Keen On America

Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein. The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein’s latest, Being Thomas Jefferson, offers an “intimate history” of the great man. From Jefferson’s views on love and race to his take on mortality, Andrew Burstein gets inside America’s most controversial and misunderstood Founding Father. And what he finds at the end of his voyage inside Jefferson is an intellectual Don Juan. “Jefferson’s language is his legacy,” Burstein concludes. “He wrote with a musical cadence, poetically, at a time when most political writers did not understand what he did about seducing the reader”.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

There was a time in the mid 20th century, the literary historian Gayle Feldman reminds us, when the book business was cool. Back then, New York publishing resembled Silicon Valley tech and the Mark Zuckerberg of his day was the Random House founder Bennett Cerf. In her new biography of Cerf, Nothing Random, Feldman tells the story of this celebrity entrepreneur, noting that he helped pioneer the publishing industry’s venture capitalist style business model which enabled hit authors like Ayn Rand or Dr Seuss to finance start-up writers like Cormac McCarthy. Those were the days, a slightly wistful Feldman reminisces. She’s right. If only today’s corporate publishing industry could recapture some of that Cerfian magic. Then books might become cool again. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Trump’s Gazan dream is to overlay the complex human history with his own narcissistic real-estate fantasy. But for Maia Carter Hallward, co-author of a new contemporary history of Gaza, this once vibrant Mediterranean entrepôt linking Africa, Asia and Europe is now defined more by nightmare than dreams. “In peace studies, we talk about positive peace, which has rights, liberties, the ability to reach human potential - and we talk about negative peace, which is the absence of war,” Carter Hallward says. “I would say we have none of those in Gaza right now.” No negative peace, no absence of war. For Carter Hallward, that - alongside the more than 70,000 dead Palestinians - captures today’s Gazan tragedy. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

What if the right isn’t wrong - or, at least, totally wrong, about education? That seems to be the conclusion of James Traub, a liberal educationalist, who has spent the last year visiting the civics programs of American high schools. Neither the 1619 Project nor Trump’s 1776 Report seems to be the message of Traub’s account of these travels, The Cradle of Citizenship. Schools can help save our democracy, Traub concludes, by equipping American students to think their way through the complexities of their nation’s history. The point of a good education, he concludes, is to foster thinking rather than moral outrage or virtue seeking. More Homer in the classroom, and less social media. Those are James Traub’s old school principles for our new century. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Timing is everything. The versatile American journalist Kenneth Rosen was last on the show in early 2021 talking about troubled teens. Since then, Rosen has travelled extensively in the Arctic and has just published Polar War, a narrative about the chilling costs to both America and the world of the new Cold War in the Arctic. Timing is, indeed, everything, especially in the book business. But Rosen’s travelogue of melting icecaps and vanishing indigenous cultures offers an alternative take on the media’s current geo-strategic obsession with Greenland. "I worry most about the indigenous communities and their ways of life. This is the sustenance lifestyle that will be eradicated—something that we'll lose as a country and as humanity,” Rosen warns. “It's only a matter of time before the snow and ice melts forever." And when it’s gone, it’s gone. Then timing will be nothing. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe