture of investigative journalism – he went to the archives and to the veterans themselves, and it shows. McCullough is more interested in culture: painting, architecture, education, the intellectual habits that shape a civilization. He’ll spend as much time on Thomas Eakins or the engineering of the Brooklyn Bridge as on any political figure.

History Matters also gives us something the other books don’t – a view of McCullough’s own formation. His childhood in Pittsburgh, his early mentors, his lifelong attachment to literature and visual art. It’s the backstage pass to the grand claims made in his other works, and it makes those claims more convincing, not less.

Why Read These Books Now

The obvious answer is that these books offer a corrective to the 250th anniversary spectacle. They replace cheap patriotism with the demanding, rewarding kind that requires actually knowing something.

But there’s a more specific case for each of them. Ambrose’s To America is a reality check. It prevents the comfortable nostalgia that imagines the past as simpler or purer than the present. Every generation, he insists, faced catastrophic challenges and internal divisions – and the question each generation had to answer was whether it would do better than the one before. Reading him turns you from a passive consumer of national mythology into something more useful: someone who knows what the mythology is covering up and why it matters.

McCullough’s American Spirit and History Matters perform the complementary service. Against the grinding cynicism that makes civic participation feel pointless, he makes the case for hope – not the greeting-card kind, but the documented kind, grounded in specific people who faced genuinely terrible circumstances and figured something out. The American track record of innovation, resilience, and moral course-correction is real. It doesn’t erase the failures, but it means the failures aren’t the whole story.

When the fireworks go up this summer, the question worth asking isn’t whether the commercialism is crass – it obviously is. The question is what you actually think you’re celebrating. The Declaration of Independence was not a marketing milestone. It was a radical, dangerous act by people who knew it might get them killed. Ambrose and McCullough, each in his own way, help you hold that reality in your mind while the lawn chairs and insurance jingles try their best to crowd it out.

That’s not a small thing.

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

Glazed, Frosted, and Sprinkled: Getting Ready for National Donut Day

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Though I certainly enjoyed donuts throughout my childhood, a single book is responsible for the fondness I have for them as an adult.

Books will do that to you.

Like many things in my life, this fondness all came about because of a book: Homer Price.  I have great memories of reading one of the stories in the book about Homer and Uncle Ulysses and the automatic doughnut machine.

 I remembered the image of doughnuts stacked on the counter, shelves, and stools with more coming out of the machine every minute.

I didn’t realize at the time how a book about donuts could be linked to so much more in life.

THE DOUGHNUTS takes place in the 1940’s when an uncle of a boy named Homer opens a luncheonette. Uncle Ulysses, much to the chagrin of his wife Agnes, is a man fond of new-fangled gadgets and has installed a doughnut making machine in his restaurant.

One evening, while Homer is visiting his uncle’s restaurant, Uncle Ulysses leaves Homer in charge of putting the finishing touches on the doughnut machine while he stops by the barber shop. Homer works on the machine and is soon visited by an “advertising man” who stops by for coffee and a doughnut.

While the man waits for the doughnut machine to begin working, a wealthy woman enters the restaurant. She asks Homer if she can mix up the doughnut batter for him, takes off her diamond bracelet, and sets to work. 

Soon the doughnut machine is working – too well! Homer cannot stop the doughnuts from popping out of the machine! Her job finished, the woman leaves and Homer and the advertising man look for places to store the doughnuts.

Homer and the man put their heads together and come up with a scheme to sell the doughnuts “2 for 5 cents” in order to be rid of them. Eventually, the wealthy woman returns, claiming to have left her bracelet in the restaurant.

Shortly, it becomes evident that the bracelet must be in one of the thousands of doughnuts. Homer has an idea! He makes a sign offering one hundred dollars for anyone who can find the bracelet. It doesn’t take long for the doughnuts to be gobbled up and the bracelet to be found.

The end of the story finds Uncle Ulysses trying to explain to skeptical Aunt Agnes why there are tons of crumbs from dozens of doughnuts left on the restaurant counter!

Trivia Note: Have you ever seen the short film The Doughnuts, based on the story above?

As I recall, the copy of Homer Price I had as a boy came from that wonderful invention designed to sell books to eager young readers like me: the Scholastic Book Fair. Not only could I order books, but our classroom benefited too by receiving books for our in-room library. Sadly, many years later when my kids were in elementary school, the Book Fair was less focused on books and more on junk. That’s another story for another time.

What’s the big deal with a child’s book published in 1943, read by a first grade teacher to her class in 1964, bought by a second grader as soon as he could in 1965, and fondly remembered over sixty years later?

Regular readers of this website know that reading and books are a big deal to me. Introduced by my schoolteacher mother, encouraged by my daily reader father, and nurtured over the years by teachers and professors, it’s not too far off the mark to say these images explain the big deal about reading:

Books have the power to ignite the imagination and foster creativity in children. This imaginative capacity can carry over into adulthood, allowing individuals to approach challenges with creative problem-solving skills and innovative thinking. Seeing this image, and reading about Homer’s dilemma and ultimate solution planted a seed in me: sometimes the best way out of a jam is to sit and think first, and then act on the solution that comes to you.

