All tagged progress

The Small and the Mighty

The Small and the Mighty

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction

Sharon McMahon (pronounced McMan) made a name for herself  as “America’s Civics Teacher” over the course of the last decade. A high school social studies teacher, she is very knowledgeable about American history and government (and the process of relaying that information to others); for years she has been sharing her passion and knowledge with anyone interested in following from her @sharonsaysso account on Instagram. She also has a very active Substack account. Last year she published her first book: The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed America, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement (2024). The timing couldn’t have been better. This nonfiction book highlights the lives and actions of twelve Americans from our country’s inception to the Civil Rights movement who may not be well known, but whose impact was real. Indeed, The Small and the Mighty is the inspiring history lesson many of us crave of late. Its biographies capture the spirit of democracy and freedom for all that many treasure as core American values.

When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, Nonfiction, My List of Required Reads

The late nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries reeked of industry and human innovation as humankind observed, dissected, and theorized about the nature of the universe, matter, everything vast and miniscule. In effect, mathematical and scientific theory attempted to define everything, everywhere, all at once (to borrow the phrase). The impact, as Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut demonstrates in When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), led to immense suffering on mass scale (WWI and WWII). This novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 explores the cracks between fact and fiction, between progress and destruction, between genius and madness. Labatut’s book also investigates the private anguish, the inner misery of some of the world’s greatest minds. By interweaving history, math, physics, chemistry, and mathematics with a healthy dose of fiction, Labatut creates a wildly readable book that both educates and troubles, confounds and inspires. It is the perfect book to read in tandem with watching one of this summer’s blockbuster movies Oppenheimer as we consider the question of where that invisible line ought to be exist in the figurative sand of human innovation.