If You've Fallen Behind on the Reading, This Post is for You
A few comments to those of you have told me you haven't been able to keep up on the reading
We’re now a month into this reading group, and several of you have told me that you’ve fallen behind on the reading.
One friend never started. He is an accountant, and I, in my infinite wisdom, chose to start this book club in tax season. Another reader hasn’t been taking his daily walks the past week or two because of changes in the weather, and he was listening to the audio book. Yet another doesn’t want to think about the news or about history because of what is happening in Washington right now. One good friend told me has just been really busy with family stuff.
This was eminently predictable.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a very long book. And four months is a long time. Our lives are all packed to the brim. It is hard to make time to read every week.
So I wanted to write a post directly to those who have fallen behind in the reading.
This post is for you.
First and foremost, it’s ok if you haven’t kept up.
Even after we’re done with this reading group, the posts and the podcasts will still be here. You can check them out. You can email me or text me. We can still talk about the book. The Rise and Fall isn’t going anywhere. This Substack isn’t going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere.
A Few Options For Those Who Have Fallen Behind
If you can fit in a little time every week to read these posts—whether the chapter recaps, the topical posts, or both—and maybe even listen to the podcasts, you’ll still hopefully get a general sense of the flow of the book and the questions it raises, both about the past and about our current moment.
I won’t be offended if you just follow along here without reading every word of every chapter.
So that’s one option: you can just follow along here and put off the reading for a more tranquil moment in your life.
Then another option, if you’re up for it, is to try to catch up.
Here in the United States, this is a three day weekend. Maybe you can find a few hours and read (or listen to) the chapters you’ve missed. Perhaps you skim the chapters you’ve missed and then commit to reading the rest with the rest of us.
I know for some people, it might feel a bit like cheating. Or that you will be missing out on something crucial. Yes, you will miss out on something. But maybe that’s ok. Deep dives reward the time that you invest in them, but you can still glean something from slightly more superficial engagement.
In any case, I just wanted to write this note to those of you who are flagging. I’m not offended if you haven’t kept up. Pick your option for how you want to continue from here on out. Maybe even let me know. Perhaps I can rework the recap posts so they are more useful for you. (To be completely honest, I have been struggling to articulate to myself what exactly I am doing with the recap posts. So some feedback might be appreciated.)
In any case, I appreciate all of you who are reading along. I’ve enjoyed our emails and text messages and the comments here. Keep them coming!
A Name Change
It occurred to me that the name of this Substack was rather unwieldy. Yes, it’s a publication about reading a book, but hopefully it’s more than just that.
So I’ve decided to rename it “Historians and Journalists” to get at one of the animating topics behind my writing here: the value that both historians and journalists bring to our understanding of the past and the present. What they contribute is overlapping, and the overlapping part of the Venn diagram between the two has only grown in recent decades.
Because of my bizarre (and non-linear) career trajectory that at different times and in different ways has involved academic translation, archival work, academic history (and particularly in the history of media), media relations, and non-profit communications, I feel like I do have something interesting to say about the relationship between history and journalism.
In any case, I hope you find it somewhat interesting.
As always, I am open to your thoughts on the name change or what you’d like to me to write about in these (web) pages. Please just let me know.
This week, I was working out of Washington, DC, where—if you haven’t heard—a lot is going on. So I didn’t have time to write any topical posts this week. However, I did manage one podcast episode.
If you haven’t listened to my interview with famed war correspondent Jonathan Randal, I highly encourage you to check it out. Here he is on discussing his start in journalism:
I was discharged from the Army and sitting around Paris and thinking how I love this city. It was a very exciting time. It was the end of the Fourth Republic. The Algerian War was ongoing. Governments were falling. The food was good. The girls were pretty. Why leave? I had to figure out a way to make a living, and I sort of fell into journalism.
Randal’s trajectory wasn’t that different from William Shirer. He landed in Paris in his 20s, eager to escape America under a Republican president and see the world. He ended up finding a job as a journalist and covering a lot of the major foreign wars that came in the wake of the war that Shirer covered.
One of the things that stood out to me from our conversation was the very small number of foreign correspondents for American papers in the 1950s when he started out (which wasn’t that different from in the 1920s, when Shirer began his career.) There were only a few dozen. The difference between a few dozen and a hundred and a few hundred is actually pretty substantial when you think about it. What that means concretely is that pretty much all information about the world that was consumed by Americans came through the words produced by only a handful of individuals.
In my academic work, I argue for the importance of a social history of editors and correspondents of foreign news. Now that those gatekeepers are largely gone from the scene, it behooves us to understand what went into their curation of knowledge for an entire country.
Of course, that was when Randal started. The number of foreign correspondents grew a little later in his career. In our interview, Randal notes that Vietnam was the televised war: TV channels were flush with money and paid for a lot of correspondents and support staff. Every day they were able to beam images of the war into American living rooms. But newspapers were doing relatively well at that time too. Their foreign staffs grew in the latter part of the 20th century.
One thing I didn’t have a chance to ask Randal about, but wish I had fit in was the role of non-American correspondents in American news. It’s a tricky and at times controversial subject. Locals inevitably know the world better than American expatriate journalists.
However, what they don’t always have is the linguistic competence or American cultural knowledge to translate their knowledge into interesting reports for an American audience. But both those things changed significantly over the course of the 20th century. English language ability improved remarkably across the world. And foreigners knowledge of American culture similarly grew in leaps and bounds. The fact that non-Americans were rarely given the opportunity to report the news to American audiences the way Shirer or Randal did raises a few questions.
There is a post I’d like to write later on about the value of American foreign correspondents. There is a value to an American leaving his or her culture behind and learning another in order to tell those stories back to Americans…but there are also drawbacks. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about, but that’s a subject for another time.
In the mean time, thanks again for reading.
Here are the posts this past month:
Hi, thanks for this recap. I stumbled across your substack while searching for a Shirer quote, and I'm looking forward to following along as best I can.