Reading from an early age has been linked to improved cognitive abilities, such as better language skills, broader vocabulary, enhanced critical thinking, and stronger analytical capabilities. These cognitive benefits persist into adulthood, enabling individuals to process information more effectively and think more critically. Putting together a disassembled donut machine, then making it work so well that Homer had to come up with an idea to get rid of all those donuts – that’s critical thinking!

Children who cultivate a love for reading at an early age are more likely to maintain a curiosity and thirst for knowledge throughout their lives. Books become a gateway to continuously learning new things, exploring different perspectives, and expanding their horizons. Homer’s curiosity got him into the problem, and willingness to continue thinking got him out of it.

I could go on, but I hope you get the point: While not everyone who loved reading as a child maintains that passion into adulthood, those who do often find that their early love of books has profoundly shaped their intellectual, emotional, and personal development in enduring ways.

All from a child’s book about a runaway donut machine…

…which is where I now hope to make the connection for you!

It’s that time of year again when the sweet, doughy aroma of fresh donuts fills the air and Americans come together to honor one of the nation’s most beloved breakfast treats. Friday, June 5th marks National Donut Day 2026, a delicious holiday that pays homage to the humble yet iconic donut. This is an annual recognition, falling on the first Friday of June each year.

With roots tracing back to World War I, when Salvation Army “Lassies” fried donuts in soldiers’ helmets as a morale-boosting treat, National Donut Day has become an annual tradition that transcends generations. This year’s celebration promises to be even sweeter, with donut shops and bakeries across the country rolling out their finest creations to mark the occasion.

From the classic glazed to the creative cronut, the donut landscape has evolved dramatically over the decades, reflecting the changing tastes and culinary adventurousness of American consumers. Gourmet donut boutiques have taken the humble pastry to new heights, adorning them with artisanal ingredients like small-batch jams, craft chocolates, and hand-torched meringues.

At the same time, the nostalgia for simpler pleasures remains strong, with long lines still forming at old-fashioned donut counters for pillowy yeast-raised rings and sugar-dusted cake donuts. After all, there’s something undeniably comforting about biting into a fresh, warm donut that instantly transports you back to childhood.

There are several reasons why donuts have become such a beloved and popular food in American culture:

  • Convenience and portability: Donuts are easy to eat on-the-go, making them a convenient breakfast or snack option for people with busy lifestyles.
  • Nostalgia and comfort food: Donuts evoke a sense of nostalgia and comfort for many Americans, reminding them of childhood memories, family gatherings, or neighborhood donut shops.
  • Variety and customization: Donuts come in an endless array of flavors, glazes, toppings, and fillings, allowing for personalization and catering to diverse tastes.
  • Indulgence and treat: Donuts are often seen as an indulgent treat or reward, satisfying cravings for something sweet and decadent.
  • Cultural significance: Donuts have become deeply ingrained in American culture, with events like National Donut Day and the association with coffee breaks and diners.
  • Accessibility and affordability: Donuts are widely available and relatively inexpensive, making them an accessible indulgence for people from various socioeconomic backgrounds.
  • Marketing and branding: Major donut chains like Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme have successfully marketed and branded their products, contributing to the popularity of donuts.
  • Versatility: Donuts can be enjoyed at any time of day, from breakfast to dessert, and can be served on various occasions, from casual gatherings to special events.

The combination of convenience, indulgence, nostalgia, variety, and cultural significance has made donuts a quintessential American food that appeals to a broad range of consumers and has become deeply embedded in the country’s culinary landscape.

This year, celebrate National Donut Day by indulging in your favorite fried confection, whether it’s an old reliable or an Instagram-worthy gourmet creation. Share one with a loved one over a steaming cup of coffee, or treat your office mates to a box of assorted delights.

However you choose to commemorate the occasion, take a moment to appreciate the humble donut and its rich place in American culture and history. From the battlefields of World War I to the modern artisanal bakeries, the donut has proven its enduring appeal and cemented its status as an iconic American comfort food.

So grab a napkin and prepare to get deliciously sticky – it’s almost National Donut Day, and the only acceptable response is to treat yourself to a sugary, doughy delight – and a good book!

The rings of batter kept right on dropping into the hot fat, and the automatic gadget kept right on turning them over, and the other automatic gadget kept right on giving them a little push, and the doughnuts kept right on rolling down the little chute just as regular as a clock can tick – they just kept right on a comin’, an’ a comin’, an’ a comin’, an’ a comin’.

Uncle Ulysses

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

Smashed, Steamed, or Grilled: Your Guide to National Burger Day

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Every year around late May, you can just smell it in the air – that specific, greasy grill smoke from beef hitting a hot flat-top. National Burger Day on May 28th isn’t just some made-up internet holiday; it’s a day celebrating the ultimate American comfort food. Burgers have been the one thing everyone can agree on forever, whether you got them from an old-school shack or a 24-hour diner. If you’re firing up the grill or ordering takeout this week, you really need to look at what George Motz is doing, because he’s basically mapped out the entire country’s burger scene.

If burgers are a religion in this country, George Motz is definitely the guy preaching it. He just put out the 4th edition of Hamburger America, which just proves he’s still the absolute expert on this stuff. It’s not just a list of places to eat; it’s a massive road trip guide showing how different states do their burgers. The best way to spend the day is just following his lead and finding something good to eat.

The Evolution of a Legend

After the first edition of Hamburger America came out, a small but passionate community of burger obsessives began reaching out to Motz from all over the country. Many emailed to say they’d love to have his job – and almost all of them wanted to help with future research.

Most were already respected food writers or local burger experts in their own cities and regions. Over time, this growing network became invaluable to Motz. They were often the first to uncover hidden gems and new discoveries. He jokingly started calling them his EBTs – Expert Burger Tasters – and they embraced the role with remarkable seriousness.

With each new edition of the book, the EBT ranks expanded. After the second edition, the list quadrupled, and by the third and fourth editions, dozens more had joined the mission. Today, it’s a large and deeply committed group, and Motz is grateful to every one of them.

These EBTs willingly venture into forgotten roadside stands, worn-down diners, and questionable dives – sometimes driving hours just to taste a burger and report back. Their groundwork makes my own research sharper and far more efficient. Along the way, many of them have also become close friends and trusted burger companions, often joining me when I visit their favorite local spots.

Motz has spent twenty years driving down backroads just looking for the best local spots. This new edition is huge – it has over 200 places he encourages you to try. What I like about his style is that he only cares about “real” burgers – meaning fresh beef, never frozen, from places that have been doing it right for decades.

He really goes to bat for all the weird local styles that make food interesting. Whether it’s the deep-fried burger of Memphis or the butter-soaked patties of Wisconsin, Motz treats each variation with the reverence a historian might give a founding document. He shows how these burgers actually tell you a lot about the blue-collar towns where they started.

The Map of Flavor

National Burger Day is a good excuse to actually try one of these weird regional styles from the book. Like the Oklahoma Fried Onion Burger – people started making those during the Depression because onions were cheap, so they smashed a ton of them into the meat to make it stretch. Over the years the number of these burger joints has dwindled, but the fans still flock into El Reno, OK on the first Saturday in May to celebrate the “World’s Largest Fried Onion Burger,” where the three remaining restaurants work together to create a 12-foot round onion burger – sharing it with thirty-thousand plus crowd.

Then there is the Steamed Cheeseburger of Connecticut, where they steam the burgers and the cheese in a little metal box until it’s just a gooey mess. It sounds totally bizarre if you didn’t grow up there, but it’s a total classic.

Or how about the weirdly named but awesome tasting Slug Burger, a regional specialty of northern Mississippi? Developed during the Great Depression as burger counters dreamed up ways to stretch their ground beef, these burgers have breadcrumbs from yesterday’s bread added in, along with various spices. Curious about the name? It comes from slang of the era when a “slug” meant a nickel – which is what one of the burgers cost.

The stories above could be repeated in every state as various cooks over the decades have added this or that ingredient or cooking technique to hit on a winner recipe that their customers flocked in to buy.

The book shows that eating at these places links you back to generations of people doing the exact same thing.

The Philosophy of the Smash

Throughout the book Motz points out details about the “smash” technique – where you press the beef hard onto a searing hot griddle to get that perfect, crispy crust. That’s where all the flavor hides anyway. Cooks and burger joints all across have been doing it for generations, but every type of restaurant seems to have its own version lately. According to Motz, you don’t need fancy stuff like truffle oil; you just need salt, high heat, and a heavy spatula.

Keeping it simple is why people love burgers in the first place. Food gets way too pretentious these days, but a good burger doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Motz likes to say that every burger is a sandwich, but a sandwich isn’t a burger. You need the right blend of meat – usually 80/20 – and a bun that won’t fall apart when things get juicy.

Celebrating May 28th: Your Personal Pilgrimage

So what should you do on National Burger Day? The book gives you a couple of options. You could drive out to an old greasy spoon from the guide – like Louis’ Lunch in Connecticut, where they say the burger was invented back in 1900. Or just stay home and try out Motz’s cooking tips in your own kitchen. The great thing about burgers is that anybody can make a good one. You don’t need a fancy kitchen; you just have to do what the old-school places do.

More Than Just Meat

Today is really about cheering for the short-order cooks who’ve been using the same grill for fifty years, the diners where they know your name, and guys like Motz keeping the history alive. It’s time to grab a burger today and think about how much history is actually packed into it. George Motz’s Hamburger America, 4th Edition is great because it reminds you that behind every good burger is usually a family business or some local tradition that survived.

So whether you like them smashed, steamed, or cooked over charcoal – with onions, pickles, or just plain salt and pepper – go get a good one. Enjoy your burger! 

I’ve been into burgers for a long time – check out my Burger Quest from a few years ago!

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.